When I got to know how schools were de-registering students with low grades, I was shocked.
A Class X student—who had been in school for 12 long years, spends their best years in the institution and believes school to be their second home—suddenly finds all doors closed to to them. What will they go through? At this age, this dejection might break them completely and if they attain no emotional support and give up, who will be held responsible for the same?
Youth suicides due to low grades or marks are rampant these days. We force our children to believe that grades are all and the only resort for a well-deserved, desired life. A 16-year-old is just too young to sustain these labels and get through in life.
I am a mother of a 12-year-old child and these incidents send chills down my spine. I am not saying that marks or grades are not important. But hudging, labeling, demoralizing and now this de-registering the child from school should be stopped altogether.
Memorizing information without knowing it’s practical use and without being able to align it in practical world is not learning. The world hails with successful entrepreneurs who were terrible in their formative days. Be it Ritesh Agarwal of OYO Rooms, Kunal Shah, the man who revolutionized online recharge system, Pallav Nadhani, the co-founder and CEO of Fusion Charts, RazorFlow and Collabion, or Rahul Yadav behind Housing.com.
Children are not meant to be labeled. Incidents like de-registering demoralises them and makes them believe that they are no good, and won’t be accepted in the society. It hampers their self-esteem and ends their hopes, aspirations and dreams before they even start realising them. And we all know that marks do not count in later life. It’s just an entry to somewhere.
Every child is unique and cannot be judged on the basis of marks only. These days, the market is overflowed with so many career options and if passion is turned into a career, the sky is the limit. Its high time that our education department takes a plunge and implements some meaningful techniques in school curricula so that every child can be made to fit and justify their lives, rather than surviving with frustration. Intrinsic skills should be judged rather than judging each student in a single field, whether maths, language, social sciences, science and so on.
It’s high time that we need to debate, restate, rethink and know the consensus of people around us on it.