The Educated People..

India is obsessed with reproduction. Growing up, we often used to hear that the problem related to the  sudden burst in the population of the country often sprouted itself from the rural idea : earnings of a family is directly proportional to the number of heads of the family. I found this very evident during my 5-year stay in a small, locally built area around my college in Noida, UP called Raipur village! It wasn’t a village in conventional terms but it was more of an array of buildings which used to provide shelter to the mammoth population of students coming from all over India. Population was not a problem there, poor businessmen saw it as an opportunity for service to the youth!

The second scenario in India is when parents often become obsessed with their child’s career. Any student (meritorious/ talented) comes to class XI and realizes that the rat race had already begun 3 years back. The mentality, in my personal opinion, in India is all about taking up Science in Class XI. As if, it is a question of life and death, as if it is a question of social status. The mentality itself is a retrogressive one. Research says that students should be exposed to a variety of subjects early on in his/her life, it helps develop an open mind and gives the poor child, the freedom o choose. Courses shouldn’t be made compulsory after a certain point because intelligence is gifted, aptitude is inculcated. At the end, the aptitude and emotional quotient outlive the intelligence. People also loose intelligence as they age, they don’t the other too.

So it boils down to the fact, when a students passes high school with an above average performance from the background of science, there comes two options for the upper class students inclusive of both the genders: Engineering/ Medicine. The current scenario presents us that all the competitive coaching centers in India now a days gives coaching right from the age of 12, when the child is in class VI. Poor child is subjected to a lot of subjects, and I believe at least 30-35% of the kids do it out of parental pressure. The child hasn’t figured out what he/she is going to do in life, just at the age of 12, he/she has not even developed the maturity to understand the difference and the importance of subjects like science, physics, astrophysics or anatomy, accountancy / business maths but he goes to a class to solve and prepare ahead of others the basics of Kinematics/ classical mechanics, because it is the battle that’s going to decide his potential to crack a 360 or a 720 marks exam.

And then happens the inevitable, students often undergo depression and develop suicidal tendencies, gets addicted to porn as stress-buster and parents believe, their child is in a wrong circle of friends. They become overprotective often and this often harms the natural capabilities of the child to handle problems. If at all, a child has to be educated, it should be at the level of , moral values, at the level of adaptability, at the level of equality towards genders, respect to the country and the people  of this country. The parents of the child knows all these things but they are afraid, that the child will lose precious time preparing for competitive exams and all these can be learnt through the hardships of life, but this education is not learnt in the text books and by the time a child becomes and adult and learns all these, they often have committed a few mistakes in their lives.

With the recent changes in the patterns of how higher education could be perceived in this developing country, I believe the system has to be uprooted and refreshed from within at the very lowest level, the courses in the school structure have to be changed, the mentality ain’t going to change if there is no change in the system. People have to believe, that there shouldn’t be any discrimination based on the stream of subject that a person chooses to study, that is the least we can do in a country which already discriminates a lot on the basis of caste and contacts and marks on a sheet of paper. Let’s hope things look brighter and hopeful in a few years time.