Every parent wants his child to be groomed and educated properly. Each one of them wants their child to be the topper. With these goals in mind, parents force their child right from the preschool stage, causing huge stress in children. Small kids are put into a variety of competitions where failure isn’t an option and finally it becomes a major cause of stress.
This is coupled with pressure from schools on these children. The schools have their own interest to pressurize the children for better results. At the cost of children’s comfort they want to showcase the best result records to meet their gains. Ultimately, this all sums up in psychological disorder in today’s school going children.
Child is also facing a severe problem of physical burden in the form of heavy school bags. By rule a child can only carry 10 to 15 percent of his\her body weight. But they carry much more than that in the form of their school bags everyday to their schools. 
Many medical experts have been warning that if a child is regularly forced to bear such burden he will be facing problems like backache, headache, ligament tear. Constant load on spine with bad standing posture can cause lower back-pain is what they say.
Coming to pressure tactics to perform better, we have come across situations where students have committed suicide simply because they couldn’t match the unjustified expectations of their parents. A year back, fear of failing in making it to the top after missing some questions in Maths at unit level examination proved instrumental in forcing a 10th class student to kill himself. He fell victim to a sense of ‘perform or perish’ created by his parents.
We need not to have brain storming sessions to locate the root cause. Basically, the blame lies on our education system, which breeds stress and frustration more among students than infusing physical, mental and spiritual confidence among them.
Take the case of our examination system. It breeds fear among students. We have a teaching community instilling the fear of examination even from primary grades. They have evolved a culture of continuous testing which engulfs the primary school curriculum. The whole chain of private schools operating in our state use the stick of punitive measures to ensure that teachers concentrate on pushing students to improve their scores. Does it induce competitiveness? Of course it does, but at a massive cost of burning out the natural desire to learn in children. Precisely we can say that the present state of affairs in our education sector had made even some of our best teachers to act like coaches and drill masters.
Here in our system, the message is clear: “perform or perish.” This attitude has led the children to believe that marks, and marks alone, matter. Even our colleges and universities do not consider it necessary to apply their mind to assess the student’s potential. They go by the student’s marks scored in previous examinations. Parents push children to work for the highest possible aggregate, rather than to pursue individual interest. This kind of pushing destroys the student’s confidence. Our system undermines the student's ability and potential if he/she has not scored well in the examinations.
This attitude needs to be changed. We need a change in attitude of parents, teachers and our educationists. This cannot be achieved by the mere imparting of factual information and practical skills. It is the cultivation of the ability to analyse, the desire to question and the courage to challenge convention. Development of a good student to a great extent rests on the schools and the type of education and opportunities given to the students. The parents also should come out of the narrow expectations of making their children an engineer or a doctor but allow them to develop their innate skills. They should cooperate with the schools to implement the reforms initiated for the betterment of the children.
I believe, if emphasis is given on understanding and creativity rather than memorizing information, much of the bloat from the curriculum can be simply removed.

The views are of the author & not the institution he works for. Feedback: sajjadbazaz@greaterkashmir.com

Lastupdate on : Fri, 6 Apr 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Fri, 6 Apr 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Sat, 7 Apr 2012 00:00:00 IST