Yet another statistic. Some lamenting, some heated articles – then we will go on our way, minding our own business.
Fourteen year old Devika set herself ablaze in Kerala. The reports are that she went to this step because she could not access her digital classes. It is that time of the year when we are usually inundated with tragic stories of young lives cut short. Reasons could range from failures in school leaving exams to the stress of fiercely competitive exams or simply being unable to cope in colleges. The virus may have lulled us into ignoring this problem, but Devika paid with her life to bring us out of this stupor.
Predictably, there are many angles being debated around Devika’s death – the effect of the lock down on education, the need to ensure digital access and the kinds of models of digital education that have to be made. Social inequity gets one more new peg, called the digital divide. Depending on your co-ordinates and leanings, you will place yourself in the spectrum of these discussions.
But the issue that gets forgotten here is – how did we get to this point where the process of education has become a game of such high stakes? Has education failed in its primary objective – of preparing the young people for a life in harmony with themselves and the world around?
As an adult concerned with children, I cannot but notice how fragile and vulnerable our children are. Years ago, I was assisting the admission process in the school I was working in, when I stepped out of a family interview to attend to the child who was getting disturbed; I remember watching in shock the little girl’s trembling hands, she was nervous about getting admitted to Class 1. I knew sadly that this was not the first time she was going to tremble. Caught in the crossfire between parental expectations and peer pressures, children have no time to grow up. With childhoods on fast forward, they are propelled to master more and in lesser time. We have managed to create such ambient conditions that children get into this mode of performance almost as if on default. For the privileged among us, we take our children’s move into this mode as an automatic, self-evident truth, almost one of virtuosity. For the less privileged, this is an aspirational movement, the one that sadly pushed Devika to her decision.
The lock down and the ensuing pause presented us an opportunity to look at what learning should be and what role the adult could play. Instead, we have moved in very quickly to fill the expository spaces we occupied in their learning paths, with virtual replacements of ourselves. An unspoken assumption here is that children will have to be be programmed into structured environments for them to learn; and from adults, with content that we will pre-determine. We seem to have lost sight of the objective of school education, namely to build abilities in children to learn.
There may be another reason for this too. Maybe we are afraid of letting our children have the time to grow up. If we allow them to find their own mind and develop their own ideas, perhaps they will contest the paradigms we have built. If we include knowing oneself as part of the “multi-dimensional” experiences we want our children to have, perhaps they will hold a mirror to us for us to reflect and grow. If we allow them to develop without our conditioned impulses, perhaps they may find more authentic solutions to the challenges of alienation that are surrounding us.
These are uncomfortable questions. It is easier to respond with more digital infrastructure. But it is time we looked at this question. For the sake of our children, and the future we have borrowed from them, we should reflect – individually and collectively – on our parenting, teaching, paradigms of child rearing. As a young student asked, “Why are you adults so afraid of letting us be?”
Why indeed?