Poaching Lives in Coaching Factories!

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

~ Hal Borland

Couldn’t find a better way of summating my thoughts for the beginning of 2016. Especially, when 2015 ended with an unfortunate lesson that we refuse to learn as a society. The suicide of a 14-year old boy Bhanu Singh just days before the year ended, the thirtieth such in Kota, known as the coaching hub for aspirational students pursuing engineering and medicine, highlights the shocking apathy that society has come to accepting this as a norm. As per reports, he was the third such student to commit suicide over just seven days in Kota – where annually over 1.25 lakh students join coaching institutes with dreams of cracking highly competitive entrance tests.

Dreams, that are rarely one’s own and often borrowed through societal validation or at its worst, thrust upon as per familial legacy or perhaps as an inheritance of aborted parental aspirations. I wonder what Bhanu’s dreams were that got plundered amid the gruelling high-pressured environment. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? In all probability his parents too didn’t know or understand. It isn’t surprising when reports paint a picture of shell shocked parents who couldn’t believe that their child would take such a drastic step. And yet, there are such incidences by the dime. Unsurprisingly.

Three things form the base for predicting the ‘success’ of any educational programme – 1. Learner aptitude and engagement; 2. The overarching goals of the programme and its fit with student aspirations; 3. Inclusivity – taking into consideration every learner’s needs and the corresponding environments’ 4. Partnership based model – where the programme dually, borrows through derivation while also contributing to societal solutions. Programmes designed to achieve stereotypical outcomes by standardising processes, therein alienating minds and disregarding the sanctity of varied environments are counterproductive. The term ‘rat race’ was conjured so for a reason!

If we look at engineering for example. Even with the numerous coaching classes, and institutions sprucing up, as per a survey in August 2015, around 2 lac engineers are unemployed in India. To make it worse, studies have also stated that 90% Indian engineering students are not employable! Of course, things are changing slowly. We have playschools and schools speaking of learner-based education that is fun and outcome based, wherein the outcome isn’t gauged typically. We have parents who act as the main support system in a child’s education and institutions realising the integral part they play, along with society. But it changes when a child crosses say the eighth grade; wherein s/he is supposed to buckle up overnight and choose among the same prestigious vocations. In comes the market of the million coaching institutes and substandard professional degree colleges in far flung areas just to cater to this frenzy. Our higher education system is crumbling. And evidently, it hasn’t happened overnight.

What is most shocking though is that we accept student suicides as ‘normal’. That even if children have to take the extreme step of ending their lives over something as trivial as marks scored in a subject, the presumption remains that the fault lies with them, their ineptitude. No one questions the veracity of a system that alienates a child from his environment, his inner self.  Bhanu will go on to be yet another unfortunate statistic among countless other youths, who chose an unceremonious exit rather than live and start afresh. Gives us much to think as a society when we rob our young the promise of a beginning.