Can the 21st century please stop forcing us to be hyper competitive already?
Indian schools love spreading a really insidious belief; you winning means someone else losing. The system really wants you to believe that you have to stand on your own, revel in the losses of others, feel ashamed about seeking help, or feel superior if someone seeks yours.
It wants to assert that the world is divided into winners and losers, and that that is a fact of life. If someone gets poor marks, a later-in-life version of which could mean being unsuccessful or economically weaker off, it’s because they didn’t work hard enough, not because the system failed them.
As someone who never hesitated to help anyone or even from seeking help, I realised that nothing could be further from the truth. People aren’t hopelessly lazy or just plain dumb. Working together can usually achieve any set goal. And even if people are particularly hard to get through to, it is ultimately the system’s responsibility to help them or provide a realistic goal for them.
There is a cause effect relationship which got lost in translation here; students don’t exist for schools, schools exist for students. It’s not up to children to strive for success for the glory of schools, to feel ashamed at the school’s disappointment in them, or rejected and bullied. It is instead the school’s responsibility to ensure students are given all the help possible, all the attention needed, and every tool available. What we need is a reverse report card.
In the real world, if you imagine this in terms of a product you are trying to create for whatever end, to sell or to put your creation out there or for self-fulfillment, then it would make sense to want it to be as good as possible. If I want people to really relate to what I’m writing in this article for example, I should care more about whether it achieves that goal than to feel superior for writing it without seeking help. If the quality of this article increases, then paying for it by splitting credit is a small, if not insignificant price to pay. But alas, such is our conditioning that we feel an involuntary stomach ache at the very thought.
Yes, credit where credit is due is important, but perhaps not as important as inculcating a sense of understanding that seeking help from others, who may have achieved more than me, would only improve my chances of reaching my goals. Undeniably, there are certain situations where it is unfeasible to seek help. You wouldn’t ask a person applying for the same job as you for tips. But the system’s failure is highlighted by the fact that so many of us assume every single situation to be like that by default.
Instead of mindlessly creating robots who go to engineering colleges without any real love for the field, perhaps the school system should teach us that humans are meant to help each other so that we may collectively progress as a society, not step on others to get where we want to. I posit that if it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to do almost anything else. Harbouring ill-will toward our fellow classmates, a consequence of our education system, would only impede whatever wonderful, creative things we are capable of. You don’t necessarily need to work with others, but you definitely don’t need to stop them in their tracks. At the school level at least, creating divides between students has no benefit, because the very reason for schools to exist is to help us tackle the world, not write us off before we even enter it.
