Stop being a Marks’ist
Why your child’s examination marks should be treated like your salary figure. It’s sensitive. And it’s very very personal.
[ NOTE: This article is a commentary on the Indian schooling system and is based on my experience of the same ]
Its results time in India. That unnerving time in every Indian student’s life, when that long-forgotten distant aunt suddenly reappears in your life posing that perennial question “Kitne number Aaye? ( How much did you score?) ”
Every kid born in an Indian middle-class family has been through this. For those studious(read: sycophantic) students like me, the result days ( or maybe months, depending on your vanity ) was a time to show off and lose oneself in the pleasures of schadenfreude. All the hard work of mugging up answers and buttering up teachers for extra credits/ special ‘notes’ for exams, has finally paid off. For others, this was a period of seemingly never endings hideouts, induced shame, and self-loathing.
Welcome to the golden age of meritocracy: where your ‘merit’ is decided by strangers with red ink and put up for public exhibition during grand ‘marks’fests.
The industrial model of education has already been reprimanded enough. Indian educationists have been long suggesting the Government to get rid of this barbaric tradition of grading and scoring the ‘quality’ of kids. But the other side always trumps the argument with the notion that the system though flawed is ‘working’. And the education system is too crucial to experiment with; or in the words of silicon valley, ‘disrupt’.
Although, I think ‘marks’ ism’s roots are deeper than the visible system that incorporates it. It’s the human psyche to rate and order things in a hierarchy. From historically dividing people into various castes and then ranking them from purest to the ‘untouchables’, from looking down upon certain races to our modern ‘flat’ organizations where hierarchy is to be implicitly understood but never explicitly stated ( political correctness FTW), and finally to the United Nations where its members are grouped into G-5, G-20, G…
The crux of all this is that unless your parents are loaded enough to send you to an alt-school for ‘wholesome’ education, I’m sorry to be the harbinger of bad news, but it seems like you are stuck with grades and marks for the time being.
Now, the more immediate question is this: How can we prevent a number/alphabet based on some neanderthal rubrics assigned to a child by a sadist with dubious qualifications, overtime time grow into this malign tumor on your self-worth whose pain you need to carry to every job interview you sit through, to every dinner party with your extended family, to sleepless nights where you almost feel like giving up?
The answer is simple: Treat kids like adults.
I’ll set up a scenario: You have just finished your annual appraisal and you extolled your egotistical boss so much so that he has agreed to give you a 3X hike. What do you do now?
Do you bang open the meeting door, run out waving your new contract like a lottery ticket for a free Eurotrip with Scarlett Johanson? Or spam all your WhatsApp groups about how much money you are making now? Or distribute cheap sweets made from synthetic milk with all your neighbors?
No, you don’t. You quietly walk out of the meeting room with impish glee on your face. At best, go out in the evening with your girlfriend and closest friends and cheer over a glass of wine( or beer, depending on your suaveness).
I urge you to do the same with your child’s academic achievements, or bumps.
Don’t treat his/her marks like India’s score against Pakistan in a cricket match; don’t go about either publicly ranting or celebrating it. Treat it like how you would treat your salary. It’s personal. It’s extremely sensitive. And most importantly, it’s none of your god damned business.
Whether we like it or not, the reality is that we as a society have collectively allowed an arbitrary number written in red ink over some pages of innocent handwritings, to be so invariably powerful that it can severely exalt or bury a child’s self-esteem to a point of no return. The concern here is not the exaltation or the burial. The concern is the unquestioning power that a two-digit number ( or an alphabet) has over us and our worldview. This is dangerous: both for the ones exalted and the ones buried.
For the ‘losers’ of this race, the damage is obvious. Brené Brown in her years of research around shame and vulnerability has found that the single most important factor in differentiating happy and unhappy lives is the feeling of worthiness; the belief that you deserve this happiness. The ‘loser’s in this race for grades, loses something much more fundamental than merit itself: Their sense of self-worth.
For the ‘winners’, it’s even worse. There have already started measuring their self-worth via an external societal measuring scale, whose weights can turn against them at point of time. The longer it takes, the worse it hits. The ‘winners’ have already started climbing an imaginary ladder of marks, college-seats, prestige, and honor that is so precariously balanced that at any point, one small slip can pull you all the way down to the bottom. You have no other way but to keep climbing. Keep pushing yourself up ( an invariably albeit unintentionally pulling others down) till one day when you realize there is nothing but regrets at the top.
We rate and rank everything around us. Restaurants, mobile phones, colleges, hospitals, pens, books, cars, coffee, and even water.
Please, let’s not rate our kids.
Gautam Buddha, when asked about enlightenment famously said “ Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water”.
I would paraphrase him to give the same advice to kids and parents who are victims of the parlance of our times:
Before marks, chop wood, carry water. After marks, chop wood, carry water.
