Following the announcement of 10th and 12th class board examination results, the newspapers in Jammu and Kashmir were filled with the congratulatory content regarding the students who qualified these exams. Every school and educational institute claimed the remarkable achievements of their students, the adverstisements in the newspapers suggest that coaching centres are anxious to handle the successess of the students; besides, various schools and colleges have begin with the admission processes for the deserving students. To put it briefly, one can clearly see that there is no shortage of ‘success handlers’ but at the same time the dearth of ‘failure handlers’ is evident. As a norm, to all those students who received failing grades, what awaits them is just reappearance in the examination and nothing else….
Our education system maybe better and quite responsive at handling the successess of the students but it has so far never attempted to handle the failures of the students. If the government run schools are ahead of producing failures, the private schools are also not far behind in the same but it is only the bad performance of government run schools which remains a matter of discussion, while as the private schools just own the students who pass their examination and not those who fail in it. There is no denying the fact that most of the times the failure is choosen but it is also true that sometimes the failure is also enforced upon the students.
After the announcement of 12th class exams result, in order to seek the truth about their failures, I met a few students who did not pass the examination. Majority of those students told me that that they were forced to take up certain subjects by their parents which were beyond the grasp of their intellect ability. Just like the success which has got many desirable aspects, failure is not plain and it has also got many dimensions that need transformation. The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) also known as “School of Failures” holds such a distinction of assessing the dimensions of ‘student failures’. Sonam Wangchuk who is the founder of ‘SECMOL’ saw the failure of the students in the 10th class examination which was recorded 95 percent in the year 1998 not as the failure of the students but for him it signified the failure of the system and with this approach this failure percentage of class 10th students came down to just 10 percent after a gap of ten years.
The educational institutes of Jammu and Kashmir should take a cue from the ‘SECMOL’ initiative and adopt policies to tackle the student failures. With the government of J&K announcing the remedial classes for students of Dardpora school in Kupwara district among which only one out of 44 passed the recently held examination, the government should also urge all the other educational institutes to take responsibility of starting the remedial classes for its students who have failed the examination.
The problem with the feeling of euphoria and social importance assigned to the board examination results is that it leads to a judgemental error that is believed to foretell what a student is going to do rest of his/her life academically. But the truth is that passing the 10th or 12th class examination is not the finishing line of a student’s academic race instead these two achievements are just the lapses in it and there are more of them ahead in his/her academic career. Parents should stop associating the exam result of their kids with their self-esteem and also they should not take these academic outcomes whatsoever as the verdict of their kids academic career.
(The author writes on topics concerning politics,society and public welfare exclusively for “Kashmir Horizon”. Views of the author are his own)
