The Meaning of Success
I feel like it to write today after seeing the date of my previous entry just now. It has been ages since I last rambled about the trip back to KL after Raya. I am very sure the regulars are pissed off seeing the same damn old thing every time come in.
I am actually touched by the recent news of a young girl in Nibong Tebal, Penang by the name Subashini who committed suicide after her unsatisfactory results in her UPSR with 4B 1C. Well, is not too bad after all and the least notion in my head to regard it as fail, what more when it is merely an assessment for primary school students.
The first thing came across my mind upon reading the news was the coincidence in the name, my wife’s student also named Subashini, who also committed suicide two years ago. And she was from Penang too. She hung herself with self-woven rope from the ceiling fan in her room at the hostel. It didn’t make the news on the national front as it was protected by the authority to keep the good name of the governmental institution.
Anyway, it’s easy to comprehend when a college-going adult in her 20’s to do such thing for she might have had too much to bear on challenges in her threshold of adulthood. It must be a major slip of thought that never had given her second chance to think.
But it’s hard for me to understand when a 12-year old kid would have had guts to act out something like that.
The only thing that lingered in my mind is something has terribly gone wrong in our education system if not the life value itself. We are pushing them too much, aren’t we?
To me, kids would never have thought of committing suicide if they are allowed to grow at their own pace and achieving what they would achieve in their performances and let them choose the means for them to grow up (and of course parental guidance never out of sight). Let them live the life of children and thus to love life will be second nature to them.
At that tender age, they still have no idea on the benchmark of any target-setting and oblivious to what failing and succeeding are. What can we expect? They are only kids that are very dependent on adults and the systems adopted by the society. They would only be such if it is systematically in their surrounding pressuring them to be at what designated them to be. That in turn, failing to reach the mark would mean to them, they are of no value to face the world and live.
When the time they needed such encouragements and motivations to absorb what they comprehend as failure and deeply wounded over what wrapped in their fate, nobody was there to give words of comfort. And it is imperative to note that, a cliché goes like, no such thing is called failure until a time when one stops trying. Being overwhelmed by the thoughts cascading from their kiddy surreal indulgent, they would have had a hunch that, adults are giving them cold shoulders; of which it is as good as adding salt to the wound. And there goes, it makes the news when they execute what they thought it was the only way out.
It’s time for us to reform. It’s time for us to look at educations objectively.
Every parent wants his or her children to do well in educations. No doubt with good results it will be a motivational factor for children to reap another milestone of success in their academic years, but it is still not a guarantee. Poor results do not mean their futures would be bleak and desolate either. The most important fact that every parent has to understand is, not all children are the same. Some are slow learners while others are fast. Some bloom earlier in life while some are having hard time to be out of their buds.
Doing well in school with flying colors is only a bonus. On top of anything, all the children need is only the unconditional love from parents, and it is important for them to not just know they are loved but for them to feel it too.
Let them know, let them feel it. Let them have life.
See HERE
GAB: Uncelebrated successes are equally as bad as condemned failures.
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