Imagine a school that teaches division through practical examples, immersing you in a social hierarchy within its ecosystem. Here, students grapple with intense psychological conflicts, facing the challenges of power dynamics and personal identity. They are placed in a chained framework, with little room to grow freely and breathe comfortably.

The school prides itself on its accolades and national rankings on the grounds of outstanding academic success of its students. Admissions to this school are also no easy feat. Yet, perhaps the greater challenge lies in unlearning what a child absorbs here - a sense of inadequacy, a sense of not belonging, six hours of daily grind spent between feelings of inferiority and superiority.

Children are taught here with a state-of-the-art pedagogy of rote learning, treading the conventional routes, abiding by the rules relentlessly, and being assessed on how well they can “go by the books.”

In the guise of their academic growth, they also learn to please, or learn to try to please their well-wishers and teachers, and eventually everybody else. They learn tolerance of being judged on limited parameters and comparison with their peers on unwarranted grounds. In the long run, they become thriving professionals carrying heavy weights of stubborn trauma. They feel directionless and confused, with bitter ingratitude for their alma mater.

To this day, children learn to endure lasting damage in the “best” school in the city. Each standard is divided with suggestive names into different sections and classrooms. The classification is done on the grounds of academic merit. The creme-de-creme sits on the high grounds in sections named - Self-Esteem, and Valour, which are sections A and B of class sixth here. Then in the decreasing order of precedence comes Section C- Honor, Section D- Faith, and Section E - Hope.

Sections D and E are named Faith and Hope as if the futures of their students hinge on these virtues. These are the students who faced disapproval, who struggled for recognition, and whose teachers often overlooked them. They carried the weight of feeling inferior and guilty. Some of them still do after many years, despite being so talented.

Setting nostalgia aside, the coloring influence of our "one of the best schools in the city and nation" still impacts many of us today. As alumni of our prestigious school, we are learning to unlearn many of the lessons we were taught there—as if the distorted societal divisions in our nation were not enough already!

The real culprit behind the subjugation of innocent childhoods is the system meant to educate them—the society they inhabit, the unrealistic and misdirected expectations from parents, and the constant pressure to distinguish oneself between winning and losing, good and bad.

“To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world.

Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. Surely, this process is not relationship, but mere imposition, and it is therefore essential to understand the difficult and complex desire to dominate. ” - Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life

While it's not my place to dictate the role of a school, but as someone who has personally experienced these divisions, I too, can certainly suggest what it should not do—through the story of our alma mater and many similar educational institutions—due to its far-reaching consequences.

Schools should distance themselves from any form of derogatory divisions as if suggesting that a student scoring ninety percent holds more worth as an individual than one achieving a sixty. Every life, every mind, and every child holds immense value, and should not be wounded or corrupted by narrow social bifurcations.

Our school system was such, that as somebody who stood somewhere above average, I do not like to remember my alma mater out of fondness. There is nostalgia, but I wish it had not made learning a stressful and serious affair for me and so many others. So many precious years of ignorant joys, of so many, could have been nourished. We would not have taken comparisons seriously and personally, measuring our value in it, and also not become the next-gen of the same vice. We would be less judgemental of ourselves and others, and less wounded, less hurt, and less serious.

For me and many like me, the toppers of our school, who were not just toppers of the school, but some were of the state, or the nation as well, would not become god figures, as somebody unapproachable, as someone so high that we stoop low in worth, and stand lower in the eyes of society comprising our very own teachers, and parents. Our transition could have gone more smoothly into the adult world of responsibilities and duties.

It’s not as if only the “also-rans”, and the lower “caste”(read-section) students felt inadequate. I got in touch with one of my batchmates, who was also the school topper. He told me how he despised the division we endured in our school, and how it made him lose friends because of changing sections (read-castes) due to the differences in scores. In his understanding, it made him into somebody who constantly bore his heavy expectations of also always standing out in his career, leaving him all bugged up and clueless in life and living.

This is a reminder for every new-gen parent to save their child from such psychologically depreciative influences of the society, of the culture in which they are born so that when they grow up they can build a brave, new, and better world.

.    .    .