Some kids in India are pushed even more than this Chinese kid; a kid sister of my friend goes to private tuition so that she could pass the entrance test of another private tuition which takes in less students and trains them to write and pass the entrance exam of a reputed college in India (so in simple words, she is going through two levels of tuitions to get into another tuition which she might attend 4-5 years later). This is certainly not a one-off case; there is a generation which is growing up like these or much worse.

Every other week I read in newspaper that a school or college kid killed himself/herself because they failed or got lesser marks than their peers. The most recent I read was a girl killed herself because she got 4 marks lesser than the topper of her class. It is scary and it actually makes you wonder, does the cost of sitting in a cubicle coding a website really worth a life lost.

I have actually thought a lot about the reason “Why Parents are pushing their kids to the wall”, it is certainly not job uncertainty (there are plenty of outsourced jobs here and you can see almost anyone who is slightly not retarded getting one). The only answer I got was “Most of the parents in third-world countries lack good identities” because they are in some jobs which they are not very happy or proud of and the only way for them to escape from their ‘past or present’ is to change their future which they think is in the hands of their kids and not theirs. They constantly hear of stories of kids who studied well, got a job in some company and bought his/her parents house (which if he/she is lucky enough to hold on to a job might own it in next 20 years). As I have seen most of the pushy parents are highly incompetent who actually believe that their life is over, they can’t change it because they missed opportunities when they were young or some crap like that. A real person would go achieve what he wants at any age irrespective of anything else, but pushy parents are not real people because they are betting on their kids and that is much easier to do.

The other part of the problem is housewives (I am not sexist); this is a group which actually doesn’t have an identity. If you have ever been near one, most of their sentences start with “My son/daughter is…” most of these sentences end with an achievement of their kids which are incidentally better than other housewives kids. Now the housewives who were humiliated in the conversation go home force their kids to do well in whatever they do. It is certainly not limited to studies; it can be anything jumping a fence, throwing a ball or anything else. At the end of the day, their kid has to be better than other kids. It is kind of like playing WoW where they want their avatars to be better than others and they want their avatars to level up faster so that they can fight bigger battles. So the problem is certainly not the education system, it is actually the society (housewives and people who are not happy with their jobs). So my solution would be think about the kids later, create jobs for housewives (idle minds are devil’s workshop, they are the clear example of it) and create social programs to make people like their jobs or better yet preach Entrepreneurialism. Keep the housewives busy and you would automatically see an improvement in kids who are back to being creative and independent like they always were. Please leave the kids alone, nurture them and if you can’t don’t kill the creativity they have by putting undue pressure on them.

I have always believed that to be successful intellectually, you should be driven by curiosity rather than fear. — tigerthink

update: This is also being discussed on Hacker News and has some good and contrary thoughts on this particular topic. Check it out here.