We are killing our future.

With the increasing rates of student suicides, the question becomes not whether the society loves us or not but whether they are doing justice to it.

Who is to blame for the suicide of these young individuals, potentially the future of India? Is it the parents? The peer pressure? The educational system? Or they themselves?

I think the answer to this major question is that all these people have a role to play in the death of our future.

Let’s begin with the people who give birth to, and raise these youngsters, the parents. The role parents play in an individual’s growth and mindset is comparatively more than any other part of their lives. Not only do the children get influenced by them but also inspired. The hard truth is that these parents are raising their children with the mindset they grew up with. They tell them that all that matters for them is that one piece of paper they bring home with (hopefully) an A on it. This makes the child feel helpless and worthless (intentionally or not).

Some parents and family members go to the extent of forcing their own dreams onto the student, who perhaps hasn’t discovered his/ her own calling yet.

All this makes them lose themselves, and the great amount of helplessness causes them to take their own lives and snatching away an integral part of our society’s development.

Another important aspect of a student’s life is his/ her friends, classmates and schoolmates. They influence the thought process of a person. Sometimes children go to the height of putting their lives and passion at risk in order to satisfy the needs of their friends and that of the society. Often, under pressure of these, usually unintentional circumstances, students sacrifice their health and lives.

I, personally, think that the one to blame the most is the education system. Although made with the right intentions, it is destroying individualism, dreams and lives. Initially made with the idea of testing patience and memory, it soon turned into a tool of judgment of one’s personality and future. The system not only wants us to ace in all subjects, irrespective of their relevance in the future we want to make, but also the choices of students are being subconsciously affected and changed by the  morally corrupt system.

Students, themselves, need to understand the importance of a broad based education, the concerns of the parents and the family. But above all they need to put their health and dreams first. They need to stand up for themselves and their fellow youngsters. And provide the best they can to the society and the world.

The parents need to sit and think a lot, about how they are going about teaching their children things that might not be of any use to them but instead make them feel helpless and confused. I think parents would know better how important their child is to them and how they can improve their relationship with their children in order to see them successful and happy. Students also need to understand that their parent’s lives also, to an extent, revolve around their own future, and how devastated the parents would be if they took such an extreme step.

So what we all need to do is step back and introspect what all we can do as a society and as an individual, depending on which pillar of education and students we consist of. We need to know where we went wrong and how we can improve.