“Y ou’re not good at maths; I doubt if you’d do anything great in your life,” my school Principal told me.
These words reflected judgmental views regarding success and choices of life-streams. A student who might be good in humanities or commerce or even in biology is often thought of as mediocre.
During my school days I often faced such incidents. The human mind is a complex machine, and it operates not largely on the basis of recent feeds but those from beginning of its functioning. This complexity gives rise to a sense of loss of one’s self-respect and self-worth in the long run. In the process, a person comes to have judgmental, chauvinist and discriminatory points of view and attitudes.
Being called mediocre doesn’t always make you so, but it touches down to being poor, academically, financially and socially too, leading to corrosion of basic human self-respect and dignity. For students it is quite frustrating, as they come under peer pressure to meet a certain criterion, only where he/she will be judged optimistically. This restricts the scope of development of his/her taste, choice, capability and comfort zone.
It is the beginning that matters most. When a person is young, he or she must be taught basic human values of respecting people, animals and nature, which we have forgotten. Also, parents must respect a child’s choices and regularly engage with it.
I wish that a day comes when a child exercises his right of choice of career, marriage and way of living on his terms and mind is free from biased way of thought.
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