“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.
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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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