Number of words: 495

A common complaint in educational circles regarding the non-performance of students in school relates to generation gap. It is difficult to capture the attention of the student today and to persuade him towards the goal, when he is interested towards other fields and when he appears to feel no relevance to the goals in hand. Would it not be much more productive to let this young persons know of their own limits and move along areas to which they feel an affinity? There can be little doubt that this way of thinking has been largely contributory to the indifferent attitude of students who enter schools today, so often with no knowledge or idea as to where they are going or want to go.

And the reason is because when adult control disappears, the young control each other. When the teaching faculty has difficulty in being authoritative without being authoritarian, when they side too much with the students for fear of being considered old fashioned, it is that feeling and not reason which dominates. The result is that the student becomes the sage, uttering words of wisdom that are equally lapped up by one and all as patently inspired.

Are the teachers not encouraging an egocentrism that finally leaves the student arrogant and destructive? Youth has always been characterized by impatient idealism. So far it is good, because it will lead to change. But it is an act of shared cowardice for a teacher to accept the verdict of his class that he is dishonest, interested only in increasing his material possessions and in becoming richer.

Sensitivity is no monopoly of the young, while society is a product of thousands of years of development and if there is, for instance, this grab for riches, it is a process that has been long in the coming so that it cannot be attributed to one’s immediate forbears. The teacher needs to explain this to the young that what he seeks, he sought, and what is finally won is won slowly and painfully, that arrogance and riots and violence are not idealism but tyranny and will not help to mend fences, that there is no room for apology because he is not solely responsible for the ills of the world and that like in the family, the school and the world need rules to run by. With penalties.

Failure in an examination is thus not necessarily the bias of a teacher towards a student, but often an accepted and necessary right of an institution to decide on the competence or non-competence of its members. It is time, talk of a generation gap melds into the talk of a progressive evolution, in which the individual is seen to be the fruit of the enrichment of past generations rather than as a shooting star that suddenly startles by its brilliance one moment only to vanish forever for the next.

Excerpted from pages 139-140 of ‘Examinations: An Informative Update’ by M Mascarenhas.