Kota (Rajasthan): Experts have been advising parents to assess their kids' aptitude using professional consultation before deciding whether to send them to prepare for the highly competitive JEE and NEET exams in Kota, due to the unrest caused after the suicide of four students within a month in the country's coaching hub. After keeping a close eye on the recent events of suicides, educational experts and psychologists have said, "Grooming students mentally and training them to do their daily chores on their own are also a very important part of the 'Preparing for the preparation' exercise."
Dr Chandra Shekhar Sushil, Head of the Department of Psychiatry at New Medical College Hospital in Kota, said, "Instead of pushing children to become doctors and engineers, parents should make them take an aptitude test and then decide what's best for them. A majority of parents send their children for coaching there with almost zero preparation and the focus is only on arranging finances and logistics." In the year 2022 itself, a record 2 lakh students enrolled in various coaching institutes in Kota, and at least 14 students studying in coaching centres there committed suicide this year, allegedly due to academic stress.
The recent incident where three students committed suicide within 12 hours on December 11th and another student died by suicide on the 23rd, all allegedly due to academic stress, has triggered a fresh debate among experts regarding the mental health of students who are often bogged down in the fast-paced curriculum, family expectations and societal pressures, and prompting the district and coaching authorities to ramp up measures to keep the problem in check.
"I do not believe coaching institutes have much of a role in student suicides. We have to admit that JEE and NEET are very tough exams and hence the teaching and learning is also supposed to be of the same level." "However, taking an aptitude test before sending students to Kota is very important. It is equally important that some sort of counselling and grooming is done at least two years before the child comes to Kota as majority of these kids have never stayed away from home before," Sushil added.
Harish Sharma, Principal Counsellor and Student-Behaviour expert at Allen Career Institute, says, "When a child is in class 5 or 6, parents decide that two years or four years later he or she will be sent to Kota." They start saving up accordingly or start making plans to move to the city well in advance, he said.
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"They start saving up accordingly or start making plans to move to the city well in advance. However, they never try to professionally analyse whether their child actually wants to do that or is even fit for doing that." There should be no shame in accepting suggestions from the professionals and acting accordingly, he added. "A decade before, professional help in aptitude testing and decision making wasn't that easily available but today it is." Parents mostly focus on their children getting higher marks without understanding their mental capability, he said.
"Scoring above 90 per cent in class 10 or 12 cannot be a benchmark to decide whether a child is meant for engineering or medicine. We often find students here who either come under parental pressure or did not have an idea early on about their choice of subjects. This is where professional aptitude tests can help," he said. He said making an informed decision early on is important.
Sharma further explained that, when the child is already here, the ship has kind of sailed. Parents and children often get bothered by the fact that their peers know about the move and if they return without the desired results, they will be looked down upon. If an informed decision can be made early on, it can be really helpful. "Talking to neighbours and relatives whose children might have gone to Kota is not enough and professional help should be sought at an early stage," he added.
RK Verma, Managing Director and Academic Head of Resonance, a coaching institute in Kota, says that developing proper communication channels between parents and children well in advance is very important. "The parents cannot expect that their child will suddenly start communicating with them when he is here. This bond and comfort level has to be developed before. We have also noticed that the kids are completely dependent upon parents till the time they come here," he said.
"The academic pressure in Kota's coaching centres is far more than what students would have dealt with earlier. The inability to manage the routine chores like arranging your wardrobe, sending clothes for laundry, reaching the mess on time to have meals, waking up themselves, all of these things....the children have not done on their own before coming here," Verma said. "So suddenly, the child finds himself lost. So we advise parents to stop keeping their children in their laps, at least two years before sending here. So that the only difficulty they find is the dealing with the academic part, which we can resolve here," he added. (With agency inputs)
