Obsession with success

I have had occasions to sit through the ‘Annual Day’ programmes of a large number of schools all over the country. The Head’s report is invariably a list of ‘successes’ and ‘achievements’ of various kinds. I too have done the same thing while presenting the annual report of my institution. However on every such occasion I have felt more than a twinge of discomfort. This is because somewhere I feel that the idea of success in the world of education must not be, but unfortunately is, the same as it is elsewhere. This is the kind of success that thrives on institutionalized aggression, what we call competition. It portrays the pursuit of status and power as a desirable and justifiable yearning for the Holy Grail. We are a society obsessed with the idea of success but rarely have we paused to question the nature of the ‘success’ that we make our young hanker after. Very conveniently we forget that someone’s success is also someone else’s failure. Haunted by the specter of failure we produce large numbers of students who suffer from, what a newspaper recently called, obsessive career disorders. No wonder we live in a sick society dominated by aggression, hostility, betrayal and injustice. There is little or no societal space for the passive, the acquiescent, for one who is not a warrior all set to conquer the world. The massive insecurity that such a situation creates is both astonishing and highly destructive for our young. One wonders how one can even begin to address this issue, let alone reverse the trend.