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Thulasi Muttulingam : The more I see of how Jaffna parents undermine their children's cognitive development through constant tuition, rote memorization and the obsession with coming first in class, the more grateful I am that my father stepped in to ensure my siblings and I didn't grow up that way.
I hadn't appreciated the significance of that intervention when I was young. I only wish I'd had the opportunity to thank him for it.
My mother was the typical tiger mum who would happily have followed the community norm of beating us for anything less than perfect scores.
As I was telling another teacher recently, schools really need to stop publishing class rankings on report cards. First, second, third... all the way down to 30th out of 30.
It isn't the child who comes last that we should feel most sorry for. Usually, after a few beatings, parents resign themselves to the fact that the child simply isn't academic.
It's the poor child who consistently comes second who gets hammered every single time.
My father had been that poor sod.
He came second throughout much of his school life and was beaten for it. As a result, he developed a lifelong allergy to that particular parenting strategy.
It was one of the very few parenting decisions on which he drew a firm line with my mother.
"No beating the children over marks."
They eventually reached a compromise.
My mother insisted on straight As.
My father said, "Fine. The children should get at least 75. But don't beat them for getting 98."
Growing up in the Maldives, many of my Sri Lankan Tamil friends were beaten for scoring 98 out of 100.
In the meantime, my siblings and I coasted along with 70s.
The result was that throughout primary school I was the laughing stock of the community because I got "only 75" while everyone else's children supposedly scored perfect 100s, or high 90s they were still punished for.
My parents didn't care and neither did I. Some of them actually took the time to come to our house and mock us as stupid. We shrugged and rolled along.
I never studied at home throughout primary school.
No tuition.
No exam revision.
I simply paid attention in class and still got the minimum required for As.
By the time I reached secondary school, I realised that strategy was no longer enough.
I still had no tuition in Grades 6 and 7. Both my parents believed children needed time to play. But I learned that I at least needed to revise before exams.
I still earned straight As in most subjects, but Mathematics slipped to Bs and, once, even a C.
So in Grade 8, I got my first tuition teacher.
For Mathematics.
As it turned out, I probably didn't need him.
That same year, a mathematics teacher named Mr. Luxaman Dantanarayana joined our school while on a two-year sabbatical from Trinity College, Kandy.
If anyone reading this knows him or has his contact details, I would be incredibly grateful. I even contacted the Principal of Trinity College a few years ago hoping to find him, but by then he had moved on.
He was, without question, the most influential teacher of my life.
Until then, I had been largely indifferent to mathematics and had begun wondering whether I had dyscalculia, long before I even knew such a condition existed.
He was a shy, quiet and gentle man.
Yet the moment he began teaching, he came alive with a fiery passion for his subject that he imparted to us.
Just a few years later, my very first job straight out of school was as a Mathematics teacher to Gr. 8 students. Several of my own students told me in turn that I had passed the burning passion to them. Under him, I went from scoring in the 60s to regularly scoring in the upper 90s.
I never quite managed a perfect 100 because of the occasional careless mistake but frequently got 98.
And I no longer needed tuition or endless revision to achieve it.
I remembered what he taught at school and solved extra exercises at home simply because I enjoyed them.
Grade 8 also marked the beginning of the London O Level syllabus in the Maldives. Subjects from then on required critical thinking. Rote memorization wouldn't cut it.
The students who had once been far ahead of me began falling behind. They went from 90s to 70s while I moved up from the 70s to the 90s in the marks range. Their parents were still dropping in at various homes after exams, comparing notes on how their kids had fared. Some of these peers begged me to tell their parents I had actually scored less than them. They would be beaten otherwise.
I complied - and also came home to warn my parents to perpetuate the fibs. Even my mother who was rather annoyed, still complied.
Some poor kid would have gotten beaten otherwise.
And all for what?
Years later, especially as a teacher in Jaffna, I have watched with increasing alarm how much damage this culture of excessive academic pressure can do to children's cognitive development.
Looking back, I realise what a fortunate escape I had because my father insisted that learning should be enjoyable rather than driven by fear or competition.
The tragedy is that these parents genuinely want the best for their children. They invest enormous amounts of time, money and sacrifice in education. Yet many end up achieving the opposite of what they intended.
I regularly teach adult students who exhibit limited critical thinking skills and no learning strategy beyond memorization. Not because they lack intelligence but because that is all they have been taught all the way through school and even university.
Many also lack the practical life skills to navigate relationships and life, or professional skills to manage their careers with.
All they seem to know is unhealthy competition, undercutting and undermining each other for no good reason. They don't get ahead much that way. They just ensure that no one else does either.
We are bringing ourselves down as a society with this mechanism.
They collectively exhibit litttle to no concept of happiness, relaxation or camraderie.
Because we as a society are damaging them young by removing those concepts from children who naturally have it.
Poor little kids are woken at five in the morning for tuition from primary school onwards, spend every spare hour in tuition classes, all the way to midnight. And at the end of it all, they get asked what happened to the remaining two marks if they scored 98 or how dare they do less than Chitra aunty's son who got 99.
Has any parent stopped to think what effect this will have on them now vs when they are 30?
Children need time to be bored.
They need time to play.
They need to interact with other children, solve problems independently and discover that learning is about far more than outperforming everyone else.
Those experiences are not distractions from education.
They are part of education.
If we want children to develop the life skills needed for adulthood, we need to stop treating childhood as one long race for marks.
This culture is harming not only individual children but our society as a whole. It leads to toxic workplaces as well as neighbourhoods with everyone trying to one-up each other and actively undermine each other while they are about it. Why aren't more people stopping to ask whether there might be a better way?
And no, the better way is not migrating to Australia.
As those countries are discovering, people take their problems with them. Especially cultural problems.
One drop of poison in a river might not damage it too much.
An inflood of poison will make it undrinkable for everybody.
That's the effect mass migration is having on those countries now.
I said what I said.
Stay home and develop better cultures. In turn leading to better neighbourhoods and workplaces. Stop poisoning your kids, and in turn the systems around you. And stop taking your problems with you to Australia while you are about it.
I used to follow anti-migrant narratives from the West just to see how so called racists from there think. Now I just feel sorry for them. If you don't want your kind as neighbours, what makes you think they would?
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