Can An 8-Year Old Be a "Failure"?

My experience in secondary school in India makes me particularly sympathetic to victims of torture and arbitrary detention. I was in Rosary Matriculation School, on Santhome High Road, in Chennai, from UKG to 4th standard and even if someone had launched a national search for the ‘Most Miserable Child’ in the land, they’d have been hard-pressed to find one worse-off than me.

In the post below, I will rant about the humiliation heaped upon my 8 year old self and if such a thing still happens, it’s got to stop.

Like most Indian schools Rosary loved ranks to grade kids at the end of exam results. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and on and on it went reaching the bottom of the class to about 58th. Least fun way to practice numbers. However, there was a category worse than those bottom ranks. If you didn’t get the requisite 40 marks to pass, you were, rather too easily in my opinion, labeled a “Failure”. You have to love the lack of nuance.

I was in 4th standard and my fear of numbers had just set in. In the high-speed rush to go through the syllabus the teachers only kept pace with the sharpest kids in class. If you stumbled you’d be trod on by a fast-moving little regiment of nerds who like the teacher had little patience. Basically, you could get left quite far behind, dazed and confused, which is precisely what happened to me.

So far behind that for the first time in my life, at the wee little age of 8, I failed Maths. FAILED.

And immediately, I was pushed into the category of “Failures” with the speed of Alice going down the rabbit-hole.

But that wasn’t all. As if the semantics weren’t bad enough, this whole business of ‘failing’ was visually represented as well.

Rosary had a tradition where the school Principal, invariably a stern nun, went to every classroom to individually hand over each student’s report card to them. It was always a tense interaction where the class teacher nervously shifted her weight from one foot to the other and the Principal smiled a pained smile to the pupil while handing her the report card. To make this affair orderly, we had to sit along the benches according to rank with the highest rank holders starting from the first bench and flowing downward from there.

The last rows were reserved for the “failures”. With feet that weighed a million tones, I dragged my little self to the back and arranged me in the midst of the ‘Failed’. I now recall that many of the girls at the back were invariably from less privileged backgrounds – their blue uniforms having faded and shrunk, streaked with lines of white - a remnant of excess starching because their uniforms were long past their sell-by date. It was a sad, little lot.

Sister Teresita, a goggle-eyed terror, was the Principal that year. It has just occurred to me that she should have spelt her name “Terrorsita”. Hyuk Hyuk. Anyway, she came in and distributed the report cards, while maintaining a stiff smile throughout. I may now be imagining this, but I thought I received the cold stare of a dead cod. Nehru would have cried.

For this humiliation and also simply because I wasn’t as good as the other kids, I went through all my years in school setting the bar very low. I only wanted to pass Maths. I didn’t want to sit at the back again and I didn’t want nosey uncles and aunties asking me how much I had got in “Max”. I just wanted to pass. So I took the focus away from wanting to do well to figuring out how I could pass.

Improving the school system will require an overhaul of gargantuan proportions. But we can begin by getting rid of labels such as "Failure" and other discriminatory practices which sometimes parade as discipline. If this nonsense is still on at Rosary, its got to stop.