MURDER NO 3

Living in age where education and leadership have surrendered their nobility to a more practical and profitable approach, we awake each morning to shocking events. Where cold commercialisation has eroded ethical values, and we have a medical student slain in self styled revenge, three “honourable” leaders sharing dishonourable moments in legislative assembly and a teacher who meets a tragic end in her school. It may be rarest of the rare cases in the living memory.

Nothing is more shocking than the violence of the children. For any society, Children are the personification of innocence, free from the lies of the corrupt, adult world they are yet to enter. The murder of a school teacher by a 15 year old student in Chennai who was angry at being lectured for his poor performance in class has thrown up deeply alarming question on parenting, teaching, social and culture mores. Under any circumstances, the teacher did nothing beyond the expected duty. After the lad’s poor performance in the subject, Hindi, she wrote some notes in his school diary to attract the attention of his parents. In the prevailing situation it is common in students to tame a grudge against the teacher, but, in this case, the boy took a step ahead and planned to kill his mentor and waiting for the right opportunity. Was it wrong that the teacher wanted her student to shine in his studies? This makes the task of guarding against the recurrence of such events almost impossible.

Blaming parenting is easy, but it cannot be the deciding factor at least in this case. There is nothing which shows that the boy was brought up in an abnormal society as all his siblings are doing very well. It is obvious that the parents bear a greater share of the responsibility for the behaviour of their children, but at the same time bad parenting cannot explain such deviant behaviour. One may blame our educational system, including the process of examination and the marks evaluation mechanism, but these too cannot be held responsible for violence in the school.

The reason may be that the student do not occupy an innocent world of their own; they are very much part of the nasty, unworthy and adult universe. The teacher’s murder is indicative of the collateral damage of the society – our school cannot remain untouched when the outside world is burning. We need to pursue remedies at the school level by including counselling and early alarming system that can help the students to cope up with the stress and the strain in a better way.

In the last we have learnt a very good lesson from this incident that teachers are not devils and students are not always angels.