I don’t have too many happy memories of school. The best of my days were spent organising my classmates in such a way that I got to borrow a book using the library cards of all those who did not read. The friends I had were few and far in between, mostly because tendencies for fickle childhood allegiances did not match the staunch loyalties I had learned from Harry Potter.
When I think back to school, it was for me just a place to access knowledge and opportunities. While my classmates battled it out for who’d top the class, I’d spend the night writing fan fiction and nearly glide into class the next morning, head half in a story. The magic of school was that no matter where you came from, you all wore the same thing and learned the same things.
I come from a middle class background, grew up outside India but went to a very Indian school where a large population was more affluent than me. A school where we were taught some very important things about the Tyndall effect and mitochondria, but missed a few things – such as how to cheer for your classmates when they bagged an achievement instead of spreading rumours about them, or how to build a wholesome circle of friends, including the people you got along with, and not just confined to people who matched your demographic.
I grew up with a cocktail of mental illness, autonomy, big hearts and two people – my parents – who believed that I could reshape the stars. While the soul-less school environment taught us to compete with each other, my mother taught me about a few numbers that really mattered; the smiles you could put on the faces of those you cared about, for example. While school forced us to mug up the specific weight of each atom in the periodic table, my father encouraged me to explore each dish that people of different cultures made during their festival day, and break bread with them.
On the other hand, I still grew up with mental illness – something that wasn’t acknowledged or looked after – it was the thing we didn’t discuss in the hopes that it would quietly go away, and that I wasn’t ‘mad’ after all. My entire life has been one long search for the term ‘mental health, but it was only at 16, when I saw the words ‘bipolar disorder’ in my psychology textbook, when my stomach churned and a large, inexplicable part of my life fell into place.
I spent years being angry at my parents for refusing to acknowledge my mental illness when I first went to them at 16, and later pretending it didn’t exist when I wrote to them at 20. But ironically, it is the very things they taught me; empathy, the power of using my voice for a larger good, and how to hold conversations with people who needn’t agree with me – that served as the tools which shaped me into the mental health advocate I am today.
Empathy enabled me to see fear in the eyes of the man who so vehemently questioned the very same medication that kept me alive. Self control stopped me from saying something scathing in response to a snarky comment on extroverted advocates. And what perseverance got me is a family who now wholly believes in mental health, a support system I’ve never had my entire childhood, and a whole lotta self love. I understand now that my parents were wary of taking me to the psychologist’s office for fear of their child being labelled mad by the community, the larger society, whose responsibility it actually is to hold an individual when they need it the most…
Children escape a lot when they step over the gates of their homes to be in school. Class, caste, colour and a hundred other social divides collide to enlarge distances between humans, an education can equalise us all, level the playing field. There’s much to wonder about what we constitute as education, though. Is it enough to know how to calculate the mass of a blue whale?
We cannot continue to harbour this narrow-minded idea of education as serving to shape a career. If I’d had the chance to be in a classroom that valued empathy and leadership, perseverance and communication, maybe I’d have been called “that determined girl with a mind of her own” instead of “that loudmouth who had to do everything her way.”
As a mental health advocate, human connections interest me more than the average human. Something that I’m determined to see through my lifetime is the establishment of a life skills curriculum in schools. As I see it, this will give young students, particularly girls, a space to discover themselves and decide for themselves the kind of humans they want to be, without a lifestyle being prescribed to them. Little girls are powerhouses whose potential is sadly wilting away behind closed doors and beneath heavy baskets. To formally address human emotions within an educational institute means to validate the human experience, which is priceless for every single growing girl.
There is much to be said for what a school values, that translates into the kind of people it produces. The world is in dire need of individuals who aren’t just excellent at practical skills; it needs those whose thought processes can diverge, those who can cut across differences to build revolutions together. For what are we if not a bundle of emotions locked in a tiny skull, longing for honest human connections?
Do you think formal Life Skills training in school can help empower young girls to take charge of their lives and find wellbeing and bright futures like Sanchana? Share your story, thoughts and solutions to integrate this training in schools, and we’ll take it to the Ministry of Human Resource Development! Write in with #SkillToLead and learn more about the campaign here!