There has been a sea change in students’ relationship with teachers. They approach the latter with less consternation than before, and are no longer averse to looking upon them as friends. But the healthy and much-welcome shortening of distance between the staff-room and the classroom has also had its pitfalls. The recent aggression shown by students in several schools in West Bengal following their failure to clear the qualifying test before they could sit for the board examinations is perhaps an inadvertent and unfortunate result of this. In at least seven educational institutions across the state, teachers have suffered much harassment at the hands of students who did not think twice before putting the blame for their academic failure squarely on the school. They gheraoed the principal, damaged school property, disrupted school and even prevented their successful classmates from filling up their forms for the forthcoming board examinations.

What is most surprising is that their parents, instead of driving sense into their wards, became equal partners in this rampage. The stridency in guardians’ response to decisions taken by the school is not new. Parents have often chosen to show their concern for their children’s education by voicing their objections to what teachers wear to school. The quality of education teachers impart is perhaps less worrisome. This is natural considering the fact that the chief purpose of education today is that of clearing examinations. Which is why both students and parents appear so inordinately worried about the lost chance to appear for one. The schools’ argument that the failed students are not academically sound enough to take the board examinations does not hold water. Students know, as do their parents, that irrespective of their past performance, tuitions and what are popularly known as ‘suggestions’ can do a lot to help preparations for the finals. Hence their confidence of doing well if allowed to sit for them.

Agitating parents have argued that they had not been informed by the school about their children’s academic performance. While there is reason to suspect a lack of communication between the school and parents, concerned guardians cannot be entirely unaware of how their wards are faring. That they should refuse to take a year’s delay as an opportunity to improve on their children’s performance makes for weird logic. Stretched a little further, this logic could even be used for allowing students to cheat to pass examinations. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the licence for mass cheating has become an electoral issue. Politicians, whose connections with the educational set-up have always been too close for comfort (as their interference in this incident shows clearly), have even pushed schools to give pass marks to the underprivileged. Their argument is that these categories of students need to pass examinations to make use of the reservations in jobs. But if examinations are the spoiler in every sense of the word, why have them at all?