6 min readAug 8, 2026 07:07 AM IST
First published on: Aug 8, 2026 at 06:45 AM IST
Adult members of society are so used to being surrounded by the young that they often forget how different the young actually are. They think differently for a variety of reasons their parents don’t take seriously. For one thing, the young carry a different sense of history. Even if parents and teachers tell them what all happened before they were born, this knowledge stays marginal to their consciousness. What is central is the history they have seen unfolding since they were about 10 or 11 — the age when awareness bursts forth, and the intellectual capacity to make sense of the world starts to move to a new level.
Many speeches made by young participants of the recent protest carried the fury that collective presence in a crowded, narrow space allowed to erupt. The cramped and winding space itself became a symbol — of the absence of comfortable dialogue with the adult world despite its claims of concern for the future generation. While the nation dreams of making every nook and shrine tourist-ready, its own children have slipped from attention. Many speeches conveyed a sense of betrayal. This was further confirmed by the state’s use of brute power.
Parents have long known how difficult it is to win and retain the trust of their progeny after adolescence sets in. Then onwards, children rely on their own sense of things. They seldom articulate their deepest queries and concerns as they are convinced they will neither be understood nor appreciated. By the time they are 14 or 15, they begin to dismiss adult explanations of how the world got where it is.
Theoretically, adolescence should phase out by the end of secondary schooling — around age 18. If we look at this period of human life in a purely technical manner, we will miss out on the historical reality of today. The extreme idealism of the young mind and the craving for self-identity don’t find an edifying response in a world where injustice is common, and not an adequate number of people have jobs — many of them unstable and mostly meaningless. Such jobs don’t build an identity — the feeling that this is what I do best, and more importantly, others can’t do it as well. A large section of the educated young have no stable work lives, let alone a career. The race for career jobs is terrifyingly competitive. Preparation for success in such races consists of cold, bone-chilling drills and, for many, the guilt of wasting parents’ money on coaching. The new technological environment doesn’t make inner life any easier. Rather, it adds to the emotional turmoil that is often covered up in addictive ways with entertainment and by letting age-mates stay in touch.
Suicide at a young age is an indicator that the social system is in distress. When suicide cases started to be noticed, they were rightly attributed to the stress caused by incoherent syllabi and the pressure of exams. The Yash Pal report of 1993 examined the issue. Its perspective did influence curriculum and pedagogy for a while, but systemic reversals edged it out of circulation. Suicides by educated youth continued to increase at a steady pace, moving into higher education. After its expansion to include students from marginalised social backgrounds, institutional capacity to do justice to the new entrants sharply declined. Rohith Vemula’s case was a glaring signal of a rupture in the higher education system. He was no teenager, but his words echo the haunting memory of childhood: “My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness”.
The only members of adult society who might have an inkling of the young person’s mind are teachers. However, they are so immersed in their formal routines that they have little time or energy left to relate to the young. Within their own professional domain — education — they are treated as subordinates. Their lack of status means that their reading of young minds counts for nothing in the policy world.
At the cultural level, suicide cases among young adults were symptoms of intergenerational breakdown. Neither the state nor society acknowledged this. Both chose to sustain the myth that continuity between the old and young was resilient enough to survive the change in values and behaviour. The popular belief was that so long as the older people shared their stories with the young, continuity shall stay intact. Barring a few scholars of social psychology, no one noticed that the idea of continuity became irrelevant after the 1970s. Factors causing discontinuity emerged, but no single cause could be held responsible. Shredding of social cohesion was one, and it reached its peak by the last decade of the 20th century. A damaged national narrative left the adolescent puzzled about adult thought on core issues and the future.
What happened in Delhi recently has confused many sections of adult society. Those who believe in early indoctrination wonder how such a massive expression of resentment escaped their foresight. We will do better next time, they might say. Others who see it mainly in political terms are tempted to discern in it a conspiracy. Didn’t the protagonist fly in from overseas, they ask. Then there are seekers of more precise reasons, and they want to focus on the NEET fiasco. However, they cannot easily explain why the NEET scandal resonated with so many others who had not taken the exam.
Arguably, the protest found resonance in a wider section of the young. It vented a deeper anger. It was the anger of the ignored. It demonstrated that youth frustration is not merely a perception: It is real, and neither education nor economic policies have responded to it. Rather, education has contributed to the sharpening of youth discontent and has offered the means to express it. Considering how constrained and fractured the system is, the means education has imparted to the young for expressing their indignation are limited. Any attempt to “fix” education by treating it as a mechanical toy is sure to miss the sharp decline in institutional capacity to make the young feel at home.
The writer is a former Director of NCERT and the author of Thank You, Gandhi
Any attempt to “fix” education by treating it as a mechanical toy is sure to miss the sharp decline in institutional capacity to make the young feel at home. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)
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