Admission Phase-Brown Parenting: A Match Made in Heaven (or Hell)

    Studying in itself can be rather exhaustingly competitive for a student of the national curriculum of Bangladesh, but the taunts for missing out on public universities can arguably be much harsher than those when your team gets eliminated from the FIFA World Cup. Suddenly, "7up" is not the Germany vs Brazil score-line, it's now the number of public universities your friend got into and you couldn't.

    In context of Bangladesh, almost every student, be a topper or a bottomer, has to face the ultimate challenge of outperforming the “পাশের বাসার ভাবির মেয়ে” throughout his/her entire academic character. No matter how good you score in your tests, there will always be a better brown kid of a poor rickshaw-puller you don’t know, contending with you, from a remote place you’ve never heard of. News of random scholarships will come into your house and you will be questioned for why you've never gotten any.

    This takes an even more gruesome turn when it comes to university admissions. University admission phase in Bangladesh can very easily become draining, depressive and in some cases deadly for some students and the blame falls on the “I-know-what’s-best-for-my-children” parents.

    While The Daily Star struggles to publish political evidence of class warfare in the society, brown parents start their own class conflict in the open benches of Udvash and Mentors’, a conflict we all know as “public-private” condescension. The ongoing stigma regarding public and private universities determining the caliber of students has become a deathtrap for the examinees who have no clue as to how this makes sense, because it doesn’t. Job market runs on brand value, yes, but that doesn’t mean students have to bear a “I am BUET” stamp on them to get a job or make a living, and this is what society tends to forget. Consequently, examinees undergo the unnecessary pressure of having to sacrifice their passion in order to fulfill their parents’ dreams because obviously parents know what's best for their children. Children become robots, forgetting to live, studying day and night, trying to get into public universities because they are made to believe that there is no other option than to follow the orders of their parents.

    Although universities like BRACU, NSU, AUST and others are doing quite well as engineering universities, parents are still hellbound in hand-cuffing their children to the peripherals of public universities. Similar situations can be seen for business institutes, medical colleges and other universities as well.

    

    As the admission phase progresses, a conversation in random gathering of parents becomes more common that go somewhat along the lines of “(cuing visible bragging) My son has gotten into every university he has applied for,” and “(cuing visible disappointment) My son is an imbecile who has wasted his life on computer games and football.” Now, what this pops up at home for the students, whose luck hasn’t favored them enough, is them having to face the destructive wordplay of their parents, words which include failure, useless, waste, disgrace and sorts. Parents become so blinded by social status that they metamorphosis into Hason Raja and sing “লোকে বলে ওহ বলে রেহ, ঘরবাড়ি ভালা নাই আমার,” because they cannot find peace in their house where they apparently breed a failure. Neither does this help the mental growth of a child nor does this help in the next exam and yet this has become a common scenario in almost every brown household out there. As much as it is true that BUET still holds the top position as an engineering university in the country, admission in BUET doesn’t determine whether a student is a failure or not. In fact, it matters less where you get admitted to but more how you build yourself from it.

    Not getting into a public university doesn’t harm a student much if not any at all, but what harms is the emotional turmoil s/he has to go through during the phase. Confidence, self esteem, mental energy falls down to almost the battery level of a facebook addict phone user and no one takes the blame for it. Instead of creating an inspiring and motivating environment for the examinee, parents deteriorate whatever spirit students cultivate to sit for the next exam.

    A common case of punishment that parents deem appropriate is grounding their children and restricting all sorts of entertainment facilities. A survey might even say students having the same rice are expected to perform similarly in academic activities. Another well established belief is that threatening daughters to marry them off to a rickshaw-puller somehow miraculously inspires them to perform well in exams.

    A lot of students fall prey to anxiety, clinical depression and often suicide cases from these sorts of mental torture during the admission phase. University admission phase in Bangladesh and brown parenting culture in the country is like a premium match on "shadhimatrimony.com".