Driving children to suicide? Who is responsible?

March 28, 2012, 7:53 pm , The Island.


Your editorial of March 27, ‘Driving children to suicide?’ is indeed praiseworthy. I wish to congratulate Prof. Chandrika Jayasinghe, a junior colleague mine on her excellent article in The Island of March 23 on this subject where she had made use of her own experience as a mother of her young daughter as well as a medical teacher. She belongs to a rare breed of medical professionals in this country who write regularly to the press (mainly in The Island news paper) on current issues thereby exhibiting her social conscience and therefore her intense patriotism.

My intention is not to delve into the psychological, social and medical consequences of the current education system which has been dealt adequately by your editorial as well as Prof. Jayasinghe’s letter. I wish to consider some possible causes and identify who is responsible for this malady. It is certainly not the child who is at fault but most of the blame should be borne by the parents themselves as well as the educational authorities who in turn are dictated by the politicians. The politicians have seen to that the economic development of our country do not percolate down to all sections of the society. They perpetually keep them undereducated and therefore misinformed so that hey could be fooled by exotic promises made at an election time. The upcountry Tamil politicians have done it so effectively so that the economic standards of the estate sector have not appreciably improved during the past several decades. While most of their children are being educated abroad, it is the children of the poor and the middle classes who have to compete for the limited resources that are available to them and it is so intense that it has become a do-or-die battle for some of them. The farmer or the carpenter or the manual labourer does not wish his child to follow the same vocation and the only avenue left for them to advance their future is based on a sound education. In this respect it has been shown by recent reports that most children who commit or attempt suicide belong to the lower social classes.

The parents are at fault since it is they who drive and push these children to unattainable goals since all children are not made intellectually equal. They do not recognize the potential of a child to train for a profession that the child would be good at. Instead every parent wants his or her child to be a doctor, an engineer or an accountant or a lawyer since that is where future economic stability lies. In contrast children of rich families are aware of the fact that it doesn’t matter what educational stream he chooses as he knows well that he will some day inherit the fortunes of their parents. The second reason why the parents are at fault is it is they who ultimately vote for the politicians to come to power and enrich themselves at the expense of those who elected them.

Prof. Upali Illangasekera,
Professor in Medicine,
University of Peradeniya