By Phillip Das
I recently read a disturbing story about three boys, all just 16, who were involved in the death of a girl their age in a school. I stopped after reading it—not to judge the boys, the school, or the parents, but to wonder how three young people could reach a moment where something so terrible could happen. At 16, you are still growing up, still trying to understand yourself, your friends, and the world around you.
It made me think about our schools. For years, we have measured education by results—examinations, grades, university places, qualifications. Parents want their children to succeed, schools want good rankings, and children are taught to compete. All of that matters, but is it enough?
A school teaches mathematics, science, history, and languages. It prepares us for exams and careers. Yet who teaches a child how to deal with anger, rejection, humiliation, jealousy, or hurt? Who teaches them that being angry does not give us the right to harm another person, or that another person’s life is as valuable as our own?
These are not questions answered by another test. We often say children are our future, but before they become the future, they are children growing up today—exposed to violence on screens, angry voices, public insults, and cruelty disguised as entertainment.
Then we expect them to walk into school and behave perfectly. Perhaps we need to look at education differently. A school should not only prepare a child to make a living; it should prepare them to live with others, to accept that there will be people they dislike, people who disagree, people who reject them, and moments when life does not give them what they want.
Of course, schools cannot solve everything. Parents, families, friends, and society all have roles to play. Teachers cannot be expected to know everything happening in a child’s mind.
But schools can be places where children know there is someone to talk to when something is wrong. Sometimes a child does not need another lecture; they simply need someone to listen. Yet we have become very good at asking, “How did you do in your examination?” and less good at asking, “How are you really feeling?”
The difference may seem small, but it isn’t. Behind every exam result is a child, behind every classroom a group of young people trying to find their place in the world, and behind each of them a life still being shaped.
I don’t know what happened in that school, nor what was going through the minds of those young people, and none of us should pretend we do. But perhaps this tragedy gives us reason to pause.
Maybe the purpose of education is not simply to produce clever children, but decent human beings—children who know right from wrong, who can disagree without hatred, who can control anger, who understand kindness, and who value another person’s life.
We cannot prevent every tragedy. But we can ask whether we are teaching our children everything they need to know. Because one day they will leave the school gates and enter the real world, where the greatest examination they face will not be written on paper, but in how they choose to live with one another.
That is the lesson we should never leave out of the curriculum.
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