On report cards that lie, trophies that gather dust, and the quiet collapse of children we once held up as proof that the system works
Dr Arun Prakash
Every June, something predictable happens.
Board results are declared. Newspapers fill their front pages with smiling teenagers holding mark sheets — 98, 99, cent percent, district topper, state rank. Schools issue press releases. Parents post on WhatsApp. Coaching centres claim victory.
And for a day, perhaps a week, we tell ourselves: See. The system works.
Then August arrives. A year. Five years. Fifteen.
And if you have spent as long as I have in education — more than forty years, from a village school with no electricity to principals’ offices in India and abroad — you begin to notice something we rarely say aloud.
Some of those toppers are not failing in the way newspapers measure failure. They have degrees, jobs, salaries, apartments.
And yet, in a deeper sense no mark sheet records, they have failed.
They are anxious. They are lost. They are successful on paper and hollow in person. They cannot choose. They cannot rest. They cannot fail without panic. They do not know what they want — only what they were told to want.
They were toppers. We celebrated them. We used them as advertisements. And then we left them alone with a trophy cabinet and no map.
I must begin with a confession, because this article will not be honest otherwise.
In my early years of teaching at DPS Korba, I believed deeply in marks. Passionately. Rigidly. I used to say that marks define a child. I was ready to write on stamp paper that certain children — especially those who always hovered between zero and ten percent — would fail miserably in life.
“They will be a burden to society,” I said once in the staffroom.
I believed it.
Then came the almanac test.
I told the class: no subject questions. Ask them from the school almanac — rules, timings, policies. Let us see who pays attention.
Most of the correct answers came from the so-called “duffers.” The ones I had written off. These children knew everything — house captains, holiday patterns, leave rules, the theme of the annual function.
They were not absent from learning. They were deeply present — just not in the ways we were measuring.
Perhaps it was not the child failing my subject. Perhaps I was failing to make the subject worth entering.
Three decades later, those same “duffers” are thriving — entrepreneurs, storytellers, business owners, often earning far more than our school toppers.
And the reverse is also true. It is not that every topper collapses. Some do brilliantly. But the number who struggle quietly — trained to perform but never to live — is large enough that we cannot keep calling it coincidence.
Let me tell you about Ritika.
She was everything a school dreams of. Class X board: 96 percent. Science stream. NEET coaching by sixteen. Polite, punctual, perfectly groomed. Her notebooks were models of neatness. At PTA meetings, parents pointed to her as the standard.
I remember one afternoon after a unit test in Class XI. She had scored eighty-seven — not a disaster by any measure, but below what she and everyone around her had come to expect.
She did not come to the staffroom. She did not tell her friends.
A junior teacher found her in the girls’ washroom, sitting on the ledge beside a broken tap, crying quietly into her dupatta. When asked what happened, she could only whisper: “Papa will not be able to show his face.”
Not I am disappointed in myself. Not I need help understanding this chapter.
Papa will not be able to show his face.
That sentence has stayed with me longer than any topper photograph.
Ritika was not weak. She was obedient to a system that had taught her, year after year, that love and rank were the same thing.
Years later, at an alumni gathering, she told me plainly: “I was more afraid of failing than interested in learning. Every exam felt like a verdict on whether I deserved to exist.”
She has a job. She is, by ordinary standards, fine.
But fine is not the same as free.
Her classmate Ravi was another story. Homework late. Attention scattered. Brilliant in discussion, average on paper. He failed small tests and shrugged. When I asked him years later how he handled setbacks, he laughed. “I failed so often in school that by the time real life came, failure did not feel like the end of the world.”
Both are employed. Both are surviving.
But Ravi’s path is happier — because he learned early that a bad score is not a death sentence.
Ritika learned that a bad score must never happen. That lesson, drilled over fifteen years, does not switch off when the board exam ends.
This is the part we do not discuss at result time.
Topping an exam is a specific skill. It rewards memory, compliance, speed, tolerance for repetition, and the ability to predict what examiners want. In Indian schooling — especially under board and coaching pressure — it also rewards the willingness to sacrifice sleep, play, friendship, and curiosity for a number.
Discipline matters. Effort matters. I will not dismiss them.
But life — the life that continues after the mark sheet is folded and put in a drawer — asks for something else.
Can you recover from failure?
Can you choose when nobody is choosing for you?
Can you name what interests you when nobody is assigning homework?
Can you work with people when there is no rank list on the wall?
Can you sit with uncertainty without collapsing?
Toppers are often trained out of these capacities — not because they are weak, but because topping required them to suppress every other muscle in favour of one: performance under evaluation.
When the evaluation stops — and it always stops — the muscle that remains is exhaustion.
In my forty years across schools — from small-town classrooms to campuses in the Gulf — I have seen this pattern repeat so often it can no longer be called coincidence. The anxious ex-topper who cannot make a simple career decision. The brilliant student who quietly stops. The child who had everything on every list, and nothing inside.
These are not exceptions. They are outcomes we keep producing — and then pretending to be surprised by.
I think of Arvind sometimes.
Quiet boy. Not a top scorer. His chemistry marks were explosive — not in the good way. One day I found him sketching in his rough notebook — abstract designs, geometry, almost architectural. He could explain exactly why one shape worked and another did not, the way a good teacher explains a theorem. Nobody had given him a subject for it. Nobody had told him it mattered.
“I do not know, sir,” he said. “I just like seeing how shapes fit together.”
Today he designs learning spaces for schools — furniture, classrooms, playgrounds built for collaboration. He found, eventually, the room where his mind belongs.
He was not a topper.
He was a learner.
That distinction is the whole argument of this article.
There is a harder story I carry.
A friend’s maternal uncle — Mamaji — was born with rhythm in his soul. He could make the tabla sing. His father, a towering lawyer, would not allow it. Music was distraction. Destiny was law.
Mamaji was forced to study law. He earned the degree. He made a secret promise: I will never practice law. He kept it. He never returned to music either. A brilliant, sensitive man who drifted through life — not for lack of talent, but because he was never allowed to become himself.
How many toppers are Mamaji in waiting — perfect on the transcript, strangers to themselves?
Every year after board results, something terrible happens somewhere. Not everywhere. Not to every child. But often enough that we cannot keep calling it rare.
A boy who was the studious one simply stops.
A girl who had everything on the list develops anxiety so severe she cannot enter a classroom.
And afterwards, the same bewildered question: But he was doing so well. But she was a topper.
What went wrong, often, is that the child was never allowed to be anything except a topper. When the rank could not be maintained — in college, in coaching, in the job market — there was no self left underneath to catch the fall.
The trophy cabinet was full.
The inner life was empty.
In earlier articles I have written about Rohan — a boy who could explain photosynthesis on Monday and forget it by Friday, rewarded by the system for short-term performance while his long-term emptiness went unnoticed. And about Shagun — ten years old, loved to draw, already carrying a weekly schedule heavier than some retired officers, being prepared to top rather than to live.
And then there is Sharma ji ka beta — marks plus music plus coding plus karate plus kathak by twelve — who arrives at college not as a whole person but as a CV with legs. Tired legs.
The system produced all three. And the system called them successes.
Let me be blunt, because children deserve the truth — not applause.
Schools use toppers as marketing. I have done it too. When a child tops the board, admissions rise. Nobody asks what happened to that child five years later.
Parents use toppers as insurance — if my child tops, we are safe. It is a reasonable fear, but it is not an education plan.
Coaching centres use toppers as proof of magic. The child becomes a billboard. The billboard does not ask whether the child slept, or played, or wanted to be there.
Children learn the lesson anyway: your worth is your rank. When the rank goes, the worth goes.
That is not education. That is conditional love wearing a mark sheet.
Am I saying children should not work hard? No.
Am I saying marks do not matter? No. In India, doors are narrow. Marks open doors.
Am I saying every topper becomes unhappy? Absolutely not. Some are grounded, curious, resilient — often because someone protected their inner life while they studied. Someone said: “I am proud of your effort, not only your rank.” Someone let them fail a test and live.
But when we treat topping as the highest achievement of childhood, we are lying — to parents, to teachers, and to children who believe at sixteen that they have peaked or crashed for life.
So what should we do?
Stop treating toppers as proof that the system works. They prove that some children, under pressure, can deliver what the system asks. That is not the same thing.
Ask what happened to the child, not only what number they produced. Are they sleeping? Are they curious? Do they have one friend they trust?
Teach failure as a subject — survivable, structured, without humiliation. Ravi learned by accident. Ritika did not. That was design, not fate.
Measure schools by growth, not glory. One topper from a coaching factory tells you nothing.
And as parents, want a child who can live without you — not a child who can impress your WhatsApp group. At DPS Korba, Mr and Mrs Rao sat beside their sons. They did not tell them what to become. Both boys are settled — not because they topped, but because they know themselves.
I still carry that evening by the Sangam in 1987 — D. Phil. in hand, twenty-four years of being a student, no idea what life expected beyond a few narrow doors.
Education had given me knowledge.
It had not yet given me a self.
Our toppers deserve the chance to become someone — not merely to become someone impressive.
The tragedy is not that some toppers fail in life.
The tragedy is that we call them successes on the day of the result — and only notice their silence years later, when the photograph has faded and the child inside the frame is gone.
A life is not a door.
A life is a long room you must learn to live in.
And no rank list, however golden, teaches you that.
Your child is not a trophy to be displayed.
Your child is a human being becoming.
Some of them will top. Bless them — and protect them.
Some of them will not. Bless them too — and watch them carefully.
Because the world does not end at the topper list.
It begins where the list ends.