Despite official guidelines limiting bag weight and reducing homework, implementation remains tokenistic. Parents continue to buy long booklists, teachers continue to overload assignments, and schools continue to equate more material with better education, Dr. Fiaz Maqbool Fazili
Dr. Fiaz Maqbool Fazili
One morning outside a school gate in Srinagar, I saw a frail little boy, no more than seven, struggling to lift his enormous schoolbag from the ground. The straps kept slipping off his thin shoulders as he tried to hoist it up, his face flushed with effort. Finally, he sat down on the pavement, defeated, watching other children march past. His mother, adjusting his uniform, whispered encouragement, but the bag was nearly half his size. That moment said more than statistics ever could—a silent cry from childhood crushed under the literal and moral weight of our education system.
In every city, town, and village, one can witness a familiar yet heartbreaking sight: tiny shoulders bent under the crushing weight of an oversized schoolbag. The symbolism is cruelly ironic. What should represent learning, discovery, and growth has turned into a physical and emotional burden. Behind those heavy satchels and endless homework lies an even heavier truth—our education system has forgotten the child. We have built schools that test memory but ignore meaning, celebrate grades but neglect growth, and praise performance but suffocate personality.
The crisis of overburdened children is not new, yet it remains unresolved. Decades of circular debates and half-hearted directives have failed to lighten either the schoolbag or the spirit. The problem is not confined to posture or back pain; it strikes at the very innocence of childhood. Overburdening takes many forms—too many books, too little play, rote learning, parental pressure, unrealistic expectations, and a silent epidemic of anxiety and depression among students. The cost is immense and cumulative, shaping generations who equate learning with suffering and achievement with fear.
The Weight of Bags, the Weight on Souls
Studies across India have revealed that schoolchildren often carry bags amounting to 20 to 30 percent of their body weight. Orthopedic clinics report increasing cases of spinal deformities and muscle strain in children under ten. But these are merely the visible wounds. The invisible ones are deeper: exhaustion that dulls curiosity, anxiety that kills confidence, and an early alienation from the joy of learning. A child who begins to associate education with pain eventually loses the sense of wonder that is the foundation of knowledge.
Despite official guidelines limiting bag weight and reducing homework, implementation remains tokenistic. Parents continue to buy long booklists, teachers continue to overload assignments, and schools continue to equate more material with better education. What we need is not another circular but a change in philosophy—from weight to wisdom, from volume to value. A lighter bag must be accompanied by a lighter mind—freed from rote and fear, inspired by creativity and compassion.
The Vanishing Virtue of Value Education
Even when the physical load is addressed, what fills the child’s mind remains a question of deep concern. Our syllabi glorify mathematics, science, and languages, but the subjects that build character—moral science, social studies, civic ethics—are relegated to the margins or treated perfunctorily. This imbalance has grave consequences. We are producing individuals who can calculate but not care, who can code but cannot communicate, who can argue but not empathize.
The moral decay visible in our society—dishonesty, intolerance, apathy—is not an accident; it is the by-product of a system that measures intelligence but not integrity. Schools must go beyond producing professionals; they must nurture citizens who understand responsibility, respect diversity, and uphold humanity. Moral science should not be a relic of the past but a living, engaging subject that teaches values through stories, debates, and service projects. Social sciences must not be about memorizing dates but about understanding democracy, environment, gender equality, and social justice. To restore these disciplines to their rightful place is to restore balance between intellect and ethics.
The Silent Crisis of Mental Health
Yet, the most neglected aspect of schooling remains the psychological well-being of students. Mental health in our schools is a blind spot, seldom discussed and rarely addressed. Depression, anxiety, attention-deficit disorders, learning disabilities, and behavioral issues are increasingly common, yet often misread as laziness or indiscipline. Teachers are rarely trained to recognize warning signs, and parents, trapped in their own anxieties of competition, dismiss distress as immaturity.
The statistics are alarming. Adolescent suicide rates have risen sharply across India, and every such tragedy is a mirror to our collective failure. The tragedy deepens in conflict-affected regions like Kashmir, where children grow up amid uncertainty, disrupted schooling, and exposure to trauma. Here, emotional resilience is not a luxury but a survival tool. To ignore their mental health is not mere ignorance—it is institutional negligence, even moral abdication. A nation that celebrates its “demographic dividend” cannot afford to let its youngest minds suffer in silence.
Mental-health education must be woven into the school fabric. Teachers should undergo regular orientation on child psychology and early identification of distress. Every school needs trained counselors—not as a formality but as part of its core infrastructure. Students must be taught, age-appropriately, how to manage stress, express feelings, and seek help without stigma. When a school normalizes mental-health discussions, it transforms from a pressure cooker into a place of care. Healing must become as intrinsic to education as homework.
Parents, Teachers, and the Lost Dialogue
The burden of schooling is not borne by children alone; it is shaped by adults—the anxious parent, the competitive teacher, the inattentive policymaker. Many parents measure their child’s worth through grades, not growth. Teachers, in turn, measure their competence by student results, not student happiness. Somewhere between expectations and evaluations, dialogue is lost.
Parents need orientation as much as students need instruction. Workshops and open forums can help them understand developmental psychology, realistic goal-setting, and the emotional cost of comparisons. Teachers must be encouraged to see beyond the syllabus—to be mentors and listeners, not mere deliverers of content. Civil-society groups and healthcare professionals can play an important bridging role, conducting mental-health awareness drives, screening programs, and counselling workshops within schools. The community at large must stop viewing emotional distress as weakness and start treating it as a health issue—urgent, real, and deserving of empathy.
Towards a Humane Education System
Reforming schools is not about rewriting textbooks alone; it is about rewriting intent. Education policy must shift from producing employable youth to nurturing humane, emotionally intelligent citizens. This demands a holistic framework that integrates physical, intellectual, moral, and emotional development. The National Education Policy 2020 spoke of flexibility, creativity, and well-being, but these ideals will remain on paper unless enforced through committed local implementation.
Schools must reimagine classrooms as spaces of joy and participation. Playgrounds should regain their centrality, arts and music should no longer be treated as distractions, and service learning—working with the community, the environment, and the less privileged—should become an essential component. When education becomes experiential, children learn empathy naturally. When learning connects to life, knowledge becomes meaningful.
Beyond Classrooms: Healing through Education
If we truly wish to revisit “overburdened innocence,” we must see education as a form of healing. A good school is not one that merely teaches well but one that cares deeply. A child should not enter school with fear or fatigue but with anticipation and confidence. The tragedy today is not only that children carry heavy bags but that they carry invisible weights—fear of failure, loneliness, unspoken trauma. Our challenge is to lighten both.
True success for a society lies not in producing toppers but in nurturing balanced, happy, and compassionate human beings. It is time to move from an education of pressure to an education of purpose, from the tyranny of competition to the serenity of character building. Teachers who inspire curiosity, parents who encourage dialogue, and policymakers who prioritize wellness can together rebuild the sanctity of childhood.
The Call of Conscience
To revisit our schools is, in essence, to revisit our conscience. We must ask ourselves uncomfortable questions: What have we done to our children’s laughter? Why must a six-year-old wake before dawn and carry a bag heavier than his joy? Why do we still equate success with exhaustion and obedience with intelligence? It takes courage to challenge an entrenched system that thrives on marksheets, and compassion to build a new one that values minds and hearts alike.
The way forward lies in lightening not only the bags on their backs but also the burdens on their souls. Let education rediscover its original promise—to liberate, not to enslave; to enlighten, not to exhaust. Our children deserve classrooms where curiosity replaces fear, where silence is not a symptom of stress but a moment of reflection. They deserve an education that restores dignity to learning and joy to growing.
To revisit overburdened innocence is to make a solemn pledge: never again shall our pursuit of knowledge come at the cost of a child’s peace, dignity, or wonder. When we reclaim that balance, when we allow the child to be a child again, only then can we truly say that education has fulfilled its purpose.
Author is a medical doctor and social commentator who writes columns highlighting social wrongs and public concerns. He can be reached at drfiazfazili@gmail.com
