Our View: Parents belittling their kids: stress good practice for future life

Another pretext has been found by the Confederation of Parents’ Associations to stop the holding of twice-yearly exams for graduates. The new council of the confederation issued a statement on Monday saying that the disruption caused to education by the pandemic and the appearance of the Omicron variant forced many students into distance learning and thus created inequalities. It concluded there was no other option than the suspension of the exams for this school year to allow graduates to focus on their university entrance exams that would determine their future.

Parents and students, with the support of teaching unions, have been chipping away at the holding of twice-yearly exams which have been turned into an unending sage ever since the education ministry announced their introduction. The first concession to students and parents was putting back the introduction of the new exam system by one year. The confederation also mentioned that the law on exams had been implemented selectively and not in its entirety, citing this as another reason for suspending the exams at least for this year.

To further their case, the parents also presented students as victims, because they had to sit exams. They asked the education ministry to consider “the anxiety and pressure experienced by this year’s graduates because in addition to this year’s learning challenges, they have to deal with the stress and uncertainty caused by the previous two years during which they received most of their education through a screen.” The deficiencies of the previous years “increase the stress and emotional uncertainty of graduates.”

Parents are doing a disservice to their children by making such arguments. Taking school exams and dealing with the related pressure and stress is part of the educational experience and a good preparation for the demands placed on them by university and in their future jobs. There will be no parents’ association at these places, arguing that their children should have an easy life.

To a large extent, the problem has been allowed to fester because the education ministry failed to take a hard line when it introduced the new exam system and refusing to engage in talks and negotiations with parents about the matter. Once the decision was taken it had to be implemented without discussion and discounts. The ministry did not do this and it now has to deal with parents, students, who are demonstrating against the exams on Tuesday, and the teaching unions that are also opposed to twice-yearly exams.

Only in Cyprus could parents and their kids be under the illusion that it is their right to decide when secondary school children must sit exams.