CHENNAI: The educational system is focussed solely on academics and fails completely at imbibing students with life skills or the ability to handle failure. After going through years of such lopsided and irrelevant training, students end up in a state of heavy emotional stress, paving the way for suicidal tendencies or disruptive behaviour, says consultant psychiatrist Dr Kannan Gireesh.This understanding was the base of Dr Kannan’s idea to start Livelife Education, a framework to train teenagers and college students to inculcate values that they have not been taught by the system and that would allow them to use their faculties in a balanced manner.“A recent WHO study has shown that the number of students feeling stressed has close to tripled in the last decade. This is best demonstrated in the exam season that is around the corner. We usually see many students undergoing breakdowns or contemplating suicide or worst of all, actually committing suicide,” says Kannan.The high stress levels are also the result of the information age, he says, pointing out that students today have to study and know more about everything than they did even a few years ago. This usually creates a scenario where the student is unable to reconcile realities and dreams.“Students are told to dream big, so they do. They are usually at odds with what they can achieve. It is like a cat looking into a mirror and seeing a lion. What would happen if the cat actually tried to keep up the charade?” asks Kannan.“It is wishful nonsense, and we are the experts. The students end up with irreconcilable and unachievable dreams, fail at their attempts as a result and end up justifying their failures and blaming a variety of factors. Ultimately they settle for mediocrity and never take responsibility from their actions. The Livelife Education programme aims at changing that precise paradigm,” Kannan adds.He designed the Livelife training programme using his experience working with Jack Canfield, author of the wildly popular Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. The programme, designed to suit Indian communities, is designed to connect a student’s self perception to ground realities, opening up a range of realistic options, automatically putting the student at ease with himself or herself and thereby getting rid of the unnecessary stress.“It is not only those who are not able to achieve academic success that are stressed. There are a huge number of academically successful students who display stress because their interests lie elsewhere. The programme would also help them,” says Kannan.The Livelife Education initiative, which was started about a year ago, has already trained around 3,500 students at SRM University’s Ghaziabad campus and Vel’s University. The programme seems to have caught the imagination of a number of other institutions, and Kannan says he would be training around 15,000 students in the coming year.
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