If schools are to be true centres of learning, they must move away from the present assessment-obsessed structure to a system that rewards kindness and consideration for social good

The ‘Mental Health Status of Adolescents in South-East Asia: Evidence for Action’ report published by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2012 stated that 86 million people in South-East Asia suffered from depression and that 25 per cent of all children between 13-15 years of age suffered from this disease in India. The report further said that India has the highest suicide rate among 10 South-East Asian nations. The most common reported reason for teen depression was anxiety and stress due to academic performance, peer pressure and poor self-esteem.

Given that depression can lead to suicide, which is the second highest cause of death among people in 15-29 age group in the region, it is essential that the school curricula be revised so as to ensure proper mental health and well-being of people.

Recent brain research has exposed the vulnerability of the adolescent brain. During adolescence, the brain undergoes tremendous neural growth and pruning, leading to massive re-organisation of connections between different brain areas.

During teenage brain development, prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive decisions, begins to connect with other parts of the brain, primarily those connected with emotion. This connection  between the prefrontal cortex and the emotion areas (the limbic cortex) regulate  reward, risk, problem solving, planning and regulation. Short-cutting of neural networks from external receptors to the limbic cortex in some way explains irrational decision-making among teenagers.

But we must return to brain science for answers. Drawing from research on doctors, nurses and Army veterans, who have long been vulnerable to stress, fatigue and depression, neuroscientists recently showed that focused and explicit training in mindfulness, empathy and compassion can provide solutions for better mental health. Research from the laboratories of Richard Davidson at the university of Wisconsin, Madison and Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig showed that each of these competencies employ a distinct neural circuit and build new connections between the prefrontal cortex and limbic cortex.

Mindfulness is the conscious paying of attention to experience and life that is unfolding right now and to cultivate conscious regulation of attention, emotion, thought and belief. This allows responses to be made as opposed to just reacting to them. Empathy and compassion need to work in synchrony and are particularly helpful in handling anxiety and peer pressure. While empathy is our general capacity to share emotional states of others, compassion ensures that we are not swayed by them and, instead, handle them with kindness and positive action.

Importantly, the practice of self-compassion has emerged as a powerful antidote to handle anxiety. When faced with life challenges or while confronting failure, if adolescents respond with compassion and kindness to self, rather than inflicting harsh punishment,  they accept and recognise that limitation and weakness is a part of the human experience. This process not only allows students to handle academic pressure but also builds a healthier and realistic representation of self — a process now acknowledged to be critical for good mental health.

The process of building these networks has been coined as Firing Gandhi Neurons, which is inspired by the seminal work of Neuroscientist VS Ramachandran’s work on mirror and empathy neurons. The difference between this approach and conventional approaches is that rather than focusing purely on building intellectual knowledge, of why reducing stress is good and its benefits, focus is on building emotional resilience to stress.

The key here is to create a neural network across the intellectual and emotional such that these neural networks can in actuality produce the virtues and values that drove Gandhi to practice empathy, kindness and compassion to all beings, irrespective of religion, gender, ideology, and caste.

The good news: Recent studies involving adolescents in schools show similar promise. Initial results point towards more pro-social behaviour on the part of the students who were exposed to mindfulness and empathy cum compassion training. The research and experiences are still at an infancy stage but the science suggests promise.

Therefore, if schools are to be ‘true’ centres of learning, they need to be able to empower our youngsters to not only acquire intellectual and technical skills, as required by the job markets, but also provide them a better understanding of themselves, their identities and relationship with other beings. But there is a dichotomy here that we must address and alert all stakeholders in the education chain; this includes not only the teachers, school administrators, and education policy-makers but also parents.

We all must move away from the present assessment-obsessed system to a structure that rewards kindness and consideration for social good. If not then we can expect learners to be in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance, which might even cause further discomfort, stress and anxiety, wondering which path they should take.

With that sobering warning, we see optimism for the future as the younger generation do begin to question values and beliefs of the past and explore new multivariate identities that emerge from a system that encourages understanding the self, understanding and helping others but with a critical eye to facts and evidence. Once they do, then what they think, what they say and what they do is in harmony. And that according to the Mahatma is the secret to creating happy schools.

(Anantha Duraiappah is Director, UNESCO MGIEP. Nandini Chatterjee Singh is Cognitive Neuroscientist at UNESCO MGIEP)