We have stayed quiet for a while. Partly because we have never believed in exams as a fair way to measure a mind — no single method, multiple choice or long-form, can hold the many ways a person understands the world, let alone stand in for the ways an entire nation’s worth of minds might be judged. Partly because we are a young organisation, still finding our footing, and free speech in this country has often felt more decorative than functional — the moment you step outside what is popular, you’re treated as a threat, and we have been careful about what that could cost the work we’re building.
But silence about what’s happening now — young people hurt in the streets for asking their country to keep a basic promise — would be its own kind of dishonesty for an organisation that calls itself made of educators, parents, and people trying to shape a livable future.
We are proud of how this generation has shown up — peacefully, persistently, with more courage than most of us managed at their age. And we are angry, and sad, that they have to. It should not fall to eighteen-year-olds to repair what decades of adults let rot. That they are doing it anyway, and doing it without matching the violence sent their way, says more about who they are than anything an exam ever measured.
Many are calling this moment a democratic awakening — a generation finally refusing to stay quiet. We welcome that, wholeheartedly. But we want to gently ask: let this waking-up not stop at banning leaks. Let it go further, into the questions the leak was only ever a symptom of.
Because underneath “why did the paper leak” sit larger questions we have been avoiding for far too long.
Why hasn’t a single exam, in all these decades, bought us cleaner air over our cities, or drinkable water in our lakes and rivers? Can we protect a child’s curiosity long enough for them to grow into someone who protects the planet, instead of one more consumer conditioned to extract from it?
Why are we still poor while a handful get richer by the day, in a country that produces more rank-holders every year than any other? Why do we treat exams and formal schooling as the only road to dignity and mobility, when for most people they have led nowhere close to either?
Can our communities and neighbourhoods hold each other the way they once did, before we built asylums for our elders, creches for our infants, and schools for our children, and called the separation progress? Can parents come back to their children as they grow, instead of arriving only for the milestones?
Can we open ourselves to how limitless a human being actually is, instead of reducing them to a rank? Can we hold a single life as immeasurable, instead of grading it?
We don’t ask these because we have answers. We ask them because we think they are the actual size of the problem, and the paper leak is only the smallest visible edge of it.
Some may say these questions are too large, too far from the protest on the street. That is exactly the gap we’ve been sitting with. So here is our attempt to close it.
We resort to violence because we confuse authority with leadership, power with control, and indifference with composure. A classroom that ranks a child for eighteen years doesn’t teach them to lead — it teaches them to obey, and to expect obedience once they hold power of their own. So when a generation raised entirely inside that logic finally meets a generation that refuses to obey, the only tool left in the box is force. This is not a failure of individual character. It is the exam hall, grown up, holding a baton. And on the other side of the barricade, the students marching peacefully are doing something the system never taught them either — leading, without waiting to be appointed.
This is why we don’t think a minister is the real subject of this protest, even where a resignation is the loudest demand. The deeper case being made — knowingly or not — is against a machinery that has spent generations mandating our children to follow, and called that education, when it should have been teaching them to lead. If this protest wins a resignation and stops there, it will have won a name and lost the argument.
Because this was never only an education crisis. It is a referendum on the kind of civilisation we are choosing to build — one measured by rank, or one measured by how well we belong to each other, and to the land that holds us. Learning, earning, and living have never been separate; reform one and leave the other two untouched, and the breakdown simply moves house.
We keep looking forward for an answer that was already handed to us. Our ancestors and this land gave us pathways for how to grow, how to work, how to live together — not as an alternative lifestyle, but as ordinary common sense, long before “alternative” needed a name. A forest does not test its trees before allowing them to grow; each finds its own way to light while staying bound to the same roots, the same soil, the same rain. Nature has always organised itself this way — look closely at a fern, a coastline, a river delta, and you’ll find the same pattern repeating at every scale: fair, self-similar, and never uniform. That is not chaos. That is a kind of order our exam halls have never once considered — one where every part can look different and still belong to the same whole, still be held to the same standard of care, without being flattened into a single rank.
We think that is closer to what “success” was always meant to look like.
We don’t have the whole answer, and we’re wary of anyone who claims to. What we can offer is smaller: at Inner Companion Foundation, we’ve spent the last stretch of years building one real attempt, among what we hope will be many, at treating learning, earning, and living as the single interdependent thing they always were — not because we’ve arrived, but because we believe the way forward will not come from one ministry, one policy, or one exam reform. It will come from many small communities relearning, together, how to live in harmony, humility, and a collaborative spirit, with the same respect for natural law and indigenous wisdom our ancestors once held as ordinary common sense.
So to the young people in the streets: keep going, and please don’t stop at the resignation. And to the rest of us — parents, educators, neighbours, citizens — the invitation isn’t to wait for the system to change before we do. It’s to start asking, in our own homes and streets and classrooms, the larger questions this protest has cracked open. The paper leaked. Let something bigger leak through with it.