When the Nagaland Board of School Education (NBSE) declares its High School Leaving Certificate (HSLC) and Higher Secondary Leaving Certificate (HSSLC) results on April 24 (Friday), thousands of families across the state will hold their breath. Results will be celebrated or mourned with a weight that, in most other contexts, would seem disproportionate to a set of examination scores. That disproportionate weight is precisely where the conversation must begin.
Education in Nagaland has long been treated not as a journey of inquiry, but as a passport and a very narrow one at that. The moment a student clears their Class 10 board examinations, the machinery of social expectation begins its grinding work. Stream selection is rarely a conversation about aptitude or interest. It is, almost invariably, a referendum on family ambition. Science is virtue. Arts is consolation. Commerce, somewhere in between. The student’s own voice, what moves them, what confuses them, what sets their mind alight, is among the first casualties of this process.
The Science stream, crowded beyond its natural capacity, produces thousands of graduates each year who pursued Biology or Physics not out of curiosity but out of compliance. The Arts stream, which in any intellectually honest society would be recognized as the foundation of critical citizenship, carries the quiet stigma of the second-best. A student who wishes to study History, Political Science or Literature is not seen as pursuing knowledge, they are seen as settling. This is a profound cultural misreading of what education is for.
Beyond the stream selection lies a longer tunnel: the expectation of the degree. Then the postgraduate degree. Then, if the family is ambitious enough, a civil service examination. The pipeline from Class 10 to a government officer’s desk is so deeply grooved into Naga social consciousness that deviation from it is experienced not merely as a career choice but as a failure of character. An educated Naga who does not become employed in the formal sector, preferably in a government post, is in the eyes of many communities an unfinished project.
The cost of this pipeline is rarely calculated. Years are spent chasing qualifications whose relevance to actual livelihood or fulfillment is assumed but never interrogated. Young people who might have built thriving small enterprises, developed craft skills, or contributed to the cultural and agricultural fabric of their communities are instead found in Kohima and Dimapur, waiting for results, for call letters, for something to validate the decade of examination-taking that preceded it. The waiting becomes a kind of occupation in itself.
What is being produced at the end of this process? Technically, graduates. But what kind of graduates? Graduates whose education has been largely oriented toward reproduction of received knowledge for examination purposes, rather than the development of judgment, curiosity or vocational confidence. The quality of classroom instruction, the shortage of trained teachers in rural districts, the reliance on rote learning, and the absence of robust career guidance at the secondary level, these structural failures compound the problem. A system that is weak in its delivery but ferocious in its social expectations creates a particularly cruel bind for its students.
Naga society places extraordinary emphasis on the educated individual as the family’s instrument of upward mobility. This is not unique to Nagaland, but its intensity here is amplified by a public sector dependency that decades of political economy have reinforced. When government employment has historically been the most reliable route to stable income, it is not irrational for families to funnel children toward it. What becomes irrational is the refusal to update this calculus even as the public sector’s capacity to absorb graduates has long been exhausted.
Happiness, fulfillment and a meaningful life do not appear prominently in these calculations. The successful Naga, by prevailing social metrics, is the employed Naga. That employment being joyless, ill-suited to the person’s nature, or disconnected from community wellbeing is a private matter, not a public concern. Mental health consequences, anxiety, aimlessness, the particular despair of those who have followed every instruction and arrived nowhere, go largely unacknowledged. The mark that Naga society is missing is not academic. It is philosophical. The question of what education is for has not been seriously asked in the public sphere. If education is for employment, the system is mediocre. If education is for human flourishing, for producing citizens who think, adapt, create and live with dignity, then the system has not yet begun.
The results on April 24 will be numbers. Behind each number is a young person who deserves better than to be processed.
