At­til­lah Sp­inger

Imag­i­na­tion

Re­al­is­ing great vi­sions

Imag­i­na­tion

I want you see your­self

Be your­self

Free your­self

-Imag­i­na­tion, 12 the Band

The day Com­mon En­trance re­sults came out, the chil­dren who had passed for pres­tige schools were told the good news ex­cit­ed­ly by their teach­ers, the oth­ers had to wait. My heart broke for my friend who hadn't passed for a pres­tige school like me and had more time to ag­o­nise over her moth­er's in­evitable anger.

The truth is she had worked a lot hard­er than I ever did. She knew the im­por­tance of the ex­am. I was lucky to have a brain that could fig­ure things out and spit back pieces of in­for­ma­tion with­out much thought. I got my come­up­pance in high school when I dis­cov­ered that I was no longer good at maths. Some wiring changed in my brain and I stopped be­ing able to un­der­stand why I need­ed to do it. Fun­ni­ly enough, it made sense in ge­og­ra­phy but it was de­cid­ed for me at an ear­ly age that I was a life­long fail­ure of the math­e­mat­i­cal va­ri­ety.

Now that I look back on it, I think I would have been bet­ter if some­body had un­der­stood how my brain worked and giv­en me the en­cour­age­ment. And I don't have any anger to the maths teach­ers who at­tempt­ed to teach me. It just so hap­pened that there were re­al­ly bright girls in my class too, who were re­al­ly good at it. Teach­ers I guess grav­i­tate to the good pupils be­cause they make them feel bet­ter about their teach­ing skills.

Maybe I was just lazy and un­fo­cused. But now that I'm old­er and I re­alise that maths is ac­tu­al­ly cool in a to­tal­ly un-nerdy way I feel some pangs of re­gret. There's ac­tu­al­ly no log­i­cal rea­son for me to be bad at it. Ex­cept that ex­ams give me the hee­bie jee­bies and I can't deal with the pres­sure of hav­ing to sit still and come up with the an­swers to ques­tions that I may or may not know the an­swers to.

But ed­u­ca­tion was al­ways some­thing that con­fused me. I didn't un­der­stand why I had to sit in a class to learn stuff when I re­al­ly just want­ed to be out­side read­ing a book. And from the time I got in­to trou­ble for writ­ing a po­em when I was sup­posed to do a com­po­si­tion, I knew that for­mal ed­u­ca­tion wasn't for me.

Is ed­u­ca­tion prepar­ing us to think or to fol­low in­struc­tions? The va­ri­ety of in­tel­li­gences we have, the com­plex way that the brain works, we have bare­ly be­gun to scratch the sur­face of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of our brains in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem. And for all our drilling and rote learn­ing, are we cre­at­ing a so­ci­ety of crit­i­cal thinkers or a so­ci­ety of peo­ple who can cheat the sys­tem, an­swer on­ly the ques­tions placed in front of you in a way that you have been trained to.

If you don't know the an­swer, well z'af­feh you. Don't even talk about dyslex­ia or oth­er spe­cial ed­u­ca­tion­al needs that put you even more at odds with the chalk-and-talk ed­u­ca­tion. If your ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem fails, your so­ci­ety fails.

It's not enough to have a lot of smart peo­ple walk­ing around. It's not enough to have peo­ple who are good at pass­ing ex­ams. What we need is more young peo­ple like Ve­ra Bha­jan who are good at pass­ing ex­ams and al­so un­afraid to stand up for what they be­lieve in. So that in­tegri­ty is not an anom­aly that makes front pages.

It's not about the ge­nius­es. Like it wasn't about the girls who could do maths or the chil­dren who passed for the pres­tige schools. Not to re­ward medi­oc­rity but to com­mend ef­fort and find un­ortho­dox ways of bring­ing out the best in every­body, what­ev­er that best is.

For the rest of us who are not lucky enough to be con­ven­tion­al­ly bright, good at cer­tain sub­jects or re­cep­tive to tra­di­tion­al ped­a­go­gies, what is left? You would think that since we were so blessed with this abun­dance of oil wealth that we would be in­vest­ing said wealth and time and ef­fort to train teach­ers and teacher's as­sis­tants who are charged with ex­pand­ing our nar­row no­tions of what an ed­u­ca­tion is.

You would think we would be spend­ing mil­lions to evolve our own in­dige­nous ped­a­go­gies that re­ject colo­nial par­a­digms and val­i­date the many ways we can learn. To cre­at­ing spaces that are nur­tur­ing en­vi­ron­ments for learn­ing and not nec­es­sar­i­ly for pass­ing ex­ams.

If our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and the sup­port­ing struc­tures around it don't catch these young peo­ple who fall through gap­ing holes, we haven't re­al­ly pro­gressed. We ur­gent­ly need to analyse where we are fail­ing and where we are suc­ceed­ing and point our­selves in a di­rec­tion where the ed­u­ca­tion we re­ceive will help us re­solve these prob­lems in the fu­ture.