Feature
Learning by Heart!
C. Z. Murshed
IT's a gloomy day. Asif is sitting at a broken tea stall at the neighbourhood of some ten to fifteen skyscrapers. He is unmindfully sipping tea from his teacup and thinking of the job interview, which he has just failed. He has earned his degree, with pretty good grades from a renowned university, still no luck! He is thinking about his educational life. All those golden years! All he required to get a good grade was just making the best use of his memorizing skills! Just learn by heart and that's all! Wait a minute, does it say, “Learn by heart!” Did everything he learnt so far ever reach his heart? No, they never did and that's the main problem with his educational life! All he did in these years was, put into his brain some large facts and just throw it up in the exam hall, that was enough. He never tried to understand what those facts meant, why bother? It wasn't necessary at all, at least not to get a good grade!
As he was thinking over all these, frustrations of every sort were enclouding his senses. Just when he was at the peak of his emotions, an ill-clad beggar came to him for some money. Quite unexpectedly he burst out in anger and threw the cup of tea at the beggar. The beggar, hurt by the well-dressed young man's behaviour replied: “You seem to be an educated man, did your education teach you this?” Asif looked at the beggar in surprise, and asked himself the same question, has all these years of his education ever taught him to be a better human being! He murmured to himself, “There must be something wrong, there must be something wrong with the entire educational system!”
Yes, there must be something wrong! Well, the above scenario was just imaginary. But it can happen to anyone of us, anytime in life. Have you ever thought, what all these years of education has given us or what actually education means?
Socrates once said, “Knowledge is Virtue!” My question is: in this educational system of ours, are we treating it as a virtue or just as a product to meet some ends! Are we getting the true essence of knowledge in this system? Education is supposed to create wise, sensible, rational human beings; though I do not mean that education is supposed to create philosophers only. Besides teaching us to be better human beings, education should also train us in practical and creative skills. And of course, practical skills should be taught in a way, which is really practical! And not loaded with heaps of theoretical facts.
Education is never meant to create parrots or robots; it is a process by which 'knowledge' can be delivered into the hearts of human beings!
(The writer is a student of ECE, BRACU
C.z.murshed@gmail.com)
Time never stops for anyone, does it?
Munzerin Shahid
BEING a girl from Bangladesh I'm always encircled by my family. Both on times I need them and when I don't! The times I don't need them they usually put me in very clumsy situations too! But then when I'm sitting here wondering what to write next, I'm actually inferring that the times I need them hugely overshadow the ones when I don't. For instance, I CANNOT imagine ANY of my friends bringing me my dinner when I have a Pure Math test the next day. Or I cannot imagine any of them getting me a dress worth almost a thousand taka this Eid either!
It's so funny that I'm sitting here thinking that there are innumerable things which only our parents can do for us and even then I'm not at the dinner table having food together with my mum and dad. It's weird how we almost beg our parents to get us the latest cell phone in town and then when we're out with our friends we don't attend their calls in the same cell phone.
I still remember, though vaguely, that when I was around 11 and was at always at home, I was pretty different from what I am now. Back then I could be called the perfect daughter always with my mum when she's watching the evening news and massaging dads head whenever he was having a headache. But now, I realize how different I've grown. Just yesterday when my fuppi came home after almost 7 years of staying abroad, my mum asked me to stay at home and to be there to welcome her and have iftar together at any cost. But as expected by her, I already had an iftar party with friends that I HAD to go to. I don't remember her stopping me even once. But that's my mum! But then when I came home after the party my fuppi had already come and I saw that I had missed the best part of that day. Every year when we have relatives come over at Eid all of us cousins gather at one room and the guest would always sit at the centre and give the gifts to all of us together. We would always admire each others gifts a lot more than our own but even then, there was something different about it all the same. But unlike all those years, that day I saw that all my cousins where watching a movie together and the gift giving session was already over.
I saw that my packet was kept at the corner of the room and when I asked my sister about how it went, all she said was, “Mun, you missed the best part.”
That day actually got me into thinking, what if I had listened to my mum and shifted the party some other day? I realized that if I had done so, I would have had fun with both my friends and my family. I realized that I had lost one really special memory.
Today, I actually deciphered that I wouldn't get that particular moment till next year. I realized how much I have changed. I realized how much my parents would want their old daughter back. It even hurts me to say the words “old daughter”. Why couldn't I remain the same old Mun? Now that I want to, I can't go back to the way I was. Something inside of me doesn't let me. That's when I encountered the thought that time never stops for anyone. That one day, I wouldn't have my parents here to stop me from going somewhere. Or that some day, I wouldn't have to beg them for a new phone but get one myself! That someday, all of these special days would no longer keep happening to me.
But no matter how imperfect I am, I want my parents to know that I love them a lot. I can probably never say it to them, but that is the one reason I'm writing it down in Star Campus to let them know that despite how less I show it, I love them. This is just one way of letting them know how I really feel.
(Student of Bay View School, Chittagong)
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