Colouring outside the lines: An argument for research

Sabrina F Ahmad
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During my senior year at university, I decided to try a little social experiment. I walked into a freshman class and handed everyone a survey questionnaire. In addition to basic demographic data, the survey asked just one question: if money and parental objections weren't an issue, what do you want to do when you 'grow up'?

I don't know what I was expecting to find, but it certainly wasn't what I got. When the results came back, I found that a staggering 90 percent had answered "To be an executive at a company.” So I went back to the class to interview some of the respondents.

-- Why an executive, and not the boss?
--No, no, that's too much responsibility.
--What company, then?
--It doesn't matter; as long as I get a nice salary.
-- Why?
-- Because you need money to survive.

At this point, I was getting frustrated with the fact that they had obviously missed the first condition of the hypothesis, that money wasn't the issue. When I bit back my impatience and asked them what they would spend the money on, I got some variation of "get a house/car/spouse etc etc." Not that there's anything wrong with wanting any of those things, but I guess I was disappointed to see a lack of individuality in their answers.

Having had no particular objective in mind for that experiment, I filed it away in my memory and didn't give it much thought. And then I graduated and began to teach undergrad classes, and that's where the problem resurfaced. There's something soul-crushing about teaching a liberal arts class knowing that the only reason why those forty-odd students signed up was to complete their credits. Of course, this may hold true for teachers in other disciplines, but creative fields demand a particular amount of passion. I was teaching Media classes to students who didn't read books or newspaper, or watch much television, or have much of an interest in films. How do you even begin a conversation? What would they relate to? More pressingly, for me at least, what do we do about this?

During my early school days, I was never a 'good' student. This is not to say that my academic achievements were poor, no. I got decent grades, participated in what extra-curricular activities I could, and even picked up a couple of school awards. However, I went to school during the mid-80's through the 90's, and a 'good student' in those days was one that coloured inside the lines, learned her multiplication tables and poems by heart, accepted without question what the teachers had to say, and stuck to 'age-appropriate' books. All of those things had their purpose, I am sure, but as a young girl, I was having none of that. I struggled with memorisation tasks. My drawings had jagged edges. I couldn't relate either to the stories of Pat and Dick and their pet dog in my English reading books, nor to the stories of Rahim and Amina who drank water from their tube-wells in my Bangla books, and didn't see why I had to read them again and again. The forbidden works of Sidney Sheldon interested me far more than Noddy's adventures.

What I had, however, and I think this is why I survived school, was an insatiable curiosity. I read voraciously, anything I could get my hands on, from encyclopaedias to biographies, and yes, lots of Sheldons and Harold Robbins, and a lot of other books highly inappropriate for my age group. I pestered grown-ups with endless questions. In the days before the Internet hit Dhaka, I conducted experiments, and play-acted, often by myself, a habit that continues to this day and continues to perplex my parents, who question my sanity. In short, I learned by doing. I wasn't alone in this either; most of my year-mates were disgusting over-achievers who combined my proclivities with ambition. I am sure we gave our teachers plenty of hell en route to an education.

My work as a journalist allowed me to compare the impact of different learning approaches. I was at once mentoring young writers at the magazine and teaching specialised courses at the university. The kids on each Rising Stars team were no smarter or dumber than my students when they started out. But the very nature of their work required them to read more, watch more television, get out and ask questions. In contrast, my students were used to digesting and regurgitating class notes with little or no outside research. The first group was easily more dynamic and innovative than the second. My students struggled with the very idea of having to create something for themselves, something that quickly became second nature for the RS writers.

The world is changing a lot faster than ever now, and knowledge quickly becomes dated. There is a constant pressure to keep informed and up-to-date just to stay relevant. Never before has it been so urgent to have a forward-thinking workforce simply to stay afloat. With the global economy the way it is, finding conventional jobs has become trickier. It's the strange and quirky niche professions that provide more employment opportunities, and yet our students miss out on these because our schools process them for more 'mainstream' fields.

The answer, I believe, simply lies in curiosity. The youth today has access to a wealth of information that was unthinkable for my generation when we were growing up. And yet, they've been beaten into mindless drones by the very institutions that claim to be working to create tomorrow's leaders. We really need more hands-on learning happening at the school level, with a variety of teaching methods to address the different learning styles of various students. These need to be supplemented by research centres in the secondary and post-secondary levels, to continue to push the youth into thinking creatively and addressing their individual talents. We cannot possibly hope to compete in a global economy driven by innovation, unless we ourselves are dynamic, adaptable thinkers, open to possibility and imagination. Let us colour outside the lines, why don't we? Let us dream.

(The writer is a Junior Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communications at the Independent University, Bangladesh, currently on study leave and pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.)