Education is about life-long learning

Musings

By Dr R Neerunjun Gopee

A couple of weeks ago over lunch I met up with two former classmates who were with me at the Royal College Curepipe. They were both visiting from abroad. One lived in Geneva and had had a career in aviation, the other who had in fact been the laureate of our 1957 batch had settled in Toronto as a physician after studies in London. We were meeting after quite a few years, and at that time there were about 7 of us.

Understandably, much of our conversation was about reminiscences – of those who had passed since the last meeting, and of others about whom we exchanged whatever we knew regarding their whereabouts and careers. Inevitably, the talk turned towards our teachers. We shared our favourite stories, impressions, and jokes about those who had most marked us. Since both my friends had lived and worked abroad, unlike me they hadn’t had a chance to catch with any of them after leaving school, whereas I was able to do so as I returned to practise in the country. I told them about my later encounters with a couple of our teachers.

All those who go through the educational system will have come across teachers who have made a difference in their lives – fostering interest in a particular subject, inspiring them to give the best of themselves and to aim higher and higher, or influencing a career choice as happened in my own case. They valued their teachers’ experience and pedagogic skills. But those who were passionate about their subject and transmitted that passion to their students generated an emotional connect which heightened the latter’s respect – even awe – and liking for them.

Down the generations, to this day, and in spite of the pervasive feeling that there has been a gradual but sure general degradation in many aspects of the educational system, there have been and always will be teachers who will be remembered and talked about long after their students have left school or college.

However, while our teachers may have equipped us to pursue a career, it is only as we go through life and have to fight our way through circumstances and different situations as we strive to earn a living that we perforce realise that there are other skills that we need to cope and move ahead both in our chosen career and in life generally. These were not taught to us in the formal school system – they had to be picked up the hard way in the multitude of experiences that we continuously undergo, consisting of both failures and successes, minor and/or major, depending on our expectations. In other words, it does not take us long to face the hard reality that education in the true sense of the word is about life-long learning.

These reflections came to me after I had parted ways with my friends. As I looked back over my own career and life to date, I imagined myself as a teacher facing eager students poised for a take-off on their own life course and pondered what all I would pass on to them besides the specific subject matter. In fact, I have also been involved in nursing and medical education, in the course of which I have had to propose some life lessons to my students as they approached their final exams, readying themselves to take the leap into the wide world, of seeking work and pursuing career and building a family. 

Towards this end, I have collected a few thoughts that, I hope in a more general sense, can help prepare students of whatever category to better face the world. I leave these to their appreciation:

• Revere your parents and your teachers.
• ‘Want to be’: set your goal, the path will open up.
• Be a global citizen: speak many tongues, so that you will be at ease in several different settings.
• If you study/make a career abroad: Come back to Mauritius. Or keep in touch.
• Work hard: don’t chase money, but pursue excellence: perfection and money will inevitably follow
• Build Mauritius – it’s your future and that of your children; Mauritius is you and yours. Get involved. Criticise if you must – but constructively.
• Don’t lose hope and heart: put in the right effort and amount of time in all your endeavours, make allowance for the unknown constant k as in mathematics, then accept the result as being your responsibility and yours alone. More importantly: be prepared – (the Boy Scouts’ motto, which I learned when I was a Boy Scout for about five years in my teens) – to bounce back if need be.
• Be good: think, talk and do good. Done every day that’s 3 ‘goods’ per day, multiply by 365 and if you start now, over a lifetime which is now on an average beyond 70 years that’s over 65000 bits of goodness! You know that according to Newton’s Law to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s in physics: in human relations the reaction can be much more and not necessarily opposite, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain in being good, doing good.
• Bond with others – family, friends and society: it keeps you young, prevents disease and premature ageing.
• Do volunteer work – it adds meaning to life.
• Eat less – do more exercise.
• Remember always: You are an ambassador – of your country, your profession.
• Never stop learning. Question all the time, everything. Never accept anything without thorough questioning.
• Read widely – don’t rely only on social media.
• Take nature walks, to soak in its grandeur, and to observe and learn from the living.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 13 September 2024