Dear quarter lives,

In recent decades, there has been an emphasis in education on high performance, and in doing so, people have made the assumption that a more learned person is a person with higher grades. There cannot be a more untrue statement. Perhaps it is the way tests are standardised and how the grading system works, but learning is not the same as going to school. Learning is a life-long skill, and for most of our lives, it is self-initiated learning, there is no classroom, no teacher in the conventional sense, no one to tell you you must learn, or acquire an end result. Often times we do not know exactly where this learning is taking us, but we must go with it anyway. But schools have forgotten and teachers with them that schools are not merely there to produce good workers, but to produce resilient humans, ones that can endure life, for there is no tougher boss, and no tougher teacher. And unfortunately the skills taught in school today equip you in no way at all for this continuous independent-learning called life. And because we have forgotten that the goal is not to survive till retirement, but to survive till death comes for us, we have not prepared people for life. It is the ethical duty not only of parents but of educators to teach children how to acquire knowledge. Not all knowledge is in classrooms and not all knowledge comes from books. For some of the greatest teachers can be in our backyards, a tree is a great teacher, but we need to be told that it is okay to access alternative forms of learning, ones maybe that can’t be tested, ones where students cannot be shown a right or wrong answer. By ignoring the needs of a human life, and focusing on the needs of corporations, we have neglected millions of souls on the way and polluted many others, and like it is our responsibility to clean up the environment, it is our ethical duty to clean up our souls and the souls of the communities we live amongst. 

Always with love,

S.A.