Educating The Youth: Saving the World

EDUCATING THE YOUTH, SAVING THE WORLD

Failure indeed is the mother of all learning, but failure to properly educate the people especially the youth would mean the end of history, the end of a very short-lived civilization.

But what is learning? Is it the learning that we get inside the classroom? Or is it something that we get inside the laboratories? Of course, we have more than enough of them. What about learning from experience? Is this not perhaps what we sorely need at the moment? God forbid, but let us not wait for that time that we ourselves will experience what people in many parts of the world are currently experiencing: TSUNAMI, FLOOD, DROUGHT, TYPHOON, LANSLIDES and what have you. They come like a thief in the night claiming lives in droverich or poor, young and old. Dear heavens spare us from all these terrifying calamitous events. Of course, everybody is terribly afraid of all these catastrophes, but how can our fear prevent these catastrophes from coming to us. Getting horrified is normal but let it not stop there. Let us learn from it and move on! Hand in hand together, let's come to a decision to ACT NOW.

And may I ask everybody what you think is the next thing that we should learn. The answer? Well, its learning how to UNLEARN ideas and habits we used to be doing and thinking before. Let us have a total change of mindset! There should be a total change of attitudes and values that is thinking of others first, and the very world we live in before our selfish interest. Quite impossible to hurdle! Yes, but if we find it not doable, then we accept we're giving up the fight of saving our world!

For quite a while, we have become bad actors in the art of living and conquering. I must challenge anybody here to refute me if I am wrong! Start looking at how we manage our own garbage! Have we meticulously segregated the biodegradable from the non-biodegradable? Have we cared doing this at home, in the schools and in all places we happen to go? How about the load of traffic that we encounter daily? What is it that irritates us? It is the sheer volume of noxious fumes coming from the exhausts of cars, trucks and tricycles that blacken our lungs which eventually develops into cancer. The load of carbon dioxide and other pollutants from these seemingly useful facilities emit poison twenty four hours a day, something that by the passing of the years have successfully degraded our environment. We have been told that the vast amount of pollutants trapped in the ozone layer is not able to leak out into the atmosphere. What happens is that the heat these gases produce COME back to earth causing an abnormal rise of the earth's temperature and that is what we now call GLOBAL WARMING. We all know this perfectly. We are very good at theories! But what happens next if this global warming goes on? We should not be surprised global warming breeds an erratically violent character now popularly known as CLIMATE CHANGE which breeds severe droughts, typhoons, storms, floods, landslides and other terrifying manifestations of nature's wrath. Thus, we have created our own monsters! Monsters which do nothing but wreck havoc to our precious lives. Shall we allow it then to go on with its rampage? We certainly cannot allow it. But one thing is clear. Billions and billions of us continually contribute our share in feeding these monsters.

Clearly enough, we have failed to learn the things we are supposed to unlearn, that's where our failure of learning lies. If we remain apathetic to what is happening around us then and only then, I shall brand our learning a failure.

But if we opt to take a complete turnabout that is unloading ourselves from accumulating self-serving interests and wanton disregard of others including the world we live in then and only then we can proudly claim, we are just starting to learn.

Let us wake up then from our complacency. We are running out of time. Let's do it before it is too late.

0