Have We Not Learned Anything?

(Writer's note: This one was first published in 2002, in an alumni's homepage which is no longer in existence...)

Remember the time when we thought that facing PMR/SRP exam was a big event, a life changing experience?

Oh, how we laboured for it… We studied hard, revising until the wee hours in the morning. As the big day neared us, we prayed fervently, asking for help so that we would remember every tiny meeny bits of information we made our grey matters absorbed at the time…

And there were the seniors – who kept smiling teasingly upon seeing us so distraught and kept telling us time and again that it was just kacang and we really had nothing to worry about. Easy for them to say that, we thought – they had gone through it and we were the one who were going to face the coming exams…

Ahh… the good old days when SRP/PMR was a big event…

Nobody told us that it was just the beginning of a series of life-changing experiences…

Nobody told us that we would one day be making decisions that will change lives. Not merely ours but others as well…

Any teachers/tutors out there ever been warned at fifteen that one day their paper-marking could make or break a student’s life? Any boss ever been advised beforehand that selecting who to go and who to stay at the company under the economic pressure could change the fates of many children? Any law/policy makers ever been alerted that their decisions could change the nation, and in turn, could change the world?

And yet, when most of us reach this stage in life, we stop caring as much as we did when we were fifteen to study it all carefully. To revise our deeds and lessons day and night to hinder making a mistake. To know our subject matters so well to the extent of having everything at the back of our hands.

We studied hard for SRP/PMR, harder still for SPM, even harder to get our degree. Then when we started working, we began losing most of our ideals and capability to study the way we used to. As we grow older - more mature and more cynical - we tend to forget that it is the day by day, hour by hour and minute by minute process of studying and revising the same thing over and over and over that ultimately gets the desired results. We forget that in the pursuit of excellence, there’s the process of refining, of adjusting – too often we only know how to make mistakes and only then learn from these.

Of course, mistakes can be good. They are our teachers and our tutors. We take from them the lessons that will lead us towards the next win. They are to be analysed and they are to be respected. But avoiding making them in the first place would be extra helpful.

No teacher or tutor would like to be told that they made the biggest mistake by failing a student and only to meet the student – a rich and succesful yuppie - in years to come and be reminded what a mistake they made by not paying extra attention to that student so he might remember the teacher or tutor in good light.

No boss would like to be informed that the clerk he just forced to leave the office is a mother of ten still-schooling kids who need the money desperately for some of the kids would be sitting for important exams.

No law or policy maker would like to be told that they made a grave mistake
in their decisions which led to make things difficult for the already poor people.

But many of us forget to study our subject matter well. We tend to forget how to look at things from all angles, to study every aspect of our decisions. If only we can remember what it was like to be fifteen, taking our days seriously by studying, revising over and over and over again…

And to think that we once thought facing SRP/PMR was the life changing experience…