Schooling : Then vs Now.

A colleague asked me to help invigilate the class assigned to her for an examination as she needed to do something else in another class, I got there, met some students sitting at the window and ordered them to get down and find somewhere else to sit, they began to murmur and said they don't have a place to sit. I told them the front was spacious enough to sit, and was pointing to the ground out of annoyance. A way of telling them that there are enough spaces to sit on the ground.

My time in this particular school has got me asking myself "What has happened to the educational system of today?" Students, especially those in public schools are not serious anymore. Many of them would dress shabbily with different colours of slippers on when the normal school shoes or sandals should be in black or brown, while their socks should be in white. Things have changed from the past; the time we were in school. There was nothing like dressing like touts to school as we feared our teachers then. Even right from the school gate, we would be sent back home if we were not properly dressed or our dressing was incomplete. In other cases, we are being punished and we dare not dress that way the next day.

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But students nowadays do not care. They dress however they want. Some will wait to be reprimanded before going to take their socks from their bags, they usually come with socks but are too careless to wear them from home. Some students won't tie the buttons of their shirts as they reveal their chests. I was pushed to flog a student with that attitude and warned others not to be seen loosening their buttons and showing their chests like hooligans.

Getting to the end of the exam yesterday, a student walked in and was still proud of himself as other students started hailing him in my presence. That attitude infuriated me and I ordered everyone to stand and were all punished. When I asked the student why he was just coming in which was 10 minutes to the end of the exam, he couldn't find a genuine answer. I just shook my head for him and allowed him to write whatever was in his head down.

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Back in those days, students were always afraid when it was almost examination time, everyone would go back to reading and studying as they were always doing their best not to fail, but today, students aren't scared to fail. Is it the students that won't even show up on the days of examination or those that will even come on days they feel like without any iota of seriousness in them? We always wanted to compete with our mates in class and worked hard to ace our academics, even teachers did not care this time around. Everyone wants the month to end, collect their salaries and that's all. So sad.

One bad thing about being a student back then was the lack of access to the Internet. At that time, there was not much access to the internet and those who had access to it were seen as the rich ones who could afford expensive data in those days. The only place we could go to was the cybercafé where we paid for the number of hours we would use searching and browsing for the right information. I remembered how I would follow my uncle to the cafe when he wanted to browse the internet and would use the opportunity to get answers to my questions. We were only limited to reading our books to get our answers, but today, technology has taken over. Everyone now has phones and laptops to search for whatever information they want. They do research from homes once data and networks are working.

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We don't need to get out of the house, looking for a cafe when we could do that with our phones anywhere and anytime. This is something that has made education easier and efficient unlike how it was back then. Even though students misuse technology in the wrong way, we can still be proud of the advancement in this century and how it is helping us achieve a lot of things at a fast space instead of the longer hours and days which we used in the past.

_{Both images were created by me on Bing AI}