“A man without an aim is like a ship without a radar.” Almost each and every one of us has written this line at some point in our academic life, usually in a paragraph or an essay titled “Aim in life.”
There is nothing wrong with the sentence. A person should certainly have a direction in life. But the real problem came afterwards.
Why did our ships become the same? Why did they all sail towards the same destination? Can everyone’s aim in life really be the same? Perhaps this is where the failure began, passing from one generation to another.
From class 6 or so, we started writing about our aim in life. In Bangladesh, we traditionally followed specific grammar and composition books, guidebooks, and teachers’ notes. Teachers often provided model answers and encouraged students to follow them because those answers were considered safe for examinations and could help students get good marks.
What were we actually writing?
If I am not wrong, there were usually three popular aims in life: Doctor, engineer, and teacher. We did not have to think too much. The professions were already available. We only had to choose one and memorize the paragraph.
The doctor would return to his native village and provide free medical treatment to poor people.
The engineer would contribute to the development of the country.
The teacher would educate the nation and build the future generation.
The stories were almost identical. Only the handwriting was different.
Having some experience in school teaching, I have seen the most ironic part of it. A student from a commerce background is still writing: “I want to become a doctor.”
Does the student genuinely want to become a doctor? Probably not. Because that is what the student has been taught to write in the exam.
Why is this problematic?
The whole idea becomes problematic when we ask children to decide their future by memorizing a model answer.
Why should everyone become a doctor and then go back to their native village to provide free medical service? How would they earn a living? How would they build a career?
And if everyone became a doctor, engineer, or teacher, who would become the banker, entrepreneur, journalist, farmer, designer, or researcher?
We never discussed these questions. The purpose was to write something that would satisfy the examiner.
And then comes the bigger question: How many of us actually reached the destination we wrote about? How many of those students became doctors and engineers? What happened to the rest?
Perhaps the student who wrote, “I want to become a doctor,” eventually became a teacher. Another became an artist, a businessman, a journalist, or a photographer. Someone started a restaurant. Someone left the country. Someone became a parent and devoted his or her life to raising a family.
Did they fail? Of course not. They simply discovered their passion or a different destination.
And this is where I want to ask our teachers a question. What if a student today writes, “I want to become a YouTuber or an influencer”? What if they write “chef”, “singer”, “cricketer”, “footballer”, “content creator”, “gamer”, or “entrepreneur?”
Would you immediately consider these answers less respectable than “doctor” or “engineer?”
Perhaps some teachers would say that children need realistic ambitions. Some may argue that social media careers are uncertain and that students should focus on traditional professions.
There is certainly a valid concern here. Not every ambition will become a sustainable career, and students need guidance about the realities of different professions.
But guidance and imposition are not the same thing. A teacher’s responsibility should not be to tell every student where the ship must go. It should be to teach the student how to navigate, read the map, understand the risks, and choose a destination.
The world has changed dramatically since many of us were students. New professions have emerged. The way people work has changed.
A young person can now earn a living through skills that did not even exist as recognized professions some years earlier.
Yet our classrooms sometimes continue to operate with the same old list of acceptable dreams.
Perhaps it is time to change the answer. Perhaps it is also time to change the way we evaluate the answer.
A student does not necessarily have to write what we expect to see.
Maybe the problem is not that students have the wrong dreams. Maybe we have been evaluating their dreams with the wrong expectations.
Maybe we should be more interested in understanding why a student has chosen a particular goal.
It should be a student’s own answer to a very difficult question: “What do I want to do with my life?”
Md Inzamul Haque is a lecturer at the Department of English, Southeast University. He can be reached at [email protected].
