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This young lady walked up to me, she used to be my Chinese student; she asked;
”Excuse me sir, is it true that Indians live on the trees?”
”On the trees?” I queried.
”Who told you that?”
”My former teacher said Indians live on the trees and Africans live in the desert and have no water, that’s why they’re black.”

Somebody planted that in the mind of this young lady as she grew and now she becomes caged in that false education so that she walks out of the classroom anytime this other teacher different from her former background information, walks into the classroom. How do you confront such unfortunate situation in the mind of a growing child? I invited my young girl over for lunch with a couple of her friends and had to continue the education from where her former foreign language teacher stopped.

This is called Continuing Education or what is simply referred to as ‘Adult Education.’ Continued education is the only means to a truly tolerant society of young people loaded with false background information of other people they never had contact with. Helen Keller, the dumb, deaf and blind genius did said; “the highest result of education is tolerance” and in education, we learn to get along with various disciplines, social issues, people and their differences. If I don’t have a tint of that, I will likely pick offence with my student for her sheer ignorance and whosoever that gave her such wrong information.

True education is therefore, a teaching of the way of life, an approach to living and cultural styles that transcends mere classroom experience. It is not what the teacher taught you in the classroom or what you have learned from the book but a continuous contact with humanity, so much that it is what your study and learning has taught you about yourself, life, the human condition, and moral values that counts. This is what makes up the highest result of an enlightened individual and not the chalk and board experience. The chalk and blackboard experience discusses knowledge that has been packaged by some egg heads we consider more educated than us – but sometimes, this knowledge can be deceiving – I once read an information on a large poster on the wall of a school in the North East of China where I used to teach in that reads;

‘The entire Republic of Cameroun has only 2 Schools and people had to walk like 2 Miles on bare foot to get to the school’ – this is by the year 2004. I met one of the Deans in the college and told him;

“This information is wrong and misleading, Cameroun has crossed that boundary long time ago and if I am a Cameroonian I will simply consider this as an insult - This is a Teacher’s College and this young men and women are going to graduate to trade this information along to whoever they are going to be teaching.”

And he replied; “But I am really sorry if that upset you but that is how we saw it in the book and we reprinted what we saw in the book.”

That is how deceitful and harmful knowledge can be. Therefore, the Chalk and board experience should ideally be considered as an introduction to a person's true education through which the child or the individual is trained to ask questions and get positive answers on how to approach life, changes and differences of humanity and their environment, live their life, value their life, and learns from life's experiences. Sometimes these questions could come from a very innocent mind that has been fed with wrong information, like my Chinese student.

This is the value of true education, learning to understand through self-analysis and broad thinking ‘asking yourself such questions like;

‘Is it possible for human beings to live on trees?’ Imagine such a scenario; climbing up and down the tree everyday to eat, play and trade, the mother, father and children all climbing up and down.’ ‘Is it possible that there is not a thing as honesty among humanity?’ ‘Can a whole country be filled with only criminal minded people with not even one sane person among them?’

The truth is; no one can be given a completed liberal education in school, colleges or the university. just like the mind’s capacity for growth does not stop at youth, true education actually commences where the school classroom systems stops and it is evident that wherever you employ a broad thinking perspective to deal with any issue, the resulting effect could span through a lifetime and in most cases it yields positive results. God Bless
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