Chemist August Kekule discovered the famous benzene ring structure accounting to his dream, Mathematician Da Vinci’s experiments were always inspired by his dreams too and the US went through an important transformation following Martin Luther King’s big dream. Dreams have always played an important role in changing the world.

I have a dream too. I want to change the world through education. I want to be in charge of Nepal’s education system.

I dream of controlling and regulating Nepal’s Ministry of Education and running it my way.  The present situation of education system in the country is bizarre. We, the students, are prepared for facing examinations but not for tackling life’s challenges.

A student ‘parrotises’ and mugs up his textbooks, passes the exams and comes back to teach the younger generation students about the way he became a ‘Parroto-Human’ mutant. I am not blaming teachers for this flaw; it’s our system that forces everyone to do so. The worst part is that the system is a vicious factory that makes robots and parrots out of human beings.

There is a major flaw in the system that discourages the students to really learn. The pass mark is 40, but the minimum mark required to get admissions in a good higher-education institution is 80. The students who score in the window of the these two marks often get lost . They are dismissed as the ‘below average’ group that are incapable of leading a worthy life.

If I were in the driving seat of Nepal’s education system, the students would not need to worry about their marks. They could instead plan ahead of time and work on meeting their future goals. Instead of working hard for exams, they could work smart for life.

I would introduce a system where the children are judged in their respective field of interest. I would find solutions to block the radiations of textbooks that cause mutation of the humans—turning them into rote-learning machines.  No mother would ever tell her daughter to give up on her love for pianos and guitars, just because she scored 20 out of 100 in math. No father would deflate his son’s football because he ought to focus on engineering instead.

 I have a dream of turning the ministry into a blessing rather than a curse. Under my leadership; the ministry will be an organisation that expands beyond political arena. The students would grow creatively in the fields they love. They would work smart and not hard. They would enjoy education and appreciate the system.

There would be no suicides as a result of the system, just students soaring with their wings spread out.

Lamsal is a student at Motherland Secondary School, Pokhara