Our society gives unusual importance to those people who lack a sense of 
pleasure in their work simply because they once had earned certain degree

Recently, I attended a teacher’s training workshop organized by my school. A trainer was hired to train teachers on various aspects of teaching. Many of my colleagues presented their robust ideas to cover the topic. Such training are conducted almost every year. The contents might be new for fresh people who have just made a foray into teaching, but for those who have been teaching at least for a couple of years, they were quite familiar. 

In training, one would expect a bit of some innovative ideas related to teaching apart from the inevitably repeated terminologies and their definitions. One would expect to relish some firsthand anecdotes from the trainer’s professional life, and some indoor games or fun activities that we as a teacher could also incorporate in our teaching.

But to our dismay, the trainer this time around, despite his formidable academic credentials and professional associations, turned out to be the case of from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous. He was a complete failure as a trainer, at least for us. The school might have been tempted to hire him on the basis of his American doctoral degree and his reputed associations back in Nepal. But that miserably failed to yield what we trainees wanted from a trainer.

Academic degrees and sometimes even years of experience do not guarantee the best of what 
we want.
 

We wanted our precious time of four hours to be productive so as to make everyone feel fulfilled as a result. Honestly, it was a real purgatory having to endure those four hours in the auditorium hall. The nonchalant, prosaic and uninspiring nature of the trainer was frustrating. All he was doing was read out points to us that were in the hand-out papers.

The point of this article is that academic degrees and sometimes even years of experience do not guarantee the best of what we want from a person both in professional firmament and life. There might be some underrated professionals out there who could have the latent talent in them for the job but somehow have been going about their run-of-the-mill kind of life. All we have to do is remain open-minded and give them the benefit of doubt. 

For instance, our Extra Curricular Activities (ECA) coordinator (a young go-getter in his early 30s) who, by design, was not supposed to have any role in the training itself, humbly asked for permission to share his experience and input with regards to what was being discussed. 

The trainer had been (un)successfully trying to explain what thinking-out-of-the-box is capable of achieving.  But our ECA coordinator shared a beautiful story and his firsthand experience. He then had the hall reverberated with rousing applause.

This brief moment interspersed in the training by our ECA coordinator was probably the sole highlight of the whole training session. If we had invited the likes of him as a trainer, it would have helped some up-and-coming talent to realize their potential. On top of that, such youths would have put their sincere efforts to perform at their best as a trainer as opposed to the ones who have comfortably ensconced themselves in the belief that owing to their academic degrees and their so-called experience people will buy regardless of what they dish out.

Addressing the graduates of Rochester Institute, former mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, USA, Newton D Baker (1871-1937) said, “The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after.” Indeed, if a person strives for obtaining an educational degree just for the sake of securing a comfortable niche in the field of professionalism and leaving just a reputation in the society in capacity of that degree but stops honing his skills and expanding his knowledge in future, then the person will no longer have the privilege of calling himself educated. 

This typically applies to many people who make it to permanent government jobs in our country and later end up letting their vast horizon of knowledge and awe-inspiring reasoning power, which they had honed while preparing for the competitive exam(s), shrink astonishingly. Our society gives unusual importance to those people who lack a sense of pleasure in their work simply because they once had earned certain degree. 

Therefore while selecting a person for a job, we should consider the person’s attitude towards his work, his capacity of presenting ideas to others and steering the job with imagination and sincerity. The academic degrees should be made to take backseat to aforementioned aspects so as to use degree to keep any ambiguity on selection criteria at bay.
 
The author teaches at Rosebud School, Kathmandu, gpbabaje@gmail.com
 

 
• degree
 
• delusion