By S. Jayasankaran
Education is what remains after you’ve forgotten everything from school – Albert Einstein
This morning, I read about one of my final-year university classmates becoming Malaysia’s first scientist to be made a Fellow of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society.
That’s no mean feat as her peers would include Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. Clearly, she’d drunk deeply from the river of knowledge that life presents us.
Then there is the guy who’d been staring at me the other day at the Selangor Club. He came over and said he thought I’d been his science teacher in 1979.
I had.
He seemed delighted to see me. Alas, it was more a reflection of my public relations’ skills than anything of a pedagogic bent: he confessed to flunking out of school and now sold insurance.
Remember I said river? He’d probably only gargled its waters but appeared no worse off for anyone’s wear.
In 1979, I was playing guitar in a pub band and was happy as a lark until a news daily featured us. My father read it and was understandably furious because I’d told him I had a temporary job with the university.
The band had to find a replacement guitarist and I went back home to become a “temporary” teacher.
I wasn’t happy but, truth be told, it paid a lot more than gigging in a pub.
The replacement guitarist is now the chairman of a think-tank, while my other two bandmates settled and thrived in the US, but in non-musical careers. The pianist, though, still tinkles the ivories at weekend gigs in Tampa, Florida.
Back in Seremban in 1979, I didn’t have a driving license which meant I had to do what I generally did when I went home – use the bus. When you’re a teacher in charge of the “rougher” classes at the Anglo-Chinese School – said insurance salesman et al – that can get tricky.
The mornings were fine because my father generally dropped me off. But the afternoons had to be managed.
The trick was to wait a prudent half-hour after the bell when the bulk of the students would have left.
There is precious little moral high ground or dignitas to be had when you board a bus only to find your students sitting while “Sir” has to stand because there are no more seats. It’s even worse when, God forbid, a student offers you his or her seat.
I think that’s what Shakespeare meant when he babbled about “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
That’s the beauty of the half-hour wait. There are enough seats, and most, if not all, students would have left.
During weekends, I went to the Seremban Bowl with my old classmate, Chris, because it served good beer.
One evening, a large person looked us over for an uncomfortable while before sending over a complimentary jug.
He joined us and said we were all in the same school, but we wouldn’t remember him because he was in a “lower class” and “you were the Smarties” (his words).
He said he dropped out after Form 5 to help in his dad’s pig farm. Now he ran “all three.”
He asked me if I’d been to university and what I did now. I told him.
“Teaching” appeared to genuinely grieve him. That made two of us.
Then he asked how we got to the Bowl, and I confessed I’d used the bus.
As if to reinforce his point, he pointed to a gleaming Volvo in the parking lot.
“I can give you guys a lift,” he said.
WE