Lord Heron writes:
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is illusion of knowledge.". That's the story of Stephen Hawking. For the record, 8.614 high school students today, at 8 o'clock, experienced their first chill, in the harsh reality called "Cypriot society". They felt their efforts wasted, facing an issue that more or less required their critical thinking. Which one?
It is admittedly acceptable and indisputable that our schools, public or private, NOT offer the necessary, sufficient, quality or -as-otherwise-you-want-to-call-knowledge to our Cypriot students. Some 45-minute lessons a week that can not cover even the basic material, students and non-students, teachers-teachers, dusty and exhausted from the weight of the ancient secretariat, remembering the glamor of their own time with the woods and sticks, a generation of "rebellion" and "anarchism", the generation of snapshots and hashtags. All this reconstitutes the current educational system. And as another savior, the Minister of Education appears as a kind of savior god, who with fluffy promises, commits to change the education system and the implementation of these cursed reforms that have been coming and going in the pre-election drawers of each government for 40 years. The trade unionists are shouting, going on strike, the minister is calling for a discussion and the students are feeding illusions.
Today, as you say, 8.614 students have tasted the so-called reform. The writing of the Pancyprian Examinations has been completely reformed! Didn't you want reform? I did not believe in the difficulty of writing, until I found out for myself that the subject of the exhibition would be difficult even for an adult, let alone a graduate student who is called to determine his future within three hours. A high school student who for 12 whole years -3 thousand something hours of his life- comes and goes to school with a suitcase full of dreams and memories, with a desk loaded with student love and useless yellowed books, with a mind full of questions and a heart full of feelings , with a teenage age full of reaction and "rules", a high school student who for a year sees his sweat dripping drop by drop over physical-mathematical-Greek-biological-chemistry, a student who takes vitamins and stays awake to save the last chapter, for a child who wants to learn Japanese, to make paintings, to buy a Daniel Wellington on the condition that he gets good grades in the Cypriots, a child who is made by others a world in which he has to survive. I am not a teenager , I was 13 years ago, but I see in these eyes the agony and the bewilderment, the anxiety and the hope for success. Do I see in these eyes that a world different from the one they live in is painted, a world with color, love and free WiFi! And yet one day, the dreams of these children are shattered in a system that we built and handed over to them, in a world that we tore down, in a country where some 60s politicians, bankers, stockbrokers and developers leveled. In a country of securities, well-being, unpaid loans, ocels, Cayenne, Marie, invasion, buns, coups, troika, bombed-out presidential, fanatical stands, bankrupt banks, Prosperity, the pool, the lifestyle, the vanity, the bribe, the black money, the oiled politician, the full cafeteria, our third world education. We brought these children to this country. We did not ask them, but one day we asked them to do a self-criticism. Our own self-criticism that we never dared to do. We asked them to apologize for what we did. We asked them to apologize for the illusions that our homeland lived through for so many years. And with this requirement to be their only opportunity that will determine their future. Why; Because that's how we learned. It is tragically ironic, but some of these children, from what they learned about today's exam, were a gracefully optimistic quote, which they memorized to use in a possible report today: " We did not inherit this world from our ancestors, we borrowed it from our children ".
