AN amusing story tells of two pupils who once climbed the wall of their school and landed on the street to find they were meeting face to face for the first time. The small escapees then introduced themselves with the first saying his name was Winston Churchill and the second Bernard Shaw. Years later the first boy became the most famous British politician while the second is well known as philosopher and writer. The story indicates that it is not necessarily true that clever students will become famous when they grow up. School is one thing while practical life is something different.
The most important certificate that any one can obtain is the one earned through exercising practical life. This is because intelligence is not confined to one area. A student may be clever and intelligent in his or her studies. We formerly called such a student a memorizer — the one who learns by heart. Once this student is out facing real life, he soon discovers that life is not something like a book to be memorized and that events and people keep changing every day. To face real life you need to enjoy a different type of intelligence, a practical scientific approach as well as the ability to analyze, draw conclusions and thus succeed.
A second example is a failing student whom everybody predicts will be a failure in life. This is illustrated by the case of Russian President Vladimir Putin who stormed his way into the Kremlin in a short time. Russian newspapers disclosed that Putin was an average student and never scored high marks except in history exams.
Not only that, Putin was a troublemaker, always fighting and disturbing class. He used to score zeroes in drawing and his teachers expelled him from class a number of times. This menacing student later became the undisputed leader of the Russian Federation, a country which despite the disintegration of the Soviet Union is still considered the second strongest nation in the world after the United States.
Perhaps none of Putin’s clever and gifted schoolmates who scored the highest marks in final exams and were admired by their parents and teachers and who are now working as engineers, doctors or university professors has ever considered sitting in the president’s chair.
Succeeding in school does not necessarily mean you are going to succeed in real life. At the same time, we do not advise students to copy Putin’s example and then dream of becoming leaders in their countries.
***
A recent warning has cautioned against fast food in place of a hot meal prepared at home. The warning was well timed because nowadays too many housewives rely heavily on fast food and other forms of prepared meals. They do this because of time constraints and also because when they return home from work, they are so tired they don’t want to enter the kitchen.
The warning literally came from the sky — from the airline industry where a controversy involving 10 food processing companies has broken out. The airlines accused the companies of being responsible for a series of food poisoning cases over the past few years.
According to a report by the central laboratory at Los Angeles Airport, almost one quarter of the meals served to passengers were found to contain high levels of harmful bacteria. Out of 1,013 meals examined at 10 of the kitchens run by catering companies supplying food to airlines in Miami, 241 were found to contain a level of harmful bacteria that is 10 times above normal. More than this, one of every five meals was found to contain high levels of extremely harmful bacteria. The tests also discovered some meals contaminated with salmonella coming from outside the United States. People traveling by air stand the risk of being exposed to food poisoning a thousand times more than those eating in restaurants or at home.
The matter is not only confined to poisoning but also involves deaths. Many passengers have lost their lives as a result of contaminated food served in airplanes. The threats posed by food are not confined to those traveling by air but also includes those who prefer previously prepared meals over home cooked ones. Scientists say the phenomenon of increased violence throughout the world over the last 20 years is due mainly to processed food. They say no matter how efficient the refrigerating system, this does not make food immune from microbes. Frozen, chilled or processed food tends to lose its nutritious value once it is subjected to processing.
The warning is very serious. The solution lies in a return to home cooking.