When I was asked this question, I wanted to cop out of answering it by saying, “You are the only person who can decide what your profession should be. Because no-one is quite like you. You will have “likes” and “dislikes” which are peculiar to you, and which can only be truly known to you.”
“Others may try to suggest what you can or cannot do; what you may or may not like. But they will be looking at you from outside yourself and the best they therefore do is to guess what you should do!
“What that means is that they will look at you from their perspective; from their own likes and dislikes. Whereas what they should be thinking about is what would really suit YOU best.”
“But Grandpa, I would like you to guide me, please!”
“Well, I did some pretty foolish things in my life, I have to be careful. Can you believe that at the age of 15, I left school and went to Accra to try and become a taxi driver?”
“WHAAAAT! You? But I thought you loved books?”
“Yes, that was part of the trouble! I’d become bored with school. No challenges to overcome. I needed someone to spot that and take me out of there and teach me new things in a new way. But because of the way our education was organised, I could only wait for the Common Entrance Examination to be held. And wait for the results, and then undergo a great deal of bother before I could go to a secondary school. Even there, I might not necessarily have been introduced to knowledge that really interested me. It all depended on who was teaching what – because teachers have a lot to do with whether one likes a subject or not!”
“And what happened to you?”
“Well, my mother was heart-broken when she realised I’d left school. Women have an intuition about these things. I loved her madly, and she managed to persuade me to allow her to go and plead with my headmaster to take me back into the school. I can never forget her, six months pregnant, but walking in the broiling sun beside me, sweating profusely. She begged the headmaster to reinstate me, and luckily, he agreed!”
“Ah, so someone knew what was good for you! Your mum?”
“Yes, but inside me, I was still bored with schooling. I allowed myself to be persuaded by my mother to go back. But that shouldn’t have been the case. So, yes – others can have an influence on our lives and choices. But ideally, those choices should be made by ourselves.”
“But things turned out to be all right for you, didn’t they?”
“Yes. When I left the school, I became a pupil teacher – that is, an untrained teacher. Whilst teaching, I was introduced to a course run by the University of Ghana’s Extra-Mural Studies Department (now Institute of Public Education) which, I soon realised, was exactly what I needed. The course was conducted by a person who had read – and loved – English literature. And he took us through advanced English grammar and essay writing – things that interested me greatly. But above all, the lecturer took an interest in me personally, and encouraged and mentored me to take a correspondence course that enabled me to pass my GCE O Levels within 15 months.”
“Ah? Fifteen months? Ei, so someone else could help you to get what you wanted out of the educational system?”
“Yes, but remember it was almost all accidental. That man came into my life at just the right time and put me on the path of self-discovery. But suppose he had been a maths teacher instead of a lecturer in English, and he saw some promise in me, and decided to teach me maths?”
“Hahahahaha!”
“That’s why you should search your own soul and decide to do what you are best suited for. Of course, you must seek information; get to know all about what you want to do and how best to go about doing it.”
“All right, let us assume you are the right person for me and that whatever you say, it would agree with my personality and desires. What would you like me to do?”
“Well, if you put it that way, I can’t help but try and answer it. But remember that much as I love you and you too love me, we ARE different people, ok? Let’s do the basics first: what are we in the world for? I don’t know where we came from; or what we are doing here. But one thing I know is that we CAN IMPROVE the world as it is, despite our ignorance about much of it and our particular purpose in it.”
“Improve the world? But HOW do we do that?”
“I was coming to that. We can improve the world by getting to know as much about it as possible. That means learning physics, mathematics, biology, engineering and chemistry.”
“But those are mostly science subjects? Suppose I am not good at science?”
“You can acquire enough science to make you understand how the universe began; how our solar system works and that sort of thing. But what I would hope you specialise in is how to end the prevalence of poverty and diseases in the world, so that humanity can be happier than it is now.”
“So I should study medicine?”
“Yes, but not medicine alone. I would hope that you can also invent new things that are technologically useful to humankind. For that, you would need to learn Economics, too, for if you invent things and they cannot be put to a practical use, there’s no point to it. You see how the world has moved from computers to smart phones, for example? The knowledge about “nano-science” that brought that situation about was not of a single dimension. The physicists and engineers combined each other’s knowledge and invented things together. They then managed to convince industry that what they had invented would bring economic prosperity. And so it has turned out to be.
“I would like you to be able to help those of us that are called “poor countries” to eliminate the situation whereby we work hard to produce things – like cocoa and coffee – and get only a tiny fraction of the income that those products create. And to help in levelling incomes in the world generally, so that no human being can ever go to bed hungry, or have diseases that cannot be easily cured. And if you set out to achieve such objectives, you will also have learnt about politics; communication and a whole lot of other things…!”
“Grandpa, my head is swimming already. Can we continue this discussion some other time?!”
“Sure, my love. Anything you say!”
By Cameron Duodu