shahuru.com

My wife’s intelligent, smart and well disciplined cousin just accomplished pleasurable 8 As grades in GCE O Level and took the first place nationwide. Congratulations! The other day I asked if he knew how to ride a bicycle. He said he didn’t but I am sure if we had bicycle riding as subject he will bring straight As from class 1 to 10th like he did in every other subject.

Knowing how to ride on two wheels is no small thing to achieve. Wheel is one of the oldest and most important inventions, which originated in ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in the 5th millennium BC. So is the locomotion it provided for the man. Two wheels riding appear to hold an eternal place in human life; bicycles or motorbikes. I guess most people, even the richest, fall few times from the bicycle on the way to four wheels riding.

I remember, I started secretly claiming on to my dad’s bicycle when I was just seven. By the age of 9 I was already riding a 24 inch bicycle. My left foot goes half way the paddle circle, and I wait a long 15 seconds on the middle bar for the right paddle to come through to the reach. But you should have met me those earlier days; I used to be excited, rode where ever I found more children to look at me and I knew nothing else to talk about in my 3rd Grade class room. Of course my 24 inch and ugly Rallie horse was nothing comparable to the present day children’s best friend the computer.

Every kid loves it. Every adult feels inferior not knowing how to use it. Personal computer could be the best thing happened to common man since the bicycle. Society has come to recognise personal computers and their portable equivalent, the laptop computer, as icons of the information age. We in the Maldives have even a GCE O level subject known as Computer Studies. It is one of the subjects my cousin in law earned an A grade.

Little 4 year old Jauna, my cousin in law, arrives in room as I was to close the laptop. I asked if she knew how to use a computer. Yes, yes, she said. She was head over heal to play with the laptop and prove me her skills. Surprised I may have been, but she has been playing with her brother’s PC for last two years, she knows her way around Windows Office and Coral much better than I ever imagined.

Bicycle might have, as sociologists suggest, enlarged the gene pool for rural workers, by enabling them to easily reach the next town and increase their courting radius, as the computer of today. Bicycle manufacturing lead to industries of vehicle producing, many of the industrial skills of metal modelling and factory management as did information technology, recently.

But you shouldn’t take bicycle riding too seriously, as much to introduce a subject as GCE O Level in Bicycle Riding. Provide a bicycle at home; kids will learn how to ride at a younger age than you think. They can at their fifteen handle most of the repairs. It will be a huge waste of time and money to introduce a GCE O Level in Bicycle Riding and Repair at schools so that they become engineers in future. I think the basic science subjects they follow are more than enough for the due course.

A bicycle costs US Dollars 400. So will it cost, if you make it happen, for a Personal Computer from china, to reach a Maldivian home. You may be scared to touch the computer mouse like my very big aunt who at the age of 20 had to learn bicycle riding at the same time as I did. Little Juana is not. Its just a computer mouse, not a rat!

Get ride of the subject GCE O LEVEL in Computer Studies! Introduce a GCE O Level in Maldives National and Cultural Studies, instead. If the August 18th vote is hypothetically for GCE O LEVEL in Computer Studies OR for Maldives National and Cultural Studies; what will you vote for? Education, I believe, is about nation building. It can never be equal to bicycle riding as that of computer studies.

Little Jauna seems destined to become another girl who will ridicule our national policies for its stupidity at her fifteen. She might even feel alienated for she is likely to have no-idea and no-feel for the identity, culture and history of her motherland.