Career Advice at Crescent Model School

Today while relaxing (read "procrastinating") after quite a hectic day at the Old Baily Central Criminal Court, London I stumbled across a -not so revolutionary- idea of giving something back to my school (where I spent 12 years of my education, yes from Grade 1 to 12) for what it has given back to me.

Let me start my saying a few words about my school, Crescent Model School. It is now about 35 years old and in its hay days it was the best school in Lahore my home town. It split up into boys only and girls only branches sometime back in the early 90s. The boys only has seen a steady decline in the quality of education it provides. Its part subsidized nature meant that it has never been able to pay competitive salaries to its teacher [Note I never knew about the exact figures teachers received so I cannot verify the veracity of this statement but this was almost universally agreed at the time I was in the school].

The result was that bar a few exceptions most of the quality teachers left the school for other private school that were charging higher fees and were able to offer better pays. I do not think Crescent School school could have done much other than to raise fees as well but that would have went against its philosophy of school for the middle class.

This being said there were a lot of things I did not like about my school at the time (most nothing to do with quality of teaching), and certainly do not like now after benefit of hindsight. Now I do not intend to list what was wrong with my school or what was good because things have moved on. It has been over 5 years since I last stood inside it as a student and knew the ins' and outs' so that information may well be redundant.

Now you must be asking where am I getting at, what is this idea? Patience I beg. While spending time at the school and college one thing I sorely missed was career guidance. Being children of middle class families there were not too many options we were all concerned with, doctor, engineer everyone wanted to be (something that has never been possible and never will). Even then, no one growing up until grade 8 and some, including me did not know what to do in order to be a doctor or an engineer. We certainly did not know how to pursue our interests in general and discover our talents in particular.

What I would dearly love is, have graduates come and visit the school, once a term [i.e. 3 times a year but it can be more or less periodical if necessary]. Graduates would mean university students to people with established careers and dare I say recently retirees, but people with a lot more "worldly" experience than the students themselves have. It can be as informal as it gets, over lunch, where children talk to these ex-students in one-one discussion to some form lectures with a lot of questions from the audience [which ever works best]. The idea being to talk about practical realities, more away from the books students are concerned with at all time and ensuring these youngsters are able to step back and look at the bigger picture. What the world is like. What there interests and ambitions are and how best to achieve those ambitions.

An idea in progress. If you are current student reading this I have two things to say, first I commend you for reading thus far and good luck for changing things around and putting into practice this or somewhat similar idea.

Ahmed Uzair [Class of 02[Matriculation] and 04[A-Level]]