What the private lesson teaches

In the private-lesson centres of Assiut, every evening, a teenager asks the question school has trained him to ask before any other. Is this going to come up?

It is a sensible question. For years the whole system has rewarded one thing: find out what is wanted, reproduce it, collect the mark. The lesson beneath every lesson is to wait for the answer key.

A few years later the same young people go looking for work, and the people hiring want something else entirely. Someone who notices a problem nobody assigned. Someone who proposes a thing that does not exist yet and takes responsibility when it only half works. Someone who would rather ask a good question than recite a safe answer.

The brands that grow, the small sellers who break through, the shopkeepers who change a whole street: they all run on people who go first, who build rather than copy, and who care more about what could work than about what is marked correct.

We spend twelve years drilling one set of habits and then complain that we cannot find the other. Given how hard we work to keep things as they are, it is close to a miracle that anything moves at all.

So the question is worth turning on yourself. Not what grades you got, but which habit you actually practised for all those years, and which one you are practising now.