By Muhammad Rabi’u (Bin Isah)
IN MOST CASES, we look at many successful people without remembering those people that held the lamp for them. Teachers are the light-bearers of success, the beacons of progress and the building blocks of a good generation. “Islamiyya teachers” at the top, and the Boko teachers; they all hold lamps for us. But they are less assisted, remembered and appreciated.
Of all people, teachers are the most selfless segment of the society that derive pleasure not in failure but in the success of their students and people in general. Whether doctor, engineer, lawyer, administrator, etc., a teacher stands behind you in support. They feel delighted when students learn and understand, take and pass their tests, and when they hear that one of their students has made a remarkable achievement in life. After exhausting their energy in bringing light in person, they are now fully assured that their effort has not been in vain.
Teaching, as the essential task of teachers and the most fundamental component of education, can never be achieved without teachers. Education, the art of imparting knowledge, skills and experiences to learners, will lose its meaning without the help of teachers. Because education, which we now equate with schooling, taking schools as the vital places of learning, where socialization takes a decisive form, is not effective without teachers’ sacrifices.
The system of our organizations, whether governmental or non-governmental; the processes of our public and private enterprises; the modalities and mechanisms of our modern state of affairs; the leaders that serve the workers that run our world and us; all are not but the manifestation of the work of one selfless, good-loving and a charitable individual called a teacher. But this teacher is not appreciated, and they don’t care as long as the world stays educated, sane and developing.
Whatever we may say about teachers, we can never elucidate the merits of their services in their deserved way. Words can never capture the splendour of their roles and works in man’s development and wellbeing. Teachers love nothing more than the feeling of being successful in putting life into a place where death has taken an abode.
Teachers can be forgotten, but in every word spoken and any letter written, and in any sense made and any problem solved, the teacher takes credit, and particularly the teachers, at the primary levels of our learning, who have helped us learn how to read and write, understand and play with numbers in order to have eyes, hands and tongues to communicate with the world.
You can say “Thank You” to your teachers, and you’re still less thankful for the life they have breathed into you. Perhaps, by excelling more and being a good member of society, the teachers will feel better appreciated. And you can still never pay them. And nobody can ever pay them. Indeed, their reward is in heaven.
Thus, I say, a happy #WorldTeachersDay.
Muhammad Rabi’u (Bin Isah) writes from Bauchi State.
