A rose, as you know, by any other name, smells just as sweet. You are now being made to believe that ranking you, by any other name, at the tender age of 11, will propel you into an elite class.

But it would be in your own interest to be aware of and reflect on a few other things. In the USA a recent projection has shown that children born in the developed countries this century will have a life expectancy of 120 years, they will work up to the age of 80 and take three different university degrees, the last one at the age of 60 !

You will be living and working in tomorrow?s global village, which will be completely different from the world in which your parents and teachers have grown up. Concentrating all your efforts on an examination which will be irrelevant to you in your future life, if it is not already an anachronism, will neither allow you to enjoy your childhood fully nor prepare you for the future.

You need to study and become proficient in the subject areas you will be taking for the CPE exam. But you also need to enjoy your childhood, learn to appreciate such other aspects of education as music and art, and enjoy taking part in sports which will also help you in your physical development. Above all, you will have to learn how to live together with your classmates and other children of your age. The world you will be living in will require that you develop many interpersonal skills and be able to think globally and for yourself.

Your parents and your teachers may mean well when they ask you to spend almost all your time on studying the same subjects at school, at home and in ?private tuition? which is not private at all anyway. But they will not be preparing you to stand up to the pressures of the completely different environment you will be living and working in 20 years? time, let alone 50 or 60 years from now.

Fexibility and adaptability are going to be far more important than getting top marks in written examinations which rely more on recall of facts than on their interpretation, on solving problems mechanically rather than on solving problems in real life situations.

Discover the joy of reading, whether it be Harry Potter, Paul et Virginie or an ancient epic written in a modern language. This will help you in many ways, not just in writing properly instead of the SMS you send using your mobile phone. Let your imagination make you dream about anything and about what you would like to do when you grow up, whether you fancy becoming a scientist or a medical doctor, an artist or a musician, a footballer scoring goals or an athlete winning medals. As the song goes, If you can?t have a dream, how can you have a dream come true?

But dreams must be followed by action. Don?t just watch Beckham on TV Learn to play football intelligently. Don?t be satisfied with just listening to the music of Mozart or Ravi Shankar, although listening to good music is in itself a very satisfying experience. Try to learn how to play an instrument. Don?t do like me who was ranked first in music in Form I, but as it was based only on a written paper, that was the end of my proficiency in music !

It is also very important that you care for others and for the environment. It is only when you participate in the joys and sufferings of your friends that you will grow up understanding the world. Having feelings for others will prevent you from throwing bombs and killing innocent children.

Instead of having a myopic view of the world through the subjects you will be doing over and over again for your exams, the global village you will be growing up into and which will become your workplace requires that you understand the various cultures, civilizations and ways of life of the people you will be interacting with.

Those of you who are already in secondary schools should realize that the School Certificate, by itself, will be of no use to you unless you use it as a springboard to develop skills that will make you employable. If you move on to the Higher School Certificate, this will be a better springboard to develop higher order skills.

But whatever skills you acquire will become obsolete in a decade or two if you do not keep pace with new developments, new discoveries and new inventions, which you yourself can contribute to. This state of affairs is going to be the order of the day. Colleges of further education, Technical schools and Polytechnics as well as Open universities are going to be much more important than the traditional schools and Universities. They will be the new Centres of learning to promote human resource development and the compulsory recycling of the labour force every five to ten years.

Nobody can forecast what the world will be like in 50 years when you will still have to play an active part in it. But your education ? in the broadest sense possible ? will have to equip you with the strength and flexibility to cope with all the pressures you will be subjected to at home, at work and in the world at large. Hopefully you should also be in a position to contribute positively to the emergence of a better world for future generations even if you do not become world class ministers.

Surendra BISSOONDOYAL