The right to be wrong.

While I was typing the previous post here, I embedded a song entitled "The right to be wrong" by Joss Stone which, you can also check it out right here. It's my favourite song since I was like..... 14.

Anyway, enough linking to other sites using the word "here". Now let's get to the point.

Remember the time when we go to school, sitting in a classroom with 35 other kids who are more or less of the same age group? Everyday we show up for class from 7.30 in the morning to about 12.45 noon, doing nothing but listening to the teacher blabbering about something from the textbook, copying notes from the blackboard and also bringing some schoolwork home only for some of us to come up with a list of excuses instead of bothering to finish the work, only to repeat the whole thing for almost 300 days a year for 11 years. Also, exams is one of the things we fear most.

But, if we were to think back on our school years, the only lesson that has been subtly repeated since kindergarten is that mistakes are totally unacceptable, even though they are unintentional. The idea that mistakes are not to be tolerated has been drilled in our mind for so long we simply accept that idea with open arms.

The kind of questions we answer in our exam papers usually goes more or less like this:-

• Who is the man that kills 5 dogs in the Buckingham Palace?
• What year did the Ketupat War occured?
• Name 3 places in Mongolia where Joseph tries to sell his bicycle.

Sorry for the non-sensical questions above but, you get the idea, right? These kind of questions requires only one-dimension answers:- the RIGHT ANSWER!!! So, what happens if we give answers other than the RIGHT ANSWER? We'll be told that the answer is WRONG and, most probably told to study(memorize) more so that we'll have higher chances of giving THE RIGHT ANSWER to all the questions in the papers. The answers are almost never multi-dimensional answers, where our intelligence is really tested. The end result is the gradual demise of innovation and expression because a lot of people are afraid of being wrong due to the fact that mistakes have been badly stigmatized.


We can even see the product of that lesson everywhere. Two people got into an argument over some small and stupid matter and sometimes it will get verbally nasty beyond cleaning simply because nobody's taking the noble responsibility of admiting their mistakes. Even I myself wouldn't admit my mistakes sometimes. It is something that really needs to be un-learned fast because an army of fools who thinks that they are always correct is on the rise, potentially consuming the whole planet by 2012. Not only that, the term "RIGHT" has also been used, misused and abused in so many ways, we still hold on to Industrial Age ideals (which may not be applicable anymore).

So people, don't just FUNCTION. Live a LIFE and you do have the RIGHT to be WRONG.

Until then.......