If you want a respectable country… start with the teacher
By,: Hamza Mohammed Elhassan
These days Sudanese people are sharing a striking story about an Algerian engineer who visited Sweden. He stopped at a free passage in one of the metro stations, designated for people who cannot afford a ticket. The scene stunned him: no guard watching, no cameras tracking, no gates to stop cheaters. He asked the ticket officer, surprised: “What if someone has the money, but chooses to pass through for free?”
She looked at him in surprise, then answered with a question that seemed to sum up the philosophy of an entire society: “Why would they do that?!”
People may differ on the accuracy of this story, and its details may not be historically verified. But its value does not lie in its literal truth. It lies in the deep question it raises: how does a nation reach a level of civility where honesty becomes instinctive, integrity becomes a rooted habit, and respect for the law becomes a matter of conscience rather than fear of punishment?
The answer is not a miracle, nor a secret too difficult to understand. It is education.
Not the kind of education that fills heads with information and leaves hearts empty. But the education that builds the human being before it builds the employee. That refines conscience before it piles up knowledge. That plants the value of integrity before it explains the texts of the law. That creates a citizen who does what is right because he believes in it, not because he fears the penalty.
Great nations are not first built with cement and iron. They are not established with slogans and fiery speeches. They begin by building the human being. And the human being is made only by a living school, a dignified teacher, and a curriculum that educates as it teaches, and instills values as it instills knowledge.
That is why every talk about rebuilding Sudan, every discussion about the constitution, the government, or the shape of the next state, will remain incomplete if education is not at the forefront of the national project.
What kind of homeland do we want?
Do we want a state that places a policeman at every door, a camera on every street, and an inspector in every institution, because it does not trust its citizens?
Or do we want a state where conscience is the guard, values are the monitor, and integrity is a general culture, not a rare exception?
The real difference between nations is not made by wealth alone, nor by natural resources. It is made by the human being that education has formed. The nations we admire today did not reach what they reached because they were richer than us from the beginning. They reached it because they understood, early on, that real wealth is not in oil or gold, but in the child sitting at a school desk, and in the teacher standing before the blackboard, shaping the future of an entire nation.
It is not wise to attribute the civility of peoples to religion alone, or to economic abundance alone. Public ethics are not a gift people are born with. They are a long construction built by upbringing, polished by education, and solidified by daily practice, until respecting the system, safeguarding public money, and honesty in dealings become automatic behavior that needs neither a preacher nor a supervisor.
Sudan today does not only need to rebuild roads, bridges, and buildings. Before all of that, it needs to rebuild the human being.
We need schools that graduate a citizen who will not steal public money if the supervisor is absent, will not cheat if the opportunity arises, and will not betray trust if he feels safe from punishment.
We need a teacher who lives with dignity and honor. Because a nation that humiliates its teacher is, without realizing it, announcing its contempt for its own future.
And we need curricula that raise a generation that believes the homeland is a responsibility, that the law is a value, and that integrity is a way of life.
Every pound spent on education is an investment in security, in the economy, in justice, and in social peace. And every pound taken away from the education budget, the nation will pay back many times later in fighting corruption, crime, unemployment, and moral collapse.
That is why those who explain the success of nations by economic prosperity alone have it backwards. Prosperity did not create education. Education created prosperity. A strong economy did not create the good person. It was the good person, made by good education, who built the economy, established the rule of law, and entrenched respect for institutions until it became part of general culture, not a product of fear of punishment.
As for us in Sudan, how much we talk about a state of law, a state of institutions, and a state that is respected at home and abroad. But this state will not be born from the womb of loud speeches, nor from the noise of podiums, nor from changing governments alone. No respectable state will rise on the ruins of a collapsed education system. And no nation that neglects its teachers and leaves its schools to poverty and neglect should expect to produce from them a generation that carries the project of renaissance.
A nation that is stingy with education is stingy with its future. And a nation that humiliates its teacher is, with its own hands, knocking down one of the pillars of its survival.
If we want a new Sudan, then let us start where every nation that got ahead of us in renaissance started: from the school, from the teacher, from the curriculum, from education before exams, and from building conscience before filling memory.
So if you hear someone asking: how do we build a respectable country? Do not look for the answer in the palaces of politics, nor in the clamor of podiums, nor in the noise of slogans. Go to the school. That is where nations are born before governments are born. That is where minds are shaped before constitutions are drafted. That is where conscience is raised before laws are legislated. And it is there, and only there, that the road begins to a homeland that respects itself, so the world respects it.