on staying small

i used to be louder about this. in 2014, when i had just started college, i put up a poster in my room that said education should be for knowledge, for joy, for the peace of mind and soul — not for passing exams, for admission tests, for jobs.

people laughed. i was twenty. it was the kind of thing twenty-year-olds put on walls.

i'm twenty-seven now. the poster came down years ago. in between, i dropped my CV at more places than i can remember. i worked one of those jobs for eight months. i tried a startup. it stalled. i walked, for a while, the conventional roads i used to mock.

none of it changed my mind. it confirmed it.

the hunger i had at twenty is still there. what changed is that i stopped needing to announce it. the poster came off the wall not because i stopped believing in what it said, but because i stopped needing to wear my position publicly. it lives quieter now. it didn't get smaller.

this is an essay about one specific thing i still won't do.

coaching centers are a particular bangladeshi industry. mostly one teacher — sometimes a small group — teaches specific subjects to hundreds, sometimes thousands of students in batches. they rent classrooms. they advertise heavily, online and offline. they brand themselves around specific exam targets: SSC, HSC, engineering admission, medical admission, public university admissions.

the business works. teachers who run good coaching operations earn many times what individual tuition pays. their students do better on the exams they're being prepared for. by the system's own measures, coaching delivers.

what it sells, though, is not education. it's a credential ladder.

the pitch goes: GPA 5, then BUET or medical or DU, then a good job, then the rest of your life set. failure at any rung is presented as failure at the whole climb. the biggest centers run massive celebration programs when their students place into top universities, as if tickets to heaven had been handed out. the marketing reinforces this. the pressure reaches the parents. the parents reach the students.

most of the students i tutor have already absorbed this before they ever sit down with me. they're convinced that if they don't get into a particular university, their life is over. and so when i try to teach the subject the way it should be taught — slow, curious, willing to go sideways into a related idea — they look at me sideways. there's an exam coming. there's no time. the syllabus doesn't include the thing that just made me excited.

i can't apply marketing to education. i know that's my problem, not anyone else's.

i'm not arguing the system needs to be reformed. people can choose what to do with their education. plenty of people sensibly treat school as a credential machine, get the credential, and get on with their lives. that's fine — for them.

it's not fine for me. i'm not built that way. i can't study to pass an exam, or build a business around helping others pass exams. the idea unsettles something basic in me.

i'm not a robot, and i don't want to live just to die — to pass through the same cycle as everyone else, eat, sleep, earn, repeat. i might be the only one in my immediate circle who finds that cycle unbearable. that's not a complaint. it's a fact about me i've learned to make peace with.

i've been suggested to build a coaching center many times. by parents, by some of my students, by people who watch me teach and assume i'd want to use the skill that way. each time i've said no.

the thought never crosses my mind on its own. i only think about it when someone else brings it up. and when i do, what i see clearly is a version of me that i don't want to be. a poster of my face on a wall in some classroom. promises of exam results. a schedule built around delivering credentials at scale. the curiosity that brought me to teaching in the first place, slowly drowned in the operations of running a business.

the money would be a significant multiple of what i earn now. the math doesn't move me. it never has. that's part of what makes me weird, i think — not that i refuse the money, but that the money was never really part of the offer to me in the first place.

here is what i can't pretend about. i'm still inside the system. i teach in ways shaped by the exam, because the students who come to me are preparing for exams. i can't sit them down and teach the subject the way i'd want to teach it. their next test is coming. the test doesn't care about curiosity. so i meet them where they are, and i resent it sometimes.

what i tell myself is that working one-on-one is at least not the same as scaling the harm. i don't run advertisements. i don't put up posters of myself. i don't tell students their lives depend on a particular result — even when the rest of the system is telling them exactly that. occasionally, when a student gives me the slightest opening, i slip in a small disclaimer: that life isn't a single road, that the exam matters less than they think.

it's still a compromise. i tutor because it pays, and because individual sessions don't compound the harm that scaling would. that's the most honest version i can write.

i'm not proposing an alternative coaching center. i don't have a model in mind.

what i do have is everything i'm working on outside the tuition hours: a website that takes its time, games i'm building, essays like this one, eventually articles that explain concepts the way i wish someone had explained them to me. things that aren't sold as preparation for anything. things made because making them is enough.

if the alternative to coaching is anything, it's this — work where the value is the work itself, not the credential it leads to.