Heartiest congratulations to each one of you! Mahisha, Anjana and Amasha, you have topped the grade 5 scholarship examination obtaining 183 marks each out of 200, in the All Island Competitive Exam where 619 candidates got zero marks.

I listened to each one of you on the electronic media, and also to your dear parents and teachers who appeared to be extremely and deservedly proud of you. Well done teachers, well done parents!

Your parents emphasised that you were not just reading only the textbooks but also many supplementary journals, books and children’s educational newspapers. I think, as a veteran teacher myself, that the secret of success lies in your endeavour to go beyond a limited syllabus.

The trouble with the ordinary teacher and student lies in the fact that they think if one ‘covers’ the syllabus it is enough. But if one goes beyond the syllabus his or her knowledge and ability to face an exam is far greater.

But don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t let all the congratulations and media publicity make you feel that you are far ahead of those who failed to score like you.

You may have heard that failures are the pillars of success. They are indeed. Remember that Albert Einstein was sent home by the teacher for ‘day-dreaming’ and not attending to the school work! Our own Martin Wickremasinghe was not a successful candidate at exams but he was not without brains!

So when you go back to your respective schools forget that you had topped the all-island list. There may be, and I am sure there are, many ordinary looking school children or even those who seem to be day dreaming during a lesson. Remember the fable of the hare and the tortoise. There may be many tortoises in your class. Don’t let them defeat you in the end.

But, exams are not enough. All exams will show how much of knowledge you have gathered in your subjects. There is also a thing called intelligence or wisdom which no teacher or institution can give you. No exam can measure your intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to deal with the problems of life. People with the highest exam successes and academic achievement commit suicide when they fail to solve life’s problems.

You have just passed one hurdle in life and that is your scholarship exam. But you are yet too young to realise that there is a whole life ahead of you. Education is not just passing exams. Education is the ability to think, not according to a pattern or path but directly and truly from moment to moment as you live. A person who thinks according to any pre-planned method, pattern or path is a thoughtless person. He conforms to a pattern. He repeats words and phrases and thinks in a groove. As one wise man said, to understand life is to understand ourselves. That is both the beginning and the end of education!

Our schools, yes all our schools and universities produce only scholars, technologists, job hunters but not an integrated human being. There will be no enduring peace in Sri Lanka or anywhere else in this whole world unless there are integrated human beings, those who are not disintegrated according to beliefs, race and national chauvinism, labelled and divided as Sunnis and Shias, Hindus and Muslims, Sinhalese and Tamils or Arabs and Jews. The UNO is only an organisation to mesmerise us that nations are united. As long as we are divided into nations there will be no enduring peace. United Nations is a misnomer!

You three little girls who topped the list have only just begun to live. Be aware of all the traps on your way ahead. If you ever choose the teaching profession don’t do it merely to earn a salary. To regard teaching as a means of livelihood is to exploit the children for your own advantage. It is happening right now in Sri lanka where teachers hold the children or the answer - scripts to ransom whenever their trade union leaders tell them to. If you take to politics be careful because as Dallas Alahapperuma, Minister of transport says (refer Island 20/9) "The public today viewed politicians as rogues who misused public property!"

If you take to nursing or the medical profession think of the poor, suffering patients who are dying in hospitals, before you take to the streets with placards asking for more pay!

The true teacher or doctor is one who is not ambitious. He seeks no power, in any form. He is free from the compulsion of union leaders and politicians. Such teachers and doctors have the first place in an enlightened civilisation. True culture is dependent not on engineers and technologists but on true teachers and doctors.

You have been born into a world in which there is a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom. Everybody knows all about war but nobody seems to know how to end war!

Your life is being threatened not only by conventional war but also nuclear war! There are enough books on what would happen if there were a nuclear war. The whole earth would be covered by a thick layer of dust and smoke. No sound will be able to penetrate it. The temperatures will fall to near zero.

By then, not a living thing will survive on the planet. All this will be the result of technologists who are only concerned with their own particular lives. They will totally disregard what happens to human beings anywhere!

Ten million people will evaporate even with an ordinary nuclear device.

Man, during the last fifty thousand years acquired every kind of knowledge but where do we stand? With war, hatred, chauvinism, racial and religious killing.

Three little girls, you have a long way to go! What place has all your knowledge (not that knowledge is unnecessary!) in the world of human relationship? Are you going to conform to patterned thinking? Are you going to live and die like any other person, like a doctor, an engineer, professor, the prime minister or even the president?

Or are you going to let your brain open to all the misery in this world and come out of your narrow little caste, race or creed? Are you going to be concerned with the rest of humanity - Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians - who are your brothers and sisters? All those divisions are destructive, you can see for yourself the ethnic conflict that is going on.

Are you going to be an integrated human being without a divisive label? I will not live that long to see what you will be but let me die in peace hoping that you will be three integrated humans!