Beyond the exhibition: making inquiry a daily habit

When I first wrote about the "new life of the peela school" in these columns, on 31 January 2026, I was trying to name a quiet shift I witnessed while judging STEAM Muqablo: government-school corridors, for a brief but meaningful moment, becoming what they were always meant to be - spaces where children practise reasoning, empathy and agency. As I had opined, I grew up within those yellow walls: chalk-dusted blackboards, morning assemblies, and a time when learning carried a certain seriousness and teachers carried an unquestioned social respect. Over the years, I watched that spirit gradually thin out, replaced by mechanical memorisation and institutional fatigue. Yet STEAM Muqablo was not simply a competition; it felt like the revival of an attitude and a classroom culture we have been missing for too long. Students stood beside modest, resource-limited models and spoke with remarkable clarity - explaining each step, defending their ideas, revising their arguments, and inviting dialogue instead of waiting to be examined.

After sharing my STEAM Muqablo experience, I received many comments: some praising the students' confidence and clarity, others questioning whether such events create change beyond a single day. Together, these responses pushed the discussion beyond celebration and toward a harder truth: our children clearly have potential, but what is missing is a system that consistently turns thinking into habit and protects that potential from being wasted.

Many comments then shifted the lens from students to the broader machinery of education including recruitment, professionalism, governance, and the long decline of merit. The point repeated in different ways was that competitions can spark hope, but they cannot repair structural problems: politicised, non-merit hiring and unstable governance over decades have weakened the culture that makes learning rigorous, leaving education under-supported and under-respected.

A recurring, and admittedly uncomfortable, point raised in the comments was that even as the number of highly educated people has grown, the quality of teaching and the motivational power of classrooms have often weakened, exposing a widening gap between credentials and the craft of teaching. This was not framed as an attack on higher education, but as a caution against assuming that academic degrees automatically translate into pedagogical excellence. Research training is valuable, yet it does not, by itself, guarantee teaching imagination, mentoring skill, ethical assessment, or the ability to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. Without clear professional standards, continuous mentoring and real accountability, lectures can easily slip into ritual syllabi "covered", attendance marked, and minds left untouched.

The rapid growth of private schools has turned education into a marketplace where cost-cutting and marketing often replace quality, making teacher professionalism the first casualty. Underpaid and untrained teachers cannot sustain inquiry-based learning, no matter the slogans. This is why "responsibility and professionalism" matter: responsibility means merit-based hiring, strong training, transparent evaluation and accountability, while professionalism means treating teaching as a serious craft i.e. well-prepared, question-driven and focused on step-by-step thinking rather than rote memorisation.

I return to STEAM Muqablo with hope because it shows what public schooling can become when classrooms move from authority to facilitation and from rote instruction to exploration. In that moment, the peela school turns from a symbol of deprivation into a symbol of possibility, proving students already have the confidence and clarity needed for a scientific culture - if the system supports them. The real task is to prevent this from remaining a once-a-year spectacle by embedding inquiry-based learning, projects, debate and reasoning-focused assessment into everyday teaching, backed by continuous teacher development and merit-driven recruitment that treats teaching as nation-building. Only then can the spark of a competition become a sustained educational transformation.