Taking a trip down memory lane, the first thing that comes to my mind a young kid growing up in the streets of Bucharest was to one day be a footballer. It was 1999 when I shed my first tear for the sport. When it planted itself into my heart and opened my eyes to the incredible world of kicking a ball on a field with other boys to finally hit the ball between two posts to actually score a point. Sounds stupid but graceful in the same time. It was the place you’d assert yourself in the school yard, in the eyes of your friends, of the girls, of yourself...but never in the eyes of your parents. No sir, when it came to mum and dad, nothing made their heart break more than me coming home with another note from school saying I've been skipping classes to play the beautiful game. Looking back, they should be happy, i mean, at least i wasn’t in a gang, or selling drugs or just wasting my time listening to Tokio Hotel, contemplating whether my life has meaning. No, i was playing sports. But that’s the thing, at least if I was doing it in a “gang” way of doing things. An organised, controlled atmosphere where I can exert my “expertise”. I was just playing it on the streets with no sense of direction or guidance, just like a mime on Las Ramblas who thinks standing still is an actual skill. And why? Well according to my dad, being a football player back then meant you’ll grow up mentally challenged. Now, I'm no hypocrite, they’re not the brightest stars in the sky, but thats based on exactly what i’m going to talk about...education.
When you think about it, education is what made me who I am. But is my father's sense of education the same thing as another parents? Is the fact that i can tell you all the 50 capitals of Europe making me any better than a kid who scored 50 goals a season for his boyhood club? We grow up with this mentality of knowledge as a benchmark of being successful. Doctors go through a lifetime of schooling, engineers have to move faster than the internet to keep up or even teachers who by the time they finish school, they’re behind with what's going on around them. And for what? We see footballers making the amount they would in a lifetime in what? 1 year? Maybe 2? And that brings me to the question: Is it fair?
But how exactly do we measure this fairness? The books we read? The hours spent in school? Does being smarter make you more worthy of making more money? Or is it what each and every individual can bring to the table when it comes to other people? I believe in the value of emotions. It’s the best selling product of our generation. Give a homeless guy a sandwich, he’ll put it in his bag, give him a beer, he’ll sleep happy. Why? Because that point he has reached in life gives him less emotion to living and more to shortcutting. And that’s where we are today. We live in a world where coming home from school, surrounded by merchandise, advertising, glam, products, buy buy buy, won’t make a growing young boy want to aspire to being smart, but to aspire to being smarter.
Education is what we chose to educate in our own lives, and it will only grow based on who you have around you to do so. So do footballers deserve bigger salaries than teachers right now? Sure, because who taught them to be who they are today are much better tutors than the ones teachers have.