Imagine if we were 6 years old, and we were all given an hour a day to write what happened in our day. We were asked to write what we ate, what we learnt, who our friends were, what our thoughts were, who we met, what we said, and how we dealt with difficult matters; we were then asked to read that page in class and compare notes. Would we be writers?
I just had this thought last night. I’ve never kept a diary, well, I did, but I didn’t actually write in it all the time, and I still have those diaries, though I don’t think what’s in them can be considered printable material. Just imagine, though, I had travelled widely, met a lot of interesting people, and seen so many things in my life. I feel that had I kept a diary, it would be worth more to my kids and grandkids than any material things I leave behind. Who will care about the clothes I wore or the jewelry I owned, decades from now? None of it will matter the way words will. Anyway, what I’m saying is, if I leave something written behind, it might be worth more.
If we were asked to write down what happened during our days: our thoughts, our feelings, what food we ate, who scolded us, what games we played, what books we read, day in, day out, we would take an hour of our time to write. Agreed, we can probably only write from age 6 or 7, since that’s when we’d start remembering things clearly. Imagine how much would be written. Okay, let’s do the math: if I started at age 6, writing 2 pages a day, every day, I would have written 23,725 pages. This is the equivalent of 79 books of 300 pages each. That’s a lot of books for one person, and it would be over 7 trillion books if everyone wrote. But of course, not everyone would continue writing after school is over, unless it’s a state order! Imagine the discipline in the world, as no one would want to write about bad things, so there would be no bad behaviour. Imagine how great our world would be: lots of greenery, machines that don’t harm the environment, no wars, no quarrels, no hate, no one wanting to expose himself or herself. We would all have great manners.
So how about this: it could be a way to help students pass, and if they write truthfully, they’ll earn extra marks. Who wouldn’t want that? Imagine the discoveries, the added knowledge, the new inventions that would be uncovered, the new philosophies. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I feel it’s such a terrific idea. Okay, enough of praising myself. Memoirs have been around for centuries, so what am I talking about, then? I’m talking about memoirs in the school curriculum, something that would be read by teachers and examiners, with rules and guidelines around it. Of course, each of us is different, so we’ll have hundreds of styles. We’ll have writers all around the world. There could even be competitions on the best time spent in any day. Imagine what will be written during school holidays, I wouldn’t want to miss reading what the kids write about that.
I feel that writing a daily memoir can be a great way to help everyone, especially writing with pen and paper. This should definitely be a subject in school, not an extracurricular activity. Maybe I should propose it to our ministry.
Some materials that I had found about the same subject: