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A reflective personal piece on how academic success is increasingly imagined only through emigration, and on the spiritual and civilizational cost of training young people to dream only of leaving home.
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Where Are We Driving Our Children? A Real Story
A reflective personal piece on how academic success is increasingly imagined only through emigration, and on the spiritual and civilizational cost of training young people to dream only of leaving home.
Article pageTranslated in-site version of an externally hosted articleCounsel and Admonition
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- Section: Articles
- Date: 2025-10-14
- Source: Alukah Network
- Reading time: 3 minutes
- Link: Article link
- Back: Back to articles
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Where Are We Driving Our Children? A Real Story
The author reflects on long years of teaching in the Faculty of Computers and Information since 2005, watching generations of students arrive full of hope, ambition, and beautiful dreams. He shared those hopes, trying to be for them a mentor, adviser, and academic father whose happiness grew with their success.
Yet, in recent years, something changed. Many students no longer see success as meaningful unless it ends in emigration. The highest ambition has become leaving one’s homeland, family, and cultural setting in order to dissolve into another world. At first, the author tried to see possible good in this, hoping students might acquire rare knowledge and return to benefit their countries. But he grieved at the cost when departure seemed to come at the expense of religion, values, principles, and identity.
He then recounts the story of Ahmad, one of the most brilliant students in computer science. Ahmad’s graduation project was deeply humane: he designed an eye-tracking system to help his quadriplegic friend control a computer. The project won awards, his reputation spread, he was appointed as a teaching assistant, completed his master’s quickly, and moved into artificial intelligence and data analysis. Eventually he worked with foreign companies, resigned, and left.
Years later, the author came across a social media post in which Ahmad proudly announced his Canadian citizenship while holding his daughter before Canadian flags. Rather than joy, the author felt the bitterness of loss: a mind lost, a gifted innovator lost, a future professor lost, and a model who might have inspired younger generations to build at home rather than dream only of escape.
The article ends with a painful question: what are we training our children to seek? A foreign birth certificate, or a God-centered identity? A place that shelters the body, or a creed that protects the heart? It is a call to reflect before an entire generation is raised to believe that the summit of aspiration is simply to leave.
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