They say children must learn morals and ethics in school.

I laugh.

Not because it is funny, but because it is tragic enough to deserve laughter. The kind of laughter that comes when the lie has been repeated so often that even the liar begins to believe it.

Look at the schools.

Private schools first—air-conditioned morality factories. Clean uniforms, rehearsed smiles, English accents polished like shoes. On the walls, slogans shout about honesty, discipline, and character. Inside, teachers who once barely survived the system now guard it like priests. Many of them are dropouts, not of life perhaps, but of the very academic ideals they enforce. They are paid one-tenth of what a government teacher earns, yet asked to manufacture virtue, leadership, and confidence—three things their own paychecks deny them daily.

How does a man teach dignity when his own dignity is rationed?

How does a woman lecture about self-worth when her labor is priced cheaper than chalk?

The children learn quickly—not from the textbook, but from observation. They learn that ethics are preached upward and practiced downward. That power decides truth. That morality is loud only when it is safe.

Then come government schools.

Government schools—where stability replaces sincerity. Where teachers speak of nation and future while silently arranging an escape route for their own children. Where belief stops exactly where personal risk begins. These schools do not fail because of lack of intelligence; they fail because of absence of faith. No one trusts them—not even their custodians.

If morals were truly taught there, the first students would have been the teachers’ own sons and daughters.

But no.

So we expect children—confused, impressionable, fragile—to emerge ethical from institutions that themselves do not believe in what they teach. We treat morality like a transferable skill, like typing or algebra. As if goodness could be outsourced.

Ethics are not taught.

They are stumbled upon.

They are bruises that leave lessons.

They are formed in moments when no authority is watching.

Society loves rational setups. Rules. Structures. Frameworks. It comforts us to believe that systems produce humans the way factories produce objects. But humans are not products; they are accidents with memory.

Science explains the world—but not the person living inside it.

It tells us how planets move, but not why a man chooses to stay when leaving is easier. It can map the brain, but not the moment someone forgives without benefit. Science progresses, yes—but it does not understand. It observes.

The will of man remains untouched.

It is absurd.

It contradicts survival.

It disobeys advantage.

Science is programmed. Even AI—You can build artificial intelligence that defeats grandmasters, writes poetry, diagnoses diseases—but it will never wake up one morning and act without knowing why. It will never rebel against its own advantage. It will never destroy itself just to prove it is free. This is the fault line of AI, reason, science and logic.

A machine cannot sabotage its own logic to prove freedom.

A human does it daily.

And even I don’t know why I am writing this.

There is no goal. No syllabus. No outcome. Perhaps this itself is proof—of will acting without instruction. Will writing about will.

Will people understand me?

Some will read this to find errors, to mark contradictions, to feel superior by labeling it illogical. Some will skim it while trapped between notifications, dopamine exhausted, attention bleeding away. Some will read it simply because they have nothing else to do—no reason, no curiosity, just motion.

And maybe one person—somewhere—will stop scrolling. Strained. Tired. And this text will feel like an interruption rather than content. Not understood, but recognized.

People are fools.

And yet, in that foolishness lies unpredictability. Freedom. Danger. Beauty.

They can destroy civilizations and write poetry in the same breath. They can obey systems while secretly hating them. They can teach morality without possessing it. They can read this without knowing why—and that is precisely why this matters.

No school can teach that.

No science can model it.

No machine can surpass it.

The will remains a mystery—ungraded, unmeasured, unteachable.

And perhaps that is the last honest thing left.

The author is a Gold medalist in Environmental Engineering from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).