Learning 101

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple have taken over our lives, and how !

All have no college degrees to boast about.

I find it amusing that parents of young children fret so much on type of education curriculum even in lower schools & begin to worry of college for their grownups of the future !

If education really transformed ordinaries into greats, then a few wealthy people with access to best institutions and teachers would have continued to rule over us for generations to infinity.

If you thought that the products by the above mentioned geniuses have become ubiquitous due to technology, then you are wrong.

Their power comes more from cutting edge insights into human behavior and less from cutting edge technology. The latter is just a tool.

It is a worthy ponder : Historians have bestowed the title of "The Great" on Akbar, who was not only uneducated, but was illiterate too.

The Forbes 'Billionaires List' shows that 2/3 of folks who made it to the coveted distinction, are self-made 1st generation entrepreneurs and almost half have no college degree; movie stars and sports champions even less so.

We can experientially conclude with a bit of authority about the futility of a 'success-thru-education' belief, at least in the class room teaching model.

I think the educational institution per say is fantastic, if it allows the student to go through the right experiences like he / she faces, succumbs & then rises from all sorts of peer pressures & it's associated pokes, pinches, pulls & pushes.

What is important in life is the development of emotional stamina, contextual cleverness & synthesizing skills. A mark of leaders is that they call upon themselves to take decisions, when the crowd is found fumbling in doubt. 

The real life hard decisions, be they tactical or strategic, are not from text books and often have to be taken keeping in mind the situation at hand, where one must either fight, flee or fudge in-between. 

All this in the midst of friends, foes and politicians that are inescapable in our daily lives.

Finally, no institution can offer a child what nature has withheld, at most it can only set an ill-set, but already formed diamond.

I am more than convinced that scores in an exam has almost no real role to play in a child's development & in fact, often plays a negative one. At some level, the foll also happens:

* The child is gloomed if grades are bad - as it depresses the child.

* The child is doomed if grades are good - as then the child could get wrong notion of self-worth.

One could get educated but not be learned. Education is simply an advantage and not a solution.

It is time we know that a college degree is definitely not a certification of a higher level of degree of one's thinking.

It is the right experiences that ripen the knowledge into wisdom. And all wisdom is of, by, for & from the people.

At the end of it, humans by nature are gregarious & it is only people that give us most pain & pleasure. A child needs people practice. Thuz, it is still essential to go to school & college as it's the cheapest means for bringing about a long term congregation of young people (none other exists) so that good, bad & mad experiences may most likely occur in them - a simulation lab, if I may.

Don't get me wrong, it's good to hang a well laminated college degree certificate on the wall, as with advent of cell phones, wall calendars are outdated & so a fancy degree is a good fill-in-the blank item ;-)

Pls take the above with a pinch of salt !