Learning 101

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

All three have no college degrees to boast of.

I find it amusing that parents of young children fret so much about the education curriculum even in primary school, and start worrying about college for the grown-ups of the future.

If education alone could transform ordinary people into greats, then a few wealthy families with access to the best institutions and teachers would have continued to rule over us for generations.

If you think the products of these geniuses became ubiquitous because of technology, you are wrong.

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

The billionaires who make it to that coveted Forbes list are self-made, first-generation entrepreneurs, and many have no college degree. The numbers for movie stars, sports champions, and politicians holding a college degree are even lower.

We can say then with some authority that the belief in ‘success-through-education,’ at least in the classroom-teaching model - is futile.

I think an educational institution is fantastic if it allows a student to go through the right experiences: facing, succumbing to, and then rising from all sorts of peer pressures and their associated pokes, pinches, pulls, and pushes.

No education should be without a mild version of bullying and standing up to the bully.

What matters in life is the development of emotional stamina, contextual cleverness, and synthesizing skills - the capacity to grasp the situation and then to fight, flee, or fudge in between.

A mark of leaders is that they step up to take decisions when the crowd is fumbling in doubt.

Real-life hard decisions, whether tactical or strategic, don't come from textbooks. They often have to be taken with the situation in mind, where correctness is not as important as appropriateness, if one may say so.

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

Finally, no institution can give a child what nature has withheld. At best, it can only set an ill-set but already formed diamond.

I am more than convinced that exam scores have almost no real role to play in a child's development. In fact, they often play a negative one. At some level, the following happens:

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

* The child is doomed if grades are good, because the child then gets a wrong notion of self-worth.

One can be educated but still not learned. Education is simply an advantage, not a solution.

It is time we understood that a college degree is definitely not a certification of a higher level of thinking.

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

At the end of it, humans by nature are gregarious, and it is only people who give us the most pain and pleasure. A child needs people practice. Thus, it is still essential to go to school and college, because it is the cheapest way to bring about a long-term congregation of young people - nothing else exists, so that good, bad, and mad experiences are most likely to occur. A simulation lab, if you will.

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

Please take the above with a pinch of salt!