Enduring education and learning

Standardized education has had its role in the history of human kind. I am a beneficiary of this kind of education and I am still acquiring degrees. For what reason I know not much, but I know the system values credentials and anyway it isn’t that tough to get them. To be sure, I am a pure autodidact. Much of what I know about life is self- taught social wise and professionally.

I had been a tinkerer all my life until I joined campus. Before then, since the age of around 4, when I was first exposed to wrist watches and then later to transistor radios, I instantly become obsessed with these devices. My drive to know how they worked was close to mania. I unscrewed, screwed, soldered, and repaired. So, soon I had become a repairer of watches and radios in the village. All this without an iota of theory on resistors and capacitors. I hadn’t even known such elements existed. My epitome of such self-learning and tinkering occurred when I managed to actually integrate a “7 Melody Chrono” watch with a radio system and I could reproduce the melodies in the radio. All this was pure, 100% tinkering. This was around 2002, when I was 13. I also managed to rebuild/reproduce an entire transistor radio in a wooden platform which now enabled me to listen to BBC English, VOA, and other international radio stations that had very wonderful programs on nature, science and music. At the same period, I had exhausted all materials that could be read in the vicinity of our home and relatives. I borrowed novels, books, magazines. I made hand written notes on everything that was worth noting down.

Until I joined the campus in May 2010. With all my imagination, I had conceived some contraptions and wonderful ideas that I would work on. But the campus proved a different story. The overwhelming number of diverse units per semester ensured that all my energies were directed in the short term achievements. Every semester you had to cover 8 units (courses) and once you were done with a unit that was it. It was very risky to read anything outside the course outline as time was never on your side. You would risk failing your end of semester exams. So even with more theory on operations of capacitors, transistors, resistors, and integrated circuits, there was very little to do in practice. Tinkering was indirectly discouraged. Luckily I didn’t forget books and I came across such wonderful ones like “The Improvement of the Mind” by Isaac Watts, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist”. But generally, I went with the flow. Note-taking and cramming for examination’s sake. This was confounded by the fact that most of those teaching these many units seemed unenthusiastic and had very little or no practical experience on what they were lecturing on, and hence a very huge disconnect. Pumping of more equations, formulae and theory with very little linkage to physical, practical applications of the same. Quantity and not quality seemed to be the aim. The amount of information that was crowded in five years period was far beyond that which any one could digest. And so memorizing details took the place of understanding principles.

In my 5^th year, I tried to be different and even came up with some novel 5^th project that was even at first rejected since it was deemed impractical and impossible to achieve. But it was a success eventually.

Enough of this diatribe. One thing I have noted over the years is that glaring evidence and fact that the majority of the pioneers in my field of training had little or no formal training at all. Consider Michael Faraday, the Father of Electricity. He never went to any high school let alone complete basic school training due to poverty. Yet he is considered one of the most original thinkers of all time. Physical laws have been named after him. So is Nikola Tesla, and so is Benjamin Franklin and many others.

What is the school for really? Even when it comes to fundamental life knowledge, few schools and teachers care to teach anything worthwhile. Why would school care to teach a pupil or student the anatomy of a grasshopper and not how to live healthily? Who gives much care about Pythagoras theorem when I don’t know how to keep a relationship or marriage? Do we just assume the things?

You will be taught Calculus but not how to sell, make investments or get a Job. No wonder we have so many “1^st class” Students who keep on tarmacking. I say “1^st class” because getting “As” in class because you are good at regurgitating information does not make you intelligent and smart.

What is a school for?

Is the anatomy of a frog more important than self-care and emotional health? It has been confirmed by many studies that self-care and emotional health is the biggest predictor of success, yet little is taught to our children! They are not taught how to handle stress, bullies, manage stress.

Since the system is continuously failing us. It behoves parents to expose their children to what is important. Teaching them how to learn enduring life lessons on their own is the key. Almost everything about the traditional classroom is ant-life and ant-teaching. When a typical teacher asks questions, students fear to raise their arms for fear of being wrong. What concerns them the most is the question “Is this going to be on the test”? Even a whole industry of selling past papers and exam prediction papers is built on this fear.

There is a difference between being smart and being good at scoring!

Expect for the social connections and the rare exposure to opportunities, don’t expect the school to open doors for you!

Some people can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment. School can thus have a selection bias as it favours those quicker in such an environment at the expense of performance outside it.

So what is the way forward? These are the steps I have taken since graduation.

1. I read almost on a daily basis. Variety of topics form the basis of the books I read. Mostly entrepreneurial, business, autobiographical, marketing, advertising, science, psychology, relationship kind of books. I keep a yearly record of the best books I have read here, “Books”. I read voraciously, the whole sale in whatever interests me. I can in my apartment reading the entire day. If a particular book bores me, I choose another one.
2. I listen to podcasts almost on a daily basis. A list of the main ones I listen to are here.
3. I write regularly on what interests me. Education, Electrical, ICT, and even on life (lessons, poems, etc.).
4. I decided not to pigeonhole myself into a particular narrow field or speciality. I am good at some though. “As technology becomes a commodity with the democratization of information, it’s the big-picture generalists who will predict, innovate, and rise to power fastest.”

“Diversity of intellectual playgrounds breeds confidence instead of fear of the unknown. It also breeds empathy with the broadest range of human conditions and appreciation of the broadest range of human accomplishments”.

Read “The Top 5 Reasons to Be a Jack of All Trades (#19)” by Tim Ferris and also “Specialization is for insects” by yours truly.

5. I learn new skills on a continuous basis. I learnt web design and development. I am learning programming, etc.
6. Attending conferences and seminars that interest me has also proven useful.

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb says, “To this day I still have the instinct that the treasure, what one needs to know for a profession, is necessarily what lies outside the corpus, as far away from the center as possible. But there is something central in following one’s own direction in the selection of readings: what I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.”