Schooling VS Education
Today, as I was attending an online lecture of one of my college courses. Everyone was unenthusiastic about the lecture and most of us were just passing the time waiting for the dreaded lecture to be over. Professor was constantly asking for feedback and answers, but despite her best attempts, nobody was really keen on attending the lecture because of four constant hours of lecture in front of a single screen.
At the end of the lecture, when the professor asked the students “why do you all lack any motivation?” Things turned real interesting on her asking this question. This sparked a debate and I found myself amidst of very logical and and solid arguments by classmates despite them being humorous.
A student was quick to point out that the course that we were studying (Discrete Structures) was not really relevant to the field of Software Engineering (Note: The things we are studying have really no relation to SE) as compared to the other core courses such as Object Oriented Programming etc. Other told her that the school is killing creativity, some including myself blamed that college studies are same as high school promoting cramming and inside the box thinking.
Prof was quick to respond that it has a wider scope and they could learn OOP online instead of paying for a full degree and asked for our reasons to get a degree. Many humorously said that they made a mistake enrolling in it and debate went on.
The lecture ended on the lighter note with professor lecturing about how we should take this seriously and all while students enjoyed the showdown. But as the lecture ended, it got me thinking that many of the arguments made in humor were actually the real loopholes of the schooling.
Let’s start with relevance, even in the college level we are made to study some specific subjects that have little to no relation with our specific field, I mean why would we need to study the grammatical rules for straight two semesters for becoming a Software Engineer.
Then comes the question of creativity, Schools and Colleges encourage inside the box thinking which is not a surprise to any. Every person is judged according to similar criteria regardless of their caliber, discouraging them from being the best version they can be.
I do remember the time when I used to ask questions as “Why is Sky Blue?” “How does a PC work?” But after my school years, I did not even bother to ask such questions because every time I asked such a thing, either I was treated with ridicules or I was discouraged to ask “Irrelevant” questions.
Looking back at my 12 years of schooling, I realize as how it turned me from a curious mind to a person who’d follow the orders of any passerby for a quick buck.
How do they expect students to innovate if they keep on promoting such boxed standards?
This is against the education actually, which promotes children to learn something new and innovate. But instead here we are promoting the ideas of memorizing some tables, that are at the single touch of our phones.
And to be honest, I have learnt way more from Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and other internet sources than what these 12 years taught me.
I learnt programming from YouTube when I was 12 years old. I learnt to perform daily tasks such as spreadsheets and documents by using Google. I learnt most of the knowledge in a comprehensive way from Wikipedia. And what did I pay for all this education? NOTHING, contrary to millions dumped in this “Educational System”.
The real education gives you a skill, a real implementation, something that you can use and build upon, but schooling makes us think inside the box and follow orders which is not gonna get us anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong, Schools are essential but this system needs to be revamped from the ancient industrial time designs which promoted the copying and following of orders and extra memory to peform tasks fastly and accurately. Today’s word is far different than that, it requires constant innovation and collaboration and much of that is being left behind in such as system.
My advice to all the school going students would be to focus on education as well, such as getting a skill along with the formal education. A degree with 4.0 CGPA is good but it’s great and million times more worthy with actual education and skills but with 3–3.5 CGPA.
DO NOT LET THE SCHOOLING TAKE AWAY YOUR EDUCATION
I’ll end with a famous quote of a famous innovator Elon Musk.
Good Luck!
