Am I really educated?


     I completed my B.E.degree in Computers, this year. Some folks feel so proud about me. But I feel awful. This degree is merely a piece of paper. A paper which I cannot even sell it to the local radiwala.






     So I decided to go backwards in time, which is a waste as you cannot change the past. But I wanted the reasons. The reasons were obvious. My education system was just wasn't good enough. I was trained to by heart things like a parrot. Maybe we all did the same. The history was too localized only on Maharashtra (compare this to America where they are taught about teachings of Mahatma Gandhi) at a very young age. But I am wrong in blaming the system, as it is easy to blame someone else for your mistakes.

     No matter what my education system was I just didn't question it. I studied gravity, and took it for granted that no matter how many apples or bananas fell from the tree, it wouldn't affect me. I had an open mind, but no application. Knowledge becomes wisdom only when you use it.

    Then something changed, I went to St. Xavier's Mumbai. The faculty was good (not all of them). I had a brilliant English teacher. She changed my entire outlook towards life. But then came engineering, back to the parrot days.

     I still know the three laws of motion, but do they have any practical importance? A big NO pops out in my mind.

     People who have been to IITs and IIMs say to those who haven't been to these premier institutions, you haven't been properly trained. What they teach at an IIT or an IIM is simple, think logically and do the basic things right. I really don't care about IITs and IIMs because most people who studied there, as JAYZ puts it, in his song Empire State of Mind, "8 million stories, half of them won't make it".

     I am no Copernicus to give the world Heliocentrism, but I finally realized without the slightest doubt in my mind that as Robert M. Hutchin puts it,

“The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.”

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