Study

 24 years of study, no skills. What did the education give me? 

It did not give me the skills immediately after getting out of college, but it gave me certain thinking about "how to gather the skills anytime in future". It gave me a certain thinking for the long term. The study gave me an exposure to that thinking. For Example: The study did not make me an expert on computers and the internet immediately after college, but the study gave an exposure to it. The study told me that such tools exist to gather the knowledge in future. Because of the study, I can formulate a question, which if I ask google, google gives an appropriate answer. Imagine, if I do not know what question to ask google ! Then google will not give any answer and knowledge will not get added. In the recent era, skills are changing at lightening speed. If a skill is important today, it will get outdated tomorrow. But the "thinking" to gather ANY SKILL, will never get outdated.


Did it give me the appropriate knowledge to live life ? 

Yes, it did. In the form of instilling certain virtues in me ... Like ... patience ... facing the struggles ... facing the failures ... decide the priorities in life ...  choose your own people ... choose your own goals ... I chose my own people myself. I married according to my choice. I had to learn two different languages ... Gujrati and Sign Language ... get an exposure to a different culture for my marriage ... and if possible, start a new business. If I look back, there was a lot of struggle, but I slowly built my life. Today I am 50 and I survived 25 years of marriage. I think sustaining married life for 25 years needs patience. I parallelly was working on job. The job required "Java" skills. I learned them on the job. The university did not teach me "Java". But I had the skills to "dig through the code". Which helped me survive. Again, my job was in Bangalore. It was in a different state than where I belong. It has its own "state language" ... Kannada. I learned to read and write the state language, to travel by public vehicle for the job. If we know the state language, it becomes easier to understand and interact with people. Meanwhile I learned to ride two wheeler and got its license. Hiren taught me how to ride it. It is easier to get to the workplace, if we know how to drive a vehicle. Learning "Java" skills also gave me an opportunity to work in the US for 3 years. We could gather some knowlege about how a progressive country works and also earn some money. After returning back from the US, I wanted to learn and acquire different skills other than Java. I realized that "Web Applications" are not challenging for me any more. So I decided to learn "Basic Robotics" using the Lego kit. I programmed it in "Java". If you see my own life graph, one thing is constant ... that is "learning" ... sometimes "spoken languages" ... sometimes "computer languages" ... sometimes "vehicle driving" ... sometimes "web applications" ... sometimes "basic robotics" ... and there is one thing required to learn ... "thinking".


In my opinion, what is the knowledge required to live the life?

In other words, do I think the current knowledge is enough? Is the way to gather knowledge or skills is right? or there should be some other way for it? What is missing? Let's take an example of Engineering education. Currently, we have 10 + 2 + 4 + 2 + (3 or 4) years of education system, to complete Ph.D in India in Engineering. Some of the IITs have a course "Integrated M. Tech". It is of 10 + 2 + 5 + (3 or 4) years. They have combined B. Tech. and Masters of 4 + 2 = 6 years and reduced it to 5 years. It helps students who want to do Masters from foreign universities, can leave IIT after 4 years. And students who want to do masters from IIT itself, can complete it early. It gives students a motivation to work in the university for benefitting themselves and also the university. I found it a great initiative. Another thought I had is, digging deep in why we have first 10 years of "basic education"? What is the reason behind it? Is it so, that the human brain can not fully grown until the age of 18, to grasp higher education, say "engineering", "medicine" or "law" etc. Is there some recent study around the development of brain required for education? Can we reduce the basic education years to 8? Can we provide the students certain incentive to complete the "basic education" early? Apart from these basic questions, I think the subjects taught in school are right, The languages, Maths, Science, History and Geography and Computers. Some basic knowledge of each of these subjects is required to live the life, until the students go for specialization.

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