Are You Stuck In Education Trap?

Yes, education is important. But before we parrot this line like everyone else and completely subscribe to this belief, it is perhaps even more important to question our true understanding of the meaning of education. What does education really mean to us? If our definition of education is the schools we go to and the certificates we get from some formal training courses, then we need to find out more what education is.

The definition of education cannot be so narrow. At least not for something that the society proclaim is so damn important.

What is education?

It is not the degrees you see hanging on the wall. That is only a small fragment of what true education really is. Most of us believe that education is something we obtained after passing certain examinations. What is I told you that Warren Buffet and George Soros both dreaded examinations? Both of them tried to avoid the examination they need to take not in the school but in their profession!

Here is an excerpt from the book The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffet and George Soros.

Taken from Chapter 26 Do You Need to Be a Genius? (page 234):

As Buffet says, “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ.”

Neither Buffet nor Soros passed any of the many securities industry exams that employees of Wall Street firms are routinely required to take.

When Buffet became CEO of Salomon Brothers in 1991, “there was also a rule that because I was an officer of a securities firm I had to take the Series 7 exam [for stockbrokers],” he recalls. “I kept delaying it until I left because I wasn’t sure I could pass it.”

Earlier in his career, Soros actually took such an exam – and failed it miserably.

“There came a point when they introduced a certificate for security analysts, a sort of professional qualification. After avoiding it for a while I sat for the exam and I failed in every conceivable topic.

At that point I told my assistant that he had to take it and pass it. As I understood it, the importance of the certificate would not start to matter for another six or seven years and by that time I would either be so far ahead that I wouldn’t need it, or I would be a failure, in which case, I also wouldn’t need it.”

When the world’s two greatest investors fail or are afraid to they’d fail such professional exams, one wonders what the true value of these qualifications is. If neither both Buffet nor Soros has them, you certainly don’t need them to achieve investment success. What you do need is to follow the same mental habits and strategies as Warren Buffet and George Soros.

Education is so much more than that. We do not need this piece of writing here to remind us that. I am sure deep down inside all of us, we know education is much broader than schools, examinations and certificates. Yes, we are smart enough to know that. Yet we have succumbed to herd-mentality enough to think that, “Yes, I know! I know education is more than just exams and schools!

But what the hell can I do? Every parent around me is doing just that for their kids. And if I do not do likewise, my child will be damned! The society will view my child as being uneducated!”

I do not think so. I think this is all the more reason why we should do the opposite. Just because the majority is wrong does not mean we have to follow suit.

“Even if you are the minority the truth is the truth.” said Gandhi.

Jim Rohn said, “formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.”

Jeff Berwick said, “Today, however, formal education, often, does not even make you a living, as the cost of schooling has increased dramatically ever since the government subsidized it with grants, loans and tax benefits.

But education is not the real goal of the education system. As William Torrey Harris, U.S. commissioner of education in 1906, said, “Education… scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, head of philosophy and psychology at Prussian University in Berlin, said it even more clearly: “Education should aim at destroying free will, so that after pupils are thus schooled, they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”

We all know the ‘benefits’ of sending our kids to university. What about the ‘drawbacks’ of sending our kids to university and the attitude we have instilled upon them thatwithout education you will not amount to anything. Have you ever instilled into your child that if a person has not enough formal education, he or she will not have a good future?

If you think by instilling that idea into their heads will get them to study harder, forget it. They will just study enough to get us off their backs. Yet, over time, they somehow will ‘believe’ that those have not enough formal education will ‘not amount to anything’.

This is diminish their interests in learning from colleagues and bosses who have not got a formal education or university degree. What a pity. Real learning actually starts when they step out of schools. Real education is when you experience the outcomes of your efforts.

Those who are not so educated should perhaps pay more attention to the power of education.
But for those of us who are educated, we must watch out for the education trap.

This article was written by Ken Soong (co-author of Migrating to Australia Good Meh???, Buying a Residential Property in Australia: Eight Things You Should Know Before Doing It and Making It in Australia)