The Prison that is Education

Today I want to ask us to look at education.

Let me start with a few questions.

Why are most entrepreneurs not very educated, some barely having any education at all?

Why is it that most innovators and inventors are outside those silver towers we call pinnacles of higher learning?

Why do professors take their expensive autos to those backstreet mechanics who do not even know the right names for the parts of the vehicle since they barely went to school?

I have of course made very general observations to get us thinking.

Do you realize that the more learned someone gets the more desperate they are to get a job?

What is the purpose of education?

I believe the primary purpose is to expand someone’s mind. And it does that by exposing that mind to possibilities beyond what it had experienced before. No wonder it can be said that through a book one can travel the whole world from their bedroom.

I am talking about any education, whether formal or otherwise.

In our past, a child started their education immediately they knew who they were. And the bulk of that education was to make them maximize on everything nature provides in a healthy way.

As an example they learnt of a lion as a dangerous enemy.

But not only that. They learnt that a lion can be a very useful ally when you get to understand it.

That is why we started talking about extinction when we trashed that education.

When my father and his brother were in the forest during the Mau Mau rebellion, one thing the white man and his home guards were perplexed with is how they disappeared into herds of elephants.

The rebels (you wonder who ought to have been called that) understood animals and their peculiarities and therefore took advantage of that to merge into them when the enemy came around.

Their understanding of nature was such that they made use of the same.

The same way Maasai warriors can comfortably take the prey from a whole pride of lions and leave unscathed.

Understanding nature was key to our past education.

A child would learn which plants were food and medicine and which were poison, which animals were better food or could lead to better food, which plants indicate the presence of water and which animals lead to water in a desert, etc.

Then came modern education.

The first thing it did is trash all past education, calling itself superior.

But it did even worse. Instead of expanding the brain of the one who chose to follow it, it completely narrowed it beyond reason.

One must pursue the arts or sciences; then they must choose between one among many branches they chose to pursue.

Incidentally, the more learned they become the narrower their mind becomes. Talk about straightjacketing the mind.

That is the reason someone becomes less and less useful, wholistically speaking.

That is why a whole engineer must look for a technician to change their light bulb since they learnt all about electricity but not about changing fixtures. Only the uneducated are exposed enough to handle all those jobs.

Education makes someone less educated about life and how to live it.

But for me the saddest part is that it makes someone crave being someone’s employee the more educated they get.

You sack someone with one certificate and they start thinking outside employment. You sack someone with multiple degrees and they immediately start looking for another employer.

You leave someone without a degree for some time without a job for some time and they will cook something else to do. Do the same to the most educated and they become depressed since they think God has deserted them.

That for me is not education. It is indoctrination. It is imprisonment.

Education should make someone create, not support some uneducated creator.

The big break should not be that job you get with a multinational. It should be the villages you have transformed with your expanded thinking capacity. It should be in the many lives you have transformed by easing their work load.

Education and salary are not synonymous. As we already know, some of the most successful people we know started with a passion to make a difference and money followed that passion.

I feel sad when I see PhD holders yapping political drivel in support of some uneducated idiots instead of using their education for some good. You wonder why some went to medical school if the only thing they can do is make noise.

Let me close here. I hope I have got someone thinking