Thoughtless Education

Our education teaches us everything other than thinking, and there is a reason for that.

When I joined engineering, I thought that I would learn how to make things. I would learn how to engineer! Create that which never existed. My first year in engineering was spent relearning what I had already learnt over the past two years. More equations, formulae and ZERO application. As the years progressed, a depressing feeling started setting in. I was learning things that had been done, in certain cases 150 years ago. Also, I was nowhere close to creating anything new. Let alone the fact that I was not creating anything new, I could not even fix something broken.

A mechanical engineer is supposed to be able to make a car, I could not even fix a car.

Engineering had not turned out to be all that I had hoped it would be. 

Sick of engineering, I decided to take up an MBA. This time it was an American University. So I thought things would be different. That there would be something new to learn and creation will follow. Instead, I spent most of my time learning what someone else had thought or done. The arena was different - management thought, operations research, marketing, etc. The outcome was the same.

Even the case studies were empty exercises in guessing. It is the closest we came to facing the real world.

Our education the world over is about how someone else thought through a problem. Nobody ever bothers to teach us how we should approach a problem. Something new and unseen.

Just writing a blog and getting 500 people to subscribe can be an act of incredible problem solving and real creation! Can no MBA focus on something this simple over 2 years? But none of them does.

No matter how many times I explain to you how someone got on the saddle of a bike and rode it unless you yourself get on the saddle and figure out how to balance you will not learn it. You have to learn to solve that problem by solving it.

We just do not have enough thought about thought. No school or university teaches us how to think about a problem. They spend years and almost infinite capital trying to explain how others thought through a problem.

It serves them well. It creates nations of gross consumers rather than gross creators. 

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What we think, we become ~ Buddha

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