The current world offers almost access to top notch classes, books and articles in every field for free or almost, modulo paying for an internet subscription.
In this post I am not going to debate whether Education is equal everywhere in the world and that everyone has the same access to education because we all know the answer to this is a whole lot more complex. To simplify the approach, I am going to focus on individuals that have access to Internet. By taking this assumption I am also putting in the same basket the people that have an access to school easy or not but who at least can receive a basic education.
From my own experience, I came down to the conclusion that learning or getting more educated comes at the expense of time and focus. This is a very interesting concept to me because we all got the same amount of time, i.e. 24 hours a day and focus is basically a self built ability. Last if access to learning material is simple then the logical conclusion is that we shall all be very well educated, shouldn’t we? Hold on a minute. There’s something else I have discovered.
Most people are too lazy to spend time and effort learning and yes I do include myself in there. Looking back at how much time I have wasted today on YouTube and how much time I have wasted the other days, I’m sure I could have had two additional PhDs by now – one in astrophysics and another one in psychology. So, what happened? Well, as I said, I wasted my time consuming non-really-adding-value-to-my-life-but-entertaining things such as watching videos on YouTube, browsing for longer than I should Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter… Rest assure though that I learned the hard way that there is one thing for sure in this world, you can’t get time back. Since I realized that, I have stopped or put daily stops on those so called Social Media websites and try to get more focused on doing actual activities that improve myself as a human being. That could be reading, programming, cookings or spending time playing with my kids, watching them growing and teaching them how to be awesome people among many more.
To illustrate a bit my proposition, let me take the example of programming. Today, our computers or phones are extremely powerful and people only use a tiny small portion of them. Most barely realize what kind of horse power they have in front of them and how they could change the world if only they knew what they could be doing with their machine. Anyone can create a website, an app or a software. All it takes is knowing how but that comes at the price of spending regularly time reading, watching courses, testing stuff out, building things and improving them. And of course, most won’t although all of that learning material is currently right in front of them. As the old adage says, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. I do believe this is more than accurate and it’s actually probably even more magnified today. More magnified because we now have way too much info, free training and learning material made available to us that we wouldn’t know what to learn anymore and we’re getting basically killed by the volume of choice available.
However, between being a super learner and a lazy person there’s a world. I am not saying that everyone should learn everyday, albeit maybe, but rather that we shall all be spending a little of our time to improve ourselves on a topic that we love. I am seeing too many people being addicted to stupid stuff because it’s effortless and then hearing them complaining that they don’t have time anymore for what requires some time AND effort to be a better person. No pain no gain and in this world we’re facilitating way too much the “no pain” piece. I’m not gonna play the conspiration theory saying that the media and the government are focused on controlling our mind because I’m convinced that people are just simply lazy. Worst, they are unhappy and go straight to the complain mode when a little too technical things don’t work right after being switching on.
I think it would be a lot more beneficial to us in general as a society if we were all educated fool like Coolio would say. I would love to live in a community where everyone is focused on improving one another life and we invest more of our energy into preserving our living ecosystem, developing clean energy, or space exploration. Instead of that, we have created divided societies, political leaders keep on pushing their own agendas to feed their shameless hunger for power and money. I don’t consider myself with any political tag by the way, I do prone for better and more accessible education for all and highly value meritocracy. I feel uncomfortable watching TV nowadays because it’s all about brainless divas showing their skins on social medias that get all the attention. Worst, money flows in their direction instead of promoting hard brain work. Think of it for a minute, if empty shells weren’t given any penny and we all would be constructively participating to complex maths challenges on TV and largely rewarding winners and being impressed by them a lot more regularly than what we see today, the world would be a complete different place.
Last, I would like to thank all my teachers and their incredibly underrated patience. Looking back, teaching isn’t an easy job especially with the kind of kids that we have in this world. I am extremely fortunate to have a family that was very supportive and that I could evolve in an environment that allowed me to be able to think by myself. All I wish now is for everyone to grow up in a very positive environment and be able to develop abilities to think critically and build constructive relationships with others.