Education for employment is passe!

Some rights reserved by Kevin Steinhardt

Learning today is assumed to be meant to lead to jobs. The objective of learning today is not to enable us to perform greats, it simply is expected to get us closer to the job where we will earn a loving for ourselves.

Calling education as learning is probably misleading in today's world when there is more clamour for 'employable skills' to be imparted to our kids. From India to Europe to the US, we are all squalling for education in STEM or teaching kids to Code so that they can get jobs which give them better lives.

The purpose of education to merely ready you to earn a living, live a life is an ancient concept now and needs to be deprecated as early as possible. In this age where some developed societies are planning to provide for minimum basic income to all citizens [Reference], the concept of education for earning a living is soon going to be defunct. In such scenario, how do we motivate you people to aspire for education? Sam Walton has famously said - "How do you inspire a grandchild to go to work if they’ll never have a poor day in their life?"

So I think the future of education is about discovering new things, discovering truth, about learning to think, learning to experiment, learning to handle failure, learning to keep yourself motivated to learn even more. Mankind is finally progressing towards a point where the lower echelons of Maslow's hierarchy are met automatically for all citizens and the only ones that people will be able to aspire to will be Belonging, Esteem and Self Actualization - and education / learning will be the only way to attain the last one!

Continued here.

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