I have always felt that my education was flawed. 

It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on, just the diminishing alertness of what was happening around me and the world, and the inability to make anything stick.

Growing up, I was educated by the traditional test homework, lecture, tests, a constant stream of blablahblahblahblah…

Reading my mother’s Peanuts comic strips, I felt sometimes like one of the gang sitting in the desks hearing that inane Mua-mua-muah of the teacher in the background. 

I was a do-er.. I liked figuring things out.. I liked given bits and finding ways on my own. I could always see the answer in the end, but then I had to make up the middle just to get the mark on the test. I worked a bit differently than other students. I didn’t enjoy studying, but I enjoyed solving. I couldn’t sit around reading about ancient Greek philosophers, but ask me how I perceived time and why, and I would be able to explain it in details with schematics (when I was a kid I thought of time as stacking up). 

Needless to say, I failed horribly at school. Whenever I had a new education type of teacher, I would do great.. but I had to face it quickly enough that there are not many like that.

What drove it home was when at a Math’s test, totally unprepared, I figured the whole system out, and I figured how to figure it out as well. I got the right result and asked my dad (a Statistics PhD student) if what I had done was right (i kept the scraps from the test). I was told it was solid. I felt stoked. I finally felt I had hit my stride and got a good grasp of algebra. 

I got a D. To be precise, I got a 10 out of 20 (50 over 100). I was told “The result is right, and that is why you got half the grade, but that is not the method you were taught to solve these, or was it in the book’s main reading material.”

Needless to say I was crestfallen and decided that day that school was not for me. This resulted to me never getting my BA as college was more of the same and as I was working full time already as a manager, I thought “screw this”.

This has resulted up until today for a lot of employers to reject my applications. I may be smarter, more insightful, more experienced (and much more modest of course) than a lot of their applicants.. but I don’t tick that box: degree, MBA, PhD etcetc

This is why no matter how many times I apply to google.com or yahoo.com any other company of that caliber they will never pick me up. I have come to terms with that and made peace with it. That is not to say that I think their hiring strategy is good, but then, they can afford to not hire a few good people that don’t tick the box as there are thousands of others daily applying that do.

I have often thought of how education is flawed, but how to change it and today, after viewing the below little snippet of a lecture (am trying to find the rest), I am glad to see that others see an issue and understand the challenge which to me, is half the battle won.

Click Here!

Now.. I am trying not to dwell into the fact that the ability of this person to be taken seriously on a podium and give this lecture, is most likely granted by the fact that he has a long list of letters around his name, credentials of an education taken.