Is Education a key to success?

This is the most repeated sentence I have always heard growing up. Education is the key to success, but how true is it? I have taken those 5 words so seriously as if my life depends on them. As a young lad, I have always wanted to be successful and those words told that until I was educated success may be far from me made me push really hard to be educated.

In trying to become educated, I would spend my whole night awake either fixing an assignment or just studying for a test or exam. I can't even mention how tough it was waking up on a cold morning and getting set to hit the road for school. We are expected to pass our exams but never have I thought that exams were nothing but memorizing all I read in books to paste on sheet when asked questions about that. But I attended school thinking it was the only way to be educated or a way to success.

But, there are kids in my neighborhood whose parents were not rich enough to send them to school. Instead, they took another path to knowledge. They developed useful skills for themselves. Like my neighbor in the next bungalow, his children were enrolled in a small fashion school where they are nurtured. But some of them were made to go learn how to fix cars. And others learned welding and fabrication.

As children, we tease them about been uneducated for not going to school as others do. As we're made to believe, children as such would never succeed. And when we proceed to sit in for our final exams in high school, the other children were already capable of solving real-life problems by offering useful solutions. The best we could do was to speak grammar and fancy languages while they try to communicate in simple terms.

We proceed to the university to pursue our careers in the various disciplines we've chosen. And before we graduated the other children we never thought could make it had started their own, fashion houses, a fabrication company, and a mechanic workshop. And after we have graduated, and done all that was necessary after graduation, the realities of life started dawning on us. And those we used to mock for being uneducated now have established companies while we were writing proposals and applications for job openings. They moved to diversify their investments in a different portfolios, while we the educated ones are still yet to find a well-paying job.

One of our neighbor's children that never went to school became one of the richest persons in the country and others were doing just well for themselves. Most of the educated ones became employed by the uneducated ones, including myself. They became our bosses and one can say we were educated for them because we answer yes sir to them.

I have paused to ask myself again and again what it really does mean to be educated? Were we lied to? If education is the key to success, why then are those educated not more successful than the uneducated ones? And every time I tried to stop thinking about it, it keeps coming back at me.

In the 21st century would it still be correct when we say education is a key to success? I can say knowledge is key to success but education is not exactly what leads to success. Knowledge is broader and covers a wider aspect when we talk about it. But education is just a niche of knowledge. I have come to realize that we have been wrong all along thinking our neighbor's children were not educated. The problem was, that we were made to see knowledge from a very narrow point which was attending classroom activities. Our neighbor's children were educated too but in an informal way and their schools were informal. Informal doesn't mean sub substandard but it is just a way of saying they are unconventional schools.

Education is Important but not a key to success. However, knowledge is a key to success. Education is a way of becoming literate while knowledge is having a core understanding of things.