Education is overvalued in practical life

 I don’t know about your country but in India you don’t need an educational qualification to become a member of parliament that means a law maker. No educational qualification means actually no educational qualification that is you can be an illiterate technically and be one of the law makers of the country. Not only law maker but you can also be the Prime Minister of the country who runs the country, who takes all major decisions pertaining to the country, meets heads of states of other countries and discusses both bilateral issues and world issues. The one, whose decision affects the lives of its citizens as well as relationship with other countries.

This doesn’t mean that all the law makers are illiterate or less educated. Most of them are graduate, many of them post graduate but quite a few have done only school. This makes me think if education is necessary at all to be successful in life. Now there are some fields like science where you are a misfit if you are not educated. The field of science today is such that you have to be sufficiently intelligent to understand what is going on.

In business, education is said to be not important. If one is hard working, and having passion and dedication he can be a successful businessman. Every country has example of such entrepreneurs. The average entrepreneur can be successful in a business that is completely different from his field of study because there vision is fine tuned towards a business mindset.

Sadly the most educated lot is the employees whose job is to make the businessman successful. They are selected on the basis of their education and experience in a particular field and they manage the affairs of the business. The entrepreneur is just like a light house who guides the employees’ effort in the right direction. The cream of the most educated lot that is the doctorates and the post doctorates are however outside the domain of corporate employees as they do not have mush demand there except those related to research. These people steer towards teaching research and professorship.

Then there are the self employed types (not entrepreneurs) like shop owners and franchisee owners who also do not require much education. These are mostly handed over from father to son and are mostly not scalable or very difficult to scale up unless one is exceptionally talented. For example one can have a good bakery shop but he may not have the vision or money to scale it up to a chain of 50 bakery shops in different cities.

In a developing country like India 90 percent of the working population is employee and 7 percent are self employed and 3 percent are entrepreneurs. A good measure of a country’s progress would be to see how many entrepreneurs are being made. So we find that the most educated lot is not the one who is earning the most, if we consider money as a measure of success. Also these employees don’t always have the job satisfaction but entrepreneurs mostly have entrepreneur satisfaction.

Now coming back to politics, why educational qualification has not been made one of the eligibility to become a law maker? One logic that is given is that more than education what is required is the wisdom and understanding and the vision to run a country or a constituency. These three things do not require an education though it may be an added benefit. These three things generally come from maturity and age.

Whether it is a political set up or a business, both function on selecting intelligent and educated people to do the ground work and the decision taking is reserved by the top brass. That’s why when applying for a job there is invariably a requirement of educational qualification but to be the top brass there is no such qualification.

Coming back to the main question, is education required to be successful in life- though different people may have different definition of success but the most common practical parameter is money and whatever money can buy. Another parameter is that the least you are answerable to the boss the more successful you are. In this regard the entrepreneur is himself the boss and the politician once elected is not quite answerable to the people who voted him to power until the next elections.