Is Education worth it?

So I got cut up today on a thought after watching a video clip online. This is more of a thought.... so the question is:

Is Formal Education Worth it?

Yes, that's what got me thinking all day. What is the worth of education. Well, the thing is, there is actually two types of education.

• The formal Education

• The Personal Education

Formal Education: This is the normal education process 90% of the world population follow of not even more, whereby once you are at the right age, your parents or guardian enrolls you into school and the journey begins. You through that until university. Some might even to to Masters and get their PhD.

Personal Education: In this process, fine we go to school, same old schooling but we don't go all the way, we don't invest our entire life into school and trying to make parallel A's. Now don't get wrong making good grades is quite rewarding but it doesn't always favor everyone.

So on the journey of personal education you end your university, some don't complete their university while others don't even get into university at all. They just pickup a skill or something they are good at and work with it, learning as much as they can and advancing on it as time goes on.

The formal education is somewhat over rated. In my country, you hear the youths and young teens calling Education a SCAM. As much as II try to repel this thought, I can't help but agree with it to an extent.

Firstly, you as a student get into the university and let's say you want too attend a standard school that the result is quite recognizable so you can get a good job at the end. The school fees is 500,000 Naira and the course is supposed to be 4 years. So which means you would spend 2 million Naira just for learning x and y.

The class teacher or lecturer keeps telling you find x but to think of it where does x keep going that we always have to find it. They keep teaching us to do one thing over and over again but never tell us or even shoe us how to apply this in real life terms.

Imagine you being taught about how to make use of a signal generator but never actually getting to see it live or practice your knowledge gained because you don't have access to such material or equipment.

The formal education system is so flawed and especially in my country. Parents think once you go to school you should come out successful but that is not always the case. In fact, it is rarely the case. Imagine after spending 2 million on education and 4 years I apply for a job and I am told I need experience? So I still have to keep studying and that's how you get graduates in my country driving keke even with good results. Not like they do not want to work but the resources to start their own business is not there and employment is not forth coming.

Imagine how people with a lot of potential are wasting away because they lack resources and after struggling to train themselves to school in other get a job and build up from there... It all just becomes futile when they are barely able to even attain a minimal pay job.

Then think about it, the formal education and the personal education which is more expensive.

Definitely it's the formal education. Imagine the 2 million I stated above. If you used that amount of money to invest into something like a skill or as an entrepreneur, I bet you have doubled that money if not even more. But if you use that in school you barely get that and lets say you get lucky, I mean really lucky and you attain a job that would pay you 3o,000 Naira monthly, at that rate it would take you more than 5 years too gain back the 2 million Naira that you invested to acquire the knowledge.

I know the aforementioned illustration is not always the case but trust me, in my country it is mostly the case. It keeps happening over and over again one student after the other. When they fail to accomplish what they must have planned to achieve after school they just give up and that's how w keep hearing about youth comittiing suicide every now and then.

All the time I keep hearing about huge amount of money being pumped into the eduucation sector but I don't see or feel the impact. I still have to go to class very early in the morning, most times it's too early you can't get a cab or motorcycle, you would have to trek until you see one or even just trek to school. On getting to class you lucky to get a decent seat or maybe not , you could get one that's already damaged and you would find a way to make it work so as to just sit for the lecture. Then in other cases where you can't get a sit, you would have to squat or sit on the floor and after waiting on the lecturer for hours almost some minutes before the duration of the class ends, the general course rep. walks in and tells the class that the lecturer isn't coming today that he would fix a class during the week end.

I mean who does that. How do you expect us to be productive?

You get to school by 6am and get home by 6pm for those leaving around the school then for those not leaving around school we would have to still scale through the traffic before getting home by 8pm if we are lucky or by 10pm if we are not. After doing this from Monday through Friday and we are supposed to rest and fix things we've been postponing like watching our clothes, reading a book, putting the house in order and other necessary chores, you get to hear a lecturer fixing a class on weekend. What time do we have for ourselves? This is what i mean by living your life for school. Everything is been sucked up by the formal education system. All we are getting from the formal education is just a paper with your name on it. I know in other parts of the world the experience might be different be different but this is mine from my own part of the world.

The personal education is way more beneficial and rewarding from my own perspective. I believe it should actually be more expensive than the formal education based on it value but turns out it isn't.

Go to school, once you learn enough get yourself on the right track and scale up. Get into the world and learn from reality and not theories written by some individual years ago... The world as we know it changes everyday. The market change, everything changes. We can't always predict how things would go until we give it a try and when we get use to the system we can then easily make prediction, that's also how trading works.

I have gained a lot more from studying online and developing myself than I have gained from my years in the university. Both money wise and knowledge wise.

The formal school system doesn't prepare you for the real world. They are too busy making you seek after missing variables, and if you don't wise up and change your thinking that might be what you would do for the rest of your life. You might just keep chasing things an never getting much result.

Going to school doesn't guarantee success. I would even say formal educate hinders success to an extent and makes us lazy. Yes, it some cases it a refuge for people who want to escape reality. In the real world, things are not made for you or outlined for you, you have to grab your own opportunity and run with it. You would face different kind of people with brains far more than yours seeing things in different dimensions. So yeah, it's a survival of the fittest but if you do things right you sure would get your own quota of the market.

So the formal and the personal education which do you think is better? I would love to hear about your own perspective and how things are in your own part of the world. let me know about that in the comment section.