Are You Qualified?
Lima Sehgal
Yes, I have had my share of schooling. I have battled with the drip rates of leaking cisterns. I have pondered on the issues of the thirty men who took less time than fourteen men to do the same task and never needed sick leave. And the impact on my life of fathers of various nations, the Punic wars and Bentick’s reforms. And some inviolate laws of ladders leaning on walls only at right angles. And sunsets that happened only once a day, and always in the west.
Not always.
Dr. Gerald P. Carr, the American astronaut and captain of Skylab 4 said that when you go high up in space, the East and West don’t count. A spaceship takes 90 minutes to orbit Earth once in 24 hours, and so you get to see 15 sunrises and 15 sunsets in a day. I can see my science schoolteacher shaking her finger at Dr. Carr and saying, “Naughty Boy!”
The chicken and egg story has taken new dimensions. Today, you need to be educated to get an education.
I was always proud of my wonderful education till I took my 4 year old son for his admission in Nursery. There was a panel of 3 grim teachers primed for a grueling interview. My son, being smarter, fled, but I couldn’t. I won’t go into the gory details, but in a nutshell, this is what I was told.
To qualify for school, firstly my son needs to come from good stock.
I do hope that the income tax department never gets to see the school admission form. Secondly, the child needs to have educated parents. I admit, I lacked the imagination to fake a few Ph.D.s. And thirdly, I needed to have a full fledged degree in Education. This was crucial because I was required to fully educate my kid before the school did. To qualify for school entry, my kid needed to know not only reading, writing and arithmetic, but also prove that he was not a dithering idiot who had not yet learnt the ABCs of Algebra.
All this happened around the same time as when I had just started proudly sprouting a few gray hairs down my white collar.
Tom Peters, the management guru, suggests that good C.E.O.s like me should re-designate themselves as C.D.O.s or Chief Destruction Officers because ‘You essentially get paid for blowing up your business before the competition does’.
His solution is simple – “forget learning, learn forgetting.” At least, that is the one thing that I have mastered since my Kindergarten.
Why does it take nearly half our life to realize that, inspite of our education, we are quite uneducated?
Simply because the system demands the ingestion of facts and not a developmental process. Our education from birth is one of imposition and control by others. Ericsson says, “There is a conviction that a systematic regulation of functions and impulses in earliest childhood is the surest safeguard to later effective functioning in society. They implant the never-silent metronome of routine into the impressionable baby and young child to regulate his first experience with his body and with his immediate physical surroundings. Only after such mechanical socialization is he encouraged to proceed to develop into a rugged individualist. He pursues ambitions, strivings but compulsively remains within standardized careers which, as the economy becomes more and more complicated, tend to replace more general responsibilities. The specialization thus developed has led civilization to the mastery of machinery, but also to an undercurrent of boundless discontent and of individual disorientation.”
As students, we were quite familiar with the idolization of over achievers and the undue importance given to academic achievement. Going through the wringer of mass education, one is adequately qualified in the art of conformity, compromise and lack of decision making.
Because of this, in the corporate world, there is an extreme shortage of creative individuals, the majority being just opportunists drifting from one job to another. What else can happen when our educational systems churn out mass produced conformists by the millions?
Current statistics state that 90% of all white collar jobs will vanish in the next few years, as jobs are being redesigned and redefined. Are we qualified for the change?
I think we should not miss the point that Reverend C. C. Colton, the British author, made. “It is better to have wisdom without learning than learning without wisdom; just as it is better to be rich without being the possessor of a mine, than to be the possessor of a mine without being rich.”
He has a point. But do I get it?
Copyright © 2011, Jobnet magazine, issue 101
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet magazine
Courtesy Jobnet’s Directory of Placement Firms
Posted under Articles by Lima Sehgal
