Teacher's Day: Is formal education really necessary?

These days it is fashionable to crack jokes like: if you graduate from IIT you become a Kejriwal while if you sell tea on train stations, you can become a Prime Minister. There are even articles in newspapers criticising the UPA government for many of their ministers being highly educated (often partly in foreign countries) while the ministers of the NDA government are foot soldiers with much less formal education, and that too obtained within the country. 

So, is formal education really necessary? Specialised education makes one knowledgeable in a specific field of human activity. On the other hand, if your profession is in administration, management or governance, it requires versatility or some specific skills of management. These skills are often obtained in service. So should education be under emphasised? A man no less than Einstein once stated that “the only thing that interferes with my learning is my education” and also that “common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen”. He even said that “education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school”.

But this is a misrepresentation of what education is, and what its purpose is. While Einstein can joke about education, he too recognises the need for it. Education is not simply a question of getting information into one’s head, it is a question of being broadly familiar with the finest of human achievements and well-informed about some specific examples of them. It is a question of developing an understanding of ourselves and the working of nature in the broadest sense of the word. It is also a question of being able to express our thoughts succulently and understandably. It is a humbling and awe-inspiring experience. 

Formal education is necessary and crucial for several reasons. I can think of a dozen off hand, and there are many more.

- It provides us with deep and systematic insight into some specific aspect of human learning.

- It allows us to access the great literature of the world and understand the great cumulative wisdom of the world. It provides a very broad world view. 

- It provides a comprehensive vocabulary and understanding of the complexities of ourselves and the world around us. 

- It gives us confidence that no knowledge is magical and can be acquired if we are have the necessary desire and patience.

- It makes us realise that learned men and women are people who have spent a lot of time studying the subject they have specialised in. This reduces our sense of glamour but our sense of respect increases. 

- It makes us capable of expressing ourselves to create new understanding and share knowledge.

- It helps us understand fine arts in a manner that goes beyond a superficial response of shared emotions.

- It gives us the necessary discipline in our life. It gives us an ability to plan and organise ourselves and our activities.

- It exposes us to varied world views and teaches us to accept those which may be different from ours, driven by different experiences and perspectives.

- It gives a certain methodology to thinking. It helps focus and guide thinking through problems.

- It teaches the need for rigour which is central to clear thinking.

For all this, education is crucial. But how much of this can be achieved by informal education? Very little indeed. One can learn to organise oneself and a few other things, but in the absence of being taught systematically in the scaffolding of well-designed formal education, it remains patchy. The importance of a guru and reverence to the guru is central to all learning. 

Then there is the matter of specialisation. All developments in any field of human activity, require a deep understanding into its complexities and jargon. The world today is becoming more specialised and more driven by people who have worked hard to understand the complex nature of a subject. Understanding them in totality takes time and learning. Without this, one's world view can be very simplistic.

This is true for individuals as well as the society as a whole. We all wish to be gainfully employed in some enterprise that generates or manages wealth. For this, the employed person needs to have a fair understanding of the fundamental aspects of the profession chosen. Even for people who change their specialisation midstream or undertake an unusual super specialisation, being educated is crucial. Without education, the whole mental discipline necessary to absorb new knowledge will not be available. One may design an ingenious building with its own specifications, but without the knowledge of architecture and civil engineering one cannot make the building. 

In today's highly connected world, there is hardly an issue in science, technology, arts or humanities that can be handled entirely in isolation. As we begin to appreciate that human problems across the globe are fairly similar and human nature more so, it becomes important to remain versatile so that one can identify solutions obtained elsewhere where people have faced and solved similar problems. Under such conditions, it is important that we understand not only the problem and the solution offered but also the similarity and differences in the societies, exchanging notes so that we know what can and cannot be adopted and what needs to be altered and how.  

In the absence of such an ability, a culture or a society, even a country may try to solve problems in isolation out of an inferiority complex or a lack of knowledge – essentially reinventing the wheel and stuck at that level. Such an approach can hardly be productive and can lead to the wastage of enormous amounts of time and resources. One can ofcourse choose not to be educated and remain subservient to the educated, to be eternally bullied and manipulated by them, be it humans or nations.

Hence, before you attempt to solve a problem at hand, it is important to see how others tried to solve it before you and whether it worked or not. This can save you unnecessary experimentation and potential failures. To learn from others and the past is crucial to moving into the future in an efficient way. In many cases, you may find exact solutions or at least enough ground work done to allow you to quickly reach for a solution. 

On the other hand, life is strange and full of wonderful new problems for which no past precedence or theoretical formulation exists. At that time, extending the current common knowledge and experience to the problem requires knowledge, wisdom and understanding. This is where formal education can provide the scaffolding on which the solution, based on experience, can be discovered. Without the illumination of formal education, these problems can become insurmountable. 

Life is a tricky path in which one must know which bridges to cross and which ones to burn. It cannot be done in a random manner and requires a fairly deep understanding of life’s processes, a confidence with ones’ self and skills on hand to solve problems. It also needs a reasonably complete understanding of people who have had similar problems to solve. Without this, an isolated uneducated human or society cannot progress. Formal education therefore is a crucial guide to finding the path to the future. The uneducated, soon learn this at a lot of cost to themselves and those around them.

So why this criticism of the educated? Does education reduce your flexibility in finding new solutions? Are (foreign-educated) men and women useless because they cannot connect to the problems of the people? By implication therefore, is it a good idea to have, both a lower and upper limit on the amount of education for public servants? Is versatility really killed by highly specialised education? So should medical doctors and engineers be banned from the IAS and politics? Again, I think not. 

The highly-educated are also highly skilled in thinking deeply and dispassionately about problems. This is a habit for them and hence even when they encounter a strange new environment, they can be relied upon to be thoughtful. It is a question of giving them the right kind of problems to solve. And that is where the skills of a leader lie. Find the people, see what they are good at, and assign them the correct kind of problem to solve. In that sense, leaders need to be versatile while those solving specific problems need to be specialists. But both need to have a good formal education, just to comprehend the problems they are faced with. Most problems will appear easy to solve at a simplistic level – like a proverbial barber holding forth on world problems while cutting your hair. But to really understand the full complexity of the problem and the possible solution, you need a good formal education of a high standard. It does not matter where you were educated, what matters is how educated you are and how much you can learn based on this education. What counts is how you are able to understand the complexity of a problem and provide valid solutions to them. 

Individual capabilities decide competence but good formal education makes the crucial difference of providing the framework and proper understanding of the problem at hand. GururBrmha, GururVishnu, GururDevoMaheshwara.

Dr Mayank Vahia is a scientist working at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research since 1979. His main fields of interest are high-energy astrophysics, mainly Cosmic Rays, X-rays and Gamma Rays. He is currently looking at the area of archeo-Astronomy and learning about the way our ancestors saw the stars, and thereby developed intellectually. He has, in particular, been working on the Indus Valley Civilisation and taking a deeper look at their script. He has also authored a book, Physical Science and the Future of India​.