Father to Son
With my son entering his teens, a letter written to him years ago is now ripe for posting.
Dear Aryan,
I write to you today about Education. I don't know when you will start to read this but I hope you read it many times at different stages of your life coz the education I am writing about will not stop with your School or College but will be a lifelong learning.
You might someday wonder what Education is for ? and why put in all the effort and time for it when there's only one life and so little time. Well, lets just sort that part out today :
Education is to give us the ability to cut through to the crux of any situation ignoring everything that is superfluous and going to the heart of the matter after considering only the few facts that are really relevant. With this ability, there will be very few grey areas in life and you will mostly see things clearly in black & white.
To understand the fundamental motivations of how and why people do the things they do. Millions of them may appear to be doing a million different things but, all those million actions will boil down to very few basic human motivations that you can count on your fingers. This understanding will help you to assess human situations - no matter how complicated - with the simplicity and accuracy of a child's outlook - which unfortunately, society weeds out of us before we realize it was ever there.
A life spent being too afraid without taking any risk will lead to mediocrity. And a life spent taking blind risks will sooner or later lead to disaster. Education will give you the ability to assess your strengths and weaknesses accurately and objectively. Only after this assessment can you make sure calculated moves in life so that you avoid either of the two extremes above.
To understand the nature of the physical universe - so that you know the world you are living in and just how magical it is solely from a physical point of view. Without going into any technical details, just an overview of Relativity & Quantum Mechanics will open the door to a real world more amazing than the mythical one described in all the world's legends. A pity that our senses are too limited to perceive this magic directly. So you will just have to read up some scientific theory to feel the enchantment that is all around us... to just reach out and touch.
Education is to give us the ability to question any rule - no matter how firmly established or widely followed.
Education is to give us the ability to swim against the tide.
Never the least, Education is a tool to help us make a living. And if you can manage to make it so that you get paid to do what you love to do anyway, life is gonna be a breeze ! A small rider here - Education is not really compulsory to make loads of money. God only knows many people do that without it. But it comes in really handy when you go out to spend money. An uneducated person ( and I don't mean a College degree here ) will have just a handful of avenues when s/he wants to go out and spend. But with your mental horizons wide open as I hope they will be, Money will become a wonderful tool to help you live a rich life.
All the reasons above really boil down in a gist to a single sentence :
Education is to help extract useful information from all the Data that surrounds us.
It is therefore vital that our Education is based on sound premise - coz when we act upon this extracted information, there are real life consequences. An Education based on a false premise will lead to undesirable consequences of varying degree. An extreme example of education gone wrong are the kids being brainwashed in Talibani madrassas many of who end up blowing themselves as suicide bombers in the firm belief that they are serving a God and that the best way to do that is to slaughter men, women and children.
And remember child, your Paper degree will be just a small part of your Education. A lot more important will be the friends you keep, the books you read, the movies you watch, the content you absorb and the Life you live.
My life can be sieve for you so that you will be saved the countless hours I spent on things I found to be worthless later - just to find those few gems hidden in mountains of trash. And that is the real wealth I will leave behind for you. As for the money, don't even think about it ! Make your own coz I'm gonna blow it all up before I die :)
So yes, everyone's got just one life and time really is too short - all that matters then is how you live it. Thats where Education helps - to live it well.
love,
Dad
