More over robotics and embedded systems, an aspect that obviously concerns all of us as citizens of a developing nation is the purpose of education. Do we as knowledge donors or seekers comprehend what education has to offer? More than an article, this is meant to be an open discussion to reaffirm the fact that we understand simple but long forgotten goals of the education system and in the process also discover a few which need to be addressed given the current situation. The views presented in this article are not personal and have been influenced by varied personalities and scenarios.

Being unbiased: Mr. Yashwant Kanetkar, the author of many popular C programming books, was once asked in a seminar, “What made your programing skills so strong?” to which he replied, “My mechanical engineering background”. Yes, unlike what you might presume, intellects are not a result of their academic background, but a consequence of pursuit of what they felt might be appropriate for them. Mr. Kanetkar further justified his words by saying that, him being from a mechanical background gave him an edge over all his fellow colleagues (from an IT background) who would fear asking certain questions which they felt would make the audience doubt their past learnings. It is truly the presence of such an educational system which allows choice and provides exposure to experiences that helps the students realize a life-long career path for themselves.

Being enterprising: Being enterprising is more about being responsible, questioning the obvious, challenging long-established practices, existent processes and tools rather than floating a business. I have heard many students saying, “After I graduate, I would like to pursue research….”, whereas the truth is that once you are an employee you cannot afford to research amidst busy work schedules and prolonged delivery deadlines. Your formative years of education are also the most conducive years for innovation which can be exemplified from the fact that the Linux operating system or the Google search engine were all academic projects once upon a time.

Being the change: The country at this point needs technocrats but we seem to encounter bureaucrats more often. Bureaucracy is a complex beast to deal with, since most of the times it is introduced in the process of being systematic, consciously or unconsciously. It is these challenging issues that education teaches us to counter by inculcating values like patience and analysis. Enabling you to view things in a broader perspective is also something that education strives to achieve. As a matter of fact, understanding the way an OS kernel manages hardware resources may help you manage resources in your company though it doesn’t sound that obvious. At the same time applying management practices like six sigma to your software project can help make your software defect free.

Linus Torvalds (needless to say, author of Linux OS), in his book “Just for fun” has put forth a three point philosophy for the purpose of life (which I feel applies cut-copy-paste to education as well), which constitutes,

Survival: Education, directly (formal education) or indirectly (by means of exposure and experience) empowers us to survive in this world with cut-throat competition. All other goals can be addressed only after this primary goal is met, since without survival everything else would be null and void. In a way, it would be correct to say that education means enabling yourselves to live in a world that works on the Darwin’s theory of “Survival of the fittest”.

Social order: Very few of us would deny the fact that the best of friends that we have made during our lifetime are within our academic years, who also become an integral part of our social circle. We seldom realize that things that bind us together are too trivial. At times, these might also be negative things like hatred towards a common subject. Whether it be these negative things or positive things (like the GNU project, which happens to be the largest collaborative project ever), the social bonds that result have to be attributed to education.

Entertainment: This one might raise many an eye-brows but education does bring in entertainment and vice-versa. As an organization with the philosophy, “excite-entertain-educate” we have observed that it is very much possible for education and entertainment to go hand in hand (a trend which can be marked in our workshops); its just that at times education becomes the cause while entertainment becomes the effect and vice versa.

At this point you might wonder what we are trying to arrive at, but the fact is that the purpose was never to conclude; it was to make you “think”.  So, if you have  started thinking already, we would love to hear your viewpoint.

References: http://ideaforge.blogspot.com/