Everybody’s a genius
The death of Steve Jobs, son of working-class parents and an entrepreneur that led Apple from a garage outfit to the world’s biggest technology company, has resulted in volumes of comments from all over the world. Amidst the eulogies and introspections — about why a particular country doesn’t have its own Jobs — two particular themes are striking. One is that Jobs was an innovator par excellence who took nascent technologies and exploited their full market potential, and another is that Jobs was a maverick, someone who preached to students graduating from Stanford a motto from the counter-culture movement in the US — “stay hungry, stay foolish”. In the same speech, Jobs explained his reasons for dropping out of college — he found the required courses boring — but the importance of studying subjects you love. The solution he found was to drop out but drop-in to take classes that interested him, which, incidentally, included calligraphy. Jobs’ life and work offers lessons to educators and planners in every society concerned with fostering innovation and creativity, Nepal including.
The method of instruction, curriculum and testing in our education system is in serious need of reform. As clear example is the School Leaving Certificate, SLC, an examination that is designed to prevent roughly half of the students from
graduating from high school each year. Even those who excel in this and other examinations must learn to master fact-based questions that prioritise rote learning over critical, analytical thinking. Not only that, physical punishment and bullying by teachers, though it has decreased substantially, is still a terrible reality for many.
No wonder, there is a wide discrepancy between the skills students ought to learn and what they actually end up learning. The gap between schooling and reality is stark, for example, when we look at the agriculture. The daughters and sons of farmers — which constitute the vast majority of students — are taught to despise agricultural work rather than devise new techniques to make it more enjoyable and profitable. The severe lack of innovation in agriculture is the number one reason millions of capable Nepali youth feel compelled to find their livelihood often doing menial work abroad. An innovative education system, on the other hand, should teach them to use a commonly available resource, land and labour, in a most impressive fashion.
Schooling alone won’t make a nation of innovators. There are other necessary ingredients. A culture that promotes risk-taking behavior and awards it appropriately is one such ingredient. Jobs dropped out of college and made his millions by tapping into the market for cutting-edge technology coupled with aesthetics. The history of development of ideas shows that prosperity and creativity often walk together: Just like the rich Athens laid down the foundations of Western philosophical thoughts, the Malla period was well-known for the advances it made in arts and crafts. Nevertheless, it will be perilous to ignore the curriculum. What the future holds for Nepal will ultimately be decided by what the students are taught today.
Posted on: 2011-10-11 08:36
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