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Education key to success?

Every time school re-opens, I hear many people advising students to study hard because life is hard out here. They go ahead to show how education has bettered some peoples lives, occasionally giving doctors (academic) and professors as good examples.

I have no objection to the above, but sadly, that is what I call missing the point by a mile. Contrary to the saying that Education is the key to success, it is not. If you took a student to school, and the student put in a lot of hard work in their studies, they will not be necessarily successful. They may even be a failure, and a big one at that.

Consider the people that you consider as failures in your life. How many of them have undergone a decent education? Well, you may come up with the very educated excuse that the person dropped out at a certain level. Even if they did, didn’t they go through education? And what gives you the impression that they did not study hard?

Nevertheless, lets raise the bar and state that the more education that you get, the more the success you achieve. At this moment, lets take a break from this ice cold discussion. Think of your nation, your government, the economy and any other aspects in our quite exciting lives. Think of the failures amongst them. Take a further moment to study the people running the failures, and their colourful backgrounds. How colourful is their education background? Most people claim that Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe leadership is a failure. Now Robert Mugabe is a highly educated man, i gave up perusing his academic qualifications when I reached the 6th degree awarded to this Doctor. Closer home, with the government been touted as a failure, I could not resist the offer to go witch hunting. After less than quarter an hour of moderate witch hunting in the Kenyan government, I found the internal security ministry, half the health ministry (I am not able to tell which half of the ministry is which since it was spilt into 2) as examples of unsuccessful situations headed by highly educated individuals. With stricter witch hunting, you will be successful enough in picking up more highly educated witches that have contributed successfully to the failure that is the government. There is also that peculiar case of one institution of Higher learning that had differences pitting a bunch of highly educated leaders of the university against students under taking higher education in the same institution. The result of this was that several buildings at Kenyatta University undergoing internal combustion and going up in flames; they could not stand the heat. (This blog contains more articles about this issue in its archives).

Enough about the failures of highly educated individuals. Lets take a brief look at the success of a few individuals that dropped out of the education level, or were poorly educated. In your home area, take a brief look at well performing businesses. You may even consider some in the country or world wide. Then take a look at their owners (not the highly educated managers). Now take a look at the education level of the owners. In Kenya, you may consider Njenga Karume or the more famous James Mwangi of Equity Bank (sorry if i didn’t pick someone from your community, you may add them in the comments section below this post). How highly educated are they? Bill Gates, one of the worlds most famous billionaires did not need a lot of education to steer Microsoft to the success that it is. Mark Zuckerbug, the twenty-something year old behind Facebook had to drop out of a higher learning institution (the prestigious Harvard) to steer his company to the success it is today.

From this discussion, it is evident that some amount of Education is necessary for success, but clearly, Education is not the key to success. So, what is the key to success?

Intelligence is the answer, people. I hope you are intelligent enough to figure out how intelligence fits in this equation. I hope that you are even more intelligent to be successful, and intelligent to hire highly educated folks to steer you to higher success.

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Comments

William Njoroge said…
Who told u education is restricted to formal education?
8 May 2009 at 21:05
Dennis Kioko said…
the above will apply for any form of education. you still have to be intelligent!
10 May 2009 at 16:14
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