Not to Know Something is Not a Problem but Not to Know How to Know Something is!
Have you ever wondered why the majority of the great human minds in the history of mankind were before the invention of information technology? Despite the fact that all the information is just a click away from anyone with internet access we haven’t seen a single personality like Shams Tabreez, Mulana Rumi, Quaid-e-Azam, Allama Iqbal, Arastu, Ibn e Sina, Jaber bin Hayyan, Socrates, Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton since the world become global village. All of these great personalities traveled thousands of miles just to learn something which we can do at the ease of sitting at our home and browsing using a tablet, smartphone or pc.
Man who asks Socrates for all his knowledge!
Once upon a time, a man asks Socrates (A Greek philosopher) to teach him all his knowledge and wisdom. Socrates was standing at the bank of a river and ignored him like he never said anything. That man again requested the same with a more polite tone but Socrates did not even look at him. When the men asked for the third time, Socrates suddenly grabs his head and drown him in water. Socrates did not release him until the man starts suffocating to his highest limit and his struggle to get his head out of water in order to breath was losing energy. When Socrates finally released him, the man starts abusing him and when the man was walking away Socrates said to come back to me when you have the same amount of desperateness to breathe, when your head was inside the water, for the knowledge and wisdom. Do we even have even a small chunk of passion, desire, and desperateness to learn new things, skills, increase our knowledge and information?
The Instant Result Millennial’s Syndrome (IRMS)
We are living in the worlds of fast food, 2-minutes Maggie, and everything is available in packs from milk to so-called juice and even food & fruits are available in tin packs. Everyone wants an instant result, quick success in business and want to become a billionaire in a day and scholarship hunting is not an exception. I do see a lot of one-line questions like “I need fully funded scholarship for MS in Computer Science” on various groups and forums all around the internet. Now a person who posts such the query knows the Key Words but most often does not bother to use the same to search the group or on google. I haven’t heard from anyone asking how to download a movie or a song just because they really have a burning desire to watch their favorite movie or listen to a song and that is why they search it, download it and watch or listen to it on their own. Unfortunately, the same level of desire is not reflected by such questions.
Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0
If you have not heard of IR 4.0 then most probably you are doing a job that will not exist in the near future!!! According to the World Economic Forum [1], there are more emerging job roles then declining one as shown in figure 1. These new emerging roles require job seekers to learn new skills and have innovative ideas to compete with others. The time of assembly line type jobs is gone when employees were required a learn a set of things and do things in a repetitive fashion. In the near future by the time when a student gets his degree to look for the job, all the courses he studied during his degree will be obsoleted. This is more applicable to Computer Science and closely related field but other fields will also be affected by it due to the fact that IR 4.0 is going to change the whole world as we know it today. The Job Market of the future will be like the smartphone race, we will see a quick change in the required skill set and new technologies will release quickly and get obsoleted soon as well. Amazon is planning to make use of AI and Robotics to fully automate its warehouses [2]. How quick and amazing the experience of grocery shopping will be if we only have to scan our phone on entry, pick products and go home. If you think this is the future then check the Amazon Go Store that opened in Chicago in September 2018 [3].
Find answers yourself.
We do a lot of things for the first time in life, in childhood it is speaking a language and then walking but if we start depending on one person or another for everything that we do in life then there will be no more first time for us. Surely, we do need support and guidance but getting used to spoon-feeding with everything that we do for the first time is something that won’t help us to grow. I do receive a lot of questions from my fellow scholarship aspirant but a couple of questions that were asked to me were the motivation behind writing this article. I cannot write the exact questions as it might damage the self-esteem of those aspirants and demotivate them but those were related to how to fill a form that asks questions regarding previous education. Even if those people were confused with wording, it is still a big question for the well-reputed universities that what they are teaching to their students? If a student graduated with a 4 years bachelor’s degree from a well-reputed university national or an international varsity and get confused with a form regarding previous education then I have no words to say about our education system. No matter how much technical skills we have, we must have soft skills like, presentation, communication, interpersonal, leadership, managerial to excel in not only our profession but in our personal life as well. I think that the majority of our universities are just producing skilled labor that can do a job of assembly line sadly. Universities are just focused on teaching many things to the students but not the ability to find and learn things on their own.
References
[2]. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/1/18526092/amazon-warehouse-robotics-automation-ai-10-years-away
[3]. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-go-store-without-cashiers-opens-in-chicago/
#Pakistan #HigherEducation #Scholarship #Problem #SpoonFedding #SelfStudy #Student #IRMS #InstantResultMillennialSyndrome #FindingAnswers #Knowledge #Education #Wisdom
