What is real education? It is not about a set of facts we memorize. Such factual knowledge was useful in the days before the Internet, but in the age of Google and Wikipedia, it is rapidly diminishing in importance. There is no school, no college and certainly no teacher on earth that can match the breadth and depth of factual information on the Internet. There are extremely detailed tutorials and videos on how to perform chemistry experiments, how to speak in public, how to write clearly, how to conduct a sales call, how to code in Lisp, how to travel in China, what is high temperature super-conductivity, how does magnetic levitation work - you name the topic, there is a ton of material there. 

Clearly no human being on the planet, not even the smartest among us, can know even a small fraction of the sum total of knowledge human beings have accumulated. So education cannot really be about how many facts we know.

So what is real education?  It is a mental habit, of thinking things through, of asking questions in a systematic way, of chasing a train of thought all the way to a conclusion. Or to put it differently, real education is the ability to discover or generate new facts about the world, by applying thought. No, these new facts need not be scientific discoveries and most of them would not be. The facts we discover or generate are very specific or contextual, in the sense that they pertain to a particular time and place and lose their relevance outside of that time and place. Many facts we discover may already be known to other people, but it is still thrilling to chase down a thought and arrive at a known conclusion.

A few examples will help to illustrate this idea of creating new facts. Consider our ability to understand a market need and address that need with a product and sell that product to customers. By doing so, we create a new fact - the fact of our product meeting a particular market need. In its own way, the thrill of a product we create meeting a customer need is as exciting as any scientific or mathematical discovery - I have done a little bit of mathematical tinkering so I know the feeling!

In a similar way, when we find a technique to organize code so that it is clearer to understand, we have created a new fact. When we figure out a better way to market our product, when we come up with a nice catchy slogan, when we create a cool new UI, when we figure out a better way to deliver customer support - we are creating new facts all the time! Most of these are transient, context-specific facts.

You can follow my train of thought here. We need highly educated people to do all these activities, but that does not mean we need highly credentialed people in the sense of them having various advanced degrees.

It is this systematic habit of thought that enables a person to create new facts out of old that I would call real education. So how do we cultivate that habit of thought?

Cultivating that systematic habit of thought comes down to this: how much do you read? How much do you observe? How much do you think about what you read? How much do you chase a train of thought to its conclusion? 

You can practice this with any thought whatever. Let me pick at random: food, a favorite thought (I am hungry as I write this!). We can trace a chain of thought staring with food on our plate all the way to how it was produced, the price of it, how inflation affects food prices and so on. Or you can think in terms of the capacity of land to grow food, how much land a person needs to survive and so on. Or you can think about what percentage of people work in agriculture in various countries, how productivity varies dramatically and so on. On each of these, we can issue Google searches, consult various sources of information, and within a weekend, we would know more on that subject than a typical college level course on Agro Science.

If you cultivate your mind to chase down thoughts like this, systematically chase down, and hit Google when you hit a roadblock because you need some factual information, you will find  yourself magically transformed over time into a very educated person. You will find your creativity soar. You will suddenly find yourself called "very intelligent" when all you are doing is simply chasing thoughts down.

Sridhar