School Is a Scam or Not
If I got a dollar for every time I hear this statement, I should have bought a house in Banana Island by now. Just joking😂 😂
Imagine after you’ve spent 6 years as a law student, with two years of law school and NYSC, and someone is screaming into your ears that “school is a scam”.
Now you will want to go down memory lane to see where you should have dropped out or where you missed the sign because indeed your experience is beginning to look like you wasted time, effort, and resources to attend a tertiary institution.
How would you explain that a law graduate is currently a content creator not because of unemployment but because you find fulfillment and it pays bills? Or like me, who did not study anything related to writing, but yet I have a career in content writing and I find fulfillment.
I bet you, if I knew that I was going to fall in love with writing, I would have studied mass communication or something related, just to help me sharpen my skills as a potential content creator.
Yet, I have come to understand that as humans, we evolve and it will be unfair to our maker, God if we choose to pitch a permanent tent around an expression of us because we studied it in school and we don’t want it to be a waste. Who even said it was a waste?
We believe school is a scam because it is far from the demands and reality of the economy. Just like I said a few paragraphs back.
But the truth is, even if we knew the demands and realities of the economy, we may still end up pursuing a career that’s unrelated to our course of study because it is natural for man to evolve except you don’t want to grow.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” — Nelson Mandela
School is not a scam, it is simply a temporary tent for an expression of you that you are aware of at that particular time. Of course, we were made to believe that going to school should guarantee us a job placement after graduation, but our reality is not close. Employers prefer people with skills and abilities to people with only certificates.
When I was in the university and approaching graduation, my post-graduation plan was to get a job as a teacher (yeah, I studied political science education) because that was the expression of myself that I was familiar with and had obviously invested in.
Fast forward to a few months after graduation, I got exposed to another expression of myself — I could learn how to code and develop a website from scratch. Now, this reality made me abandon/upgrade my previous ambition. The updated ambition is to teach schoolchildren how to code.
Between that time and now, my ambition keeps getting updated like a computer operating system. The good part is for every update that happens, the previous knowledge does not become redundant, instead, it becomes a part of you and can even help you to function efficiently at the new adventure.
School is not a scam because,
- It gives us exposure to an entirely different environment that comes with people from diverse cultures, backgrounds, languages, and ages.
This exposure also helps you to see beyond yourself, your family members, and your friends thus you find yourself cultivating friendships with a random fellow in your class or in your hostel because man naturally has a need to depend on other people for survival.
2. It helps you to develop cognitive abilities that your secondary school teachers couldn’t because of your age and mental capacity at that time.
Why do you think some lecturers include presentations as coursework? That’s an opportunity for you to practice when you have to speak at a meeting in your workplace, talk and convince investors to invest in your business idea or even a client.
True, the educational curriculum of Nigeria is flawed, but for how long do we want to keep changing the curriculum every time the economy is demanding something new? The best that should be done is to make room for new knowledge and the curriculum can be improved and not completely changed.
When you get the chance to be a group leader, class representative, department president, etc, that’s your chance to build your leadership skills. Yes, nobody will tell you, you have to figure it out yourself. The more reason why you should not have the mindset of “school is a scam”. Instead, see it as an opportunity for you to grow and build yourself in that temporary tent of your expression.
I hope with these few points of mine, I have been able to show you that school is indeed not a scam.
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