For people with a disease I call "f**k School, Drop Out" Syndrome especially Africans, maybe we need to read more deeply before we hop on the bandwaggon. Before you starting going around telling people how to drop out of school or how foolish it is to stay in school read this.
Lets look at Facebook. Facebook was initially developed within the campus of Harvard University by a couple of young friends. What if they never went to school or they dropped out even before striking the idea? Okay take it this way, what if these boys were at that time schooling at the University of Nigeria or some obscure university in the troubled Central African Republic? Your guess is as good as mine, we may never have Facebook, oh yeah they would have made something but not Facebook!
Even Google would not have been built if Larry & Sergey had not studied computer science at Stanford or were not in Graduate school towards PhD....okay, they may have built another thing but not the monster Google.
Another thing we need to know, when people talk down on education....we need to distinguish programmes? We need to be reminded that many of the greatest inventions and innovations in the IT/Computing world is still and still continually from the universities...now note I did not say 'products'....I said innovations! For instance the early inspiration of the Linux OS grew from Linus Torvard's Masters thesis at the University of Helsinki! Same goes for Bill Gates, who knows if he had never been close to the University of Michigan, maybe we may never have had Microsoft...who knows! This also is true for many stuffs we take for granted in gadgets and tools these days.
Facebook, Twitter, Snapchats, BBM, Wechat, Whatsapp, are not inventions, they may be, to some extent, innovations, they are even more of products, but never inventions. The inventions are usually those tools, techniques, algorithms, platforms, systems, mechanisms, devices and middleware that makes these innovations highly dynamic, intelligent, scalable and almost invincible! The interesting thing is that these inventions are still largely made in the Universities, Research Laboratories, while the rest are made by Researchers in the Industry championed and sponsored by the big corporations...e.g. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM etc. Please note that because you build something doesn't necessarily equate you as an inventor...if you built something extremely revolutionary with largely other existing mechanisms you are an innovator.
Finally, the earlier we know that we all cannot end up owning the next Google, or Facebook or the next Billion Dollar IT Company the better for us. Some will, some will end up being teachers, doctors, entertainers, managers, planners, architects even farmers.
We also need to learn that as developing economies we can hardly compete with the advanced countries without sound EDUCATION. Not the current kind of epileptic and half-minded education that pervades African countries. The developed economies started somewhere with pervasive education, all the cosmetics of todays world and the fundamental fabric of todays technologies is due to the sound education they have been provided for generations from elementary schools to the Universities. It is no magic that some of the worlds leading minds, innovators, thinkers and researchers are from these ivy league universities.
We don't even have such robust educational policies yet.
We must encourage people to go to school to KNOW not to PASS or to GET A JOB!!!!
Nigeria, and Africa, must encourage people to study mathematics, science, engineering and technology!
EDUCATION IS FIRST ABOUT LEARNING, KNOWING, AND LIBERATING ONESELF. MAYBE GETTING A JOB COMES AFTER.
Cc: @ Prog. MDEE (2015)
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