Applying knowledge matters more than academic results

‘Education is what liberated me. The ability to read saved my life. I would have been an entirely different person had I not been taught to read when I was, at an early age,” Oprah Winfrey declared in a 2016 interview with Today’s Woman magazine.

As someone who started spelling and reading at a very young age and can attest to how my life was impacted for the better as a result, this statement resonates with me.

That foundation laid the groundwork for how I found myself in my current career trajectory. However, in South Africa we have seen that spelling, reading and writing are things in which not all learners reach proficiency, let alone excel.

The value of education cannot be denied, but I often wonder whether learners and students truly appreciate its value beyond it being a tick-box exercise in completing their formal schooling career and staying out of trouble.

When I was growing up, I remember not being the most enthusiastic learner because I often felt it was keeping me from doing what I really wanted to do, which was to read books that transported me to other worlds and to write my little heart out.

The schooling system at the time was not invested in finding out what my natural intellectual inclination was or how to help me to nurture it. It felt very much like a conveyor belt that simply churned out numbers to make the education system look good and didn’t really care about me.

Surprisingly, it was only in varsity that I felt more centralised in my own education because my courses, together with my extra tutorials and extracurricular activities in the form of supporting social clubs, aligned with my interests.

After a false start to my university career in my first year, I went through what I often used to describe to my friends as “scales falling from my eyes” – a strangely biblical reference for someone who is not at all religious.

I was still not the greatest of students, but I really started to understand the value of the education I was receiving – that it was a privilege not afforded to the majority in our country and was also meant to enable me to live an independent life of my own.

But are we all on the same page and in agreement regarding what education is meant to elicit from children?

For me, the value of education lies in how your mind and world open up as you discover new ways of understanding the world and how to apply your mind to solving problems.

It is a way to ground yourself in the principles required to challenge ways of thinking and existing norms with the view of betterment.

It is the foundation on which our thinking is shaped and our knowledge base is broadened to create the world we want.

What I have come to appreciate is that we are not the sum total of our academic achievements in matric or at varsity. What makes for a good student is how you apply the content gained from academic institutions constructively.

So your results in matric or at the end of your degree or diploma don’t hold as much weight as how you apply the knowledge you have gained in the real world.