Well, if this has generated some curiosity, it is fine. I found out that COL needed some assistance to propel its philosophy to the general public to either get noticed widely or benefit the followers of COL to understand the role of Dr. Watson to help COL – the Sherlock Holmes of learning.
It was always a mystery to me why we end up with the same results in-spite of the improvements made or the results appear to be short-term in terms of benefits derived. Unless you are monopolistic in nature in providing the educational services, the new entrants will have all they need to take the services provided to a higher level, leaving behind an impression that the improvements made earlier are either falling short of the actual need or the needs were just a blimp in the sky of a bigger needs.
The lessons we have learnt from many titans of businesses show that an ongoing effort that is needed to understand the changing business landscape cannot be underestimated. We have Sherlock Holmes of all kinds everywhere in the business. In spite of that they found that the findings are often too late for their implementations or appear incomplete or lack something.
Each and every one of us have some feel on changing times. The impact of these on economy, lifestyle, cultural changes go unnoticed for several years, before a series of incidents wake us up to the reality. The incremental changes are the devils lurking in our midst choking the innovations that are necessary to deal with such realizations. Moreover, we do not like or cannot deal with continuous change. We give up sometimes thinking that we are either getting too old for all these things or feel that it is the same old thing in a new bottle – not realizing that the bottle is generating a new set of changes – either ignored or go unnoticed.
We are in that situation right now with education. If I exaggerate by saying that the education is the root cause of all good or evil in this world, please do not be surprised. Education need not always result in good things happening. The education so acquired can be abused. We have seen million such instances in our history books. However, it should not deter us from enigmatic learning – a learning which is more meaningful than the ones that can be just felt, seen or heard. For that we need Sherlock Holmes in our education systems too. Education takes us one step closer to acquiring other skills with ease, but we need Sherlock Holmes to help us out with the skills that we need to acquire.
Ideally, education needs to be as free as the air we breathe and skills costing us the real bucks. Education need not be measured in terms of how many dollars were spent in acquiring a piece of paper telling us that we are holding a degree, say in MS in Engineering, and making us believe that it is sufficient enough to prove to the world we know a great deal in that field and are ready to deal with the problems of the world. Sorry, that is bit naive. Many of us would realize that by the time we step out of the university holding that degree in our hands, a lot more things have changed and the paper only acts as an entry door to something else. There is lot more to learn after that.
That’s when we need Sherlock Holmes of education to walk along next to us to take us on a journey that is not locked up by the processes that we are sucked into to follow, but helping us to discover many other things along that journey. While the well-defined processes bring sanity to deal with our daily lives, they need not become the barriers to innovative learning. It need not be limited to one Steve Jobs, as we are all Steve Jobs in one way or the other. We may not be as rich in terms of money, but are rich in terms of ideas that we can generate. However, all these ideas need channeling to contribute in a meaningful fashion to produce goods and services that can give us a feeling of fulfillment no matter what we do for our existence in this world. I believe the philosophies of COL working together with philosophies of other circles of trust, effort and innovation will help us to do that.
What else do you think can help us?