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| Photo: The Huffington Post |
It's not just what you learned but, more importantly, that you learned how to learn and keep learning, because things change so rapidly, and knowledge, even the most specialized kind, can get out-of-date very quickly. Given the accelerating pace of change, one has to ask: Does investing time and money in education still have the same payoff it once did? Does the particular expertise you acquire remain relevant and put you at an advantage in the real world? Or have you lost a step and several years on your way to attaining an impractical degree? I don't intend to diminish anyone's education, but these are questions worth considering.
I want to make a distinction between degrees and education. There have been recent news articles that suggest that degrees may not be as important as they used to be. Rather than debate the degree issue, I would rather focus our attention on the fact that education itself -- the ongoing process of discovery -- is absolutely essential. Becoming an expert in a field of study is and will continue to be important only if you keep learning. Therefore becoming an expert at learning is invaluable.
What we need now is not "knowledge" in the sense of some static commodity that you can go out and acquire once and store up in a vault for later use. Instead, we need a perpetual state of learning, of taking in all the new information that's coming our way, and using it to increase our understanding, which allows us to drive innovation.
In other words, the most valuable kind of learning you can do is to learn how to adapt and innovate, not to memorize but to contribute, not to consume but to create. It's likely that as we go forward, traditional degree programs will refocus themselves and perhaps emerge as something else entirely.
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Source: The Huffington Post
