Learning Is Not About Accumulating Degrees

In the current age, the problem with true learning is that it cannot be captured on a chart. It cannot be counted. And if you cannot count it, you cannot manage it.

Now, should learning be managed?

I’m sure you know of those students who the teacher felt were extremely gifted, so much so that they suggested they move to the next class or a couple of classes ahead. One evening, my mother told me he had received such a suggestion from my class teachers. She couldn’t hear any of it. Instead, she insisted I continue in the class I was in. A wise option, I would add.

Again, should learning be managed?

I will be running counter to my thesis by saying that it should not, because I’m giving a definite answer. A definite answer is an example of managing what I think should not be managed. Management becomes possible with such definitive boundaries and finite numbers. If learning is open, it lacks this demarcation and becomes infinite.

The number zero is the perfect example of a finite object that contains both sides of an idea. Zero can split up into negative one and positive one. We can stretch the entire number line on the positive side and the negative side, up to infinity, and all these, when added, can still fit inside the finite number zero.

My suggestion is that learning should be open. The only one who should manage your learning should be you. So yes, learning should not be managed, and yet, it definitely will be when you say you’re done learning. Confessing that you’re done learning is another admittance that learning is infinite.

An open mentality towards learning amounts to the kind of life I want to lead. At some point in my life, when I was in my early years on campus, I wanted to have countless degrees. Heck, even before joining campus, I had shared the idea with my brother. I wanted to do it all. Finish medical school, then join electrical engineering, and then cap it off with architecture, while doing music lessons in the evening and computer science during the long holidays.

He told me the world would think I was crazy. That I lacked direction. The response hurt. It made me stick to medicine. But it seems I never learned. Or, maybe because I deviated, I learned what it is to learn. Learning is not about certainty. It’s about being comfortable with uncertainty and having the courage to continue regardless, a lifelong lesson in humility and formidability in pressing on.

Thus, my thesis is that learning is not about accumulating degrees. The world will not tell you that. The reason is — the world as we know it is all about control. The one percenters want to control you. They have been successful thus far. This begins from the time you have attained the ripe age of going to school.

Independent thought is like an eternal enemy

— Kendrick Lamar

School is a conveyor belt. They have established structures to bring in new cohorts every year as another leaves. Education is supposed to be free and accessible. It is the reason I can comfortably string sentences together and hope you heed, or better yet, challenge my thinking. But school will shoehorn all the bright individuals, with the promise of heaven only when one sticks to the rules.

The smart ones foresee a ladder several rungs high above their peers. A head start in life because of their intellectual gifts. Teachers will encourage these “gifted ones” to continue reading hard for a brighter life. We were told that the only time we would struggle would be in high school. After passing “with flying colours” — the phrase we were hardwired to always use — we could lead the lives we dreamed. Life looked at us and guffawed at our silly plans. God really is gangsta.

From a young age, this idea that certain paths have been laid for us to tread has the structure of “closed-endedness”. Consultants would never tire of asking what my future plans are. It’s never ill-intentioned. When you don’t have an answer, they would subtly apply the pressure, telling you that you should not be a chronic medical officer.

Chasing degrees will create a safe space where the idea of a chronic medical officer (MO) is abhorrent. An intellectual life will ask why? It may rightly come to the conclusion that the existence of a chronic medical officer implies the existence of a chronic consultant. Why should the chronic MO then be a bad thing and not a chronic consultant? Nobody has yet given me a satisfactory answer.

Truth be told, specialization has its benefits. But what we conflate is academic achievement with intellectual lives. Academia sets a clear path. Complete your diploma or undergraduate degree. If you’re smart, get the highest honours. Proceed to graduate studies. Secure your PhD. Don’t stop there. To be an edge above the rest, continue to a postdoc or a fellowship. This path is clear. The path is supposedly infinite, but finite, closed, as much as we would like to believe that it isn’t.

In contrast, an intellectual will be interested in whatever interests them, open to feedback, letting their curiousity guide them. No deadlines to submit a proposal with SMART objectives and hopefully get a supervisor who wouldn’t give them hell. There is no list of references with a good number of up-to-date peer-reviewed articles to support or challenge their hypothesis. It is completely open-ended.

The entire structure of a thesis is meant to prevent loss of focus. From the beginning, there’s a target: a document submitted in partial fulfillment to achieve a degree.

Degrees are the lazy way of assessing someone’s intellectual capability. And boy have I encountered many degreed fellows who are hardly as smart as the cobbler who makes my shoes. In fact, the cobbler is more interesting, having created a skill that cannot be taught in walled institutions. The cobbler can learn first-hand from every customer they get. Stories will be his staple when he reports to his open-air office. He has practically understood a Warren Buffett principle — find a demand that will never be satisfied, such as shoes getting worn out. What they may not have learned is how to build a moat between themselves and the next cobbler.

Now, the intellectual life is knowing all these and proceeding nonetheless to become a cobbler, but one who experiments with creative options. You can be focused without a clear target. Novelty is a more potent stimulus than achieving objectives.

Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman have compiled a book to support this idea. Its title, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, says it all. An absolute recommendation. They advocate for novelty rather than objectiveness. True intellectual living. How can you graduate students based on novelty? How can you control it?

You shouldn’t. By not controlling it, you grow it. It cannot be captured in a degree title. The very idea of having a list of degrees to offer in an institution presupposes that ideas will emerge solely from the list. The conclusion? No new field will be formed. This is not the intellectual life.

Truth, it resides in the fire
The need of it’s dire
Deceiving the lies, I know

— Kendrick Lamar

At the time of this writing, I had completed filing my objectives for the remaining half of the year. I looked at the financial targets. To achieve them, some changes were necessary in our unit. After the promotion at work, there was more expected of me. They wanted me to create ways of achieving the outlined targets. The world only cares about what you can create. Not how many degrees you hold.

Let that sink in.

Now picture everyone who attended your graduation. Are they genuinely happy about your achievement? Maybe they are. They imagined how hard you studied. They probably contributed to your tuition fees. You could have been a parent while battling exams. The smile on your face after bagging that degree became infectious. Maybe they were genuinely happy for you.

Maybe there were those who were jealous of your achievement. They showed up but were roiling in envy. You cannot tell one from the other because your happiness at that moment is blinding. Baby Keem sings:

Are you happy for me?
Really, are you happy for me?
You smile in my face, but are you happy for me?
Yeah, I’m out the way, are you happy for me?

The intellectual life is being comfortable in the fact that these two sides will be present in your graduation. Openness. Now let’s look at the people who brought you to this world, before you even bagged that degree.

They created you. Now you have a degree. The world showed up to celebrate their creation — you. This creation (that is, you) followed the path outlined to join the conveyor belt of the ever-growing workforce. Before joining campus, it was a raw material; after graduation, it was a finished product, ready to get picked for its designed role. The world only cares about what is created, not your degrees.

Names that have gone down in history are remembered because of what they created, not how many degrees they held. We remember Albert Einstein, not Professor Einstein. Before he passed on, I wanted to talk with E. O. Wilson about my ideas on evolution, not Professor Wilson. We remember the person, not the title.

I have previously written about titles, anticipating some backlash, but I stood my ground. Titles are exceedingly overrated; they are preserved to maintain a hierarchy, to continue playing status games on perpetual treadmills that never stop running.

That kind of life fosters rigidity. It turns into an escalation game. More degrees. Not more ideas. Many people will follow the path, but will be forgotten. Every year, universities will graduate individuals, but will have forgotten who they are by the time the ceremony ends. The question the world will ask you is: what did you create?

Did you fashion your CV so that you can get picked? Did you advance your education so that you can get chosen? Did you continue working for years, gain experience, and hope you get picked for the next promotion? Where will the guy ahead of you go so that you can occupy that seat? Do you think you will be the last one to occupy that office? Why should they remember the last person and not the first one?

The question you should be asking is: how did that office come into existence in the first place? This is creation. It required an intellectual. They observed the growth of what was being created, considered a line of work, and created the needed duties for that department, then called it procurement. Or sales. Or marketing.

The sclerosis of future pathways has continued to be revolting, especially when I imagine that I will not be any different from the other colleague who is pursuing the next degree as me. Why should I go out like that? Is that really what life is about? Can’t I do something more? Can’t you?

The beauty of being an intellectual is you can freely pursue your concept and follow wherever it leads without any form of grading. It means anyone can be an intellectual, provided they are curious and dedicated to finding more. You can have a conversation with a musician and marvel at the depth of their content in the field of consciousness. Music tends to free its arbiters in this regard.

Let me divert briefly and discuss how music has historically been used to inspire thinking. We owe much of our philosophical schools to music. The first laws were sung. Music was owned by communities and summoned during celebrations or adversity. Leaders would consult shamans, who were known as bards. Folktales were often shared in ballads. Music offered a path. It may not promise triumph, but it generated a path. This is the basis of my argument. Intellectual living is not about the promise of a definite destination, but calls for courage and faith when taking a path whose course you’re unfamiliar with.

That changed when music was sidelined in favour of text. Since music was owned by the people, a shift in authority became evident when texts required an author. Now the power sat with an individual. The author had the author-ity.

Societies began to revere texts and documents, as the very people who owned and generated them continually ridiculed and dismissed music. We now consider degrees — which are documents validating your graduation from an institution and that you have authority in a particular field, just as authors have documents with their names — as proxies for intellect.

We have come a long way, but we also have to acknowledge that writing is a form of creation, as are all the ways we preserve text. Writing uses symbols. Symbols can turn artistic when skillfully moulded by an artist. We remember Picasso for cubism. We don’t remember the geometric shapes made in all packaging sections of companies. Thus, a new form of writing is what one will be remembered for, not that you can write. The former is a creation; the latter is just another Tuesday. The world cares about what you create, not your degrees.

Now, we have AI.

The leading contenders are OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and DeepSeek. These are creations. I don’t know Sam Altman or Dario Amodei because of the degrees they hold. I know them because of what they create. Fifty or so years ago, we never would have anticipated such a world. It requires openness to create such a piece of tech.

Currently, most of the world is thinking — I should take my child to a computer or AI course, because AI is the future. A degree in AI is a sure bet in employment. It’s sad.

The cat is out the bag, I am not your savior

— Kendrick Lamar

And neither are stacks of degrees. And yes, some stack degrees and live the intellectual life. Here, here 🥂. But the former is not the latter. We applaud you for your achievement.

Now that most search engines are mutating into summary engines, we begin to see just how the intellectual life is fading. A summary shortens the distance between A and B. With AI, this distance can be so short that B can bump into A. An intellectual revels in the journey, without even caring that they have gotten to B. All they know is that they are no longer at A. Openness. They are comfortable in the uncertainty that awaits.

But when you are so keen on getting definite answers, and so fearful of failure, the intellectual life may be a thorny road. Culturing humans from the time they are young to seek definite answers, pursue certainty over novelty, and continue to pile more certifications is an anaemic way of using the most advanced organ we know — our brain.

Can we take the risk and start using it?

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube