Watch out for the organisation's imminent book publication titled "The Illusion Called Certificate".
As might be initially thereby erroneously conceived, this book makes no attempt at trivializing the formal education system. This is because without formal education, society would have no calibrated means of appreciating an individual's intellectual level, or to generally place them in the various fields of relevance. Formal education teaches one how to learn, how to research, and what steps to follow in making one's findings known - engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. all have to be formally trained in order to attain any level of relevance – so do not hope that you would asked, as it is widely believed and promoted around Africa, to shun the tertiary education system and beckon on whatever talents that you have in order to succeed. The people who suggest that are merely untaught and perhaps selfish - because however relatively substandard Africa’s academic institutions might presently be, our society would definitely be worse off without any at all.
The aim of the book, therefore, is to present formal education as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. The whole essence of paper certification has been misconstrued. Instead of a certificate being just a means, fellow Africans have now assumed paper qualification to be an end. Instead of formal education to be a starting point, it is now an end point for many a person. But then there is a limit to what formal education can offer you. The highest level of attainment for formal education is probably a PhD, but there exists no limit to self-education. The end point is self education! As you may have heard, not only do you stop learning when you die, also, you die when you stop learning!
It is a well understood fact that the more educated the populace of a country are, the greater the progress levels for the country. But I feel compelled to inform you that Africa, and indeed Nigeria, has up to five times more doctorate degree holders than all of Europe combined - and yet it continues to be the most retrogressive, technologically disadvantaged, and poorest continent on the planet. What then gives way to this great discrepancy in the supposed educational and developmental levels? We shall discover in this book. - The lack of concordance between formal and self education accounts for most of Africa's plight. In fact, what is the one thing that we all learn in school and continue to use throughout our lives? It is learning to learn. Therefore if this great ability had not been well acquired and subsequently utilised, the whole essence of the process is defeated.
Let me conclude. Everybody wants to be the next big footballer. Practically every youth wants to be the next celebrity musician, actor, comedian or entertainer; but hardly any African youth wants to become the next Albert Einstein. I know you get the point now. (A foremost sign of celebrity is that their names are often worth far more than their services; why just about person wants to be one).
The rate at which the youth of today now engages in sports betting (with the hope of hitting a jackpot overnight), is alarming. More and more people continue to delve into politics with some expectations of owning a mansion in one month. Everybody wants the short cut to success, money and fame, but little did they know that they could become anything that they wanted and even more, together with sufficient education - anything short of wanting to attain the highest level of education, especially by oneself, alongside other life endeavours, is characteristic of mental laziness and a desire to cut corners in achieving greatness. It is an enduring myth that money brings happiness. But as we would find therein, money, standing alone, doesn't give anyone lasting happiness or fulfilment. In fact, there are people who are not happy making millions of dollars monthly. Scientifically, it's been shown that the tendency to be happy with more money drops gradually until you have about $15, 000, and then it stops making much difference when you have more.The point is that success is not the key to happiness, rather happiness is the key to success. A combination of knowledge, character and wealth is what leads to true happiness.
This book is certain to improve on your perceptive. Watch out!
- Likeminds Humanist Organization
Reference: Some of the aforementioned remarks are cited from "The Illusion Called Certificate".
