Here’s why students fail, or succeed in life.
What is success? Is it financial, ideological or psychological? What determines success and how does it correlate to education? Success, simply, is the achievement of aim or purpose. If I decide to read a novel and summarize it in a week and am able to pull that off before the end of the week, that is success. If I decide to fly to America for an exhibition and am able hop into a plane and eventually attend that exhibition, that is success. Success is a broader idea, larger than many are willing to imagine, except if we wish to narrow it down to the financial because that is the implication of the prevailing argument. Because, why would educational institutions bother themselves with the depressing responsibility of dissuading their students from pursuing their fields of study, if not with the faint hope that they may succeed financially? Which brings us to another question. What is education? It is acquisition of truth, especially truths that will arm the student with skills to navigate the world. If success is meant financially, then I disagree with the idea of educational institutions dissuading her students from pursuing the fields of study they imagine they would not succeed.
If the student is given proper education, he will succeed in all areas of his life, even financially. From education we get culture, and culture is the cultivation of the mind. If the mind is thoroughly cultivated, it will be a fertile ground for creativity which will spring out trees of achievement, sprouts of creativity and fruits of success. Consider for example, Nicolas Cole, one of the digital experts of our age. He studied piano and fiction writing, the latter which was reputed for offering its students after graduation jobs not higher than a coffee staff at Starbucks in America. In fact, his lecturer in a tone of despair told them that writing in this age of technology is a failed craft, but with a ray of hope, added that those who could navigate through this technology with their fiction writing are the ones who would succeed. If Nicolas had followed the trend, perhaps he would have dropped out of that career and pursued the trendy one – computer science. But he stuck at fiction writing, and by his rare creativity, turned that into a million dollar agency that consults for top executives, athletes, and even start-up founders in the Silicon Valley! How was he able to pull that off? Because he had a proper education, by which I mean, home education where his mother taught him the importance of honing one’s craft, and that laid the foundation of his latter education and enabled him to navigate the murky waters of technology. This should be the duty of the educational institutions – to develop the mind of the students and not to dissuade them from their career paths, else they would be confused graduates, moving on with the trend, pursuing financial success with a very distorted mind.
Also, if a student pursues the fields of study they are curious about, not only will they succeed, they will also lead far happier lives than the ones of the majority who do not pursue their curiosity. Another famous example is the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is granted, she was an exceptional student, she was the overall third best in her high school certificate examination, and the prevailing norm in Nigeria then was that the exceptional students should naturally study medicine. But she had a deep love for writing. In fact, in one of her interviews, she said that writing gives her joy and that if she had not succeeded in the way the majority understood success – financially – she would be in an obscure corner of the world but she would still be writing. How would she handle this conundrum? She said in another talk that she had developed a strategy in which she would work as a pediatrician during and then use the stories of her patients for her fiction writing in the night, but one year of medical school made her see how unpractical that would be. And also it made her discover her true calling – a writer. She fled from medical school and became one of the most celebrated writers of our age. She is very happy, she found her life’s fulfillment in fiction writing. And she is also successful financially.
In a nutshell, I strongly believe that educational institutions should bother themselves with the thorough cultivation of the mind of their students, and not to dissuade them from their fields of study simply because they think that they may likely not succeed.
