Non scholae sed vitae discimus, as they used to say in Latin. We do not learn for school, but for life. There’s no difference between formal education (schools, colleges, universities) and informal education—except that you have to sit for exams and obtain a piece a paper under the former.
Some people regret not having received any formal education. We take education for granted. Everyone assumes that they will go to elementary school and, after that, secondary school, followed by college or university, or learning a trade. But we often forget that generations before us weren’t in the same situation. People who lived through World War II and are still with us didn’t have the luxury of going to school—often not even primary school—because the war made all that impossible. Many of them think back and somehow feel that they were cheated out of something crucial. While that observation is certainly true, because war deprives people of nearly everything that matters in life, these people still made it through life, worked for a living and had families. Some even decided to pursue an education by returning to school and finally obtaining that coveted school-leaving certificate at long last. By that time, they had already passed into their eighties or nineties, but to them it was worth it.
As I said, the only difference is the paper you’re awarded. There is no guarantee that the person with a diploma is smart, just as there is no guarantee that the one without such a piece of parchment is stupid. You will find an equal number of smart and dumb people in both groups, to be sure.
Speaking of wars and missed opportunities, I should like to insert a brief side note. For some people, the war didn’t represent a missed opportunity; it actually provided a fair number of opportunities. Michel Thomas, while trying to stay alive, saw a necessity and turned it into an opportunity that would ensure his future well-being. While fleeing from invading armies and Nazis here and there, he learnt something like eight or ten languages along the way. When the war was over, he was able to to capitalize on his special skills, went to France to study psychology and eventually ended up in America, where he created a special approach to teaching languages. He set up a language school and became a teacher—of French, Spanish, etc.—to a lot of influential people and Hollywood stars. That school today has several locations around the world, and teachers trained in the «Michel Thomas Method» help people to learn foreign languages. Thomas himself passed away a number of years ago, but his legacy in teaching languages—and he never had any formal education in languages—lives on to this day.
As such, Thomas is a great example of what I’m about to say next. Real education comes in life, without a diploma, and we absorb it even without attending a classroom. In fact, whatever I know, I taught myself. Yes, I have had all the schooling you can imagine, but it wasn’t the teachers and schools that taught me. They merely pointed out what mattered and told me what I should read and study, and all that reading and studying, and absorption of knowledge, I did by myself. And so can anyone. In the past, people could go to a library and go through book after book and learn all sorts of things. Today, thanks to the internet it’s even easier. In fact, you can even take university courses virtually, and free of charge, from any computer or tablet.
And you want to know something else? There are many people who had a formal education, may even have obtained a Master’s or PhD, but they’re not educated or smart at all, at least not in the strictest sense of the word (especially when their chosen field was something completely useless such as Gender Studies or similar social-engineering programs). Why? Because they just memorized everything from their textbooks and assignments, like robots, and passed their exams. But did they understand what they memorized?
I took what schools and teachers offered and studied it on my own time and on my own terms. Instead of covering only the material for that specific school year, I would study ahead and cover the material for the following school year and the year after that. So, when I was 13 or 14, my teachers told my parents at one parents-teachers conference: “We give up, we can’t teach your son anything anymore. He knows it all and even more than we do. He corrects us when we get it wrong. He’s teaching us!”
In other words, I created my own «informal education system» within the formal system, and the «informal» part benefited me more (because I studied and understood the material, instead of just memorizing it) than the «formal» part.
Anyone can get books on algebra and learn the stuff. Anyone can pick up the collected works of Shakespeare and read them. Anyone can get themselves a book or audio or software and learn Italian. The world is our school. And we are our own teachers. We just need to reach out and grab.
I liked my teachers, all of them. So, I don’t really want to disrespect them, but when people ask me, “Who was your favourite or best teacher?” I would have to say, “I was my own best teacher, and also my own best student.”
Finally, let me say this to anyone who has regrets or feels inadequate about the education they may have missed out on, for whatever reason: You have nothing to be ashamed of. You may not know everything that someone else with a few letters after their name knows, but you know many other things—things that the lettered individual doesn’t know. And having gone through the school of life, the school of hard knocks, you’re probably a whole lot better at many things that the other person can only dream of.
We’re all destined for different things, based on our interests and talents. Too many people still look down their noses on people who learnt a trade, instead of going to university and becoming a lawyer or doctor. Those who do so are truly stupid and narrow-minded—and since looking-down-one’s-nose is one of the things they’re good at, they’re probably lawyers or doctors themselves, not realizing that the person who has learnt a trade may actually be making more money now than they do.
Early on, I was torn for a while over what to do with my life. I had inherited technical inclinations from my father, and the linguistic-creative element from my mother’s side. In fact, I came very close to taking a double major in languages and mathematics. Does the fact that I never enrolled in maths lessen my life somehow? No, I can still enjoy my knowledge of mathematics (and any discipline in which it plays a key role) even though I don’t have a piece of paper for it.
In the end, we all know what we know; how we came by that knowledge doesn’t really matter, does it?