Written Tue, 21st August, 2022, Published on 22nd June, 2024

May be school is important after all?

Actually, I just want to say you guys should go to school. It is a great place to learn and create connections. That is if you go there to really learn and create meaningful connections, connections are not on the floor to pick you have to create them. There is this funny colloquial statement that I learnt in my days in the boarding house during my junior high school MPS, Kintampo that says “You either go through the school or the school goes through you” I don’t remember which part means which, but one means you excel in the school and the other means the opposite.

Oh yeah, yeah, I know over the years I have lamented on how crap school is and that I have occasionally thrown tantrums at school so this is a change of mind? Actually no. I have always had these two views of school and one is same what everyone believes so it was boring mentioning that.

So note anything I ever posted or will ever post about school didn’t and will never take your emotions into consideration. My status isn’t a psychiatric hospital and if it were, I wouldn’t offer free services in the open. [ edit When I wrote this, it was meant to be posted on WhatsApp status, this was written 2 years ago and I didn't have this blog.] So, actually the current school system is crap but not complete crap.

If it is crap, why do I still want others to attend? Truth is, the majority of people can’t sit on their ass to do shit on their own. If everyone were to be an entrepreneur who the F was going to work as an employee? The people that want to be entrepreneurs should get the hell out of school and learn to adapt to the fast changing world. The people that are interested in been employees, well, school is for you. Just don’t pass through the school but please learn a lot so that you can become great employees to help great entrepreneurs to build great companies.

In my school days, I liked physics. Physics was beautiful. I wasn’t getting A’s though but I got pass marks. The universe spoke physics to me but well I didn’t pick it fast and because of that, I did the bare minimum to pass my physics papers.

I failed most at times at mathematics. Not that I was a bad student or didn’t understand maths. I lost the basics at an early stage growing up so I was always catching up and catching up sucks. I accepted that I was bad at maths and that was it. I never put any effort to learn pass my comfort. I vividly remember when I was in JHS 3, I was called to the black board to solve a Maths problem, it was some basic algebra. I was at it and was finding it difficult but the teacher, Trinity pushed me by giving me ideas and I solved it. Afterwards I gave the chalk back to him and he told me something like “Alale it is not that you are poor at Maths, you are just lazy” and that stuck with me forever.

It was also more like a validation to me. people regarded me as smarter than the average kid and that stuck with me. If not for anything I was a very creative kid growing up and probably still is. I would find myself in situations that I would have to think about solving a Maths problem and if my brain got a little hot from thinking, I would go like F it and forget about problem to go do other stuff.

So naturally I moved towards reading subjects. I really loved to read and that was what I did. I loved all the reading subjects except may be Social Studies I didn’t hate it though. I just didn't enjoy much, I still had good passes.

And reading is how I discovered programming and picked it up. In school anytime the class was noisy, I would go to the library and read ICT books. I love computers and everything ICT so it made sense. And that was when I discovered programming and I fell in love with it instantly. Call it love at first sight.

If you are going to school, you should understand that the current Ghana school system is struggling to barely make you valuable. Why do we go to school? To make money. Learn. Pass. Get paid and make a livelihood. How do you get paid, becoming valuable to society and offer value to society and get paid. How do you become valuable? For a long time it was also going to school and getting good grades and graduating with flying colours. But now you can go do all that and yet won’t find a good job. So are you really that valuable to society? Not really. If your certificates can’t get you good jobs, what is their value?

[ Edit - This wasn't part of the first post but yeah, my views have changed a lot since 2 years ago. ] The above statement doesn't account for the people that goes to school to learn more about subjects that interest them, I know those people exist, without them we wouldn't have the amazing architectures, machines, social systems that we have today and I admire that and I advocate for that. People like that should definitely go to school. Aside the employees these are people who should go to school especially higher education. They need to learn, the past, the present and build the future. The way they can do that is through higher education.

My advice is for people to learn digital skills. In whatever they want to do they should find a way to be skilful. That is what is going to make you valuable in today’s society. And been skilful requires a whole different mindset from what is been taught in school. Learning skills is the new school and if you are good enough it actually pays more than going to school and it cost way less, Monetary and time wise and it gives more freedom to the individual. But why aren’t most people doing that? We have all heard of this from time to time.

My guess is because of society and human behaviour. You see, school is the default route and most people just want that. Learning digital skills is hard if school is your default route. If you are out of school, you have a lot of time to learn digital skills as well but the problem with making school default and learning digital skills after school is that, most people after completing school think they are done with education but it is only school that they are done with. This error keeps them on the School path and even though they are done with school and have enough time to learn digital skills they tend to think they have spent enough time in school already to abandon that path so they look for a job. And now a job is hard to find because they aren’t really that valuable to society like they think school made them. [ Edit ] You can remove the digital skills to please everyone but when I wrote this my focus was on globally employable skills. That doesn't account for Mechanics, Plumbers and Painters, if I were to add all those then I would be talking about the industrial age. So hey this is our secret, quietly remove digital and just say skills and let's all go to bed without throwing tantrums, yay!

When I talk about these things most people tend to ask me what they should do. Come to think of it, I am not an expert in digital skills. All I know is trading crypto currencies, writing code and graphics design.

Why I Picked up Graphics design

I never really had plans on becoming a Graphic Designer. There is a lot of story here but let’s leave it for another day. As a kid, I did a lot of drawing and I was very good at it. I mentioned been creative above. A master actually saw me design award certificates and recommended that I learn photoshop and I did. I didn’t learn it to make money. I just did it because I loved it. It actually took me 5years before I starting doing graphics commercially. And it was a friend who pushed me to even do it commercially because I was good at it and it pays well. So my path to design isn’t straight forward and it is hard for me to give advice by saying hey do graphics design. Without my creativity as an individual, I might have never done design and how do I know if you are creative like me or even more than me for me to recommend that you do design?

Coding.

A lot of story here too but let’s leave it for another day. At my peak of coding, if I didn’t code for days or weeks, I would fall sick. I would get depressed because I loved coding. I loved everything about it so much that I would get depressed if I didn’t code for months. I was only able to do coding because I didn’t continue schooling traditionally. And coding is what made me stop schooling. I self taught myself coding and the most important thing I learnt from coding is that, I can fix anything if I give it enough time. If I had this mentality in SHS school, I would have had A’s in Maths and Physics but school doesn’t teach that. And this mentality has made me a better person and the fact that I taught myself coding means a whole lot to me. And coding is really hard, [ Edit - well depens at how you look at it. Now I just believe that the difficulity in coding depends on personality and in my case it is my curiosity and my love for learning and computers, my tenacity and indoors lifestyle ]. If I taught myself coding and got good at it, how come that I wasn’t good at Maths and didn’t get A’s at Physics? Because Self tuition(education) is more powerful and practical that school. So it is even hard for me to recommend coding because most people aren’t me who are in love with self tuition and problem solving or in love with computers.

Cryptocurrency Trading.

When I picked(2016) up cryptocurrencies there was lessser resources on the subject compared to the current number available today. And everything I learnt about cryptocurrencies was self taught. Yet today people come to me and ask me to teach them crypto currencies amidst the millions of resources at their disposal. Sometimes I opt to just give guidance yet their fail to learn. How do I recommend crypto when there are thousands of resources yet people aren’t eager to learn like I was years ago. It is crypto that is hard or people that aren’t serious?

Bottom line is I think I do what I do because it fits my personality and most people aren’t me. I can’t recommend things that fit my personality only because most people aren’t like me. Maybe it is not that they aren’t serious but simply because the things I do doesn’t fit their personalities and that is why it is hard for me to recommend digital skills for everyone that ask me what they should learn. I advice is that people should go out there and search and try to learn skills that fits their personality. There are thousands of digital skills out there. All with the power to make one skilful and valuable to society. Skills that will make them money people should go out there and try discovering. I have tried learning skills that didn’t work for me that I had to dump and learn new skills. Any one trying to learn might go through that but it is worth it, that is how you make it.