Last week as I was on the way back home from a faculty development class, I was thinking over a couple of opinions that teachers from different colleges had aired during our interaction after my session.

1) Human needs are unending and limitless

2) The aim of any occupation is making money

Although there could be philosophically a lot to discuss and argue about these opinions, this article concerns the implications that these opinions have in the learning methodologies and aims of the students.

The fact is that in today’s society these are two opinions that are undisputed in terms of being popular thoughts. Therefore, it is pertinent to discuss the implication of these two statements in the thought processes of students.

We live in a knowledge economy and therefore it is common knowledge that information leads to knowledge and therefore to money. We also know that education gives us information and the processing power required to convert information to knowledge. Therefore education is key to the process of making an income that leads to better living.

So, in short, education is money.

The opinions aired above will lead us to think that people are more likely to be inclined towards those kinds of jobs that will lead to making more money and thereby fulfilling as many needs as possible. Extrapolating this we can understand that there will be huge popularity for those courses that enable us to meet the above said needs. The mad rush for the engineering and medical courses explains the above phenomenon clearly.

Looking at this scenario, it is more or less clear that the science subjects will weigh heavily in the performance requirements of the students. This also explains the lack of interest of the majority towards other areas of interest like history, geography or other subjects that are closely associated with human survival.

Is education a tool to fulfil one’s desire of a good living? The proliferation of thought processes towards vocational education definitely indicates that. Here is where students need to be careful about. It is rather surprising that a number of people who have done well off the beaten track reached there by chance. A good enabler for them to reach there would have been the knowledge that their passion and skills were there in that area of work. In the modern world and system of education scope for realisation of such truths are limited given the fact that more prominence is given to a few subjects and thought processes.

The possibility of finding out what is your chosen field of work is, at present, unavailable and therefore the onus is on the student herself to find it out. Unfortunately, such luxury is not affordable with the formal education system. So the student has to find a way herself to achieve this aim. A good place to start off is the newspaper which has diversified topics and opinions. A lot of information is available and the opinions show how to process those diverse pieces of information. A spark somewhere will be the opening to a dream career and life once you have sufficient information.

Self realisation is a fortune and you should always have sufficient basic information and be ready for that opportune moment may it come your way. You need not be one of those people but if you are, you should not miss that opportunity. So be ready with all information!!!