"EDUCATION IS NOT LEARNING"

When I was young a school going kid I use to watch my mother cooking. One day I came back from a school function and was so excited about it to talk to my mother, she was listening to me and it was a very effective communciation between us, while she was talking to me she was also cooking food for us. Though she was fully engaged in the conversation she was cooking also, I was observing she was putting salt, heang, chilli poweder, termeric and other species in the curry she was cooking.

When in afternoon my father came home for lunch we sat for lunch and had the lunch and it was the usual perfect meal we use to have, the spices were perfect as usual, I coudn't understand how was that possible as while cooking she was busy in communicating with me..today I understand it, it was her learning which made her perfect and the portion of spices she used were neither less nor more it was just perfect.

My daughter who has a hobby of cooking and aspire to become chef someday in her life does lot of experiments in kitchen, watching youtube, googling and though cooking channels she often educate herself on how to cook various dishes. One day I was at home and as in any household the discussion was going on what to eat this afternoon in lunch as its a Sunday so something special needs to be cooked. My daughther came up with some dish which she had learned from a cooking channel and since she was too excited to cook we were happy to have the little chef in the kitchen. While she was cooking she didn;t allowed her mother to help telling her that she do not know how to cook this particular dish so its better she manages at her own!

After the dish was ready, we also were excited to taste it and top of it was 3:15 pm and I was dead hungry, so we started eating.....the dish was not that perfect but since it was a lot of efforts from daughter we did not wanted her to feel demotivated, we eat and the day went on.

A few days later my daugther came to me asking what went wrong with the dish, I told her there was nothing wrong, it was just you educated yourself on how to cook it and didn;t learned how to cook it. I told her your mother has learned the skill over the years and has got perfection of this level the other day when she came to offer you the help you didn't took it.

In our professional life also we see that companies often go for resources who are less experienced and less learned because they come at less cost, I have nothing against the young dynamic professionals.

All I am trying to make a point here that in our Indian edcuation system the entire focus is on education not on the learnings, learnings comes with experience and by doing things and nothing can replace it same goes for the corporate life and professional career.