As a below-average student before college, if someone had told me when I was in high school that I was going to be a student of Oxford, London School of Economics, and Harvard, I would have laughed. Some teachers thought I was stupid! The situation changed when I decided to go to university in a place where I could choose my own classes and class times. Moreover, my undergraduate classes were not mandatory and I took full advantage of it. I lost the count of how many times I skipped lectures to study the same subject at home by myself where I thought I was more productive than in the classroom. Despite all professors and many friends recommending me to go to class, I was sure classes were near useless for me. I just could not learn well from pure listening and making class notes was not useful to me. I remember many courses that I only attended the first day of class and exam days. All the other days, I did not attend. In my principle of microeconomics class, I even slept over my midterm and had a final exam worth 100% of the final grade without having attended any lecture. The strategy worked. I graduated with an extremely high-grade point average (GPA) in a 12-time Nobel Laureate winner school in economic sciences, the University of Minnesota, while doing one semester at Harvard University. I continued my studies in several of the most prestigious schools in the world following the same class strategy, i.e. never attending them unless it is mandatory. In these other top schools, which I attended for masters and then Ph.D., my best performances also happened when I did not have to mandatory attendace. Every time I had to go to class, I had below-average performance (just like in high school), and when I had the freedom to skip all classes I had a top of the class performance.
1 - My main point is not to say that classes are useless but to say that not everyone is the same. Many people may be better off with mandatory classes, but some are not like that. Just like me, there are thousands of other students who the teacher/professor may think is stupid but maybe they just do not fit their local education system rules in a variety of ways. Many times the lowest grade students are the smartest in the class, while the highest grade one may be the less intelligent ones. Exam grades, to a large extent, measure how well a person fits into the system and not how smart they are. Every person is different and therefore every student should have different requirements. Not everyone is better off attending classes, not everyone better off taking exams, not everyone must take a specific class or group of classes, etc. In my view, a major education reform is due yesterday.
2 - If I had continued studying in the place I was born, I would most likely have attended a "normal" school and received a "normal" job after. If was born in a fairly rigid educational system, like Germany, where kids are placed in certain track in a very young age, I would probably been placed in a low track, which would likely have led me to relatively low paid jobs and bad job conditions. Instead, I have being getting more money out of passive investment than I spend on a yearly basis since I was 27 (the age I like to joke I "retired"), and I have bought a vacation home in Portugal also in my 20's. All of this happened before I started to work. This capital comes mostly from investments made out of undergraduate internships, part-time research positions during my postgraduate studies, and leftovers from academic scholarships. This brings me to my second point, the goal of the educational system should be to estimulate people to study when there is no need to do so. Today, the mainstream educational system around the world estimulate people to study for a exam but most of this learned information will be forgotten within a few years after the test. This kind of learning can lead to a degree, which can help you to get a job. But education itself is often more important than a job, like my case illustrates. As Einstein was used to say, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school." Are you well educated or do you just have a bunch of degrees?
1 - My main point is not to say that classes are useless but to say that not everyone is the same. Many people may be better off with mandatory classes, but some are not like that. Just like me, there are thousands of other students who the teacher/professor may think is stupid but maybe they just do not fit their local education system rules in a variety of ways. Many times the lowest grade students are the smartest in the class, while the highest grade one may be the less intelligent ones. Exam grades, to a large extent, measure how well a person fits into the system and not how smart they are. Every person is different and therefore every student should have different requirements. Not everyone is better off attending classes, not everyone better off taking exams, not everyone must take a specific class or group of classes, etc. In my view, a major education reform is due yesterday.
2 - If I had continued studying in the place I was born, I would most likely have attended a "normal" school and received a "normal" job after. If was born in a fairly rigid educational system, like Germany, where kids are placed in certain track in a very young age, I would probably been placed in a low track, which would likely have led me to relatively low paid jobs and bad job conditions. Instead, I have being getting more money out of passive investment than I spend on a yearly basis since I was 27 (the age I like to joke I "retired"), and I have bought a vacation home in Portugal also in my 20's. All of this happened before I started to work. This capital comes mostly from investments made out of undergraduate internships, part-time research positions during my postgraduate studies, and leftovers from academic scholarships. This brings me to my second point, the goal of the educational system should be to estimulate people to study when there is no need to do so. Today, the mainstream educational system around the world estimulate people to study for a exam but most of this learned information will be forgotten within a few years after the test. This kind of learning can lead to a degree, which can help you to get a job. But education itself is often more important than a job, like my case illustrates. As Einstein was used to say, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school." Are you well educated or do you just have a bunch of degrees?