Certificate of knowledge?

Education: Learn to learn Too many people put too much emphasis on acquiring a certificate of some sort while not giving adequate attention to the actual reasons why they are attending school.

Obtaining a piece of paper that confirms one has gone to a school is not the sum of the game, as Yoseph’s.
The view illustrates
One question I like asking a lot of students is why do they go to school. Many say it is because their parents sent them, others say they go to school to pass time, others say to learn new things, and most say they go to school because ‘it seems like the right thing to do in order to get a job and earn a good salary!’
They are all fairly good reasons to go to school, and it is certainly not a bad idea to go learn a few things, and decorate your walls with a pretty certificates in a wooden frame. And hopefully, that pretty certificate does the magic in getting you an excellent job. I cannot say that it is not true, because usually employers ask to see those certificates. However, think of all the university graduates who are looking for jobs for ages after their graduation. Why doesn’t the magic of certificates work here? Because there is no magic, and a certificate is merely a piece of paper, and it isn’t as valuable as we think it is.
The way developing countries’ education system is today, our focus is mainly in passing exams, getting good grades, going to university to get a degree, and getting a good job, and we hope to be happy. What we are not realizing is that we stop caring for anything else which doesn’t help us get that certificate. Education is not about certificate, and sadly enough that piece of paper doesn’t take you anywhere. A certificate is just to certify that you did what is required, and in this case it certifies that you were patient enough to sit in a classroom for so many years and obedient enough to read what you were given for an exam. That’s it!
So if it is not the certificate, what do we go to school for? We go to school to learn to think, to nurture our intellectual curiosity, to create, to reason, to learn how to work, to discover the potentials each of us have, and to explore the realms of education. In the process, we indeed learn new things, but there is no school in this world that can teach all the new things, and what we actually learn in school is a small tiny fraction of what we need in life. I know it sounds very horrible, especially when you have to work extremely hard for all those awful exams. So yes we acquire some knowledge, but the best thing that we acquire from a school is the ‘crave for knowledge’. The best thing you learn in school is actually the ability to learn. In school, one thing we learn is that there is the presence of knowledge and how effective it is. A school gives us only a peak into the world of knowledge, and makes us curious to want to learn even more. We are encouraged to think and question in school, and have our own ideas and concepts. In a school, we get a bit of a picture of what we are good at and what we are not. In school we get experience in working with other people, we learn to interact. There is so much more learning taking place in a school, that some of the Maths lessons become not as important as they have always seemed. I am not saying that Maths is not important, it certainly is, but it doesn’t help in any way define education. It is simply part of it. The schooling experience as a whole makes a huge difference in our lives.
So my good friends, certificates aren’t as important as they seem. Certificates endorse the skills and potential we have. Experience is a powerful tool in today’s world. Education is not about certificates or science lessons alone. The best thing we can leave school with is by learning to learn.