Experience Vs. Theory

I recently returned to school to pursue a course that has always fascinated me. Yet as I sat through the first lesson, a question kept nudging: why are you studying? Is it so you can improve your chances for a better life, help humanity or are you studying to gain clout as a learned gentleman?
   

About a fortnight ago tens graduated from Makerere University and more are returning there for post-graduate studies. Ugandans today are attaching great symbolism to the acquisition of knowledge. It makes me wonder if it makes sense in the end.

Let the practical man speak

Most people who have gone on to achieve exponentially have studied in the school of life, not in formal classrooms. Consider men like Hassan Basajjabalaba, Gordon Wavamuno even Sudhir Ruparelia. Another man who calls the shots in the transport sector with his buses is a mukiga named Kanagizi. He likes to humour himself saying he does not have an "OB" because he never went to school. But his affluence has made him an influence  to important people. Even the president visits him in his home. 

"I can count a sack of millet!" he like to brag of his ingenuity with arithmetic that makes financial sense.

 It does not really change the fortunes of a nation like Uganda to sit in a classroom and be asked to "Describe and critically comment on the way the respective poets contrive and portray the descent into the underworld in Homer's The Odyssey and Virgil's The Aeneid.

 If the essence of living and fulfillment is to love and serve one another, then we must learn the hard way in the school of life, not in the boardroom with the teachers who would rather teach through handouts than eat the dust of chalk. It is true that education is the only way out of ignorance into the glorious light, as one actor puts it, but it has to be the all-inclusive education - mostly education attained on the job. I would rather have Wavanuno teach me how to make money than an economics professor at Makerere University. 

Let the man with a theory sit down, and let the man with the experience; one who has done it practically and has the fruits to show for it stand up and speak.