Formal Education and Business: Some Aphorisms

By Stephen Ainsah-Mensah

1. The purpose of formal education is to produce graduates with triple qualities: a cultured mind, an imaginative power that can execute relevant practical production, and, above all, moral discipline.

2. A cultured mind eliminates the tendency to catch upon oneself unnecessary arrogance; relevant practical production entails being fully aware of the needs of the society and helping to produce in accordance with the needs. This principle warns against unrestrained production to satisfy personal caprice. Imaginative power enables the individual to formulate outstanding ideas, which are then utilized in relevant practical production; and, finally, moral discipline brings about fellow-feeling sentiments that are essential for equitable relationships, equitable access and use of resources (and other available things). Equity guards against bigotry.

3. If this is the purpose of formal education, which may, somehow, be viewed as axiomatic, why is it then so difficult to attain them? Does the difficulty reside in the individual or the institutions that spawn formal education?

4. It is well known that most high institutions now enjoy from the massive infusion of technology, thanks to the massive advancement in technology. The impact of technology on students has been momentous. Students can now access all kinds of course-related information readily on the internet, and they can also facilitate coursework by using the computer to type and print. But the technical facility in studying and managing academic stuff has also stifled originality. If students can readily get access to course-related information, then they can also readily misuse such information in their writings and pretend they are their own. Plagiarism is partly born from this enterprise.

5. The idea - by professors - of encouraging students to study the great works of great scholars as the means to earn rightful places in academic circles is an academic sin. Instead of encouraging students to use the powerful imagination in producing original papers, what usually happens is padding supplemented with tedious quotations, references, and a writing format that belittles one’s creative prowess or mental preparedness. Whether this is meant to preserve the clout of the professor, one is not sure. It seems it is!

6. The concerns of businesses, of the business class, that many contemporary graduates underperform may be all too common. A dearth of originality among students in school could end up at the workplace. A boss may entrust a challenging task to a new graduate whose paper qualifications are excellent. The grievances of the boss that the graduate lacks what it takes to be innovative will be entirely legitimate if the graduate cannot connect the tasks to the confidence held in him/her that he/she has practical flair.

7. If the triple requirements of formal education – a cultured mind, an imaginative power and moral discipline - are stifled, then the graduate does not lack talent but the suppression of talent. One has to go back to the natural home of this problem, which would be where the student was formally trained to undertake challenging duties or tasks at the workplace. Moreover, instead of prioritizing school programs, there should be no need for prioritization. Prioritization kills talents. One has the talent to pursue a line of formal education. One suppresses this talent because this line of formal education is not prioritized. Here, one may pursue a kind of prioritized formal education without being talented in it. The society thereby has done a great disservice to such a person; for talent is wasted, and creativity, if any, fails to reach its desired or finest level. Much of the imperfections in academia and practical production arise from this spectrum. Hence, there is the need for policy makers, authorities at high places, to address the issue of prioritized school programs and, perhaps, purge them. Emphasis ought to be placed on where the student’s talent is. The student should then be encouraged to pursue this talent, both in school and at the workplace. One may call this “academic democracy”. The application of academic democracy at the workplace naturally leads to business democracy.

8. The great mistake of business managers is to think that the best person for business is the specialist, meaning the person who specialized in the formal study of business. But in business, the dominant element is the human being. The human being who is engaged, directly or in some way, in business has a string of interests: business relations, social skills, leadership abilities, creative potential, broadmindedness, general proficiency, logical capability, wide-ranging verbal and non-verbal communication skills, among others. Since a study in the human sciences gives one more of these traits than a specialized study in business, it may be stated - startling as it may seem - that those who fare better in business could be more of the graduates in the human sciences than in specialized fields of business.

9. There is nothing special about a culture that is partly constructed on the principles of the stock multiplier. What happens here is that there is the proliferation of stocks that helps to advance the mood of the economy while physical production tends to ebb. A continuation of this state of affairs engages the enterprise of all sorts of people in market and financial speculations; so, money begets money instead of actual production proliferating money. This kind of parasitism is unsustainable.