One of the most shocking discoveries (that actually marked a major turning point in my life and career; there are other turning points) was Harvard University’s sad finding about education that points to the fact that formal education is able to harness up to only 22 percent of people’s true effectiveness and greatness in life. Interestingly, it had been corroborated by other research carried out under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Indeed a lot (if not most; I’m inclined to say 80%) of what you learn in school will have little or no direct use in your life and work, so you will necessarily have to learn completely new knowledge, skills, and attitude for life and work after you graduate. In other words, of all the knowledge, skills and attitudes you need in your life and work in order to be effective and truly fulfilled, only a little of that (about 20%) will be part of what you learn in school.

Ideally, the religious organisations should be filling in the gap, and providing that needed complementary education, especially since they have access to people right from the cradle to the grave and wield such a great influence on them (much more than what schools could ever dream of) but our religious organisations have not taken the bull by the horn, and are failing abysmally. For this reason the onus is on you and I to seek the much needed complementary education on our own, and also help our people to do same; I had to fall on numerous self-help books, seminars and complementary education videos to train myself on those essential life skills, and several other very critical life skills that all the pillars of culture (including school and religious organisations) are ignoring.