How applicable is calculus to you now?

The entire world comprises the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. The 99 per cent are generally controlled by the 1 per cent who own most of the world’s wealth and hold all the power.

When you were at school did you ever learn about money? About how to make it? How to spend it? How to manage it? No? Neither did I. In fact, we were taught many things in school right up until the age of 16 but if you look back on you classroom days, ask yourself this question. How much of what you were taught in school is actually useful to your everyday life today? How applicable is calculus to you now? Does it really matter to you, as an ordinary individual, how World Wars I and II started? Aside from English and some parts of maths, probably not at all.

Based on the 1%:99% analogy, there are 2 types of education systems. There are the 1% neighbourhoods that are well funded and so the education of kids in those areas is almost elite in nature. Then there are the underfunded and grossly lacking 99 per cent neighbourhoods where books and resources are in severe short supply. Here children have a hard time learning and teachers have an equally hard time teaching. Based on this, I think the education system in most countries is rigged in favour of the 1 per cent

Now I also think there are 2 types of teachers. Those who have real world experience and those who have none. Dr Robert Kiyosaki calls the latter ‘fake teachers’ because, although they know their theory, they are clueless the practical applications of the subjects they teach. The only reason they are teaching the way they do is because they don’t have actual real business world experience in the subject they are teaching. Remember the old adage, ‘those who can, do and those who can’t, teach’? Well, in most cases, that might actually be true. Unfortunately, most schools only teach children how to be employees and never employers.

Even most undergraduate university courses are taught by lecturers who have always been lecturers, usually straight after being awarded their PhDs.

But business schools and Law schools are a tad different in that the majority of the lecturers either have their own businesses and are, therefore, visiting professors, or they retired from their jobs to became full-time professors. They, therefore do have real world experience in the subject they teach. Kiyosaki calls them ‘real teachers’. But the point here is that, surely, by the time students reach university age, it is too late for them to have the ‘I’m not just an employee’ mindset.

So the question we should all be asking ourselves is why our school curriculum did not, and still does not, cover a whole term on money, how to make it, how to invest it and how to manage it. In fact, our school curriculum didn’t even teach us how to manage a bank account, how to write a cheque or even how to balance a chequebook.

There is a reason for this! According to Kiyosaki the working population can be divided into two distinct classes. There are people who are trained to be entrepreneurs from a very early age and those who are trained to be employees. And this has happened since day one. Unfortunately we have all been conditioned to think in a specific way, whether we are part of the 1% or the 99%.

The mindset we have has been passed down to us from one generation to the next. For example, if your father knew nothing about starting a business and how to run it but knew everything about how to be a productive and honest employee, that is what is going to be passed down to you. On the other hand, if your father runs a successful business, the chances are you will either inherit that business and learn how to run it successfully or you will start your own business and be as equally successful — because he taught you how.

Why is this so, you wonder? Well, in life there is one queen bee (say the 1%) and millions of worker bees (the 99%). If everyone was taught to think like an entrepreneur, there’d be no manpower in the form of office workers, accountants, cleaners, delivery guys, cashiers, drivers, chefs and teachers who teach what you want them to teach. This is why the majority of the world’s population, the 99%, is kept in its place.

I feel that change can only come at school level because that is when we are most impressionable. Unfortunately we are taught what the 1 per cent wants us to learn and that is often only to their advantage and not ours.