Schooling prepares us to be potential employees. It gives us job, which keeps us in poverty; hence JOB is an acronym for Just Over Broke (Kiyosaki, 2012). This may sound ridiculous, but the gospel truth is that one can’t be rich by working for money, that is, depending entirely on one’s job and receiving pittance as wage or salary. Thus, the school system was created by Horace Mann to create potential employees not employers.
To substantiate this claim, one doesn’t need to look outside. For instance, in The Gambia, the richest people are not the ones with the highest academic qualifications. Evidently, most of the people who have attained the highest academic echelons are potential employees. Instead of creating high paid jobs, they find high paid jobs. Consequently, after they are pensioned, they returned to the rat race because most of them have made no investment in neither business nor in assets. Sadly, during their glorious days, they have spent more on liabilities mistaken for assets. To them, their savings would be enough to service their needs and the needs of their family without knowing that a penny spent in liabilities is a penny lost.
Additionally, parents would do everything under the sun to get their children attain Western education with the hope that it will make them rich without noticing that the school system doesn’t teach the ways of creating wealth. It teaches only literacy and numeracy base on rote learning. From the genesis of our educational journey, all we are taught in schools are on the cognitive, psychomotor and affective domains, that is, on knowledge, understanding and application, leaving out the other three components, such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation, which are parts and parcels of the Broom’s Taxonomy of Learning. This slackness of our education system in ruling out evaluation, which is rooted in critical thinking, has reduced many to mere employees working daily for pittance. Justifiably, the education system in place is here to kill our ability to think critically so that we could remain subservient to the will of the authorities. The school system only trains us in committing to memory the multiplication table and definitions of terms that have no relevance to making money. Moreover, it teaches us topics that deal with whites and white supremacy; about histories that vilify our ancestors and eulogize our transgressors and about topics that are taught willy-nilly to keep us impoverished as well as dependent on the whites and their cat’s-paws. This is the education system we have in place.
Furthermore, we are made to believe that by attaining the highest level of education we will be out of the rat race. But, after actualizing that dream, the rat race persists because in The Gambia one’s earning is not measured by one’s academic background. In lieu, it is gauged by where one works. It is interesting to know that by virtue of their positions, there are people who without a college certificate or certificate of such standing, working in other governmental departments who earn more than degree holders in The Gambia. This is a clear manifestation that degree or string of degrees is important only if you don’t get it. As long as you get it in The Gambia, it becomes trash as it doesn’t bring about financial stability. Imagine, after spending four solid years coupled with rigorous academic sojourn with the hope of escaping from the cursed hands of poverty, you return to the mud- to the rat race. In fact, you might become poorer than you were for with a degree comes with higher dependency, which implies higher financial responsibilities on a scanty salary equivalent to few dollars.
In conclusion, schooling is not a yardstick for financial success as the main purpose of the school system is to thwart our thinking capabilities in order to be eligible job seekers. Perceptibly, schooling get us a job and condition us to play it safe by avoiding risks. To be financially stable, we must decolonize our minds of the misconception that schooling is be all and end all with regard to becoming rich.
