The Why & The How!!

In his film Three Idiots, Aamir Khan speaks about being well-trained and being well-educated. This was a perspective I found very interesting, and it made me think of my sister, Lakshmi (Lux/Lucky) as she is called at home.

Lux is one of those people who seems to know something about everything. She has learned French, Spanish, and even Mandarin, not because she had to, but because she wanted to. Have to admit here that in the typical sibling way, I have taken full advantage of her knowledge of Spanish by getting her to sit in my classroom for the parent–teacher conferences I had as a teacher in Sunnyvale, CA. It was fascinating to watch how effortlessly she translated what was needed to be shared, switching with the ease of a native speaker between Spanish and English as if she were changing radio stations.

But it’s not just languages. Talk to her about anything: books, field of medicine, technology, politics, cars and she will hold her own. She can relate to a young child with the same ease as she can to a CEO. It is not professional training that gives her that ability, it is her curiosity, her openness, her way of engaging with the world that makes her so deeply educated in that truest sense.

And so I find myself wondering: being trained or being educated  - does one matter more than the other? Training gives us the skills to do something well, to perform with precision, to meet expectations, to follow a system efficiently. At the same time education, in its truest sense, goes beyond that. It invites us to question, to imagine, to connect ideas and people in ways that are not written in a training manual.

When we are trained, we know how to do something. When we are educated, we begin to understand why we do it and sometimes, whether we should do it at all. Training helps us fit into the world while education helps us see it differently.

As we continue to learn, work, and grow, it is important to pause and consider: In a world that prizes efficiency as much as it does curiosity, can the two coexist and enrich one another in meaningful ways? There is mastery that comes from being well-trained but there is perspective that comes from being well-educated.

So over to you then: Do you think one is of more value than the other? How do we find that balance between the How and the Why?