I didn't get a high school diploma. I really didn't have much of an education, which left me open to educating myself throughout my life, without the limitations on intellectual curiosity a formal education can impose. I followed what interested me.
As a physician, we are taught that learning and education never stop - they are lifelong. I think education comes in various forms: formal, informal, and most importantly, experiential. All of this defines who we are and gives us if you will our abilities to function as leaders. I believe all of those pieces constitute formal education - it is invaluable to who we are and how well we perform.
My formal education as an extension to my college degree in journalism was the time that I spent working with the student newspaper. I would argue that my greatest education occurred by working for the student newspaper. It wasn't necessarily the classroom work that made my formal education special. It was the idea that I had the opportunity to practice it before I went into the real world.
There are many types of education: formal education, street education, personal education, experiential education, and I've found that I've had different partners who have a lot of wonderful intellect and education from all different types of sources.
Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.
Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline and who manage to grow up before they blow up are invited to join the Yale faculty. Within the university they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers ... it is a place where the world's hostility to curiosity can be defied.
My father gave me formal education in raagdari. He died in Lahore in 1964 when I was 13. I was in the tenth year of school, and my father's brother took me into the qawwali ensemble and started giving me formal education in qawwali.
When I enrolled in college at age 19, I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result, I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments.
The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education.
Life is a miracle; walking is a miracle; watching the sunset is a miracle; everything is a miracle, because existence is a miracle!
My hope and wish is that one day, formal education will pay attention to what I call 'education of the heart'.
It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
Yes, it is true. I am a miracle. I am a miracle like a tree is a miracle, like a flower is a miracle. Now, if I am a miracle, can I do a bad thing? I can't, because I am a miracle, I am a miracle. . . .
At the moment I would like to emphasize the need for vocational training, for non-formal education in Burma to help all those young people who have suffered from a bad education. They have to be trained to earn their living. They have to have enough education vocational training to be able to set up respectable lives for themselves.
If a plane crashes and 99 people die while 1 survives, it is called a miracle. Should the families of the 99 think so?
In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.