Should We Send Our Children to School?

My friends,

Today I wish to place before you a question at once simple and unsettling:

Should we continue sending our children to school in the same old way?

From pre-primary classrooms to the gates of the university, the machinery of formal education stretches across years—long, expensive, exhausting years. And slowly, across the world, thoughtful minds have begun asking: Does this enormous investment truly prepare a child for life? From my own experience, I have often felt that the knowledge through which I survive today was not granted to me by formal education alone, but rather by what I learned afterwards—through self-study, curiosity, struggle, and lived experience. If schooling merely lays the foundation, then we must ask honestly: Must the foundation consume so much time, money, and human potential? Let me speak of two individuals.

The first is Asim Qureshi. A graduate in Physics from Oxford University, he worked as an investment banker at Barclays Capital and later at Morgan Stanley before eventually leaving corporate life to focus on his own enterprises. He had three children—Maryam, Danyal, and Sabeen—who until 2013 attended regular schools like millions of others. But dissatisfied with what the schools were truly teaching, he and his wife made a radical decision: they withdrew their children from formal schooling and began educating them at home.

The results startled many.

Maryam, at the age of twelve, earned multiple A* grades in examinations designed for much older students. Danyal and Sabeen too achieved extraordinary academic success at remarkably young ages. Yet academics alone was not the miracle. These children also developed socially, built friendships, played sports, and learned multiple languages fluently. And what is most striking is this: None of them had been considered exceptionally gifted while attending school. Their father realized something profound. He noticed that fifteen minutes of focused mathematical discussion during the drive to school often taught more than an entire day spent inside the classroom. And so he asked the forbidden question: What if education is not the same thing as schooling? Now let us turn to another name. Elon Musk. As a child he reportedly read books for hours every day. At twelve he created and sold a video game while most children his age were merely playing them. He studied economics and physics—not rocket science—and yet later taught himself enough aerospace engineering through relentless reading and inquiry to found SpaceX. Professional rocket scientists themselves have acknowledged the depth of his understanding. Musk too chose to educate his children outside conventional schooling. Why? Because he believes that modern education systems often produce obedient workers rather than creative thinkers. Systems designed during the industrial age still train human beings as though they were parts of factory machinery—standardized, repetitive, interchangeable. But the world has changed. Automation advances silently like an invisible tide. Computers increasingly perform repetitive labour more efficiently than humans ever can. In such a world, what becomes valuable is not obedience, but imagination; not memorization, but creation; not repetition, but original thought. And yet our schools continue asking children questions such as: “State Newton’s Third Law with examples.” A child may memorize the sentence perfectly without ever understanding reality itself. But imagine instead asking: “If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then why does a door open when we push it rather than remain still?” Now the child must think. Now the child must connect formula with life. Now knowledge becomes alive. This is the difference between information and understanding. Between memory and intelligence. Between training and education. Our schools too often reward those who can reproduce textbook sentences, not those who can question, imagine, or discover. The examination hall becomes a temple of memorization, where originality enters like a trespasser. And yet history repeatedly reminds us that the greatest minds rarely walked in straight lines. Consider Srinivasa Ramanujan. With very little formal education, he produced mathematical insights so profound that even today they continue astonishing the world. Often he arrived at formulas intuitively, unable at first to explain how he knew them to be true. Logic came later; vision came first. This tells us something beautiful about the human mind: Not all truth arrives through step-by-step reasoning alone. There are patterns hidden within existence that extraordinary minds perceive before they can fully explain them. Newton saw gravity in a falling apple. Ramanujan saw mathematics in visions. Creativity often begins where conventional pathways end. But what happens to such minds in rigid systems? Too often, we call them distracted. Undisciplined. Unusual. Problematic.

And slowly we train them back into conformity. In trying to manufacture ordinary success, we sometimes destroy extraordinary possibility. There was once a time when knowledge lived inside books accessible only through institutions and teachers. But today, the world itself has become a classroom. With a few clicks, a child can learn from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, IIT, Khan Academy, and countless other sources freely available to humanity. Knowledge is no longer imprisoned. The question now is not access. The question is imagination. The question is whether we still possess the courage to rethink what education truly means. Because when students finally enter the real world after years of formal education, many discover something tragic: They were taught information, but not application. They were taught answers, but not inquiry. They were trained to pass examinations, but not necessarily to understand life. Human civilization progresses only when individuals dare to think differently—creatively, independently, unconventionally. And such thinking cannot emerge suddenly one fine morning. It must be nurtured patiently across a lifetime.