TechCentralTechCentral
    Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentral TechCentral
    NEWSLETTER
    • News

      Dark weekend lies ahead thanks to you know who

      20 May 2022

      CSIR develops app to help kids learn to read

      20 May 2022

      Prosus to sell Russia’s Avito

      20 May 2022

      Shock as Mustek CEO David Kan dies

      19 May 2022

      Sabotage at Eskom’s Tutuka plant

      19 May 2022
    • World

      Chip giant ASML places big bets on a tiny future

      20 May 2022

      Musk moves to soothe investor fears over Tesla

      20 May 2022

      Apple is almost ready to show off its mixed-reality headset

      20 May 2022

      TikTok plans big push into gaming

      19 May 2022

      Musk says he will vote Republican, calls ESG a ‘scam’

      19 May 2022
    • In-depth

      Elon Musk is becoming like Henry Ford – and that’s not a good thing

      17 May 2022

      Stablecoins wend wobbly way into the unknown

      17 May 2022

      The standard model of particle physics may be broken

      11 May 2022

      Meet Jared Birchall, Elon Musk’s personal ‘fixer’

      6 May 2022

      Twitter takeover was brash and fast, with Musk calling the shots

      26 April 2022
    • Podcasts

      Dean Broadley on why product design at Yoco is an evolving art

      18 May 2022

      Everything PC S01E02 – ‘AMD: Ryzen from the dead – part 2’

      17 May 2022

      Everything PC S01E01 – ‘AMD: Ryzen from the dead – part 1’

      10 May 2022

      Llew Claasen on how exchange controls are harming SA tech start-ups

      2 May 2022

      The inside scoop on OVEX’s big expansion plans

      20 April 2022
    • Opinion

      A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

      19 May 2022

      From spectrum to roads, why fixing SA’s problems is an uphill battle

      19 April 2022

      How AI is being deployed in the fight against cybercriminals

      8 April 2022

      Cash is still king … but not for much longer

      31 March 2022

      Icasa on the role of TV white spaces and dynamic spectrum access

      31 March 2022
    • Company Hubs
      • 1-grid
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Amplitude
      • Atvance Intellect
      • Axiz
      • BOATech
      • CallMiner
      • Digital Generation
      • E4
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • IBM
      • Kyocera Document Solutions
      • Microsoft
      • Nutanix
      • One Trust
      • Pinnacle
      • Skybox Security
      • SkyWire
      • Tarsus on Demand
      • Videri Digital
      • Zendesk
    • Sections
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud computing
      • Consumer electronics
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Energy
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Motoring and transport
      • Public sector
      • Science
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home»Opinion»Chris Roper»You’re with stupid

    You’re with stupid

    Chris Roper By Chris Roper13 March 2013
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Chris Roper
    Chris Roper

    South by Southwest (SxSW, or “South By” as those in the know refer to it) is now in its 20th year of existence, and more than ever the premier gathering for those who work in the interactive, digital arena. Running from 8 t0 17 March, it is being held in Austin, Texas. Austin is touted as the “live music capital of the world”, and that is a claim that certainly holds up during SxSw, when there are around two thousand bands playing.

    It is also one of the hipster capitals of the world, especially when the entire Silicon Valley appears to have moved in for the conference, lock, stock and smoking attitude. Personally, I love hipsters, who are the ornate frames that make the drab worldview worth staring at. But when there are so many, getting underfoot like a slew of overexcited yet cool bespectacled puppies, it gets a bit much.

    Elon Musk’s keynote address was, if you were in the right mood, an inspiring one for a South African. That a lad from Pretoria can rise to create, and become the chief executive of SpaceX, the first privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft, is a warming thought. Last year, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carried the unmanned Dragon capsule into space, becoming the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station. The unmanned capsule became the first privately built and operated vehicle to ever dock with the orbiting outpost.

    Along the way, of course, Musk has also been part of the creation of PayPal (sold to eBay for US$1,5bn in stock), and the Tesla company, manufacturers of the Tesla roadster, the first fully electric sports car. He came across as a thoughtful, controlled, slightly detached man, albeit one that appears, strangely, to stage his thinking about questions for which he already knows the answers. (For a complete, and glowing, account of Musk’s talk, read Alistair Fairweather’s column.)

    He has a great presence, though, and got a laugh when he repeated his famous quip: “I would like to die on Mars; just not on impact.” But I found it disturbing, at one point, when, in response to a question, he said that it was fine for people to drop out of university. His contention — and I am paraphrasing here — was that you learn everything you needed to know in the first couple of years of a degree, and mostly from the people around you.

    According to Musk, he only completed his second bachelor’s degree in physics because he had to qualify for residence in the US. And he did eventually drop out of university, of course, and manage to go on to be moderately successful. Of course, he was engaged in a PhD in applied physics and materials science at the time, which presupposes quite a lot of education happening before he got to make that choice.

    I keep hearing South African “entrepreneurs” making the same claim: you do not need an education, you just need an idea, like Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates. Well, first of all, those dudes were/are geniuses, and you’re an idiot. And secondly, they have already been taught to think. Your matric from an average South African high school ain’t going to cut it.

    My frustration at this tripe comes from a confluence of events — the first, attending a talk by South Africans Toby Shapshak and Gareth Knight entitled “The $100bn mobile bullet train called Africa”.

    Many of the African entrepreneurs and innovators they described were repatriates, returning from educational stints in the developed world. Many — perhaps even the majority — of the success stories owed their genesis to precisely the thing that some smug would-be Silicon Valley Girls pretend does not matter — good education. It hurts that we are not growing more of our own entrepreneurs and ideas people at home, and that the level of education in a place like South Africa is geared to producing people who can barely achieve the ludicrously low percentage that currently masquerades as an indicator of knowledge.

    The keynote by Amit Singhal, vice-president at Google, highlighted the difference in attitudes to education of someone from a developing nation (he is from India), and someone who is dumb enough to undervalue an education he or she already has. According to Singhal, he made the choice to carry on studying, with a small stipend a month, when many were advising him to move into business. He spoke about the impact his continuing education had on him. On Wikipedia, there is a quote from him about his university studies. The University of Minnesota, Duluth “was the turning point in my life. Studying Information Retrieval with Don Crouch and then Don recommending that I move to Cornell to study with Gerard Salton, is the main reason behind my success today.”

    While tweeting Singhal’s talk, I serendipitously noticed tweets from the Mail & Guardian about a series of photos our education reporter, Victoria John, took while on a tour of the forgotten and deeply neglected schools of the Eastern Cape. Take a look at these, and I defy you to be glib about education.

    I don’t think any of the highly successful people, who say that continuing an education isn’t an absolute necessity to get somewhere in life, mean that education is unnecessary. They do mean that there can come a time when you have learnt enough to do something that’s about creating learning, instead of consuming it. Singhal’s vision of the future is one where education is a never-ending process, where Google’s computers will give you the answers to questions you did not know you needed to ask. That is the beauty of education, and seriously, if I hear one more budding entrepreneur crowing about his or her schooling in the university of life, I’m going to send you to the duncecap corner of deathly cliché.  — (c) 2013 Mail & Guardian

    • Chris Roper is the editor of the Mail & Guardian Online. Follow him on Twitter @chrisroper
    • Visit the Mail & Guardian Online, the smart news source
    Amit Singhal Chris Roper Elon Musk Gareth Knight Google PayPal South by South West SpaceX SxSW Tesla Toby Shapshak
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Previous ArticleIEC holds e-voting seminar
    Next Article Why Lenovo might buy BlackBerry

    Related Posts

    Musk moves to soothe investor fears over Tesla

    20 May 2022

    Apple is almost ready to show off its mixed-reality headset

    20 May 2022

    A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

    19 May 2022
    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Promoted

    Fast-rising fintech Bankingly closes $11m investment round

    20 May 2022

    Creating an effective employer value proposition for the new era of work

    20 May 2022

    Why fibre is the new utility – and what it means for South Africa

    19 May 2022
    Opinion

    A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

    19 May 2022

    From spectrum to roads, why fixing SA’s problems is an uphill battle

    19 April 2022

    How AI is being deployed in the fight against cybercriminals

    8 April 2022

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2022 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.