I finished reading Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design this week. I wouldn’t dare declare that I understood everything in it, and it has left me asking more questions after reading it (which is an attribute of a good science book, I suppose). However, the simplest takeaway I got from it was: how little I knew when I was gloating with a huge smile and a diploma in my hand when I graduated high school back in 2007. I know that a high school education is nothing to boast about, but being realistic about society demographics today, I would say that 50% of people I interact with even today would have less formal education than that diploma I graduated with back then.

It’s been 18 years since then, and the world has changed so much in the meanwhile. Even my well rounded education, made no mentions of quantum field theories, CRISPR or neural networks. I guess at some point, high school education has to draw a line, before encouraging a curious mind take deeper dives in college, but it still has to present a fair map of the subject left to be explored. I can blame the schools, or the teachers, or the text books – but at the end of it all, the ultimate responsibility rests on the individual to continue to update their maps about a given subject. Even if I look at a subject that I continue to be professional involved with, when we studied “Computer Applications” in school, huge areas of the subject map in 2007, huge areas of the subject map like flash memory, mobile computing, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure were missing because they were cutting-edge.

I guess the only way to continue to remain reasonably educated about a well rounded group of subjects is periodically revisiting each subject’s map. Let that be a life long journey instead of a piece of paper.