Education – what a fool believes . . . .

My Uncle Jim and I will never be mistaken for each other.

I am a college graduate with a double major in Economics & Management and English Composition and a year of graduate business school under my belt. He dropped out of high school. I have lived in Canada and Chile and several of our United States, and I have traveled in South America, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand. If Uncle Jim has spent any time at all outside a 100-mile radius of Rockton, Illinois, I would be shocked. I have worked in Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, most recently launching a franchise shared-workspace business. When he worked for someone other than a neighboring farmer, Uncle Jim drove a local delivery truck.

I don’t say this either to demean this most generous man or to extoll any talents of mine. These are facts, easily provable even in this charged political environment that doesn’t seem to recognize them.

I say all this because I was having a discussion with my brother on a drive back from southern California yesterday, and we landed on the word “smart.” He said he didn’t think he was as smart as our sister (kindly, he made no comment on how he thinks she and I compare!).

I’ve thought for some time that “smart” is a uselessly imprecise term, and I feel more strongly about that with every passing year. And when a man as talented as my brother feels like he is lacking, I know why I feel that way. “Smart” is such a nebulous concept with so many variables that it cannot be commonly defined. To wit:

If you wanted someone to build a business performance model, relating processes to each other, and associating costs and revenues to products and services, then you would be far better served to hire me to do that if your only other choice was Uncle Jim. I don’t think he’d be able to even comprehend what you wanted when you started to describe it. When it comes to creating a quantified reflection of what a business does, I am much smarter than my uncle, which is to say I understand the concepts, I know how to dissect a business, I’ve mastered the technology that allows me to build a pretty sophisticated model that can accommodate many scenarios, and I can communicate my findings.

Getting a truck or a tractor to run is a completely different situation however. I don’t know how an engine works, or how that engine transfers power to move not just the vehicle but also any equipment that it uses, or what that equipment even does. But Uncle Jim sure knows. Anything you find on a farm, he knows how to get it to work, and then he knows what to do with it once it’s going. When it comes to machines or farming, Uncle Jim is way, way smarter than me.

So when it comes to being “smart,” I think any assessment has to be contextual. There is just too much difference between people and their capabilities, knowledge and experiences – to say nothing of how all of that applies to the question at hand – to be able to declare definitively who is truly smart.

I wonder if we’re teaching our children what matters most.

Knowledge is important, of course, but in a world where data and information are at our fingertips – literally, given the proliferation of smartphones and other powerful devices that can educate us on any subject in seconds – perhaps we should be teaching them skills that help them interact with others. And not just in workplace settings either. Cooperation and collaboration in social groups and communities will be essential if we’re to achieve our greatest ambitions.

I believe that education should be the single highest priority for our societies. We owe all the members of our communities every chance to learn the things that they can leverage to build the kind of lives they want. It’s good for them, and it’s good for everyone else too, because if I’m doing what I enjoy, then I’m enthusiastically contributing to our society. And that’s the outcome we should be striving for. In jobs, in families, in communities.

We should be schooling everyone in the mechanics of healthy relationships, helping them to understand what a good relationship looks like and how to create one. And how to recognize and then navigate a relationship that’s not so good.

It’s probably a good idea to educate everyone in the principles of budgeting, estimating income and expenses, using credit appropriately. Basic financial skills can go a long way to alleviating stress in adult life, and that has so many benefits, especially with intimate relationships.

We might want to teach everyone the basics of transportation and home maintenance: how furnaces and home appliances work, how cars work, and how to keep them all in good working order.

And about nutrition – the kinds of nutrients we need, how to shop for groceries and how to prepare basic dishes.

In short, the kinds of things we need to know to live in balance with ourselves, with our neighbors, with our colleagues. It isn’t especially complicated – all of these topics and more can be taught in one high-school class period over a year.

Life skills.

Not more important than math or history or English or science. But still important enough to teach to a common level of understanding. I could have used something like it, and I believe most of my older teenage friends could have benefited just as much too.