Someone once asked Javed Akthar how did he become such a fantastic screenplay writer. Back then, there was no book, no course or degree that taught screenplay writing. How did Saleem-Javed become so good that they produced hit after hit for more than a decade during the 70s and 80s?

He said when he was starting, he had no idea how to write a screenplay. He read 20 great screenplays from Hollywood movies from the 1940s. That gave him some sense of what good screenplay writing is all about. But the real learning happened when he started writing screenplays for the movies; he learned by working with fellow writers, getting critical feedback from experienced writers, but most importantly, he learned by continually working on many screenplays one after the other.

That’s how learning (self-learning) works.

But the problem with learning is that it takes much longer to demonstrate your skill because there is no external validation. Your work is your validation, and it takes time to generate a great body of work.

The other problem, of course, is that it’s difficult to showcase your work. You can’t publish a novel if no publisher is willing to sign you unless you have a degree in Oxford literature.

Education (traditional education), on the other hand, is a little different.

Education, in the traditional sense, is more about the validation; the certificate is the most important part of it. And when that’s the case, it quickly translates into - do what I say, and you will get the prize. The education system’s key goal is to elevate everyone to a minimum level of qualification; it certifies that the person with so and so degree can at least do these many things. Of course, no one can guarantee how well do they do it.

The whole idea - which has worked remarkably well for the past 100 years - now feels outdated, thanks to the Internet.

Take MIT, for example. MIT has put all their courses online. For Free. Anyone can signup and start learning by themselves. If you are curious to explore Mathematics, you can signup for Prof. Strang’s Linear Algebra course and start learning.

But people still go to MIT, pay $100k per year to study there. The reason is that MIT is selling something else when you go there. It’s not selling learning; it’s selling the degree. And a degree from MIT is a scarce resource. And hence valuable, more for its scarcity than for the quality of learning it provides.

The thing is, learning germinates from passion and curiosity, but education, from the need to have proof that you are qualified at something. And so far, the latter has played a critical role in professional success, whether it’s getting a new job or a promotion.

Sometime during this decade, this is certainly going to flip. The Internet has solved both the problems with learning. It’s now easier than ever to learn by yourself, find other like-minded people who are equally passionate as you are and better your craft by working and learning together.

Showing the proof of work was earlier difficult; Internet has made it easy too. The best comedians have a youtube channel with millions of followers; the best writers have a fantastic medium blog; the best artists have a terrific Instagram account, and the best engineers have an excellent Github profile.

It’s never been easier to showcase your body of work. The validation that a degree provided can now be achieved by showing your work online. This is a big shift.

It would be interesting to see if traditional ways of education, and the institutions that provide it, can adapt to the changing times.

Best,
Kaddy

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