Knowledge lives elsewhere

Did we gain knowledge in school or was it something else?

I’m struck by the number of amazing people I have met, those who have achieved mastery and success, who also claim to have been poor students in the past. They talk about their learning and their journey openly, but rarely attribute their hard-won knowledge and understanding to school. At the same time, many of us have kids about to leave home for university or whatever comes next, so the question of how we learn stays close. Watching them step into the same system that shaped us makes me think about what real learning looks like, where it happens, and why it often begins only after school ends.

If you flip through the brochures, the modern university is hard at work selling the idea of learning and inspiration and growth as path to success and happiness. But look closer at the actual educational experience and you might conclude that school is mostly where people learn how to behave: how to decode shifting hierarchies, interpret signals, and perform within arbitrary systems. High school, university, grad school arguably don’t cultivate mastery; they reward endurance.

I won’t deny that great educators have helped shape great people. But for many of us, most of the professors weren’t conduits of knowledge and support as advertised. They are more like obstacles you must learn to navigate. Each has a private ecosystem of biases, blind spots, and expectations. The student’s real task is to map that terrain, to divine what this particular gatekeeper wants, and deliver it in the right format at the right time. The “curriculum” isn’t chemistry or history. It’s compliance under pressure.

This does not make school worthless; far from it actually. Learning to survive an ever-changing hierarchy, to extract meaning from unclear signals, is a life skill. It’s why people who make it through school tend to make it through corporate structures too, and that is important. But that’s not knowledge or mastery. It’s conditioning for survival.

My point is knowledge lives elsewhere. It requires curiosity, time, practice, tenacity, and space to fail: the very things these formalized systems can quietly discourage. Knowledge grows when you’re left alone long enough to look in the dark corners, to pursue questions that weren’t assigned, to fall repeatedly and then get back up to follow your confusion until it turns into understanding. Few people enrolled in university settings achieve this; perhaps a handful of post docs; and that is just minutes before they die from starvation and lack of sunlight.

That’s why autodidacts can often surpass their higher scoring peers in life. I have met a few of these people and what stands out is that they don’t wait for permission to learn. They want to read what they need, manifest their own structure, and test their understanding in the world. For them learning isn’t a performative art; it’s an encounter with reality. For them school was an obstacle course standing between them and what they want.

So maybe school isn’t where knowledge lives, but where we learn to survive the noise long enough to find it later. It gives us structure, a sense of process, and a taste of pressure. The rest, curiosity, time, failure, and the quiet work of figuring things out, comes after and, if we are lucky, persists for the duration.