Education is more important today than at any other time in history. As we leave the Industrial Age behind and navigate the fast-paced Information Age, the value of one’s education continues to increase. The question today is: Is the education you or your child receives in school adequate to meet the challenges of this brave new world we enter? In the Industrial Age you could go to school, graduate, and start your career. You usually did not need additional education to succeed simply because things did not change that quickly.
In other words, the education you learned in school was all you needed for your lifetime. As millions of baby boomers get ready to retire today, however, many are faced with the realization that they have not been adequately educated for the new world they face. For the first time in history, many well-educated people are facing the same economic difficulties that the less educated are facing. They repeatedly find themselves having to get additional education and training in order to satisfy their current job requirements. When Do You Measure the Success of Your Education? When do you measure the success of your education? Is it the final report card the day you graduate from school, let’s say at age twenty-five? Or is education’s effectiveness measured when you retire, let’s say at age sixty-five? Based on a government study, of every 100 people at age 65, one is rich, four are comfortable, five are still working, 56 need government support or family support, and the rest are dead.
It is not becoming the one rich person that this book is about. It is about the 56 who still need someone else to support them I am concerned about. I do not want you or your child to wind up in that big statistic. People often say to me, “I won’t need much money when I retire because when I retire, my living expenses go down.” While it is true that your living expenses may go down after you retire, there is one thing that often goes up dramatically, and that is health care. Health care is becoming literally a life-and-death issue for millions of older people. Putting it bluntly, if you have money, you may live, If you don’t have money, you may die.
The question is: Did the education of these senior citizens prepare them for this financial challenge at the end of their lives? The next question is: What does the plight of these senior citizens have to do with your child’s education? There are two answers to these questions. Answer number one is that it is your child who will ultimately have to pay for the health care of these millions of senior citizens if they cannot pay for it themselves. Answer number two is another question: Will your children’s education prepare them to be financially secure enough not to need government financial and medical support at the end of their working days?
The Rules Have Changed In the Industrial Age, the rules were to go to school, get good grades, find a safe, secure job with benefits, and stay there all your life. After 20 years or so you retire, and the company and the government take care of you for the rest of your life. In the Information Age, the rules have changed. The rules now are to go to school, get good grades, find a job, and then retrain yourself for that job. Find a new company and a new job and retrain. Hope and pray you have enough money set aside to last you much longer than age 65 because you will live well beyond the age of sixty-five.
In the Industrial Age, the defining theory of the era was Einstein’s E = mc2 . In the Information Age, the defining theory of the era is Moore’s law, which spawned the current ideology that the amount of information doubles every 18 months. In other words, to keep up with change, you need to virtually relearn everything every 18 months. In the Industrial Age, change was slower.
What you went to school to learn was valuable for a longer period of time. In the Information Age, what you know becomes obsolete very quickly. What you learned is important, but not as important as how fast you can learn, change, and adapt to new information. Both my parents grew up during the Great Depression. For them, job security was everything, which is why there was always a little bit of panic in their voice when they said, “You must go to school so you can get a safe, secure job.” The challenge is not to get left behind as you become obsolete working at your current job.
Part I is an overview of education both academic and financial. Those who have read my other books already know that I had two father figures in my life. The man I call my rich dad was my best friend Mike’s dad. The man I call my poor dad was my real dad. The benefit I had was that both men were geniuses in their own right. My poor dad was an academic genius and educator. After the age of nine, I began having serious problems in school. I did not like what I was learning and how I was being taught.
I saw no relevance between what I was being forced to learn and how I could apply it to the real world. Part I of this book was how my smart but poor dad continued to guide me through this very difficult part of my life. If not for my poor dad, I would have dropped out or flunked out of school and never would have gone on to graduate with my college degree. Part I of this book is also about the educational process my other dad, rich dad, put me through.
I would say that my rich dad was a financial genius and also a great teacher. In part I, I explain how rich dad began preparing my young mind to think like a rich person when I was only nine years old. Because of my rich dad’s guidance, I was absolutely certain that I would attain great wealth, whether or not I did well in school or got a high-paying job. By the age of 12, I knew that becoming rich had little to do with what I was learning in school. Knowing I was going to be rich, regardless of how I did in school, did create some unique attitude problems for me in school. Both dads worked to keep my attitude problem in check and guided me to complete my college education.