Unfortunately, the purpose of the education system at this stage of human civilization development is not the realization of individual potential or the creation of geniuses. Geniuses, however cool they may be, are not necessarily the most effective increase in unit production efficiency per person that you can create. The point of the education system is essentially to create workers that make the economy productive.
I don’t think you can say, even all these years later, that Ramanujan, that mathematician, made the economy more productive, but he certainly increased the high watermark of human civilization and created an inspiring story for individual achievement, creative realization, and artistic and mathematical expression. There’s something sublime and transcendental—no pun intended—in the kind of truths that he was able to tease out and the unique, idiosyncratic way that he expressed them. Sort of like a Basquiat of mathematics, I suppose. Or probably better than that.
That aside, I think it’s unfortunate that he died of cholera or something, isn’t it? I mean, he apparently didn’t think it was unfortunate that he was going to die. And certainly, the formal education system didn’t necessarily fail him, in that a professor at a university recognized his genius and sponsored him to the UK.
But I think, in a sense that you identify, there is this general failure of the education systems in the human civilizations on this planet to foster perhaps the best thing that they could be fostering. They’re more like a manufacturing assembly line to produce cogs as part of the economic machine.
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. I think it’s good that people can have a role to play in the larger economy and that there are pathways to bring people to the level of capability where they can contribute like that. But the lack of pathways that these systems provide—those that could contribute to the creation of the full realization and expression of individual potential—I think is sad. And I think that’s what you’re kind of identifying.