The rickshaw driver who takes me to work knows something I don’t. He knows that if we turn left at the mosque instead of going straight, we will save twelve minutes. He knows that the main road looks faster but isn’t. He knows which shortcuts flood during rain and which stay dry. He knows the city the way a surgeon knows the body—every artery, every vein, every place where blood clots and traffic stops.

No university taught him this. No degree certified his knowledge. Yet I, with all my education, sit behind him like a child, completely dependent on wisdom I could never acquire from books.

I think about this more than I should.

We have built a world that worships certain kinds of knowledge and ignores others. A boy who memorizes equations gets scholarships. A boy who can look at the sky and predict rain gets nothing. We call one intelligent and the other uneducated. But when the storm comes, who do you want beside you?

There is a vegetable seller near my house. Old man, no teeth, sits on the ground with his tomatoes and onions. I watched him once with a customer. The customer picked up a tomato, examined it, put it back. The old man, without looking, reached into the pile and handed her a different one. “This one,” he said. “This one is sweet.”

How did he know? He has spent forty years touching tomatoes. His fingers have learned what eyes cannot see. He reads the biography of each fruit through his skin—where it grew, how much sun it received, whether it was picked too early or at the perfect moment. This is knowledge. This is expertise. But we walk past him without curiosity because he sits on the ground and doesn’t speak English.

The housemaid who works in my building knows chemistry no cookbook contains. She knows exactly how much salt transforms a dish and how much ruins it. She knows which spices fight each other and which fall in love. She learned this not from recipes but from decades of feeding families, adjusting proportions by instinct, failing and correcting until her hands knew what her mind never needed to articulate.

I have a PhD. She cannot write her name. Yet in her domain, I am the ignorant one. I follow her instructions like a student.

This is the truth we refuse to accept: every person is a university. Every life is a curriculum. The security guard who watches the building entrance has studied human nature more carefully than any psychologist. He knows who is lying by how they walk. He knows who is dangerous by how they avoid eye contact. He knows when someone doesn’t belong. He has conducted thousands of experiments in reading people, and he has drawn conclusions more reliable than any study published in journals.

The street child selling flowers at traffic lights knows things about survival that business schools cannot teach. How to create value from nothing. How to read which car window might open. How to smile when everything hurts. How to find hope in places designed to crush it. These are not lesser skills. These are essential human technologies. We just don’t give them fancy names.

I met a bus driver once who could predict passenger behavior with disturbing accuracy. “That one will not pay full fare,” he said, nodding toward a well-dressed man. “And that woman will complain about something before her stop.” He was right both times. I asked how he knew. He shrugged. “Thirty years of watching. You learn.”

Thirty years. That is more hours of observation than most researchers ever log. That is a PhD in human psychology, earned on the road, tuition paid in patience.

But we don’t see these people as teachers. We see them as service providers. We pay them and move on. We assume that because they lack degrees, they lack knowledge worth acquiring. This is our arrogance. This is our blindness.

I have started trying to learn from them. It is not easy. My ego resists. Something in me still believes that education flows downward—from the credentialed to the uncredentialed, from the privileged to the unprivileged. Reversing this flow feels unnatural.

But when I manage it, when I genuinely ask the rickshaw driver how he knows which routes work, when I watch the vegetable seller’s hands and ask what they feel—I learn things I could never learn otherwise. I access a different kind of intelligence. One that comes from doing, not studying. From living, not theorizing.

The flower seller knows poetry we have forgotten. She knows which flowers speak apology and which speak love. She knows that white flowers belong to grief and red ones to celebration. She knows that certain blooms last longer in certain seasons, that some flowers open in the morning and some in the evening. This is botanical knowledge. This is cultural knowledge. This is knowledge that makes life more beautiful.

Yet we bargain with her over five rupees and walk away thinking she has nothing to offer but petals.

Perhaps the problem is that we cannot learn from people we look down upon. The posture of learning requires openness. It requires admitting that the other person has something you lack. This is impossible when you believe you are above them. The very hierarchy that structures our society prevents the flow of wisdom.

I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how to dismantle the arrogance that education instills in those who receive it. But I know that I have learned more from watching my grandmother cook than from any nutrition class. I know that the rickshaw driver understands things about my city that I never will. I know that the security guard reads people better than I read books.

There is an invisible university all around us. Every person is a department. Every life is a course. The tuition is humility. The admission requirement is simply this: believing that you don’t already know everything.

Most of us never enroll. We walk past the gurus every day, certain that we have nothing to learn from them. We stay inside our credentialed bubbles, talking only to people who have read the same books and hold the same degrees.

And so we remain ignorant. Educated, but ignorant. Credentialed, but unwise.

The rickshaw driver doesn’t care. He doesn’t need my validation. He knows what he knows. He will navigate the city long after I have forgotten which way is north.

But I need him. I need all of them. The vegetable seller and the housemaid and the security guard and the flower seller and the street child. They are my teachers, whether I acknowledge it or not.

The question is whether I can humble myself enough to learn.

The question is whether any of us can.