The Myth of Education
expressiveegg.org
expressiveegg.org
You know, maybe it is! And all the better to make sure, via the system, that humans don't come to false conclusions so easily and readily.
There is some strange deeper truths to this article that I feel I could argue for correctly, but they are sparse and the negative connotation is unwarranted, the rest is mere rant.
A good example is the way the "scientific method" is taught, where you are given a canned experiment with a known outcome, told which pieces of "evidence" to collect and what relationship to expect between them, and finally how to format your summary of your proceedings. No actual instruction on method is involved, it's just a pantomime.
I've mentored many young scientists by now. None of them come in understanding how to do science, because their entire education - up through college at some elite institutions - has not prepared them for how to actually think their way through a problem. The only place people actually learn this is in graduate school, when you are finally put face-to-face with a real problem that no one else can give you a canned answer and methodology for regurgitating.
Education is bunk. I say this as someone who went through the very best educational institutions. I'm still recovering. I didn't learn how to be a good thinker as a result of my education - I had a good early dose because my dad was a scientist and made me think creatively. Then I had a long gap where I learned nothing until I had to do my PhD. That taught me a little, but it wasn't until later when I had to collaborate with other scientists and actually solve problems that I began to really learn how to think. Most people around me still can't do this - most of what I spend my day doing is helping other people break down their problem to the point where they are able to apply some more rudimentary skillset to it.
The real purpose of education seems to me to be to separate children from adults, and thus prevent them from learning anything useful until they re-encounter actual adults again, decades later.
This not only applies to sciene... normal engineering teams have similar problems.
What follows is a polemic, or as defenders of the system would have it, a ‘rant’. Polemics express negative QUALITIES. It is generally best to ‘let the facts speak for themselves’, but there are some aspects of reality which facts cannot speak for. At various points in this book I refer, for example, to the ‘nightmare’ of the system. To those who do not experience system-life as a nightmare (usually people in nice jobs), it will look as if I am ‘ranting’ — an accusation that I tend to take as a compliment — see https://libcom.org/history/shadow-glorious-though-strange-go...
Without education, a lot of people wouldn't be able to read the article (for the better?)
Without education, people would rely on their instincts and get tricked by this article, rather than critically analyzing it.
Without education, the author wouldn't have been able to use 90% of the complex vocabulary uses throughout the article... It's almost ironic to read.
Sure there could be perverse incentives here and there that make the education system look bad, and it's definitely not perfect, and sure there's some unspoken learnings that teach people how to behave in society , but I'd argue that being at school is one of the most effective ways to make humans learn. How would you learn everything learned from age ~5 to 18 without teachers and peers?
I know a decent amount of linear algebra now. I took a linear algebra course in college; I retained almost none of it. I remember learning something about SVDs and eigenvectors; I don't remember how to do an SVD.
So how did I learn any linear algebra? I had to learn it in graduate school, where I was trying to model evolution as a Markov process. I looked up some stuff in Numerical Recipes, wrote some C classes implementing matrix exponentiation and other such things. That stuck.
School is useless.
How can you tell that undergrad knowledge didn't help you when you "looked up stuff in numerical recipes". In other words: would your younger self in high school be able to understand the stuff in Numerical Recipes, and able to write some C(++?) classes.
I know I wouldn't, and that undergrad education taught me some strong basics that would let me do it now. The end of class stuff where you take a toy example of how to use your learned basics such as calculating the SVD is just an attempt at giving some "real world" example which exercises the basics, and an attempt at grading you on this, and that can of little usefulness long term yeah, but the core concepts are useful if you pursue your education/career in a scientific path that requires those.
Yes, because my younger self used to read math books on the side for fun. This is also how I learned C.
While it is true that you may absorb some basic stuff from schooling, it is VERY thin. I was by all accounts an exemplary student, and I still retained a small fraction of what I learned. Meanwhile all of the real-world stuff I learned is still mostly there.
We would do much better to figure out how to integrate young people into real life earlier, like we used to - apprentice => journeyman => master. But we can't tolerate that, because adults need to be "maximizing productivity" or some garbage, and don't have time to train kids.
Hard pass. I doubt the author even believes this tripe; he's more likely to live in an "artificial" city than try to survive in the woods on berries.
And also education is based on punishing errors and consequently stifles real learning because we learn by erring.