Education must go beyond the mere production of words
ncregister.com
ncregister.com
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
I’ve never been an arts person and I’ve been a very, very logical person, so it’s very odd to me to realize that my answer to this is: poetry.
More and more these days I look for ways to both reason with and frame the world and current events. I’ve followed years and years of people putting forth logic and reason as explanations. But my moments of peace are when I find those perfect words written in some distant past, making me feel connected with others by a timeless dimension
The world of beauty, art, peace, feeling states is worthy of discovery and like you say, it has a timeless quality.
I've come to realize that the the past ~80 years since the first nuke, the only world nearly all of us have ever known, was a major outlier. Nukes prevented direct conflict between major powers and digital tech alone was more than enough to drive economic progress, regardless of how dumb our decisions may have been on relations or economics. Those times, on both accounts, are effectively over. And so the chaos and uncertainty of this brave new world we're now living in isn't, in fact, new. Rather it's the world that humanity has lived in for the overwhelming majority of its existence. And we're now simply returning to the world that these great works were written in and for, and they've become more relevant than ever.
I personally perceive a decoupling all over the board. Not just in language. You hear terms like "wage stagnation" or "degree inflation". Just choose an area. They're all detachments from the true thing they represented.
A person generally cannot effectively, fluently, convincingly regurgitate an argument without understanding it, and the act of memorizing a variety of different positions primes the brain to handle all of them with greater depth and adroitness. Mill greatly underestimates the power and benefits of memorization.
I think most people would agree that memorization and a standarized 'one-size-fits-all' approach are inferior to teaching methods that are (onstensibly) creative, 'active,' and individualized.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. It's a false dichotomy. All learning -- all -- starts from and depends upon memorization. Is that its only the goal? Obviously not, but memorization gets a bad rap because it's viewed, incorrectly, as contrary to or in competition with more active, creative intellectual enterprises.
They run variations, twists and traps, on recalled openings and duel and fool by creating and breaking expectations.
In line with a number of other activities rote core skills and reflexes are foundational but not all, they're essential to practice and to dealing with situations where they don't fit but can be bent to purpose.
This is a good example because a test of one's understanding is "do you know how to make the opponent pay for varying from the standard opening?"
For a beginner, the answer is no.
This is why Stratego, or various grand/large chess variants, or Chess960 needs to have replaced standard chess yesterday.
Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use.
Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.
His argument was: you cannot memorize algebra, you have to understand. Students who are failing in college do so because they do not understand the fundamentals, and try to memorize enough to succeed - not realizing that the effort needs to go somewhere else.
Rule 1 of memorization is "do not [memorize] if you do not understand". [1] (Note: that source uses the word "learn" instead of "memorize", but to me the word learn means come to understand.)
There is a role for memorization and rote repetition, but it is not the foundation of understanding.
They listen in class, then read the text and notes you posted, then watch a Youtube explaination, then ask Chat, then ask you questions ... anything to avoid trying to do a few practice questions where they might make a mistake.
It's like watching people try to learn to play basketball when they are afraid of shooting hoops in case they miss a shot. So they watch videos or read books to really understand how to shoot hoops. And then fail miserably when they are tested.
OK, you could argue that exercises build a type of understanding, and listening to explanations builds a different type of understanding, and the former is more useful, but people don't understand that.
I've never met a math student who tried to pass algebra by memorizing anything. I'm not even sure what a students would memorize in an effort to pass the class.
Confusion between words and reality has been an important aspect of all human cultures since there were words. It's one of two traditional forms of magic found everywhere. (The other being sympathetic magic.) Think about what it means to say "knock on wood".
I used to think I was outsmarting "the system" by only learning a few key facts about X and then twisting them around to get advantages and disadvantages, but little did I know that was the whole point of the course — to see the same thing from different perspectives and realize there are both advantages and disadvantages to X.
My experience (with myself and my kids) has been the opposite.
My creativity would be way less if I hadn't spent hours listening to others music. I think it applies to less fun/interesting things as well.
Daniel Dennett talked about this model of consciousness. Something similar could be replicated by AI's own self-play style reasoning. It could sharpen its own drafts. As new data points become available, the drafts could be extended, shelved, or reformulated. AI could make these notes on its own reasoning available for others for inspection and course-correction and avoiding local-minima. Common objections need not be raised by layman, AI can incorporate those by itselfs. The true feedback quality can only come from experts in their domain. Implications are what role do normal non-experts have when AI can do most of mid-to-expert level thinking on its own. Hopefully it could help students reach expert level faster.
It's curious that most game shows require a vast knowledge of useless trivia rather than reasoning skills.
'all you anti-medical compound people who keep crack illegal and it's use limited are stifling medical progress'
Wanting to approach LLMs with intention and thought is not inherently 'technophobic'.
There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject.
I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my kids doing some of the same A level subjects, and the GCSE teaching my kids friends got compared with their learning (they were out of school from late primary until after GCSEs) .There is a lot of "you do not need to know it for the exam". Memorising standard answers and definitions. Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it. Discouraging extra reading as a distraction from the exams.
I am not claiming its a new problem, but its an ever-present one that is getting worse at the moment. its the exact opposite of what you need in a world where facts are accessible and explanations are often misleading.
The only bias here is people disliking memorization. It takes effort and has concrete right and wrong answers so you can fail in a way that doesn’t happen with skills. But disliking something doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong.
There have been classes I’ve taken where ~half of the evaluation is brute memorizing dates/event names. Ive also taken classes (machine design) where the majority of the evaluation is open book and about solving problems. Most classes land somewhere in the middle.
I think there is a bias towards memorization-based testing because it’s easy. Coming up with trivia questions is easy. Grading those answers is easy. A students can’t complain about marks when they get a date wrong.
Coming up with problem solving questions is hard. Grading them is ambiguous. Students will complain that their mark should be higher. Everything is harder.
If the testing is memorization based, students will get good at memorizing facts and spitting them out on the test. If the test is problems solving, students will optimize for that.
I was able to do the math to solve quantum mechanics problems. But I didn't understand QM.
And if anything, it’s inversely correlated with at least the “education” in the West today, which is primarily an incentive ladder where the more “education”, i.e., system approved indoctrination you have, the less incentive or motivation you have to question it at all.
In many ways, we are witness to that behavior pattern in the Department of War and our whole government right now, where yet another generation of people in the military are supporting and perpetrating war crimes, while the incentive structure shields and protects them.
We can even see today that those the system fears the most, those people who start asking questions and are financially outside of that incentive ladder, the system attacks most aggressively. That has also never changed. If the system does not attack you, you know you are not actually over the target in any way.
It’s not really a new phenomenon or really fundamentally any different than aristocratic incentives to remain loyal to the king to curry favor, but the AI component introduces a whole different dynamic and in my view will even start aggressively going after any kind of knowledge or information that the system does not control, very much like how Orwell envisioned in 1984 or somewhat as envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The question I cannot find an answer to is; why wouldn’t it do that, especially since we are already seeing the groups and interests that have long undermined free speech even in the USA, only get more aggressive in their attack on free speech from all angles?
So if you have books and information of fact the system will definitely come to not like at one point or another, you may want to keep quiet about that future contraband.
There is nothing in the trajectory and the system that would give me the impression that it wants anyone to “ask the right questions” especially not the “educated ones”. Their job within the system is to ask the acceptable questions within the guardrails, and they are conditioned/trained to do that and self-police in that way.
He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
There's a meme, "Why develop one's own expertise? It's a poor investment. When you need it, you can hire it." Does AI make us all trust-fund kids?
An intro-physics educator at a first-tier university, observes that their entering students, having attended such well-funded schools, with such highly-skilled teachers, presenting material so clearly... widely lack both the skills and inclination to wrestle with a body of knowledge to extract their own understanding. To the detriment of their early-college education. The sci-ed snark version is, raising all students to the level of these, would be both an unimaginably immense triumph, and an ongoing profound failing to teach well. Will AI give everyone material presented so clearly?
More rough-quantitative reasoning? Fermi questions. Especially if done by collaborative iterative bounding "Who can suggest another soft/hard upper/lower bound? ... What do you think of that argument?"
In contrast to a plug-and-chug theme, illustrated by an ideal gas law problem in a popular textbook, which despite years of use, and qc passes for multiple editions, has numbers for solid Argon. Reality checking, a feel for reasonable values, a "Is this approximation plausible here?", being pervasively "not on the exam".
I know some of it is the result of the incremental way we teach, such that there isn't any meaningful use of this step until it's combined with others. Still, students can only find the amount of fence required for a field before concluding that it does not in fact matter.
This worries me about how we approach teaching rough-quantitative reasoning. It's widely thought of great importance for expertise. But even when there seems outlier opportunity (a first-tier institution emphasizing teaching, a dedicated class, for non-freshman, in physics), the questions... "Calculate how long to cook a turkey for, without reading the label or googling?" Really? Getting to a clear payoff may require a broader scope, or a different emphasis, or a reimagining.
> isn't any meaningful use of this step until it's combined with others
A kindergarten science educator suggests their students have a human right to understand their physical world then, not a lifetime (for them) later. Intriguing to think what that might look like as a goal... at any level.
Science education research, like teachers, is focused on the possible. Existing students, with existing resources, and constraints, and objective metrics. There's little incentive to stack counterfactuals: what if my incoming students had been taught A successfully, and B and C successfully, then done together, they enable D, and oh wow. Not when we're struggling to manage even one with any consistency. Disaster-triage chain-of-care doesn't encourage funding of population heath research. Especially when the possibility space is so little explored, that we don't even have a vision of what an E and F might look like. A incentive bootstrap challenge.
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.
It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.
Nobody can really blame you for the impression you got/get from the Novus Ordo Missae.
However, that’s not really what Mass was like for the laity for most of the past 1,000 years (much longer actually, but the history of Western Catholic liturgy is complex so I’ll leave it at that). It was mostly a context for silent mental prayer that, ideally, (1) is informed by the sanctoral/seasonal calendar, (2) prepares the worshippers to join themselves spiritually to the sacrifice offered on the altar by the priest, (3) prepares them to receive Jesus in Holy Communion.
You can experience the same today at the Traditional Latin Mass. The difference in atmosphere can be rather shocking if all you’ve ever experienced is the N.O. A lot of newcomers, who are also lifelong Catholics, relate a feeling of not knowing what to do with themselves throughout the liturgy — well, you’re supposed to cultivate your interior life, spend the 60-90 minutes actually praying instead of just rattling off verbal responses and warbling out bad hymns.
Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes.
In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has become the universal norm. In between the responses of the laity and for a stretch of time surrounding the consecration, there is time for interior/silent prayer by the laity. The laity’s posture changes from sitting, to standing, to kneeling many times throughout. On the whole, the flow of the liturgy is marked by outward verbal and postural activity of the laity punctuating the span of 45 minutes. That is by design, and is supposed to be conducive to so called “active participation”. Now, and this is important, if that N.O. Mass was offered entirely in Latin and the laity in attendance knew and spoke all the responses in Latin, it really wouldn’t change “the way it goes”.
At TLM Low Mass for the same ferial day, the laity would kneel after the priest begins the prayers at the foot of the altar, and some might change their posture to/from sitting a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, while others would kneel the entire time per their preference. No responses are offered by the laity, only by the altar server/s assisting the priest. The priest faces the same direction as the people the entire time, except when distributing Holy Communion to them, that is toward the altar, a.k.a. ad orientem because classically that would be eastward. Much of the text of the Mass is prayed sotto voce by the priest, i.e. it’s inaudible or barely audible by those in attendance. On the whole, the liturgy is marked by near silence and the laity in attendance joining their silent prayers to the quiet actions of the priest at the altar.
My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.
EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.
Totally agree, that is how it should be.
Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
Everyone can swing a hammer after they get home from work if swinging the hammer is virtuous.
Is that true? I do not know about the US, but in the UK skilled people who work with their hands out earn many who work in offices, find it easier to be self employed, and have greater job security.
Office work, however, lends itself to scaling, so earning potential is always more. Swinging hammers is great, but owning the business that hires the people who swings hammers is going to allow you to earn more, because it can scale. But you’re right back to office work.
Boom and bust in something like construction, true, but what about something like plumbing? its not cyclical because so much of the work is repairs and maintenance. On the other hand there are lots of white collar jobs that are cyclical.
We have had a huge strike in the UK (specifically at the largest local authority in Europe) because bin men's pay (not basic pay - it was a bit more complex) was reduced to bring them in line with teaching assistants (because of a court ruling that it was discriminatory to pay mostly male bin men more than mostly female teaching assistant).
Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work well before 2008. The influx of East Europeans slowed it down, but did not reverse the trend.
"Pay" is not a scalar measure, it is a vector with multiple components. Roughly speaking, pay is short for "pay to quality of life at work ratio". Which incorporates everything a person thinks about when choosing what to sell, including volatility of pay, what coworkers will be like, possibility of injury, commute time, the weather and conditions you will be working in, potential upward movement, potential for harassment at work, location of work, potential of finding a spouse with xyz characteristics, etc.
Swinging hammers or plumbing or whatever can strictly pay more, but not may not be sufficient to incentivize people to choose to do them over being paid less in an office. Pay someone 300,000 GBP per year to do 40 hours per week of plumbing working, and the UK would have plenty of plumbers, and parents would be recommending their kids to become plumbers. But if the differential is only 10,000 GBP? Maybe not worth it.
The double problem, is that groups who historically were lower class, successfully realized they could grift by building really low quality houses nationwide. Now, the atrophy in skills in literally any kind of blue collar work means that even garbage shit "plumbers" or "electricians", etc are successfully charging at least 150+ an hour in rural west virgina just to do very basic work. I got quoted 500 USD to change an ANODE ROD in my water heater. Every single fucking contractor I get ALWAYS goes to home depot and finds illegal immigrants to do the labor THEY should be doing for peanuts, is verbally abusive to them while they are doing the real work, and exploits them. All because the market allows and radically rewards this.
So unironically most workers in construction and many other trades have been a significant part of the decline in QoL in this country, and especially in causing housing inflation.
> The profession of priesthood is basically one of words.
As above, a lot more to it. Lots of time spent on pastoral work.
> Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
So? That does not prevent it from being a part of being a Catholic of being a priest.
The cost of shop class. The region where I grew up abandoned shop class and orchestra as the tax base declined due to industry moving to the South. Meanwhile, my mom taught CS at an extension campus of a state university, and her students were getting high paying jobs as programmers after one year of instruction.
For the last century, a lot of jobs have shifted from making stuff (food, goods, etc.) to providing services. So education has shifted to that and soft skills are now important. You can use a calculator if you need some numbers. It's fine if you don't do that in your head. You study something comparatively niche and useless and then you become a manager, consultant, marketing expert, or whatever that has very little connection to what you studied (history, antropology, whatever). The important skills that were taught are critical thinking, communicating, etc. Ironically, a lot of people with backgrounds like that are reverting to doing things with their hands in the end. Our cities are full of coffee shops, bakeries, jewellery makers, restaurants, etc. run by people with college degrees.
Modern AI driven technology is undoing the industrial revolution and creating a new one. The industrial revolution was all about uniformity and centralization to drive economies of scale. That meant people had to have the same baseline of skills so they could do the simple jobs that they were assigned to do. The smarter ones got promoted up. And you could build a lot with many people doing simple things like that. The bigger the company, the more money it made.
With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. You don't need a big company around you. That actually slows you down. The old services industry ran on soft skills. This new way of manufacturing runs on hard skills. And because its AI assisted you can do more at a small scale. Provided you understand what needs doing. Companies can be small, hyper specialized, and derive value from that. Their customers are other companies. Together they resemble what a pre-industrial revolution town would look like. Lots of specialists trades and shops all working together to produce wealth for the town. Instead of doing everything inside one big company, you now have complex clusters of companies, individuals, contractors, etc. working together.
Education has to focus on teaching people how to function in a world like that. It has to teach them not just one skill or trade but how to be able to adapt and combine different skills.
54% of adults lack proficiency in literacy
Public schools have failed to “educate”
It means "school paid for by taxes", which, as a European is probably the sort of school you attended
Private school is a school you have to pay to attend
The distinction between public and and private that British English historically had was useful too. State school is more accurate too (its distinguishing characteristic is state control and funding).
I also think the old (probably a century ago, or decades ago) "privately education" is a far more accurate description of what is now called "home education" in the UK and, even less accurately, "home schooling" in the US).
I can't find any data that supports this causal assertion, and I can find plenty that contradicts the premise that US literacy rates have reduced since compulsory education began.
Citation?
But I think this is a good thing.
Yes, the goal of shop class was manufacturing competency, but it was probably taught by someone that extolled craftsmanship and attention-to-detail rather than drilling efficiency. A hobbyist wood-worker, not a retired factory foreman. The former approach would clearly have been more transferrable and less brittle.
So I think instilling adaptability is already pretty well baked-in to how most teachers automatically push students towards higher-level skills and meaning instead of tightly coupling to policy mandates.
I assure you, you cannot.
Go ahead and make a USB A-B cable from scratch. A 30-year-old product that retails for $2 so hardly 'advanced manufacturing'.
There are lots of HN commenters who dislike formal education. Many of them seem to admire people who dropped out of school but became wealthy without earning a degree, like Zuckerberg, Gates and so on
Greg Brockman of OpenAI is another college dropout
Also, Pangram says 100% AI generated (some sections with high confidence): https://www.pangram.com/history/af8d47c1-dcbd-48ed-83a8-eda6...