https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_4RfHvGANPs
What I’d like to cover today is a topic that’s been requested by a few people. I know I have some teachers watching me or people are interested in education. So I’m going to cover that today. What is education and learning? So this is a difficult thing to talk about. A lot of people have sort of misconceptions about what learning is. I just recorded my Plato book seven, Allegory of the Cave, which is concerned with education and the desire for education. So I figured it would be a good opportunity to do this one now while it’s fresh in my mind about education. Now learning is not something that other people can do to you, which is not to say that other people aren’t involved in or in control of your learning. Those are separate things. I think this is where people get confused. We tend to compress the world, compress things down, reduce them to one thing. And we say, okay, well, education is really just going to school. And then other people point out, oh, we’re using the Prussian model of education. We’re not using Bismarck’s alteration of the Prussian model of education. Different topic. And therefore, it’s really just training for corporate life. That’s actually not quite correct enough to be useful. The best way to think about education is in terms of education versus training versus learning. Of course, I have a video on the difference between training and education. Those are two separate things. Training is wrapped up in rote memorization. It’s a certain type of, I don’t want to call it learning because I don’t think it’s learning. It’s a certain type of participation interaction in the world where you deeply proceduralize something and remember that procedure so that you can do it over and over again. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And it’s very useful. And memorization is used in education and learning for sure. However, that way of interacting with the world is not the same as education. Education is all about training your ability to think so that you don’t need to be trained. So it’s breaking out of the training box entirely. Now, the problem with that is that people assume that everybody is able to be educated. Now, in a sense, that is true. But in a very real sense, that’s completely wrong. Not everybody can be educated. Not everybody can be educated to a standard, more importantly, which is a big deal. And so if you want everybody to be educated, you have to bring the standard down lower and lower and lower because people have limitations. Now, you can bifurcate your education system. And I’d argue we’ve done that in the past 20 years in the United States. To the point where you’re sending kids with very different abilities to learn to the same place to learn, to be educated. Now, this results in having special classes for people with special needs. I was in special needs classes, by the way. So that’s not great, right? Because you’re breaking the efficiency of this so-called Prussian model. And I’m not going to say that whether that’s good or bad or we should stop doing it. That’s not what this is about, right? This is about to show you the limitations of assuming education is one thing and then it’s universal and that you can educate everybody to a standard. When you try that, you get this weird system where you have different people being educated at different rates within the same system to the same standard. And that is a mess. That’s what that is. That is a mess. Now, do I think education be reduced to like one thing? No, I kind of like the three and four tier model where you have sort of the slower kids, the middle kids, more advanced kids, and then the extremely advanced kids, the AP courses. The problem with that model is that it only works with lots of kids. You have to have middle schools and high schools with sizable numbers of children. Now, in some areas, this isn’t a problem even preferred because they’ve consolidated the schools and they’re just grabbing kids from everywhere. Now, of course, the problem is you have a long commute time. And the larger the school is, the harder it is to round everybody up and get them ready. And the longer it is between classes because more kids. So the scaling problem there, I’ve talked about the scaling problem before in this video. That’s an example of scaling problem. More children you have, the harder it is to get classes to run smoothly and tight. The advantage is you get to have more tiers of classes. So this idea of education is actually quite difficult to work out because it just turns out there isn’t a standard template of education that you should use everywhere. Now, we’ve been trying to do that in most countries, certainly in the United States, for years, decades, probably hundreds of years. This is a mistake. It’s a mistake. The best and most efficacious model for education is local because different communities have different sizes and different sizes require different approaches. And different communities have different needs, even if they’re the same size. This is a multivariate equation. It’s very difficult. You can’t work it out through centralized control. You need centralized control, right? But how you implement that control actually matters. Now, that may seem like a little bit of a tangent. I just wanted to give you a flavor for how difficult education is. You cannot make someone learn. You can’t do it. It’s not possible. If they don’t want to learn, they’re not going to learn. On the other hand, as an educator, you are responsible for giving people the tools to learn. These two things are not quite attached in the way that it seems. They do not have implications symmetrically in both directions. And there’s a third variable. If the child wants to learn, but you cannot give them the tools, maybe you don’t know what tools they need, or maybe you just don’t have a big enough school to give them access to those tools, your education of that particular child will fail. Coming to terms with this middle ground where there’s a bunch of people that you can’t reach because either your school is too small or your school is too big, because that happens to people get lost in the big schools, or the tools aren’t available for whatever reason, or your knowledge of what that child needs is not available, because that happens too. It’s a very messy situation. People don’t appreciate that. And I’m okay with that because it turns out education isn’t all it’s crap about. It turns out that there’s a lot of data suggesting that, effectively, if you’re in a free and open society where the trade is pretty free and available, there’s a high degree of capitalism. Yeah, I have a video on that. Of course I do. Then education does not correlate with monetary success, or any other measure of success, which is a little weird, except that it’s good news to some extent. Education isn’t that important. Now, the flip side to you can’t educate somebody who doesn’t want to learn is that you also can’t stop somebody from learning who does want to learn. So the want of learning is as important as the skill set to learn and the availability of learning. That is why I support libraries. I think libraries are the greatest thing in the whole universe. I miss older libraries with microfiche and card catalogs and all that stuff. I don’t like the internet. The internet is flooded with bad information, and it’s very hard to tell bad information from good information, especially when you’re learning. And so the learning or educational environment needs to be free from a flood of information. In other words, these things got to go completely. Because when you have an availability of lots of information, you then have lots of choices. The one thing you actually don’t want to give kids while they’re being educated, or even adults, are choices. I’m not saying you never give them that, but the process of education is the process of teaching them how to make good choices. In order to learn how to make good choices, you need to have a stable baseline for that learning. That stable baseline is the removal of choice. It is. It has to be. You have to start from no choice, get ground to stand on, before you can learn to make good versus bad choices. You’re teaching them two things. What a choice is, and how to value that choice. In the process of education is the process of learning how to make that choice, to go through that process of discerning the available options and deciding between the available options. If somebody can do that, they are educated. It’s that simple, but that’s not a simple thing. As I said, education is hugely complex, multivariate, extremely difficult to wrap your head around. It requires the cooperation of the person who does not have the education yet, or does not have proper or right education in the thing that you’re trying to educate them. So that’s worth going into. What do I mean? Well, reading, writing, and arithmetic, as they used to call it, I think those are the best three basic categories. You need to recognize that there are plenty of people, like a non-trivial percentage of the population, that will never be able to learn more than really good reading, writing, and arithmetic. The United States did amazingly well, and other countries too, but I know the United States the best because this is where I live, this is where I grew up. An amazing job of getting people reading, writing, arithmetic, and that causing a sea change in the flourishing of everybody in the country and of the country as a whole, as a unity. So that works, but there’s a limit to how many people you can train past those three categories. As you add categories for, I’m sorry, not train, educate, as you add categories for education, perhaps you have to diminish that education to mere training, and maybe that’s sufficient for a lot of things. I don’t know. Certainly seems that way. But the amount of people that are going to be able to be educated in further categories is going to diminish. I don’t know at what rate. I suspect it’s not linear though because nothing seems to be in nature. Just a guess. But it’s important to know education is not a simple thing. I’m not sure you’re so much imparting knowledge to people when you educate them. I think what you’re giving them is information and the ability to turn that information into knowledge. I think that’s how it works. I’m fairly sure I’ve covered this before in a video. That is really what you want to do. You want to give people the ability to create good knowledge in their heads so that they can rely on that knowledge in areas where it’s important because you can’t train everyone in all areas and you can’t train everyone up to the same standard. You can’t make an arbitrary high standard, but you can at least make everyone better, more educated. Except you can’t even do that. You can only make the ones whose interest you can grab or will have a natural interest already. And maybe that’s the best you can do. Maybe that’s all you need to do. I’ve had some really good educators in my past, including my English teacher, Mr. O’Rourke, who was great. His approach to teaching English was fantastic. We basically had a reading list. We’re going to read these books. You’d read a chapter and write a paper on it, basically a paragraph. Yeah, I think there were one paragraph. Maybe there were two paragraphs. Maybe it was one page. I forget. And his approach was to tell you right up front when you started the class, no one gets 100% of the time. That just doesn’t happen. I don’t give out hundreds if you’re expecting that to happen. You’re not smart enough yet. You’re not good enough yet. And you’re not going to be. All I ask is that you get better. And of course, that caused me to get at least three 100s in his class because you’re going to tell me that. So his reverse-sense was, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you, so his reverse psychology worked. Very clever man. He also did other clever things like wear a red sweater while we were reading Call of the Wild. If you haven’t read Call of the Wild or you don’t remember, the man in the red sweater plays a role in the book. And he was just that kind of guy. He was a great educator. And I’ve had quite a few really good teachers, actually. A lot of that was unlocked by me. Unfortunately, I have to state, and I don’t think I’m wrong about this, but I could be. I educated myself largely. I didn’t go to college. Most things I know I learned I found out on my own. I took the information that I got and turned it into knowledge of my own. I did my own vetting of that knowledge, right? Or fact checking is what we call it today. And I still do that now, right? I take in multiple perspectives and kind of figure out which ones I think are closest and then synthesize my own ideas and hope that they match someone else’s, who I respect. That’s how I do it. Not everybody can do that. In fact, I would say most people can’t do anything like that. But one of the downsides of education is we’re told that we can all be educated and that we can all be better educated than we are today. That can’t possibly be true either, by the way. And that we can continue our education and that also isn’t necessarily true. It might be true for a large number of people. It might even be true for the majority. I don’t know. But I doubt it’s true for more than 60% of the people anyway. So that’s not true either. It’s also not necessary though. Knowledge is not the be all end all of the world. I know we’re living in the age of gnosis where knowledge is very highly valued or perhaps the most valuable thing. But no. No. Training alone will get you a really long way in life. A really long way. You’d be surprised. Got to have some education for sure. Reading, writing, and arithmetic will do though. Really. They really will. In the United States, a lot of the self-made millionaires didn’t graduate from a college. In fact, most of the wealthiest people didn’t. A little backwards from what you might think. Capitalism is a good measure of success. It’s not the best measure, but it’s a good one. Good proxy for success. And I think it’s like half of the self-made millionaires in the United States don’t have a high school diploma. So education really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And that’s a good thing. We should try to educate more people more often. And we should try to understand those tools and where they apply and where they don’t. And we should try to get children the education that they need, recognizing that for certain things, yeah, it’s really important when and how you’re educated. And for certain things, it’s not. But also we need to consider that there are different types of education. And that you need training. And that has to be part of the curriculum of the school system. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like a bad Prussian model that we’ve inherited from bad people or something. No. It serves their corporate masters. That’s ridiculous. But also we need to understand there’s different ways in which we can teach people. Different types of learning. And there’s perhaps different types of knowing. And those need to be cultivated as well. And so education as the cultivation of knowledge is probably the easiest way to understand it. And when you’re young, the way to become educated is to play. Fairly in a fairly unrestricted fashion, right? Fairly unrestricted play. Jordan Pusion calls this rough and tumble play. I’m all for rough and tumble play. But imaginative play. And some kids are going to be more imaginative and some kids are going to be less imaginative. And you should probably make kids play together with other kids of similar age and older and younger. Because they need to learn how to get along in this world. That’s the most important style of education. And you can’t teach that in a classroom. Not that a classroom doesn’t play a role. It certainly does. It teaches you how to get along better in an ordered society. Super important. Super important. Super important to have a super ordered classroom. In neighborhoods where you don’t have that, you have worse outcomes. It correlates to the ordering of the classroom. Not to the income strata of the neighborhood. That’s in the data. No one’s told you that, I’m sure. But it’s there. You can’t do that. I did. It’s not that hard. You have to look for it. No one’s out there looking for that. Or maybe there are people now. But there weren’t when I first looked into this. Did a bunch of research. But ultimately nothing’s going to replace the desire to research. I love to research things. I don’t know why. It’s probably mental illness that I need medication for. But I don’t have any. So I guess I’ll just have to keep researching. But if you don’t want to do it, you won’t do a good job anyway. And maybe the most important thing for an educator is to find a place for a person who’s not fitting in to the education that you’re trying to give them. So that they can pursue their own education. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to find a place for a person who’s not fitting in to the education that you’re trying to give them. Their own education. Now, I hope that wasn’t too rambly. I hope it was helpful. I hope it sort of elucidates my feelings and thoughts on education as such. And if you’ve got questions or whatever, if you like this video, like and subscribe to the channel. If you’ve got questions, put a comment in. If you want to request more information on something I talked about in this video or any of my videos, let me know. I do take requests as best as I can. And I’ll do my best to elucidate whatever I can and shine a light on whatever topics you think I can shine a light on. I’m always very humble by the fact that anybody thinks that I can shine a light on anything for them. Because often I talk to people and I feel like they don’t understand anything I say at all. So I really appreciate the fact that you’re watching and that you’ve watched to the end. And thank you for your time and attention.