https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=T7VROgRBRi8

All right. What I’d like to talk about today is something that seems to be confusing to people. I want to talk about education. And there is a difference between education and training. And I think we have a deep confusion on the usage and meanings of these words. So education versus training. I don’t want to get too much into learning, which is linked into all of this, but modern education we tend to equivocate on quite a bit. So one of the things we talk about with education is we confuse education as a higher higher order education. In other words, college or higher ed with everything below it. Right. And we tend to divide it into two groups or sometimes people make high school a separate thing. But I think that the difference in what happens to you in school, say from first grade up to high school is minimal versus the jump from college. So when we talk about education in the United States and how bad it is, we can’t be talking about college or universities because colleges and universities are doing quite well. People from all over the world come to our wonderful colleges and universities because we do have some of the best in the world. In almost all the fields, so that’s not what they’re talking about. Whether they think so or not is a different a different issue. The problem isn’t in the higher education system. It isn’t with colleges and universities. The problem is that we believe that we are doing education at these lower grammar school, junior high and high school levels. Now, I will argue that there is a problem with college. College tends to be aimed at training more explicitly because you’re training for a particular degree. Right. And. Less at education as such, and I’m going to define them in a second. And the real problem is that you need education more than you need training. But in grammar school, junior high and high school, we’re doing a lot of training and we’re doing no education. So what do I mean? Like, what’s the difference between these two terms and why are we using education and not training when we seem to be talking about training? Well, right now. When we’re using the word education, we think that we’re talking about something around the idea of the ability to think better. A lot of people say, well, we have to teach critical thinking. Maybe that that’s that’s possible. But how do you do that? And I think one of the problems is you can’t really train directly critical thinking. It requires introspection. It requires all these other skills. Right. Like the the the willingness to question yourself, which is an ego deflation issue. Right. You can be careful with it. You don’t want to question yourself too much because then you’ll become unconfident and then you won’t be able to do things in the world. So there’s a lot of conflict around how we deal with these issues. Proper education, to my mind, has to involve participation. And it has to involve things that don’t have clear, concise, accurate, precise answers. Those things clear, accurate, concise and precise belong to training. Right. And the difference is the following. If you are educated, then you’re adaptable and able to exact the information that you have to new situations. Critical thinking is probably at least at a baseline available to you. Training is all about. Holding you up to a standard. So when you’re testing somebody on something, you are training them to adhere to the test, right, or to adhere to the whatever the test is pointing at. And like, fair enough, like, that’s definitely a thing. But what you’re not doing is educating people necessarily. The education is more like something where there’s an outcome, and as long as you get the right outcome, everyone’s happy. And then everybody can you do a different method to get that outcome, and it’s fine. Now, you can argue about that’s not appropriate, like in math, you always have to show your work. I tend to disagree with that attitude. I think there are times when you have to show your work for sure, but I don’t think you should always have to show your work because you’re arriving at the right answer, arriving at the right answer, and maybe you found a shortcut or way to do things that’s different from what the teacher knows about or expects. And that should be encouraged and not discouraged. So that’s my argument against showing your work all the time. There are times when you have to show your work, there are times you have to show competency in a certain way. But showing competency, you could argue competency is the one test of an education. And the only test for training is a test where you get a score. And when you’re being educated, there is no real score, I would say. And so I understand that there’s a bleed over and that some training involves just watching people. And this gets into John Vervicki’s propositional knowledge versus participatory knowledge. When you’re training, you’re using propositions and now you can measure stuff. You’re in the land of measurement. Fair enough. You get to measure stuff. So that’s what training is. You’re measuring your performance against a standard and you’re training against that standard, whatever it is. So if it’s a certain minimum score, the SATs have this, right? Oh, you’ve got an above average SAT score. OK, good. You’re above average in the training set, you know, according to the test. Fantastic. That’s wonderful. Very useful. But if you’re trying to teach somebody critical thinking, you can’t give somebody a test for that. That’s not possible. There is no such test. And that’s good to know. But also, the thing you really need to keep your eye on is, well, what sorts of things are more educational? The thing that I realized, fortunately, in my life, apparently, is that I when I was young, I went to boy scouts. I went to 4-H club. I did summer camp and I was involved in some summer programs at the private school I was at. Now, I didn’t get grades on any of that. Which doesn’t say I didn’t learn anything. So there was a lot of learning going on. Summer camp, for example, I took archery as a class. It was a class, right? But we’re outdoors firing arrows at targets. And it was my first time with archery and I scored high enough to not get the intro to archery sort of thing, but the mid tier. So two levels up because I was really good at archery. Probably not so good anymore. But. There’s no standard by which. Right, there were just levels of how good an archer you were. And so once you pass the basic level, you know, you call yourself an archer. And then in my case, I was a mid level archer because I scored high enough to be to qualify for that. But it’s not a standard to which you’re being held. Right. I mean, there is a certain minimum standard in that. Look, if you’re not going to hit the target, you really shouldn’t be messing around with bows and arrows because they’re dangerous. But beyond that, how good you are just dependent upon your score. Right. And the score wasn’t an A, B or C, right, or anything crazy like that. The score was the number of points you got in, you know, with the constraints of how many times you get to fire and how long it takes you and all these other constraints, how far away the targets are. There’s a bunch of constraints. So. That’s very different from holding you to a standard of an A. Right. And saying this is an absolute standard. And if you get this, you should be of a competence level of X. Right. That’s backwards. And that’s training. Whereas, again, education has more of this aspect where we’re going to see where it goes. Right. And so an education is something like learning the best way to tie down your shirt. Right. But the best way is not one way. It’s the best way for you. Right. Or learning how to raise a chicken. The best way to raise a chicken is a way that works for you. It’s not one way. You can make arguments about optimal ways and all that. And like, fair enough. But when you learn a system, a structure with a scoring system that’s pegged to a standard, heavily pegged to a standard direct relationship, we’ll say discrete linear relationship. You can’t necessarily accept that information out as easily to other things. Whereas with things where you get an education, you’re learning about yourself and you’re learning about the world and you’re participating. So this goes back to, again, practice versus participatory knowledge. Education is something you participate in. Training is something that you that you get by proposition. And again, there’s some bleed over, so I don’t want to draw a hard line here. But I think it’s important that we understand that. And then why is this important? Well, because. Something like nerd culture arises from the worship of knowledge. And knowledge is the highest value, and because they know things, they can do things, which obviously doesn’t always work. The smartest people in the world are not the ones doing all the stuff or even the best stuff. And some of the smartest people aren’t doing any stuff. They’re just writing papers. I’m not saying that that’s valueless, but they’re not doing stuff like writing a paper does not do anything. It may inspire people to do things. It may be very useful, maybe the most important paper ever written. But if it’s not read, it has no impact. So it has to be read and acted upon and acted upon by an agent that is competent. And so that’s important. So if you’re worshiping knowledge, you’re looking at this proposition is going, oh, juicy, yummy propositions. That’s great. That’s the rise in nerd culture. But. The important part is whether or not you can learn new things, not what you know now today. And that’s the failure of nerd culture, which you know everything about Star Trek. You’re a good Star Trek nerd until they make more Star Trek. And of course, eventually they did. There’s an end to your knowledge. And like, that’s the highest score. That’s your A plus. Right. But, you know, when you’re when you’re out there learning things by by participating in them, doing them, there’s always more to learn. There’s different aspects. There’s different ways of interacting. And all of that, I would argue, is acceptable. Now, there was a change in the education system in the United States. The big problem is not that they removed religion from schools, although I would argue that’s a big problem. They didn’t just remove religion from schools. They removed gym. They removed recess. They removed music and they removed art all at the same time. These are all participations. So you can say, oh, look, there’s a war on religion and they removed it from the schools on purpose and deliberately. Maybe I can I can totally sympathize with that position, but it’s a bigger war and it wasn’t a war on mere religion. And I’m going to say that a little flippantly. It was it was a war on participatory knowledge, knowing how to do things in the world, knowing how to get around the world, knowing how to affect change in the world, knowing how to get things done that matter in the world. So that’s a big problem, because now what you have are a bunch of robots. You have a bunch of people who don’t know how to do things and they’re very easy to control. So that, I think, is the bigger and more scandalous story, not just taking religion out of schools, although still a big deal. And once you realize the magnitude of that, they’re building robots, they’re building human robots who can’t participate. That may sound a little conspiratorial. I don’t think it was deliberate. I think it was this worship of epistemology, of knowledge as such as the highest thing. Then we have to get that knowledge into people. So what do we do? We need to know if it’s landing. We have to test for it. Turns everything into a proposition. So there’s that propositional tyranny aspect that John Vervecky talks about. I think that’s my favorite frame, but it’s a it’s a good it’s a good it’s a good frame. But what you’re doing is you’re teaching quantity and education teaches quality and quality can improve indefinitely because it’s on an infinite spectrum, roughly speaking, whereas quantity is not. Quantity always has an ending. Otherwise, it’s not useful because you can’t grade people A, B and C if you don’t have a 100 percent standard to grade against. So that’s the difference. And that’s what people are missing when they’re talking about education. They tend to be talking about not colleges and universities, at least not in the US, and they tend to be talking about things that actually are more like training. And at the same time that we’ve sort of elevated training in the schools, we’ve taken away the vocations, right? The vocational schools, the trade schools, they’ve been taken away. And yet, if you look who makes more money, especially coming out of school tradespeople, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, they make more money coming out of school and they spend less time in it because they’re learning something practical in the world that moves the world. And people need to have the world moved because they don’t want to live in nature. Fair enough. I don’t live in nature. You might have noticed I have Internet and cameras and fancy microphones and very expensive computers, lots of monitors. I’m not taking this outside. It’s staying indoors. And I will hire an electrician. Thank you very much. And if he makes one hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year, good for him. And if that’s more than the engineer that has five years work experience and graduated five years ago and has been working ever since, so be it. I should tell you something about where the value in the world is, right? Because at the end of the day, people got to eat, people got to have electricity so they can be warm. They got to have houses, right? They got to have indoor plumbing. All these things help a lot. So that’s who’s moving the world. The people with the quality of moving the world who exact their skills, they have more value. And we’ve placed this value on the training because we’re trying to measure knowledge and knowledge isn’t well measured by propositions. And you can’t do without propositions. I’m not saying you have to choose. I’m saying that your primary concern should be on quality, not quantity, on participation in the world, not on propositions of the world. Propositions are descriptive, right? And participation is not descriptive. It’s a living action with the world. And that’s much more important. And that’s much more educational. When you interact with the world, it’s more educational than when you talk about the world or dissect the world or think about the world in terms of description. I don’t need to know the description of the things in the room to interact with the room. I can just walk into the room, observe them and act appropriately. You can always put anything into propositions, which is where we fool ourselves. So the fact that we can do it means that’s the way the world is. But that’s not true. That’s just a representation. So this focus on knowledge, on epistemology is the highest value. This focus on the need to educate people, which, look, I mean, I agree, has forced us to put it into training. And I think that’s bad. We don’t want to train people so much as we want to educate them. And in our rush to make sure they were all educated and educated in a certain fashion, which I disagree with, we have turned education into training and made it dead, dead to the people who are engaged in it. And I think that’s really where my complaint is. And when we don’t understand that difference, we failed to see why the education system in the US is failing us. And that’s why. And if you have a college and university system that’s dependent upon the money coming in, they’re going to lower their standards. And then our standards for education at that level, I would argue, have already gone down and will continue to go down the more they need bodies and cater to bodies rather than filtering people out and elevating their own status and the status of the people that graduate from their institutions. So that’s my little bit on education and training and the differences. I hope that was clear. Please leave comments, likes, subscribes, whatever. And, you know, I just want to take the time to thank you for watching this video and any of my others. I hope you engage with all of my content because I think it’s good. That’s why I put all the time into it. And I know the hopefully lighting is getting better. Hopefully the sound is getting better, right? Probably editing hasn’t hasn’t gotten better, but that’s OK. It’s good enough. And, you know, it’s important to me to have you here watching this. Let’s me know that I’m getting a message across and I just want to thank you for your time.