
The Myth of Education - dorpy
http://expressiveegg.org/2018/12/15/the-myth-of-education/
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voxl
That's a lot of words without any evidence. I guess the learned are just
oppressing the creatives by demanding their arguments be evidence based and
logical? Another tiered competence that they just reject as a systematic way
to control?

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.

~~~
astazangasta
Interesting that you imply an equivalence between "evidence" and "education",
when in my experience education was rarely about learning evidence-based ways
of thinking and more about regurgitating a specific form.

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.

~~~
je42
> 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.

This not only applies to sciene... normal engineering teams have similar
problems.

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fhrow4484
> The purpose of education is also to prevent ordinary people from being able
> to communicate with each other.

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.

~~~
dorpy
You mean without _learning_. The ‘education’ presented in this article is
schooled education, not learning. People do learn in schools, but they do so
despite being there, not because of it.

~~~
fhrow4484
Yes, I disagree that education isn't good for learning though.

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?

~~~
astazangasta
School is not one of the most effective ways to make humans learn. It is one
of the LEAST effective ways. I will give you an example.

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.

~~~
fhrow4484
What you're describing is that you remembered something much better if you
have a use for it. It doesn't mean school isn't effective.

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.

~~~
astazangasta
>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.

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.

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powera
Reading through the prologue to the whole book, I get: Civilization is a sin;
knowledge is a fraud; religion is evil, money is evil, etc., etc.

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.

~~~
bjourne
Are you sure you get it?

------
nyc111
> The purpose of education is to socialise human beings into a life of
> complete institutional dependency. School teaches you that justice must come
> from someone in institutional authority, that meaningful activity must come
> from a ‘career path,’ that if you want to express yourself you must first
> gain access to centralised speech platforms,1 that if you want to do
> something, you must first of all gain a licence or a qualification and that,
> above all, your own desires and instincts are invalid.

And also education is based on punishing errors and consequently stifles real
learning because we learn by erring.

