Why do we need education?
Education is a complex institution. There are social, economic and political factors influencing education’s consumption that are not accounted for. Environmental differences create disparities in learning abilities of students.
What is education supposed to be?
The shaping of individuals is done in the family and in the many social structures they exist within. In order to maximise efficiency in developing humans, enabling them to fit into society, a large part of their development is delegated to formal institutions designed for this purpose. These are schools and colleges and universities. Since ancient times, children are taught different activities in these schools.
What is the common perception of a school? It is a place where children learn to read, write, do mathematics, and learn general information. What is special about the school is that these activities are not possibly learnt, or are expected to be learnt, in the daily travails of life. As you go through life, working on your farm, or your business, or hunting, you don’t expect to learn to read, write, do math, know how many planets there are in the solar system. Why not? Because these things aren’t involved in those activities as explicitly. But in a transition of society to a more complex, esoteric system with a lot of coding of information and the development of nuanced social systems and institutions-of government, trade, law, science, etc., it becomes necessary to know how to read and write and navigate the new formality. What about math? Well, math is necessary everywhere-counting your sheep, counting how many sheep you lent someone, how long your sheep will live, how long it takes for a sheep to go from one end of the grazing land to another and how much is the speed of the jackal relative to that of the sheep. Knowledge systems are developed for a purpose. Division of labour and innovation make some knowledge systems predominant in social systems. Therefore, everyone in those systems must be included within the fold of those knowledge systems to benefit from them.
Now, you don’t have a rough count in your head, about your sheep and their relative speeds. You have data, and measurements, and equations, that will help a large enterprise build an efficient system, even though this is useless to a small farmer, who would rather rely on his own intuition, honed over years of experience and observation.
But guess what? The large enterprise, the market-they’re more efficient than the small farmer and his barter economy. It has higher prosperity. And therefore, it is in the farmer’s interest to send his son to school, so that he can learn this new voodoo and become ‘educated’ so that he can belong to these formal systems.
Now, the son may learn equations, but he may miss learning how to do important calculations that his father made-about the sheep’s ways of moving, the sheep’s angular momentum, and so much more. He may well be less efficient in doing this.
Now, suppose the boy doesn’t get a job in the big city and comes back to work on his father’s farm and doesn’t understand the things his father needs him to know. Of what use was his education? None at all. What a waste of time and money. Who cares about algebra and geometry? You can’t calculate speeds when the jackal is chasing your sheep. You need to act in the moment. Can you create models and then use them to estimate probabilities in jackal attacks? That might be helpful. But if you can develop a model that’s both simple and effective, then your father probably did it. He just didn’t formalise it with math-its there at the back of his head, like his understanding of what to do when the bark of a tree you’re chopping starts cracking the wrong way-you need to recalibrate the force and angle with which you’re using your axe. But if you did use your knowledge of math to help stop carnivores eating your wool-producing sheep, it was in fact worth it to send you to school. But man, which school teaches children this stuff?
What did the son successfully learn in this school? He learnt to apply mathematical frameworks in real life, and improve efficiency. Math is the most powerful of the frameworks, arguably. That’s one of the things you learn in school.
Then there’s other stuff-languages. You learn how to communicate in a particular language, a paeticlar dialect, write a particular script,, so that you can exchange information in that language.
Then there’s what we all thing learning is actually about-fact. We learn facts. The sun rises in the east. The water in your town’s pond is crowded with organisms you cannot see, so is the air around you. There is a reason apples fall on people’s head and don’t go shooting into the sky.
Then there’s what we think is the most important thing to learn-skill. Its not just about knowing how to calculate the squares of the first 10 digits, its knowing them by heart and doing calculations in a jiffy. Its not just knowing that a computer exists, its knowing how to make one or use one. Its not just knowing how to play the piano, or write an essay, or brush your teeth, its being able to do the tasks well, at least as well as you’re expected to.
Then we come back to frameworks-imagined institutions that humans create for the sake of efficiency. Few of these are created consciously, most are created through collaborative efforts between human individuals and entities over time. The narratives that are most efficient become large, strong and more and more complex with nuance. To be inducted into a social system, one must learn how to operate within these frameworks, and therefore learn about them. That’s one of the things they teach you at school-the law, the political structure of society, how to make a trade deal, what an invoice looks like, etc.
There’s way too much information out there. What do you want your kid to learn? Whatever brings the most value to you and your child. What kind of value are we talking?
It depends on what you value. Do you value material prosperity and social status? Most people do. Some value religious adherence, national pride and other stuff. What you value determines what you want your children to be prepared for, and in turn determines what the hell you want them learning in school.
We, hyper-privileged, post-European Enlightenment, anglicized, urbanised, post-digital revolution modernized free thinking liberals, when we get the chance to clear our muddled and haphazard and hypocritically uncritical minds, will realise that we want to foster human consciousness and enhance human capabilities. That’s what we want society to look like. So, we want everyone to be so educated that they can harness material prosperity, social status and human consciousness, all at the same time. We want everyone to have at least enough of each of these. Education usually isn’t alone in making the first two possible, though it plays an important role. I argue that education can’t do the job alone because it is not done right.
If we teach people what they need to know in order to join our social systems and become efficient agents in the political and economic spheres of their societies and evolve social systems to more fluid and rational bodies, then they will do these.
Where we fail is in preventing esoterism from creating disparities. We have needless knowledge authorities and power gaps, and therefore the perpetuation of class inequalities, which are furthered by the development of jargon.
For the sake of efficiency, everyone cannot learn everything. But most people can learn most things. The current phenomenon on YouTube proves that- influencers, many of whom are technical experts in their domains, can provide insights to a mass audience in a palatable form that are potentially useful and help upgrade their understanding of the world. It is a shame that most of humanity cannot read academic literature, when it should be able to.
Why don’t people engage with ‘tough’ content that is foundational for our civilisation-treatises, research findings, theoretical constructs, philosophical reflections? Because they don’t have the time and the intellectual capacity to engage with it, even if it is accessible. The lack of accessibility is the most pernicious issue-many don’t know, or barely know, how to read and/or write and so cannot engage with the matter. Those who can, are too caught up in life and its inefficient paths and contours, to devote time and mind space to interesting and useful information, and generally nourish their intellect.
You don’t need a society of thinkers and reflectors, but you do need a society of well-informed rationalists, not constrained by lack of ability. We need to do our best, therefore, to make knowledge, skills, ideas and instruments more accessible and palatable.
Once we do that, people can hold institutions accountable, and they can engage with them efficiently. Solutions will be far clearer. Civic engagement will be higher, so will innovation. People will probably not take to the streets for a Marxist revolution on pot, but they will probably vote better, understand medicine, government bureaucracies, geography and climate, economic phenomena better, and will probably have better options for jobs-knowing what kind of work they should learn to do, being able to learn it and then getting the opportunity to do it. With effective education, we can solve dire problems, perhaps not the direst-like deeply rooted conflicts and destitution rates, but we will get closer to doing what we should be doing about them.
When we think of a more educated society, we shouldn’t think of a higher proportion of university graduates-that is a means to the end, and it doesn’t always meet the end. We need a society where people can rationalise, where they are not trapped by whatever information and narratives their surroundings give them, and where they can understand their own emotions and motivations and those of others and choose logic as the path to navigate through the messy fields of life. A more educated society is a society closer to have such a populace.
