The Importance of Self-Education

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about, I did absolutely no research and this is my own opinion based on really nothing. So keep that in mind before you criticize.

Humans are built to learn.

From the second we are born until the second we die, our brains constantly seek to understand our environment and form patterns which will help us survive.

If you examine your own life, you will discover this learning happening constantly. Even if you do nothing but watch TV all day, you will notice that you start to pick up on some of the characters habits. Kinda like the time I binge-watched The Sopranos and tawked like dis for a good few months, kapish?

Point is, your mind constantly integrates what you see and hear with the model that you have and this is considered learning.

So what is the difference between the learning that mind just does, and education?

The answer is intuitive and simple. Learning is information being passed to the subconscious and education is learning that gets filtered by the conscious mind before getting “learned” by the subconscious.

The importance of this filter is that without it, you just get slammed with information, sometimes information that is inaccurate or straight up bad for you.

This filter is called “Education”.

It is the difference between a raw dump of data and a nicely formatted infographic.

This is all simple fact, no hiddush. Everyone knows this.

However, there is another level of refinement that is not so obvious.

How many people proclaim that the traditional schooling system is broken? Many. But how many solutions are there to fix it? Not as many.

I believe that at the root of the education system is a lie that is so powerful that we all believe it’s true.

The biggest lie that our educational system supports is that all learning is good learning.

This is exactly the opposite of the intuitive fact that we hashed out above.

As I said earlier, education is the filtering of useful information from raw information. Our education system is only one step removed from this in that it gives a direction to the information that is being presented by the world.

But is that all, do we just need a direction? I think we need a lot more than that. I think what it takes to achieve true learning is the realization that some of the information that is getting passed on is bad or useless.

The only level that this would have any meaningful effect is in the individual.

Our schools are run as a one way model. You listen to our information. You take our tests. We say if you are doing good or bad.

What is actually happening is almost the same as a person just observing the world. You are intaking information and integrating it with your model.

The thing is, since we are trained to listen and not question the validity of this system, what ends up happening is that we never learn to put on the filter of self-education in our lives. Instead, we learn to rely on the school, or the news, or the boss to tell us how to filter.

What we need to foster in ourselves and our children is the inherent wrongness of knowing. We don’t “know” anything. We integrate. We test our theory. Then we accept or reject the information.

In my opinion, modern day America trains people to accept information without questioning and that is the fundamental problem of our education system.

If we had built a system that revolved around discovering information and focusing on building our models better as opposed holding up the information on a pedestal and forcing people to conform, I think we would be moving forward as opposed to stagnating like we are now.

But there is good news. We have the Internet.

The simple reality is that we don’t really need school anymore. All the information that can be passed in a classroom can be passed much more efficiently through a computer screen. I believe the move towards online education is inevitable. Getting together with other people will be just a side feature of the learning process, and that too will happen online eventually.

The move online should have been done years ago by the people, but it hasn’t. Why not?

I believe the reason why is that we are ingrained with a receiving culture of learning as opposed to a taking culture. What that means is that we’ve been trained to listen, to sit and just be quiet or you get thrown out.

Real learning happens when you are taking information and ripping it out of the world and stuffing it into your model.

Question Reality. The information you are hearing is almost certainly inaccurate on some scale. In order to truly understand the information, you need to find what’s wrong with it. Self-education is about proving your model wrong. It’s about taking information out of the world in front of you by interrogating it like an FBI agent.

Never Stop Learning.