Education: the informal transmission of information through society
A thought exercise on how societies are created and why they need to transmit information
What is education and how are societies formed? Is education important for our survival or is it just a privilege that a select few have? Let us explore these questions with a thought exercise, shall we?
Say you and I end up on a remote tropical island and we are completely lost and isolated. It’s more Hunger Games and less workcation.
The island looks uncannily like the one below. It is beautiful and immense and we have all the resources we need; unfortunately, to our dismay, we are locked in and have no way to safely leave the island. It is safe to say we are left to our own devices, for now.
To make this thought exercise less abstract, let us add pictures and a description of you and me!
This is you. You are a pasta and cheese connoisseur, love to do carpentry, read books, watch TV, and occasionally code to make money. You speak English.
This is me. I love Dru from Despicable Me, get excited about fruits and vegetables, cannot swim to save my life, love trees, and know everything about boats. I know nothing about English. I watched a dubbed version of Despicable Me in a different language.
We are both incredibly capable but very different. We do not speak the same language, have the same beliefs, eat the same food, or even have the same skills. We have to find a way to reconcile at least some of these differences in order for us to share the island. We might initially avoid each other but eventually, we realize we are not self-sufficient. This means we have to interact in some capacity.
You know how to chop wood, start a fire, and make pasta with exotic cheese. Unfortunately for us, we do not have any pasta or cheese on the island. However, we do have an abundance of fruits and vegetables. I know which fruits and vegetables are edible and which are poisonous. Without you, I would have no house or fire and without me, you would have no food. Both are necessary in order for us to survive.
Over time, however, I might slowly start learning how to cut wood by watching you and we might be able to build a boat. You can now catch fish. You might learn which fruits and vegetables are edible and what you should avoid. This is the first sign of an information exchange happening on our island of two. We might also slowly start establishing lines of communication with each other: we could use signs and symbols, drawings, words, and sounds that are familiar to both of us and have the same meaning. This is the start of a new language or dialect forming on our little island. Without knowing it, we are creating norms or patterns of behavior that are appropriate when we interact with each other.
And suddenly…
There is a shipwreck and we have 20 new people joining our island.
Unfortunately, they too have no way of leaving this island.Creating A Society
What does it take to create a new society?
Arriving on this island, our 20 new residents are also deeply unaware of the differences they need to reconcile. Their languages are different, their customs are different, and they have varying priorities and needs. However, they too have no way to communicate these dissimilarities. This is a problem you and I experienced when we first arrived on this island as well. Eventually, if they recognize that you and I have been on the island longer, they might try to communicate with us. They might even adopt our makeshift new language or some of our customs. It is also equally possible that they do not interact or are actively hostile towards us.
If there is no trust, then conflict is likely.
These first interactions within our new group are more important than ever; a sense of trust needs to be cultivated. They need to trust each other, they need to trust us and we need to trust them. If there is no trust, then conflict is imminent. It is also completely possible that this integration is seamless. At least, seamless to an extent.
However, now, with the added threat to our safety, we also have socio-economic problems. If the new community is cooperative and friendly, we need to teach them the ropes. This includes creating a new sustainable supply of food for everyone, finding new sources of water, providing shelter, creating a mechanism for protection against potential threats (both internal and external), establishing a sense of community to create a cohesive and harmonized society, a system to divide the work to provide those basic necessities and rules to govern our new society to maintain the peace and stabilize the system that we are putting in place. In addition to all of this, we might also need to adapt to a new language that grows out of our new community. This is a lot of work. It is also work that is both top-down and bottom-up.
If you and I are deemed in charge of our new community, we will need to figure out how everything works together. However, even if you and I are in charge, we are not the only ones making the rules. The rules emerge as a constant interaction between each individual’s needs and desires and the structures we collectively decide to create. If a structure does not support the community, we need to iterate. If we create a new rule that nobody understands, we will need to communicate differently. If rules are not followed, we will need to figure out what the consequences are. These rules and social norms will eventually form the basis of law and order in our society and these norms will need to be taught. This teaching is also a form of education.
Rules emerge as a constant interaction between each individual’s needs and desires and the structures we create.
When the first children are born on our island, they will be taught the norms of our culture. This will include our language, our culture, our work ethic, the jobs that are normal or needed here, how to navigate conflict, what the rules are, etc.
So… what does this have to do with education?
When children are born into a community, they are taught the norms of the society they are growing into; this is a form of informal education. Informal education is any education that happens outside of the classroom or any other formal setting.
Observation is also a form of learning.
If this information was lost or not provided, each generation would have to experience the process of reconciling everything with their environment; therefore, transmitting and sharing information is a basic survival need where children are conditioned to function within their environment. If this conditioning does not take place, children will still learn from their communities through observation. Observation is also a form of learning.
This form of information sharing across generations allows us to take the best of what our previous generation has accomplished, learn from their mistakes, and adapt that with newer knowledge so that we are better able to navigate the future. It also eliminates the need for each generation to go through this process of discovery over and over again.
This learning and transmission of information across generations is a form of education. It just is not formally taught in a classroom because it was never necessary to do so.
So what?
We are constantly educating each other on how to think, behave, interact, speak, co-exist, individualize, work, study, everything. We are constantly transmitting and sharing ideas with each other. These ideas are incredibly powerful because they create the basis of the structures we have. They define what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. The right and wrong create morality and morality creates informal policing and established laws.
The structures that often get established as a result of the social norms endorse hierarchies as a way to maintain the structures. In our thought exercise, you and I were the guardians of that hierarchy on the island. However, over time, well-intentioned structures create potentially bad actors. Well-intentioned structures might also be so structurally sound that they are difficult to evolve past when the structures themselves become obsolete.
So a new question arises through this exploration: When do we know when a system is obsolete and if we are perpetuating and educating with ideas from an old system?
