How modern education has changed our thought process
In a lot of ways modern education actually puts anything and everything into arrangements. We can clearly observe a few examples in the index pages of almost all modern text books. Be it, psychology, trading, geography, history, geology or rocket science the text book initially takes the reader through the basic things of the domain and next comes a bit more complicated stuff based on the basics and then the reader advances to the rest of the complex advanced stuff. It is also very important to watch out that, Irrespective of the priority that has to be given to the “Most Important concepts” of the book , the text book begins with the most essential things that will be helpful for understanding the advanced and important concepts on the later stages of studying, understanding and exercising the domain. An appropriately chosen textbook puts forward a proper road map on where you are to where you want to be.
Based on IQ experiments by Alexander Luria that were conducted on isolated , remote villages in soviet union before WWII, the above mentioned case may not hold true for the pre-modern era, most people from the pre- modern era might just look for and run behind the most important things and eventually fail before realising and finding the essentials that will bring him his important stuff. In contrast, a person with a decent amount of exposure to the modern world is good at laying out a road map of where he is and where he wants to be by identifying and arranging the essential learning and accomplishments that will lead him through the course of his transformation.
Even the above mentioned case comes secondary to the major transition that modern education has bought into the people’s analytical thinking process. The foremost aspect that I see here is the way modern education has taught us to segregate everything into domains and sub-domains. Instead of looking at things bluntly as individual and whole, we can now differentiate things as domains like science, history, maths et cetera.
No modern person would ever bluntly call Archimedes principle or laws of gravitation as history (even though it was discovered and formulated centuries ago) or would deny Stonehenge , Taj Mahal or Humayun’s tomb as a historical significance(though it still exists).
In a nutshell, Modern education has taught us Classification for breaking things down into finer elements and arranging them in a way where essential learning leads us to the conceptual understanding of things with importance and significance and Clustering similar things together as domains and sub-domains. So that recognising new patterns, new domains, new environments, new situations and information are not just happening through brute force.
