It’s the How in Education That’s Wrong

A learning’s utility comes from how you learned to think about a thing, far more than the specific thing you learned.

It is those unlabeled internal mechanisms you use to navigate problems that map universally to many other areas of life.

But this is not a blanket argument for “the value of education despite it looking useless”, it is a statement about the 𝒉𝒐𝒘.

The education system doesn’t lack utility because its subjects are often detached from reality (they are), but because they teach people to think about those subjects in reductionist, disconnected form.

It’s not that 99.9% of people will never directly use the math they “learned”; this is irrelevant. It’s that they learned to do math in a ridiculous fashion, and thus there is little universal mapping to real world situations. The education was never really there.

The problem isn’t with the topics; all topics share the same core universal patterns. The problem is with the mindless steps we tell others to follow.

The 𝒉𝒐𝒘 in education is wrong.