One side effect of the current college system in the US is that it gives us a ruling class that has spent most of their formative years cut off from the real world, living in educational institutions (k-12 school, college, grad school) that teach them to think in a certain way.
It’s not just that colleges themselves shield people from the real world, but that the desire to get into college forces kids to spend their pre-college years cut off from the real world so they have enough time to study.
During these years of school and college, students are taught how to think. They learn to use math, to write persuasive essays, to extract knowledge from books, to write code. However, by keeping students in an artificial world of thought, they deprive students of the ability to learn through experience how the messy world actually works.
In the real world, most things that work in theory fail in practice. In the real world, your model usually fails to account for something important. In the real world progress comes from incremental improvements not perfect grand theories. In the real world the new ideas often turn out to be worse than the old ones, and history rarely follows a straight line. In the real world the task you’ve been given is often impossible or at best poorly specified. In the real world your data is usually wrong. In the real world, you’ll often do the right thing and still fail. In the real world the most persuasive arguments are often the most harmful. In the real world, it’s important to try out lots of things in the knowledge that most things you try won’t work.
I think it’s fair to say that our current colleges (and the educational stages that lead up to them) are producing people who aren’t good at dealing with the real world. We see this in declining mental health. We see it in the struggles new college grads face when they hit the workplace and struggle to deal with a world totally unlike what they have trained for. We see it in our politics, where everyone puts too much effort into trying to force their strongly-held beliefs on the whole country all at once, and far too little effort into trying out lots of little things to see what works.
It’s definitely possible for a country to have too little education, but it’s possible that right now we have too much. Or at least, we need an education system that allows people to learn the theory of how the world works without preventing them from also learning the practice. If I had a theory of how best to do this, that theory would probably be wrong, but I think we should try stuff out.
One side effect of the current college system in the US is that it gives us a ruling class that has spent most of their formative years cut off from the real world, living in educational institutions (k-12 school, college, grad school) that teach them to think in a certain way.
It’s not just that colleges themselves shield people from the real world, but that the desire to get into college forces kids to spend their pre-college years cut off from the real world so they have enough time to study.
During these years of school and college, students are taught how to think. They learn to use math, to write persuasive essays, to extract knowledge from books, to write code. However, by keeping students in an artificial world of thought, they deprive students of the ability to learn through experience how the messy world actually works.
In the real world, most things that work in theory fail in practice. In the real world, your model usually fails to account for something important. In the real world progress comes from incremental improvements not perfect grand theories. In the real world the new ideas often turn out to be worse than the old ones, and history rarely follows a straight line. In the real world the task you’ve been given is often impossible or at best poorly specified. In the real world your data is usually wrong. In the real world, you’ll often do the right thing and still fail. In the real world the most persuasive arguments are often the most harmful. In the real world, it’s important to try out lots of things in the knowledge that most things you try won’t work.
I think it’s fair to say that our current colleges (and the educational stages that lead up to them) are producing people who aren’t good at dealing with the real world. We see this in declining mental health. We see it in the struggles new college grads face when they hit the workplace and struggle to deal with a world totally unlike what they have trained for. We see it in our politics, where everyone puts too much effort into trying to force their strongly-held beliefs on the whole country all at once, and far too little effort into trying out lots of little things to see what works.
It’s definitely possible for a country to have too little education, but it’s possible that right now we have too much. Or at least, we need an education system that allows people to learn the theory of how the world works without preventing them from also learning the practice. If I had a theory of how best to do this, that theory would probably be wrong, but I think we should try stuff out.