We all know confidently incorrect people. People displaying dunning-kruger. The majority of those people have low education and without someone giving them objectively true feedback on their opinions through their developmental years, they start to believe everything they think is true even without evidence.
Memorizing facts, dates, and formulas aren’t what necessarily makes someone intelligent. It’s the ability to second guess yourself and have an appropriate amount of confidence relative to your knowledge that is a sign of intelligence.
I could be wrong though.
Education, done correctly, doesn’t teach you what to think but how to think.
Expanding on this, it shows you some basic options/pathways on how to think.
For me it was more like learning how other people think. Like, I took an accounting class as an elective and while it didn’t make me an accountant but it helped me understand accountants.
Memorizing data doesn’t make one smarter… but learning concepts absolutely does.
The classic, “we’ll never need this in adult life” is math like Pythagoras’ theorem, or factoring binomial equations (remember FOIL?). We don’t learn that math because it’s practical for adult life… we learn that math so that grown ass adults don’t think someone using algebra is performing black magic.
Seems silly… but it’s just like how many folks never learned past middle school biology and now think XX&XY are the only chromosomal possibilities.
Education packs you with group of people so your instinct wants you to live in community and puts a boss ( teacher ) above you, because they want you to become a factory worker in capitalistic world. Poor animals are we.
Education existed before capitalism. Or are you going to tell me that Socrates was an industrial shill?
I am sorry I didn’t know that Socrates invented packing couple hundred of people in the same building to teach them something.
i think you have a narrow view of what education is. this is subjective but my view of education is that it’s an emergent property; as long as there’s different individuals that know different skills, natural networks will form of people teaching to anyone that wants to learn.
whether it’s institutions with professors teaching about quantum physics and brain surgery, to herds of dinosaurs teaching groups of young their migration paths and dangers to avoid; it’s all within my personal concept of what education is
I am a flight instructor. I had to study the fundamentals of instruction to earn that title, so I believe I can speak with some authority on this subject.
When discussing facts, figures and such, we consider four levels of learning. The easiest, fastest and most useless is rote memorization. Rote memorization is the ability to simply parrot a learned phrase. This is fast and easy to achieve, and fast and easy to test for, so it’s what schools are highly geared toward doing.
An example from flight school: A small child, a parrot, and some Barbie dolls could be taught that “convective” means thunderstorms. When a meteorologist says the word “convective” it’s basically a euphemism for thunderstorms. You’ve probably already memorized this by rote. You would correctly answer this question on the knowledge test:
Which weather phenomenon is a result of convective activity?
A. Upslope Fog
B. Thunderstorms
C. Stratus Clouds
Okay, what should a pilot do about thunderstorms? Are they bad? What about a thunderstorm is bad? A student who can answer those questions, who can explain that thunderstorms contain strong turbulence and winds that can break the airplane or throw it out of control have reached the Understanding level.
Problem: Sitting in the classroom talking about something is NOT flying a plane. I’ve had students who can explain why thunderstorms are dangerous fly right toward an anvil-shaped cloud without a care in the world, because they didn’t recognize a thunderstorm when they saw one. Living in a forest, people around here don’t get a good look at them from the side; the sky just turns grey and it rains a lot and there’s bright flashes and booming noises. If you can get a good look at one, it’s a tremendously tall cloud that flattens out way up high and tends to have a bit that sticks out like the horn on an anvil. Even in the clear air under that horn you’ll get severe turbulence. A student that can identify a thunderstorm and steers to avoid it can Apply their knowledge, and have thus reached the Application level.
It’s a sign that you’re ready for your checkride if, upon getting a weather briefing that includes convective activity, the student makes wise command decisions to either reschedule the flight for a day of safer weather, or for isolated storms plots a route that steers to the safe side of the weather and plans for contingencies such as turning back or diverting to alternates. A student that alters his navigational choices based on weather forecasts has reached the correlation level.
It’s difficult to go beyond the understanding level in a classroom with textbooks and paper tests, which is too much of what K-12 and college is like.
I agree, and hopefully this will help put things into perspective.
Theory is not a substitute for experience.
So here’s how I liken education. I’ve been an instructor at the Naval Engineering School so have a bit of experience in the subject.
First thing to learn is “facts” by rote memorization and then parrot it back. If you can do that you have learned something which is not unimportant and is an important base for the next step.
Then you learn how to apply those facts to help you in a specific set of situations. This is a very small hop above the previous step, but an important one, as now you know how to solve a narrow set of problems in a specific set of circumstances.
Unfortunately, this is where a lot of education ends because this is the easiest level to test. To go beyond this, you as an instructor must inspire the students.
The third level is when you take the facts you know and the situations to apply them and start modifying them to fit new novel situations. This now requires active thinking on the part of the student and will likely result in a lot of mistakes and suffering but this is where the instructor can gently guide them along and nurture their curiosity and keep their spirits up when they fail.
Next level is an important one, when the student starts to ask, “why does this work this way in this situation and this way in this situation”? That is the start of true wisdom.
And the final level of education is when you go back and try to teach the subject. That is when you truly open yourself up to learning.
Depth of Knowledge levels aren’t meant to be progressed through linearly, but a way to assess tasks. One student’s mind might turn on at level three, but not at level one. Another might crumble at level 3 even if they’ve performed level 1 and 2 exceptionally.
That first student will, having been inspired by the nature of the question, go back and learn the basics. They need to be given material that supports that activity. The second student needs to know how to chunk and connect their previous tasks to the new one.
Great educators can personalize this work for each student and meet them where they are at. They can leverage technologies to do so and express sincere belief in students in a way no technology can.
A healthy level of skepticism, both of other people’s ideas and of one’s own, is a sign of great intelligence.
Unfortunately this also gets abused by some people who believe they have a healthy level of skepticism, but actually are way off the deep end. Like anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, and other anti-science people.
So “healthy” in this context shouldn’t be defined by the individual.
Skepticism doesn’t necessarily entail outright rejection of something. Like, I could be skeptical about vaccines and their side effects, but still get the vaccine because it is the best option available to me right now.
It’s good to be skeptical about vaccines or a round earth. Then you investigate and find out that vaccines work and the earth is a pseudosphere.
Skeptical doesn’t have to mean that you straight up deny everything. It only means that you do not blindly believe it. That’s how science is actually suppose to mean. The best way to prove a scientific theory is trying to disprove it as hard as you can.
Memorization have importance. We, as a species, are as intelligent as primitive cavemen. Our brains haven’t changed that much since those times.
What allows us to be different, to have a prosper civilization, is the information we have stored. Much of that information is stored in our brains.
Critical thinking is of great importance. Of course. But let’s not dismiss the ability to store that critical information.
Memory is often used as a facade to demonstrate intelligence that lacks thinking, though.
If we define intelligence by the development of the brain’s abilities, memorization is one of those abilities. Then, great memorization would be, per se, a feat of intelligence.
That seems somewhat circular to me. Sure, if you define it that narrowly.
