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parrhesia  1yr ago (sotonye.substack.com)   2349 thread views

Most Education is Wasteful and Immoral

sotonye.substack.com

SS: I make a case for drastically cutting back on education. I argue that education doesn’t achieve its desired goals. The material is irrelevant and students forget much of the material. Most information taught in schools is quickly accessible with a smartphone. Education might be warranted if it boosted cognitive ability but it appears to be increasing IQ scores rather than actual ability to think.

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I agree. There's a difference between education and schooling. You don't need to go to school to educate yourself, and most of what a school concerns about is not education.

In particular in the area of information technology we don't bother remembering anything, we develop technologies like wikipedia.org and stackoverflow.com so that relevant information is easily available and retrievable by anyone. No education needed.

If any kills are necessary to learn are those of logic, reasoning and skepticism, otherwise everything else one learns might not be learned properly. Unfortunately I don't see anyone interested in learning these skills, they all believe they already know what they need to know, and no evidence of the contrary would convince them otherwise.

Which why I don't think you will manage to persuade many people. Either they already understand why modern education is not working, or they don't.

I’m probably unpopular here in suggesting that knowing facts about a topic vastly increases the ability to think about that topic and to draw conclusions based on context and new information.

If I know facts about Ukraine, I can use those facts to understand things going on in the country. I know where the minerals are, what their major industries are, and the geography, I can come to guess on the objectives and strategies of the Russian invasion. I might be able to understand the strategy. If I know nothing, I can’t understand it until I learn the facts to give me something to think about.

In particular in the area of information technology we don't bother remembering anything, we develop technologies like wikipedia.org and stackoverflow.com so that relevant information is easily available and retrievable by anyone. No education needed.

Are you saying that Wikipedia does away with the need to memorise information in the area of information technology or of memorising information in general? If the latter I strongly disagree.

Wikipedia is an instance of MediaWiki, but there's many types of wikis. They were created precisely for people to write and avoid memorizing.

So you can disagree, but they were created, people use them, and they work.

They're brilliant resources I won't disagree. But I don't think Wikipedia is good enough to do away with the need to memorise historical facts to the point where someone relying solely on it won't be severely limited.

If someone is misrepresenting history to you, you won't become aware that something is wrong in the first place unless you've got a stock of historical knowledge already built up in your mind (Wikipedia is a decent way to do this, but we're back to memorising information here).

Now you can double check everything you hear on Wikipedia, but even that labour intensive act can't help you find analogous information which won't be considered relevant enough to be included in the same Wikipedia page, but which may be very relevant to the discussion at hand.

But I don't think Wikipedia is good enough to do away with the need to memorise historical facts to the point where someone relying solely on it won't be severely limited.

This is a false dilemma. You can use Wikipedia to avoid memorizing certain facts, like the year WWII started, and other stuff you happen to remember.

There's many historical fact that I do remember, but I remember because I keep talking about them, and I keep looking them up. I'm not memorizing them, I just happen to remember them.

People can’t reason without knowledge. The educated man is a knowledgable man.

You don't need education to gain knowledge. And you don't need to go to a school to be educated.

But it helps.

Knowledge is a form of education even if self taught.

No, it's not. A person can gain knowledge with zero education. They are independent.

A person who gains knowledge outside of formal institutions is still educated, albeit self educated.

That's not what the word education means. A person has to be teaching.

One receives education, one doesn't read it.

By the way that comment contradicts your second comment on this sub thread.

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/self–educated

By the way that comment contradicts your second comment on this sub thread.

No it doesn't.

  1. You can be educated in a school

  2. You can be educated in your home (private teacher or family teacher)

  3. You can learn by yourself by just reading book (no one educates you)

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/self–educated

Yes, dictionaries list many words people don't actually use, and that don't make sense. So?

If you look at online trends, everyone says self-taught of autodidact, not self-educated.

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