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parrhesia  1yr ago (sotonye.substack.com)   2350 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.

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