It may come as a surprise to those who know me as the poster child of loving learning also despises the education system, but in the months since I’ve left high school, I can’t help but reflect on my journey in a nonpositive way.

This summer, I was lucky to be connected to the Teachable AI Lab at Georgia Tech, and conducted an independent study over the course of two months analyzing a cognitive modeling algorithm. I worked with high intensity deliverables, was constantly humbled for my questions but thoroughly encouraged by my PhD advisor and Masters’ coauthor, and conclusively, I learned more in those two months than I did through the majority of my senior year. It was that final realization that sparked a reflection on my interaction with the modern education system.

Modern education is like being taken to the world’s greatest restaurant and being forced to eat the menu. — Murray Gell-Mann, American theoretical physicist

baseline#

The goal of the current education system has many subcategories, which I’ve gleaned into the following two points:

• I think primarily, education currently serves to further knowledge. We can define knowledge as a set of facts stored in memory.
  • By proxy of studying and the process of lecture, activity, homework, and examination, it is true that in an ideal world we build subconscious talents for time management, critical thinking, logical reasoning, and bias analysis.
• The current education system also serves as a vehicle for social interaction: most social skills are built when we are young and through our constantly-evolving perceptions of, interactions with, and evaluations of other people. Additionally, education does currently serve as a bit of a daycare. People educate their kids because there’s nowhere else for the kids to go, and this pattern follows up until education becomes expensive.
  • It is also true that education builds a basic understanding of the world around us. We develop fundamental senses of morality, justice, empathy from conclusions about social interactions.

Generally, education can be thought of as furthering proficiency and independence in a set of skills, and (at least for the American school system) these skills have currently been chosen to promote independency and security under the American Dream. Indeed, most of the modern education system attributes its vestiges to education systems that took place during the Industrial Revolution. The goal was to cultivate efficient factory workers designed to conduct repetitive operations on a large scale.

And there is a much broader commentary to be had here about the individuality of education. Though the “learning styles” stuff is mostly a scam, there’s no denying that each human has completely different patterns of learning, explanations that make sense uniquely to them, and general styles that they would be more used to aggregating information in terms of.

pivot#

We’ve established that the goal of education is to further a set of skills. However, it’s my opinion that the most important parts about the modern education system are the lessons we take away from our first failure, the way we learn to manage our lives when we have three tests on the same day, the creative solutions we come up to for problems we’ve never seen before.

Therefore, rather than education teaching knowledge and students gaining soft skills as a proxy, I believe education should strengthen intelligence itself. These seems a broad claim, so we’ll start by defining what intelligence actually is - we know the vibes, but not necessarily the underlying formalization. I had many a conversation with my friends about defining intelligence, and best summarized it under the following two bullet points (thank you Sophie, Hope, Audrey!).

• Intelligence is the ability to aggregate and analyze experiences to produce novel thought.
• Intelligence is the capacity to come to know the truth.

I think both of these definitions are highly symbolic of the fact that we as humans are biased to attribute the vibes of intelligence to the vibes of deep and profound reflection, but I definitely enjoy both definitions (in fact, I started laughing at dinner because of how simple and elegant I found each of them to be). Additionally, both of these definitions are deeply rooted in the idea that intelligence is correlated to experience. Objective truth follows from a generalized interpretation of experiences, and a larger set of experiences makes generalization easier.

These two definitions corroborate the skills most crucial in the 21st century: in an age rapidly shaped by the rise of AI, the fast deployment of new technologies, and the societal pressure of a think-fast-move-faster industry, it is only natural that the ability to learn a skill is far superior to the skill itself. We should promote an education system that promotes the teaching the autonomy of learning rather than the practice of learning. The proxy of skills we learn from studying, homework, tests, etc. (the time management, critical thinking, etc.) is the skill we should be teaching firsthand.

Definitely, social interaction should be kept in the loop on education - it is by far my largest takeaway and still stands the test of time. However, in addition to building these social muscles, I believe the optimal education contains an important curricula of promoting independence in contributions to society. People should feel the deep desire to contribute to the intellectual evolution of the human race.

redesign + implications#

Now, the elephant in the room. Clearly, if the solution was that obvious, it should be true that implementing such a solution would also be obvious. But of course, education is a stagnant and largely bureaucratically driven system with many ties to the current government and economy. So it’s most likely that none of these changes will ever take place. I also recognize that as someone who’s just now left the current education system, my views are biased on my experience and don’t take into account coexistence with existing structures (in fact, my general view of a new education system revolves around a rewriting of our economy as not capitalist, but that’s another story).

However, I will make a couple conjectures as to what the “vibes” of an education system that fulfills the above pivot looks like. I hope that my ideas serve as catalyst for future education.

1. First, content should be diversified in the early stages of education, lest memorization become a primary focus. While memorization is important, it should never be used as a cop out to developing other skills in reasoning, critical thinking, and so much more.
2. I’m currently in a class called Discrete Math, and one thing I enjoy about the class’s teaching is that we are not only taught what tool to use and how to use it, but when to use it. Conscious contextualization of content is extremely positive to success, and having the intelligence to select the correct tools for the job is just as important as knowing how to use the correct tools for the job.
3. While some content is best taught in traditional settings, I believe versatility of providing information is incredibly valuable, as information acquisition is a fundamental skill that should be taught. Diversity of settings, instructions, methods all contribute towards increasing neuroplasticity.
4. There should be some fundamental desire for self-improvement taught early-on. Essentially, students should look at a thing they have produced and say, how can I make this better? Self-improvement does away with the concept of grades, as each student should (in an ideal world) be able to pace themselves for growth without the stress of grades, competition, or additional activities. Role-model-ship is important, but should be taught in a way that is conducive and not destructive to success.
5. Students should be introduced to social issues earlier (albeit in a more sensitive way) to spur the process of allowing them to decide what they want to change in the world. Many of my friends (and until recently, myself) had trouble selecting a niche for career, and having the self-motivation to pursue your dreams greatly helps with that.
6. Project-based learning is the best way to promote independence. It facilitates so many of the above points I’ve made, and I truly believe that given my prior experiences, I would not be who I was without the ability to pursue my own projects.

Again, this system is widely hand-wavy and there’s a lot to be formalized. I leave these thoughts here as a framework based on my high school reflection. I am grateful to have experienced education, but my biggest learning experiences were crashing and burning building a web scraper for the first time, watching Veritasium videos about entropy, and setting up Rube-Goldberg machines around my house and understanding the physics behind energy conservation. As I transitioned beyond the classroom, my project-based learning guided me to my successes, as did my sociability and the lessons I learned from school projects and extracurriculars that promoted unique and novel thought. Resolutely, I look forward to seeing my kids grow under a system that facilitates creativity and forward-thinking rather than solely focusing on rote-memorization and objective assessment.

postscript#

Apologies if this post is scatterbrained and disorganized - I struggled with finding the time to write this in one sitting and so some thoughts are quite half-baked. I wanted to put this out there to convey my opinion, but an addendum will be in order at some point. There are just simply so many more blog posts in store!

As always, if you’d like to discuss anything else, don’t hesitate to reach out! I am quite confident that my in-person takes will be better than online LOL.

- Karthik