Did Pink Floyd get it right when they said that ‘We don’t need no education?’
We have heard the quip from Pink Floyd 'We don't need no education' in the song Another brick in the wall. We have also heard Albert Einstein say that 'Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.' What about education and schooling makes these well-respected and intelligent people question it? What about education that we have gotten wrong in today's time.
While a United Nations study shows that the global poverty rate could be more than halved if all adults completed secondary school, data show high out-of-school rates in many countries, making it likely that education completion levels will remain well below that target for generations. Studies have shown that education has direct and indirect impacts on economic growth and poverty. It provides skills that boost employment opportunities and incomes while helping to protect from socio-economic vulnerabilities. An equitable expansion of education is likely to reduce inequality, lifting the poorest from the bottom of the ladder.
I want to clarify that the subject of this blog post is more connected to reimagining education. In middle-class societies worldwide, we don't look at education as purely a means to an end. People from the middle class don't study to meet water, food, shelter, and clothes. They do it for self-esteem, network, and social reputation. When we seek these things, the knowledge, and skills that are the backbone of education take a back seat. We get cancel-culture and lamentations by Einstein and Pink Floyd on the shortcomings of education. Just as powerful as education is right now in terms of lifting people out of poverty, imagine how much more powerful it would be had it been something that got the approval of Einstein?
I come from a very academic background, studying in one of the top 10 Science and engineering schools in the country where I did my Bachelors in Electronics and Masters in Science(Physics). So, I acknowledge the privilege that allowed me the opportunity to get to that position. I have been fascinated by Physics since childhood. I spent a lot of time reading Encyclopedia Brittanica in my high school library before the advent of the internet. I was intrigued because it said how the world worked, how the planets revolved around the sun, and how two marbles interacted when they bumped into one another. I would read on and on, even if I didn't understand much. But I enjoyed physics more because I could see it in action. When I used to water my garden, I would spray the water high up and be thrilled with how it formed rainbows how the tennis ball bounced differently on clay courts vs. synthetic courts(I never played on Grass). Electronics didn't fascinate me much as they seemed too far removed from my grasp. It was mind-boggling that tiny chips that one could design allowed the computer on which we read this to function, but all the moving parts were hard to envision. It certainly is a wonder that the internet works. Still, for me, it pales in comparison to the wonder of the color of the sky during sunset or beauty of fractal patterns in a snowflake, or the colorful bubbles one can spot in the bathtub. In my case, experiencing it firsthand was what instilled a sense of wonder.
As wonderfully elucidated in the book Education: A very short introduction where a bulk of this blog post is inspired from, the Latin root of the word 'education' is in educere, translating to something close to 'bringing out' — to cultivation, a nurturing, of inner talents and skills. Also, quick shoutout to my physics professor Dr. Rishkesh Vaidya for talking about it in his lecture and for kindling my interest in this topic! However, When I was in college, most of the other professors seemed keener to get us to learn theorems and dictate its proof rather than bring us to discover the proofs for ourselves. My experience in college made me appreciate the two divergent lines of thought about education: should we be telling students facts and ideas and telling them to learn them, or should we be encouraging them to discover knowledge for themselves? Most formal education systems seem to be built around the former, whereas my constitution was more suited to the latter. But I don't think I am the only one. I prefer learning that is child-centered rather than subject-centered. Kindergarten's (meaning children's gardens) are designed around project-based learnings instead of curriculum-based learnings. I was fortunate to have found a professor who rekindled my curiosity in physics while I was in college(the same professor mentioned above). However, you are still part of an institution, subject to those processes. I found power in the phrase 'Hey teacher, leave them, kids, alone!" in the song by Pink Floyd. I'd often nod my head when they equated education to thought control.
For formalists, learning is, sadly, a hard slog. No pain, no gain. They contend that it is just a fact of life that there are some things that you need to learn the hard way. There is complex information that we need to know to which there is no easy route. For example, if you want to learn to write, you need to understand how language is put together; you need to know the glue that binds sentences — the rules for making language work. This isn't easy, say the formalists, and you don't 'discover' it.
For progressives, on the other hand, learning is natural; it's happening all the time, and it's what humans are programmed for. Children learn to talk, for example, without any teaching at all. Progressive educators say that this learning of language provides us with a lesson: it shows that we are almost hard-wired for complex learning — it comes easily if the circumstances for its acquisition are right. Education is about supporting the ability to think critically for the progressives: it should be child-centered and focused on problem-solving.
No-holds-barred progressivism is at one end — one could perhaps put here a school such as Summerhill, where the students are obliged only to follow student-made rules. Ivan Illich in Deschooling society advocates for informal and decentralized networks instead of institutions. While institutions inevitably reserve power for the professional elite, networks are non-hierarchical: they foster autonomy, freedom, and self-worth. Nobody, he argues, should have the right to dictate to anybody else what and when they should learn. Most learning, Illich argues, occurs outside school, and many people can effectively teach us things. But schools and the education system more widely are constantly attempting to assert their monopoly over teaching and learning.
Strict formalism is at the other; maybe some of the Islamic madrassas, which focus exclusively on learning scriptures, could be put here. In between are many schools, which draw from both sets of understandings.
When did education become more or less compulsory in the western world? What forces drove the same? Fundamentally we are told Individuals (and organizations) can fundamentally make decisions out of love or fear. In Britain, one can take a case study about Forster's Act in 1870, which mandated education for all children up to 10 in Britain. Before this legislation, school attendance was not compulsory, and only about half of the population attended schools. But we know from comments made in Parliament at the time that the new law in 1870 was passed not out of a feeling that the populace needed to have its mind opened; the stimulus came neither from the love of learning nor from a desire to awaken in the consciousness of the workers the glories of antiquity or the marvels revealed by science.
Nothing so noble. Instead, the stimulus came from a worry about the nation and its empire losing out because of the lack of a workforce with basic education. Both the USA and Prussia had already provided free, compulsory elementary education and the Americans were, as the 20th century began, even providing universal secondary schooling.
Shifting to a motivation driven from love and a child-centered education might be more fruitful in the long for humanity. As chronicled in my earlier blog post, most people act on motivated reasoning and find evidence to support their belief system. Once that initial moral judgment has been made, we use reasoning to back it up, not reject, the judgment. Suppose we have a skewed education system with entrenched incentives, and we don't let people make the discoveries for themselves. In that case, it will be harder for the population to recognize and call bullshit, hence entering the world of alternative facts and flat-earthers. They are able to accomplish this because of their appeal to the sense of authority rather than discovery. With the advent of the internet, you can always find someone who is an authority to back up your beliefs rather than discover the truth for yourself.
As the social historian, G. M. Trevelyan (1978) put the issue some time ago,
‘Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.’
With the advent of the internet, the world's knowledge is only a fingertip away. So, if learning was all you were interested in, you could accomplish a lot with the internet, but if you cannot distinguish what is worth reading, you can fall prey to algorithms that want you to continue to be bricks in the wall.
Allegiance to an' ism becomes tribal so that one's time was spent arguing against the rival' ism(formalism vs. progressivism) rather than constructively striving to face actual problems and real needs. We should strive to pass on the traditions of human thinking while teaching new generations how to engage critically with those traditions.
From Plato's Academy to today's schools, some key questions have remained unresolved. Should schools principally pass on knowledge and skills to a new generation? If so, which knowledge and which skills? Or should they emphasize the transmission of a culture's manners, habits, and traditions? Should education be about encouraging compliance with a society's existing ideas and norms, or should it concern the promotion of a questioning, challenging, free-thinking disposition?
Many leading thinkers have proposed that education can be thought of more broadly as a part of 'conversation of mankind,' wherein teachers induct their students into that conversation by teaching them how to participate in the dialogue — how to hear the 'voices' of previous generations while cultivating their unique voices.
The political case for school has firmly centered around 'standards' and 'outcomes,' with an ever-burgeoning array of tests to assess students' performance in employability skills. Rarely do we hear politicians talking about schools failing in their duty to help children become critical thinkers. How do we sustain democracies if people cannot discern facts from alternative facts?
A friend of mine told me that the ego introduces a toxin in our minds while on a truth-seeking journey. The more we seek only to confirm our beliefs, the more we do long-term harm to ourselves and the society we live in. Before school, it's the environment we create at home, and our interaction, the amount of quality time we devote to our kids, and the stimuli we provide, serve as the primary and first education of a child. Do you want to teach a sense of discovery or rely upon authority as your primary medium of teaching? Do you want your child to be merely employable when they grow up, or do you also want them to be critical thinkers who hear voices of previous generations(helping to avoid mistakes those generations did) while cultivating their unique voice?
