Marius_Manola

Why Teaching Can Prevent Learning A framework for redesigning education in the 21st century

Isn't it rather amusing how uncontroversial and common claiming that "education is wrong and inefficient" has become? Still... isn't it a big concern when people scream from the top of their lungs about a certain problem, yet nothing gets fixed? After all, it's absurd and pessimistic to think that societal problems aren't solvable, it might be just that we don't have the right knowledge to solve them yet... But how can it be the case, when it feels as if countless resources have gone into changing education and yet we still complain about it. Maybe, like in many cases, the crowd is simply wrong... What if education is good enough the way it is? Could it be that children are simply too lazy? Learning is, as they say, supposed to be hard! Or is it? It's hard to tell whether these questions really yield any clear responses. Which question should we follow first? Which one is epistemically more useful? You'd be circling around what the current system does and play within its own framework.

I think, due to how old these institutions are, and how much they have infiltrated our culture simply through existing for centuries (where we now see schooling as a given right, as something that has always existed), the assumptions presented by the educational system about what learning is have become so deeply ingrained in our brains that we take most of them for granted. Answering most of the above questions would therefore entail bringing in assumptions from the very educational system we are trying to examine. I therefore think the best way to understand the state of things is by starting from first principles and, to the extent we can, thinking about what Education Is In Itself! What is the objective of schooling?

Let us assume that the core reason schools exist is to educate pupils [1] (although you can argue that's not their primary function). Education in its broader definition is the deliberate attempt to help the subject develop knowledge.

<Throughout this essay I'll be referring to knowledge in the broader definition that David Deutsch offers as information with causal properties>

To make it even simpler, education is the environment which facilitates the acquisition of knowledge. That encompasses all tools, methods and external agents (what schooling attempts to be if we take its core purpose that of educating).

The process through which the acquisition of knowledge happens at an individual level is called learning. It's not an external process to be controlled, but rather an internal one where the subject's understanding of the world shifts and adapts so that it can better predict the future.

Education is the environment which facilitates the learning process, and although it cannot control how each individual acquires knowledge, it can create the premises that speed up and strengthen that process. It therefore follows that Education (the environment which includes all the tools, methods, agents; teachers, classrooms, curriculum) is downstream of learning, and a way to improve it is by building upon the principles of whatever learning entails.

Learning Is Model Change...

you didn't get into yc? No problem, now you can just talk to pg. made this for fun

There's basically so much educational content out there, that you could argue there's no need for AI to "generate" lessons, when it could just restructure existing ones.

Some make it the case that you need "personalised education" for everything, but it's not at all clear that's the solution. For deeply technical things, you have to explain them from the ground up, and that can't be personalised in n ways...

I thought about making a tool that can search for videos based on context, and jump to the specific moment in the video that you needed. So for the past couple of days I've been working on notclass. We focus mostly on university lectures and long form podcasts, because most of the time valuable information is skipped due to the sheer length of such clips.

Try it and let me know what you think.

P.S. It is 100% free, no registration required, and I intend to keep it that way.