Learning is how we develop understanding. We can learn by trying things ourselves, or by trusting someone specialized in the things we want to understand. Self-directed learning will use both a hybrid of doing things ourselves with learning from others’ specialized experience.
We tend to have limited attention spans, and learn best in “bursts” of condensed information. We stop learning as soon as we feel fatigue from our memory holding too much information (which is usually about 4 new things, or ~20 minutes). To store the information in long-term memory, we meditate on those ideas to grasp their significance, then repeat the information later to create a pattern between our memory and reality.
We gain much more understanding through direct, interactive experiences than simply reading about a concept.
One of the most rapid ways we can learn is through the distilled experience of great teachers after we’ve attempted performing the tasks ourselves. We need them to offset the uncertainty we’d normally face in succeeding at something new.
Everyone in a modern society must learn the basics of reading, writing, and math (which should also naturally cover some logic). However, gaining the full range of wisdom and understanding requires a far broader range of “soft understanding”. While different societies have grouped it differently, a few general classifications always apply:
- Consuming real-life stories from the learner’s favorite past era (i.e., History)
- The learner’s preferred tactile form of creation such as computer programming, sculpting, writing or fine art (i.e., “the Arts”)
- Showcased models of virtue and success through the learner’s preference of media, which typically includes music, video, literature, poetry, and video games (i.e., Comedy in classical Greek vernacular)
- Showcased models of human conflict and pain in difficult situations, again through the learner’s preference of media (i.e., Tragedy)
- Discipline in the learner’s preference of the sciences, such as astronomy, biology, or physics
- Broad coverage of all the religions as far as the learner wishes to understand
- Understanding basic life skills and technology enough to coexist with others, as well as any specializations for modern society
Learning a wide range of interests gives us more skills at creatively solving our problems, especially when we are in a hyper-specialized social group.
Desire
To live the good life, a person will learn to the degree they desire, and no more. This is usually to accomplish or create something, and comes from the fact that they’ve been obsessing and analyzing heavily about the subject.
Learning isn’t technically necessary to try things, and someone can try anything without prior education. A learner is moderately afraid of the risks of failure, and wishes to avoid them. On the other end of the relationship, a teacher is afraid of other people failing.
People who enjoy education for its own sake (e.g., teachers, professors, philosophers) have a tendency to find meaning and relationships inside the created works of others in a secluded environment. For many of them, their friends are their books, since they’re able to penetrate past the writing into the meaning and soul of the writers themselves.
Most non-intellectuals in modern societies, though, are forced into formalized schooling starting from childhood, and are taught far beyond what they want. Since they don’t care, they’re forced to habitually memorize information they don’t need, strictly because they must pass a test. It only becomes understanding if they happen to need it later, but it more often provokes their intuition to hate learning.
Measuring
Education is understanding, so it’s difficult to measure. However, most cultures must demarcate between educated and uneducated people for specialized tasks, so they use measurable criteria to judge others’ worth:
- A test bank of multiple-choice questions. This is the easiest way to test because it can be automated by technology, but it can be easily gamed. However, providing feedback on wrong answers (and, more importantly, why) can dramatically improve learning.
- Writing or oral explanations about the subject. Usually, this is as far as most mass-population educators ever care about. Like multiple-choice, it can be gamed, especially by matching the language and opinions of the educator.
- Performance-based review by requiring the student to create something with what they learned. This is by far the most effective indicator of competence, but requires the educator (and any administrators) to legitimately care about the quality of the students’ work.
Ideally, a teacher will test their students on the way into the class to see how well they already understand and cut down on unnecessary teaching, then use a similar-enough test on the way out of the class to see how well they gained understanding.
The most distinctive measure of education is that a person can rely on their understanding for a given subject, and (if applicable) use it effectively in its time and place. Ironically, this success comes from being outside a cloistered schooling environment.
A person will, however, aspire to gain an educational credential because they’re trying to signal specific groups that they’re a new member.
In the absence of a standard test, the entire system becomes a political free-for-all, with reputation management and wealthy families overriding any measure of quality.
Conveying
Often, most teaching will sidestep technology that makes life easier. By prohibiting a classroom from using computers or calculators might give understanding of the primitives of a craft, but won’t give power to the students to use what they’ll actually use once they’re working with it later.
Anyone who shares information that goes beyond anecdotal belief into a represented value is a teacher, even if only informally or for a few minutes. At that moment, the information they have is far more important than they are.
A good teacher has a profoundly accurate impression of the student’s understanding that approximates what the student is thinking. This means they can communicate the information exactly to that person, while also being able to anticipate and answer the rational questions the student was going to ask next. To keep it interesting, they’ll appeal to novelty over repetition.
The limits of our abilities to understand and teach have an inverted relationship. If we become extremely specialized into a domain, we often can’t articulate it to others. On the other hand, if we’re preoccupied with teaching well, we’ll often disregard our continued studies further into the subject.
In practice, beyond great communication skills, every moderately successful teacher will always employ a few proven principles:
- Only teach what the learner wants to learn and, if it’s mandatory, inspire them through explaining why they should learn it.
- Instruction must begin as early as possible before people develop bad habits from bad ideas.
- Nothing is taboo. Listen carefully to every question and answer them all.
- Describe things where a small child can understand, no matter the audience. Then, work up into specifics and challenges.
- Even with deadlines, never rush anything.
- Associate everything through multiple senses as much as possible: seeing, hearing, and touching.
- Apply everything to something the learner cares about.
- Every teacher is also a living example for the student.
- Use the same or similar teaching method across all disciplines.
Teachers can use three forms of communication to get information across to the student:
- Since it’s the simplest way to communicate, they’ll often cover the raw theory and methods via spoken or written text.
- To capture an impression accurately in the student’s imagination, they’ll include a visual/audio experience, often showing a performance of the idea fully expressed.
- To ensure the student has an intuition for the subject, they’ll usually require them to create their own things as well.
Great teachers use all three elements at once. When done correctly, the experience will feel a bit more like a game than a rote memorization chore. The most effective teaching methods (e.g., Power Teaching) are so reliable at educating that they can even convey deep concepts like philosophy.
When a student has a question, they’re frequently bold enough to ask what all the rest of the class is wondering. Great teachers understand that question to great effect, and tend to merge that question into their curriculum as a full dialogue.
Stunningly exceptional teachers often go beyond great teachers in keeping the information brief, and will typically distill their ideas to less than five minutes and require the students to meditate intimately on it.
Further, great teachers will draw from many connections and associations to drive forward the value of the information, not merely the information itself. To achieve this, they must know why the information is important, not merely of its importance.
However, beyond communication, a teacher must give students the power to perform the tasks themselves, which typically means they have a type of workshop to create and experiment themselves.
A great teacher will create students who are as skilled as they are after the teacher is finished with them, though good-enough teachers can assist a student when they’re stuck with a difficult concept.
Since a great teacher wants to teach for their students’ well-being, they’ll typically be older, near the final stages of their life when they’re trying to create meaning beyond themselves.
Great teaching is not scalable, and the most effective teaching by far is one-on-one between two people passionate to learn/convey the subject. In those situations, the teacher will continue learning about it while they creatively find new ways to convey the concept, and the learner won’t forget most of their lessons because the scope of the curriculum was tailored to them.
Bad Teaching
The role of teaching, like every other form of power, draws many people who selfishly desire social status or specialized ability to leverage elsewhere. A teacher’s knowledge makes them inherently more powerful in their understanding than the students (or, at least, they appear to be).
Most educational institutions, though, have no other measurement of a teacher’s influence, so they revert to how long someone was an educator (i.e., tenure). For this reason, most of the promotion and advancement of a teacher’s status comes through political influence and merely existing in a role, rather than any comparatively universal standard of quality.
For this reason, many formal teaching institutions run the same risks of any other large-scale system that runs for decades, which makes most official education institutions dysfunctional:
- Teachers in many schools are often required to teach the same curriculum to every group of students who arrive, meaning they effectively stop learning themselves unless they pursue their education outside the classroom.
- In their hubris, many teachers desire to be right more than correct. They hamper the pursuit of the truth for their students.
- Some ideas are self-created, but teachers are frequently taught their ideas are worthless. They often hide behind circuitous references to other sources to avoid self-ownership.
- In a classroom, teachers possess legitimate authority to control the class, so a bad teacher can easily devolve into small-scale tyranny if the administration gives them too much additional authority.
- Teachers will frequently hide how little they know with confusing language (e.g., Latin). It tends to impress the majority of the students, but more intelligent students often see right through it after some experience with it.
- Many teachers have plenty of unresolved trauma that provokes them to insist heavily on order in their educational system, which insulates their culture from the rest of the world. Without a reliable amount of social risk, they’ll end up covering trends that already passed and will impede a student’s ability to apply the information they’ve learned more than if the student learned it themselves.
- If school standards start failing, school systems will often start drilling and training their students harder to compete with other schools.
There aren’t any bad students, though there are unwilling students. More often, there are many bad teachers who fail in a few possible ways:
- Failing to inspire the student to want to learn. This is the most frequent failure, and comes from the teacher’s unawareness of what the student values or why the information they’re teaching is important. A little sympathy and self-reflection goes a very long way.
- Failing to communicate the information correctly. Typically, in this case, the teacher hasn’t created anything new, and is simply using someone else’s works.
- Failing to apply the information correctly to make it useful, which comes from them not having a passion about the subject.
- Filtering educational principles through a political lens instead of letting stories represent themselves as raw information and experiences. This can become terrible when it applies to highly practical domains (e.g., science, math).
A bad educational system can be toxic to its students. Committing random information to memory without a desire behind it only clutters the mind, and the only students who survive it have a strong purpose that sits outside that bad educational system.
One of the most significant ways a school can become dysfunctional is through trying to specialize into too many roles at once:
- Teaching marketable skills for people to get jobs.
- Teaching how to think and domains of art and culture.
- Performing new research into new scientific domains.
- Running minor league sports teams.
Prevailing
The only true sign of a good educator is that the students will outperform the teachers. They were clearly doing their job, conquering the unknown enough that their students can take those ideas and run with them further.
Bad educators wish to be important as much as good educators, but most bad educators will find their students out-succeeding them to be unacceptable, similarly to awful parents.
Intelligent students can learn from dumb teachers, but they will further widen the gap of understanding between intelligence within an educational institution.
Intelligent people who are formally educated in a bad teaching system without much life experience tend to create a distinctive culture that’s not particularly good for society at large:
- They don’t trust their own or others’ instincts. They’ll reason that those instincts are irrational cognitive biases, but fail to see that there is still utility in everyone’s perception.
- They trust “experts” because they trust their group, which approves them over other well-educated individuals. While those “experts” may be intelligent, many of them are embellishing that intelligence, and it’s difficult to prove them wrong (i.e., Dunning-Kruger effect in groups).
- Any common-sense explanation will make them say “it’s not that simple”, similarly to how a person defends a religion. They are often unaware that they’re suffering a crisis of faith.
Technology gives tremendous power for people to educate others in many ways, without the approval of an educational institution. This, in turn, gives more power to everyone else to understand just about everything that could be understood:
- Beyond regulatory requirements, vocational schools are relatively easy to establish.
- Apprenticeships are more intimate, but can scale with information technology.
- Using the library
- Watching educational vlogs
- Listening to informative podcasts
- Reading blogs
Application
To read 60 minutes of content in a day, we do better for 5 minutes every hour, mixed with power naps and snacks.
Less information that’s more well-understood is always better than lots of information that’s poorly understood.
To learn the most, we must desire many uses of the information we find. More desire means we naturally understand the information more.
Those who are most afraid of things will teach about them. While ineptitude may instigate that fear, over-thinking is just as sufficient.
Learning must be our desire, nobody else’s. We must want to learn, and should always find it fun. Only teachers who enjoy the subject can teach well.
We learn when we need to or want to, but not because others told us to. The most educated people were simply curious about understanding many things.
Education is training for the mind, similar to how physical fitness is training for the body. If you’re going to exercise, you’ll follow someone who is (or at least was) very physically fit. To learn, you’ll follow someone who has a lot of understanding. Unfortunately, it usually expresses best as a more intimate one-on-one matter, so mainstream educational systems can’t scale it.
Any formalized education, including college, is a risk in exploring meaningless topics through an avalanche of information. The only solution exists beyond the educational system (e.g., getting a college degree to become a lawyer), and we find that motivation through self-awareness and learning to simplify what we understand.
Every good educational system would make “educator” a minor field of study, with the major directed toward a specific, useful discipline. The same goes for business.
A great lecture is a terrible teaching method unless the student is a self-confident self-starter. The students will imagine their difficulty understanding the subject must be from their stupidity, since it couldn’t have been from the lecturer’s brilliance.
The classroom and the cubicle are detrimental to healthy learning. Great learning should be on-site, in the field, interactive, sporadic, and fun.
Teachers who are intelligent and care about their students will use small, easily understood words and walk the students through any large words they express. If they use large words without explanation, they’re either dumb or selfish.
Great teachers don’t just permit the chaos of the students learning new skills (rather than hearing information), they endorse it when it increases the students’ interest in the subject.
The best way to introduce students to a new concept:
- Provide a challenge.
- Let the students attempt to solve it.
- Give them the correct way to do it, and why.
If you wish to learn, find a mentor in that subject. The internet is a great place to connect for that reason.
IQ tests, SAT, and school grades are measurements by intelligent people who want to call each other intelligent. They’re no more useful than joining MENSA.
Practice should always overshadow theory, but to their detriment, most formalized school systems believe the opposite.
Good teachers start with a passion for the subject, which they then influence into their students. You’re only around a good teacher if you learn something new with them every time you have a conversation with them and find new joy in the subjects they’re covering.
Kids are generally learning more from their free time and recess than the classroom, and are learning more from experience with their parents than their parents’ lectures.
Fixing a bad teaching system is difficult, but possible:
- Give the teacher increasingly important roles that continue to challenge the teacher. Or, fire all the young teachers and only hire old veterans with applicable industry-relevant experience. There must also be some sort of risk for the teacher expressing bad information, or they’ll develop and propagate bad habits.
- Consistently put teachers with other teachers of dramatically opposing views and political values (preferably co-teaching).
- Give the teachers the freedom (and expectation) to teach their self-generated ideas. If they only teach what other people have said or done, they don’t understand the material.
- Expose the teacher’s classroom instruction to public scrutiny. If the public agrees or finds meaning in it, it’s a good class. Otherwise, shut it down.
- Require the students to ask incessant questions about what they don’t know. If the teacher has been speaking for 5 minutes or longer without a question, the class should be shut down. If the classroom is large enough to scare students from speaking up, split the class up.
- Introduce at least 1 new teacher every year from a non-teaching capacity, preferably aging industry professionals who want a more laid-back role than they were performing.
- If the students start failing, the teachers aren’t covering the information well enough, and the school must either trim the curriculum or get new teachers.
- Ignore what other schools are doing. Ignore money-making activities that aren’t central to the core curriculum and focus of the school (e.g., sports teams).
If we trust others’ understanding, we must mind the culture that surrounds the people who understand something. Most experts spend so much time being safe in their specific domain that they’ve experienced many unlikely circumstances and are terrified of those things happening (e.g., a doctor who prescribes an unhealthy treatment to stave off a horrific but unlikely illness, a police officer who fires a gun on someone rapidly reaching for their phone).
A smart student can still learn from a dumb teacher, though they’ll often need to do separate research about what they’re curious about.
If children were taught sports the way most teachers conduct their classroom:
- Until they were 12, they’d read about its technique and story, and occasionally find inspirational stories of great players of the game.
- They’d fill out quizzes periodically about the rules of the game.
- Under strict supervision, college undergraduates might be allowed to reproduce famous historic plays from the game.
- Only after a few years in graduate school, they’d finally be able to play a game.
To detect the quality of a teacher, ask students a week or month after the test what they learned.
Generally, experts are 98% right on more straightforward matters, but any conflicted discussion within that community (e.g., the ideal way to amortize an asset or cover a risk) guarantees they’ll only be about 30-50% right. At that point, it’s better to trust your instincts or simply distrust the experts.
If a culture’s elderly are retired and doing nothing, they should be teaching. Any society that doesn’t use their elderly for this reason is throwing away their most valuable skills.