Why Has Education Become Synonymous With Training?

Learning anything at all has an edifying effect and should be treated as an end in and of itself.

We have overcommercialized learning. Education has become first and foremost an economic consideration. A ranking of universities in purely financial terms — average debt burden vs. average wages earned by graduates — would surely garner more attention than a ranking of universities that most creatively allow for intellectual exploration.

One goes to university to learn a major, and each of them is fundamentally vocational. Among hundreds of institutions designed to aid in learning, where is one that can be attended simply for that reason? Where does one go not to be trained but to learn?

The fundamental shortcoming of this approach is that it is intentionally narrowed. Instead of going to school to learn, you go to school to learn a particular skill set. This is an intolerable misunderstanding of intelligence, which is at its core comprised of analogy — of finding similarities between distinct things and scenarios.

Learning, like life, should be filled with a tapestry of diverse and exotic subjects. In the mind there is a common logic, and a single sensibility, that manifests throughout a variety of senses, intelligences, and subject matters. We can see an image on a canvas, hear it mimicked in a song, and mirrored in a piece of writing. The sculptor and the solicitor can learn from one another, as can the poet and the physicist. Each of them has their insights, and most of those insights are the same thing said in different ways.

In agricultural science, a field which a teacher or business person may never find themselves coming into contact with, there’s Leibig’s law of the minimum, which states that “growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource.” What an essential axiom for anyone who seeks to cultivate growth in themselves, others, an organization, or an organism!

The aboriginal hunter, who may have never come into contact with fiat currency, will have a deeper understanding of stock trading than the average practitioner in any other profession: The pains of trying to profit from an environment where nothing can be forced before its time is nothing to scoff at. In one voice, trader and hunter tell their student: “Be patient. The perfect opportunity will come and we must not take action before then.”

Isn’t the financier’s diminishing return the neuroscientist’s habituation? Aren’t Vitruvius’s three principles of architecture — firmitas (durability), utilitas (functionality), and venustas (beauty) — the keys to quality non-fiction writing? Didn’t the political philosophers learn to distribute the corrupting weight of power through multiple stabilizing legs just like the carpenter? Don’t the works of the pointillist painter, Georges Saurat, say even clearer than the philosopher Lao Tzu did that one must “accomplish the great task by a series of small acts”?

In Steve Jobs’s famous 2005 commencement speech, he talked about how “personal computers might not have the amazing typography that they do” if he hadn’t dropped out of school and began auditing a calligraphy class. Jack White, the winner of 12 Grammy Awards, credits his creative process for music to what he learned as an upholsterer. Douglas Hofstadter, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning work Gödel, Escher, Bach, expounds on his theory of consciousness founded on a concept of self-reference (or recursion) found in the works of the mathematician Gödel, the musician Bach, and the painter Escher.

Real learning and wisdom will be found in the lawyer who can work with their hands, in the artist who understands the aesthetics of mathematics, and the doctor who can hear the rhythm of good health as clearly as a violinist’s song. There is no such thing as a subject matter, any more than there is an island floating on the sea. Dive a little deeper and you’ll find that all islands and continents are a single landmass with some water within the ravines. The human brain isn’t an organized wardrobe with various compartments; it is a contiguous spider’s web.

How unfortunate to be a geneticist who hasn’t worked with textiles, a coder who never studied art history, or a fashion designer who never came across fractal geometry. How unfortunate to be any human who, for the sake of cheap money, sold an opportunity to explore the world and nourish all the desiccated parts of their mind and soul. Woe to the society that has perverted learning into a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Let us venture to forgive that unfortunate society that set up a mark that, when aimed for, can only be missed.

Education shouldn’t be a purely commercial enterprise. If curiosity was something to be narrowed and focused, it would be something else entirely. Those who set about directly learning a subject will always be outperformed by those who meandered through many others on their path. Your mind isn’t a tool: it’s who you are.

Next Article →