Self Education

No matter how many times a teacher punishes you with bad grades,

you are most likely to assume you are not smart.

The truth is that the teacher is a fraud,

they are only preparing you to put on a show.

The idea of subject divisions, pre-set time periods, and sitting in rows,

is a horrible insult to you, there is no way to apologize for something like this.

Personally, I suspect that organizations cannot help but to enter a run-away state,

where all the participants brainlessly, heartlessly, and unwisely copy things in their incompetence.

It appears that middle school and high school,

are basically copies of elementary.

Elementary does work,

because it is very useful to memorize letters and numbers and words.

But everything that comes after elementary is just elementary with extras,

which cannot work.

The expansion to include more subjects, and subject divisions,

and introduce abstract ideas is devastating and can only force students to memorize.

Formulas and abstract ideas are not mean to be memorized,

they are meant to be disassembled, rebuilt.

What is gained from this is meant to be used by subtle analogy

to construct and re-construct new things.

To memorize a formula,

is to throw it away.

In order for a school to try to function in some way,

the dangerous standardized memorization and standardized testing, has emerged.

You see the simplicity and desperation of it,

of course.

Get everyone to temporarily recall the same thing,

and use the same test for evaluation.

Tests that rely on previous knowledge,

are simply re-memorized.

A refresher course is not something that refreshes your memory,

it is just an introduction to what is basically memorization for a new test.

Modern education is very much like a dangerous theatrical play,

everyone memorizes their part, puts on a show, and moves on to the next gig without learning anything.

Because nobody is learning for real,

and nobody is fully inheriting the wisdom gained in previous generations.

People assemble in desperate self reinforcing cults,

that can only repeat history's mistakes.

Because of lack of wisdom,

people are misleading themselves.

And their chosen communities,

can only further reinforce their mistaken beliefs.

This is an old tragedy,

prevention of this curse of blindness is a large part of the reason why mandatory schooling was invented.

To prevent blindness, to prevent repetition of mistakes,

to encourage, to inspire, to enable students with tools with which they can invent new things.

But in blindness that is affecting multiple generations,

it is cheaper, and easier to put on a sick show and sell the students out for small paycheck.

Can large institutions on whom countless many people rely on for a desperate paycheck,

server both the teachers and the students?

No, not really, not without Universal basic Income,

not without generations of life long personalized (not standardized) education.

Schools will eventually work,

but it will take us a very long time to make this happen - a very long time.

Even a university education is more about the diploma than the actual knowledge,

it is not how knowledgeable a person is, it is the name of the university on the diploma that matters.

It is important for me to share these ideas with you,

precisely because so many of us have been tricked into thinking we are not smart.

Too many got crushed by the gears of the runaway machinery that sells a fantasy of education,

and sends a teacher back home with a paycheck, that they didn't deserve.

You are just as smart as everyone else,

including the confusing university graduates that fill blackboards with strange mathematical notations.

The reason why they are able to manipulate mathematical notation,

is that they taught themselves what it actually does.

Search the internet for Math As Code to see that notation expressed in a more modern approachable way,

math nerds just took the time to take formulas apart and gained the ability to reassemble them from scratch.

This doers not mean that they are smarter than you,

but they have a larger collection of tools and visualizations.

They don't quite memorize things,

they retain them the way you retained how to use your cell phone, or start your car remotely, or how to replace the toner in your printer.

They don't force them selves to repeat over and over, countlesly repeating the same task,

they just find it useful, even exiting, they see it as something that they will later rely on in real life, they see it as a need, and a strength.

We are each very unique, and one person may see themselves in an observatory at night,

scribbling extremely exciting back-of-the-envelope calculations, and maybe circuits to modernize some hardware.

There is something in their life that led them to the stars,

a book, a parent, a movie, or maybe even a school trip.

If you don't have that and the experiences leading up to it,

stars won't interest you, the observatory will not call to your heart, and you will not be interested in understanding mathematics.

But without a doubt, there are experiences in you that have conspired to create an interest,

it feels like it has always been there and it has always been a little friend.

If you follow it, if you follow what moves you, then everything on the path leading up to it, will stick to you, it will feel great to learn new things,

it will make you feel satisfaction, and a kind of quiet joy, and fiddling with all the little bits you learned will feel like meditation.

But it has to be something that is calling to you, that has been within you for a very long time,

and if you are still young then it is something that a series of you most amazing adventures is already pointing towards.

If someone else tells yo to become a Doctor or a Lawyer something that you are not interested in, then your mind will reject everything that will follow,

when you choose the path that brings you relief and joy the road ahead of you won't be so much about learning, but merely advancing forward, towards something that you like.

Please, accept the responsibility for your own education,

and never again trust anyone with it.