The iPod, the iPhone, people love them because they’re user-friendly; we intuitively know how to use them. Somehow these devices complement our physiology. They are in-tune with our brain and body’s functioning. We hate things that are hard to use, things that don’t quite fit with our natural actions. Why, why, why then, is our educational system so damned counterintuitive?

Humans are born with an innate capacity to learn, its pretty much the whole reason our cortex is the way is. It changes itself in response to new information and experiences, it searches for patterns and correlations, it creates theories from these patterns and tries to support them or formulate new ones. Yet, our schools take a paradoxical approach to learning. They insist on…well schooling you. You will remember the seven principles of some subject accumulated by some guy in some book, then you will write these principles down to my liking, and tada you are a learned human being. Rote memorization has never done much for anyone and never will. Moreover, it does little for the development of the cortex, because no integral experience has occurred, at least not in the realm of the subject to be learned.

Consider babies and toddlers. They work much like little scientists, forming theories of this and that, some enduring, some changing. Children are naturally curious, you don’t have to make them want to learn, they just go out and do it. They love science, with its hidden mechanisms and murky principles. Humans are born with the desire to explore, inquire, and reason. But our schools don’t cultivate this desire. Much like language, if it isn’t fostered properly, it becomes infinitely more difficult to master, if not impossible. From an early age this innate drive is driven out. Taking its place are obedience and conformity. Children are reprimanded more severely for being tardy, than for making a C. This is not how human beings are designed to develop, we are not meant to be temporary storehouses of useless data. This isn’t development, this is deterioration. Where is the skepticism, the reasoning, the critical thinking? Where is the enrichment from a sense of efficacy, of self-reliance and self-discovery?

Oh, I think they try and do that in college… As a graduate student you have someone to guide you, but, for the most part, you are out there on your own, discovering and experiencing for yourself, changing yourself to advance your knowledge. There is no other way to teach advanced science. Not only that, this is how the self is defined. There is no other way to progress and mature as a human being, but to do it in one’s own way. Many people say, it’s not what you learn in college but the experience. Damn right it’s the experience. That is what’s demarcating the ideas and theories you’re now much more aware of.

But does this have to be on hold for nearly twelve years, for others longer? The educational process from the very beginning should instill these foundations for higher learning and reasoning. The process should be a series of projects carried out by students, who are left to explore what they feel needs exploring. If proper techniques are used from the start, there is no reason this shouldn’t be the case. A semi-structured environment that allows free association and engenders a sense of self-reliance and worth, is the only way to produce the most capable citizenry possible. But, it would be a very dangerous citizenry indeed… at least for the extremely small section of society that is empowered and privileged, the section that has a great stake in maintaining a conformed and passive populace, and for this reason, because those with the most direct power to effect meaningful change benefit from no change, we will not see, as long as they maintain this power, the realization of man’s true potential.

“But now, with a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness.” -John Milton-