The primary mechanism our society uses to determine one’s eventual wealth and place in the social hierarchy is their academic performance. As such, many put forward an incredible sustained effort to succeed at each rung of the academic ladder, and in many cases, at the urging of their parents, begin that effort from a very young age. However, while a variety of justifications exist for the society adopting this convention, there are also major issues with it, such as:
•Far too many who go through it and put in a sustained effort to “succeed” end up with nothing to show for it.
•Because education has essentially established a monopoly on moving up the social ladder (which forces everyday citizens to participate in its rat race), it has no incentive to provide quality education to those it trains—particularly since unconditional federal support (e.g., student loans) subsidizes education and is allotted based on how many students attend each institution, not the quality of the education offered.
•Education primarily focuses on telling you what to do, not how to do it. As a result, those with inherent talent do much better than their peers, whereas many of those who simply try to do what they are told to do fall short regardless of how much effort they put in.
•By making people believe they need to be “taught to learn” through copying what the teacher does rather than encouraging the natural learning capacity of each student to emerge, the educational process makes students lose their inherent ability to learn or think critically.
Note: a recent study found that throughout history, whenever there are periods of internal conflict, states have introduced education reform that is designed to indoctrinate citizens to accept the status quo.
As such, the primary function of schooling has become more and more dependent on conditions of subservience and conformity rather than creating a generation of creative critical thinkers who can solve the issues our country faces and innovate solutions that advance us into the future. This in turn, is both highly unfair to those who are put through the academic grinder (but not inherently suited for success within it) and an immense waste of national resources. For example, as the years go by, we keep spending more money on research and education:
Yet primary educational outcomes (e.g., literacy) keep worsening, and valuable scientific innovations keep becoming rarer:
Note: I believe one of the most significant issues with the profit-focused debasement of American education is that it’s lowered the quality of the graduates who can fill our society’s institutions, thus lowering the quality of those institutions.
Studying
The primary metric determining success in education is how effectively one can memorize testable material. As such, a lot of education is compelling students to “spend more time studying” and dole out a myriad of punishments for those students who did not study enough. This in turn, touches upon one of my favorite phrases:
Work smart, not harder.
In my case, I believe much of my academic success boiled down to three things:
•In junior high, while learning a foreign language, I accidentally figured out how to use the sleep cycle to quickly memorize a lot of information.
•Because I recognized the value of natural health at a very young age, I avoided most of the things within our society which impair the sleep cycle or cognitive function.
•Because of the previous two things, there was less pressure on me to always be studying. As a result, I had a lot more time available to think about what I was studying and look into related sources of information.
This final point is particularly important as it cuts to the heart of the problem.
Students are constantly put under an immense amount of pressure to learn a lot of material, and to address this immense task, everything else gets cut out, so more time can go into memorizing the material that is taught. However, by doing this, their learning becomes much less efficient, so even though more time is spent studying, much less is learned.
Understanding vs. Memorizing
In most cases, the best way to memorize a topic is to both understand it and to know the justification for why it was taught to you in the first place. However, in most cases neither (especially the latter) happens. For example, when interviewing medical students, colleagues and I have found it fairly rare for the interviewee to answer why they were taught a specific piece of information (even within the area of focus they highlighted in their personal statement).
Typically, people recall information by having it connect to something else they know. As such, when you study a subject, but also take the time to explore it and make sense of each thing that is connected to it, those mental connections form, and the knowledge transforms from something you can hopefully recall to something that you just know (or can quickly recall by thinking about a connected subject you have a deep grasp of).
Likewise, understanding the value of learning something both fosters those critical connections but simultaneously allows the information to become something much more real you can directly take ownership of rather than an abstract fact you struggle to pull back to you (which again makes it far easier to recall).
When a light is turned on with a switch, most people don’t want to understand everything that allows that to happen; they just want to know that turning a switch turns the light on.
This lack of conceptual understanding is particularly common in medical education, where students are bombarded with a firehose of information they are expected to somehow memorize. As a result, there’s very little time for anything else (e.g., understanding the basis for it). Worse still, the hierarchal nature of medical education actively disincentivizes doing anything besides trusting the information being taught (as questioning any medical dogma can lead to harsh sanctions for the student).
I’ve long suspected this is by design as it both prevents students from ever exploring contradictory information and simultaneously creates an immense psychological investment in the value of their education, which makes them quite reluctant to question if parts of it are wrong. In my eyes, both of these are essential for the indoctrination physicians undergo, as many of the things they are taught don’t actually make sense if you really think about them—hence motivating and ensuring there is never enough time to question the medical curriculum.
Likewise, even if a student is skeptical about what’s being taught, being conscious of it often requires them to simultaneously hold two separate world views within their mind, as graduating from medical training requires each doctor to effectively present the orthodox version of medicine. Since that’s already an immense task, it’s often simply not possible to also hold any other worldview in one’s mind.
Note: I know people who had extensive backgrounds in natural medicine (and a great deal of clinical success with it) who then went to medical school and completely abandoned those disciplines because it was not possible for them to also have enough space in their minds to hold both perspectives simultaneously.
