education and thinking
This is a film about a man and a fish
This is a film about dramatic relationship between man and fish
The man stands between life and death
The man thinks
The horse thinks
The sheep thinks
The cow thinks
The dog thinks
The fish doesn't think
The fish is mute, expressionless
The fish doesn't think because the fish knows everything
The fish knows everythingGoran Bregovic - Lyrics of "This is a Film"
Thinking is for the weak. You stop to think, you die.
Goal of education is to learn how not to think, not how to think.
As you move up the steps of mastery, knowledge becomes increasingly more intuitional. Towards the final stages, you start to understand everything effortlessly. You counter arguments like a master ping pong player.
Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider.
Lancelot Whyte as quoted in Tao The Watercourse Way (Page 112)
A good education is an interplay between passive consumption and active production, similar to how the mind operates, continuously modeling from the environment and projecting onto the environment.
Training the conscious (which is what education mostly does) is not any different than training the unconscious. The difference is just a matter of speed. Former is slow but versatile, while latter is fast but non-versatile. Minimally-changing repeating phenomena eventually get automated down to unconscious. Models become more specific, but also faster. This is not any different than how standardized software eventually gets baked into hardware. Notice that even hardware is not really “hard” but just evolves at a much slower pace.
Generally speaking, evolutionary history is a grand story of automation. Evolution minimizes cost and what is automatable eventually gets automated.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
- Alfred North Whitehead
Saying that “the goal of education should be to learn how not to think” is basically the same thing as saying that the goal should be to familiarize the unfamiliar so that one no longer has to think.
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.
- Henri Poincare.
PhD thesis topics are usually handed over by the advisor to the student, because the advisor has a far more developed intuition about the subject matter and can literally see ahead. In some sense, we use our rational mind to pedantically verify what the superior intuitive mind has already discovered in a lightening fast fashion.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
- Albert Einstein
Of course every master goes through the so-called servant period. One can train the intuition only through a repeated variation of rational exercises. (This holds for all types of learning, including physical ones like martial arts.) Rote jerky repetition and slow pedantic dissection are all necessary to develop the muscles so that one can make those masterful fast and smooth movements later on.
There is a lot of dangerous misinformation floating out there (especially among the liberals) containing claims against any sort of memorization in education. If the mind needs to look up something externally all the time, it can not achieve the degree of internalization needed to automate and speed up the target circuits by sinking them down to the intuition level.
