What Makes You an Educated (Hu)Man?

 

    There is a whole lot of idle chatter today about “following the accepted experts”. Scientists or whatever. The elites look down on everyone else as “uneducated yahoos”. But few people actually know how to do much of anything outside their specialty, so they call on people who are different kinds of specialist to do everything else for them. This works as long as your specialty pays enough, but it is an unnecessarily expensive lifestyle. Also a fragile one.

    What does it mean to be an Educated Person?

    Let’s take an example. John Doe wants to become an expert at assembling jigsaw puzzles. He applies to attend a college to learn how and is accepted. After four years of attending this school, he passes his final test by assembling a 100 piece jigsaw puzzle. He glues it to a board, frames it, and hangs it on his office wall so everyone will know he is a qualified jigsaw man! Now he has achieved that piece of paper, his “education” is over. He never does another nor even works on learning to do a 200 piece puzzle, much less attempting a five thousand piece 3d puzzle. A minority of John Does go on for another 2 years to learn 200 piece puzzles and get another framed puzzle to hang on their wall. Even fewer go on to the next stage.

    Is being educated possessing a piece of paper on a wall saying you achieved certain minimum standards?

    Mary Marvel decides to specialize. She buys a 5000 piece landscape puzzle, selects a single piece, and spends her life learning every dot on that piece. She can tell you the exact color and intensity of every such printed dot. She polishes the piece daily to keep it shiny and in perfect condition. Yet she has no idea of how it fits together with the other pieces around it, or what the big picture looks like. She misses how her piece interlocks and works with other pieces to make an image. If she is exceptional she may work out how it meshes with a few surrounding pieces, but she never sees the whole picture.

    Is being hyper-specialized being an educated person?

    Education is a process, not a goal that you reach, score, collect the reward, and then rest on your laurels. Good teachers can help you learn and become educated, poor ones can hinder you and hold you back, but no one but yourself can educate you. You can achieve 3 PhD's and still be ignorant. In 1900 human knowledge doubled every 100 years, today it doubles every 13 months, and it is still accelerating, so becoming and remaining educated is a constant battle. Education is and has to be a life-long process. You always need to be reading, studying, and learning new things – and even so you will be falling behind. You need to start educating yourself at birth and not to slack off until death.

    27% of US adults don’t read a single book in a year. Women and the college-educated read the most. But there is no measure of quality in this – are the books you are reading educating and challenging you or just entertaining you and confirming your existing beliefs and biases? The same question can be asked about newer methods of education – videos, online lectures, etc. Today you have all kinds of ways to educate yourself even if you can’t find a teacher or afford a school. Take advantage of them.

    If you specialize, you will become more and more ignorant of anything outside your specialty. We are all part of an ecosystem. All parts of it work together. Specialize too much and you will miss vital connections with other parts of the system. Generalize too much and you will have fragmentary information from here, there, and the other place that you can’t fit together because so much is missing.

    The only way I can see to overcome the specialization problem is to work together in teams including both specialists and generalists, but this is usually sabotaged by professional arrogance. The specialists cannot view themselves as superior and look down on the generalists, or vice versa. In fact, the West is very ignorant of teamwork at all. Our idea of a team is one or two superstars with some lesser support people. In reality, all should be equal in a real team. The team, not any individual, should get the credit for success and the criticism for failure.

    If you are not or cannot be part of a team, specialize in something but work outward from your specialty to learn things that might immediately mesh with it, then continue studying outward following lines of connection with those areas. You will never be successful at not wasting some time, nor at not missing something important, but you will do a lot better than Mary Marvel.

 

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