Serialised book (with a progressively updated >>dashboard/ToC<< page). Part II: Philosophy of the Life Instinct

Book: Philosophy of Life Instinct: Chapter 16: Learning and Education

Levers of mind power

A seed sprouts, a baby cries for attention. They don’t need to learn how. These inclinations are in the cells, organs and bodies of life forms. We saw this in Chapter 4 (Life and the Life Instinct). From the Life Instinct, there are innate impulses for self-preservation and growth in the cosmic oddity of life.

The simpler life forms we know live, grow and reproduce purely through their inherent capabilities. A leaf senses sunlight's direction, and its cells and fibres react to turn it towards the light. Plants and the simplest animals go through life in this ‘detect and react’ way.

But life forms we consider intelligent actively learn and adapt to new conditions or control their environment. These advanced species begin learning at some point before or after birth. Learning is the creation of new memories and rules in their mind— of objects, relationships and events.

Sense data enters the brain continuously while we are awake. The brain has evolved specialised regions to encode information for immediate and long-term use. It is also plastic and changes itself throughout life. Learning is nothing but these modifications of the brain. New or modified neurons represent every new object (real or symbolic), event and rule. As our brains can change throughout our lives, we never lose the ability to learn. (Unless we get dementia, Alzheimer’s, or other memory disorders.)

We, humans, are users of the broadest range of physical and mental environments. We learn the most among all known life forms. There is evidence that we start learning while we are in the womb. One sign is that newborn babies respond differently to the language they hear the most, their mother’s. Once we are born, we are highly dependent on our parents, especially our mother. So, we learn to recognise her, her availability and responsiveness. We display this for the father a bit later.

With growing independence, children need to imbibe a lot of information about their surroundings. Their needs at every stage of life drive the type and amount of learning. What we learn best varies with age. So does the amount. The learning volume is highest between birth and year three and reduces slightly up to eighteen or nineteen. Learning stays high during the initial years of work, marriage and raising a family and begins to taper off after passing the active peak of life. But the drop in older people is not as significant as we may think. (See bibliography).

The origin of Education

We learn instinctively. It is inbuilt in our drives for self-preservation, growth and reproduction. But many animals deliberately teach their young. A tiger trains its cub to hunt, and a bird coaches its fledgeling on how to fly and forage. We, humans, also naturally teach our children. It is part of nurturing them.

At some point in pre-history, we realised that those taught well by their parents and elders did better in tool making, hunting, gathering, farming, etc. At the same time, we were increasing the size of our settlements and social groups. We would have worked out that dedicating a few experts for every area of teaching for all the children of the tribe or village was an efficient system. The production of food and goods would remain unaffected while rapidly increasing the community’s pool of skills. It would not have taken long for the teachers to find that it is best to have fixed material and timing for the teaching. Using clay tablets, rudimentary paper, and the first form of books would have made it easy to use the material repeatedly, as teacher and student. And they would have quickly realised that they needed to segregate the children by age for effectiveness. Individually questioning the children made sure they were learning. Schools were thus born. It was the beginning of systematic education.

Education has become an elaborate process, with textbooks, schools, colleges, universities, teachers, grades, certificates, degrees and higher degrees. But the basic structure has not changed much in thousands of years. We may use more sophisticated teaching and learning tools, but the transfer of knowledge between humans, using physical repositories, structured teaching and testing, has stood the test of time. One day, we may convey knowledge and experience from mind to mind directly or from machine to mind. But until then, education will maintain this tried-and-tested format.

Education’s benefits

Personal

Mental and physical skills

Education enables humans to convert raw materials into goods effectively. From ancient times, primary schooling has provided literacy, numeracy and sufficient knowledge of science, history, geography, governance, rights, and responsibilities to make us more capable of supporting ourselves and our families. It has included physical fitness, which is essential. Life Instinct drives our constant quest for more and more. As human exploitation of the Earth has grown in complexity, higher education has allowed us to maintain and enhance our powers. We have developed pastimes and arts with special education and training to keep our minds and bodies healthy and strengthen them.

Better humans

There are two ways formal education makes us better people — Strengthening the higher parts of our brain and kicking off socialisation. The cortex and pre-frontal cortex are involved in mathematics, language, reasoning and logic. Education focuses on the creation of long-term memories, which the cortex stores. Chapter 9 (The Power of our Intellect) and Chapter 13 (Emotional Wisdom) saw how our brain's most advanced part makes us thoughtful, intelligent, and wise. It happens in the cortex, especially the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Education gives it a workout. The use and exercise of the PFC bring us close to metaphysical and philosophical thoughts. This naturally leads to self-awareness, insight and self-control. Combined with the co-operation and community-feeling created by classrooms and other education groups, it makes us better humans.

Social

Co-operation

Humans are not social merely for security and safety. Working together for practical outcomes has evolved in us. We enjoy doing things together. The pleasure centres of our brain are intrinsically rewarded for voluntary co-operation. It is not true all the time, for everyone, and with everyone. But it works on the whole.

We benefit from group recreation too. Activities such as playing, singing or dancing together have their benefits.

Productivity and pleasure are higher when the participants have the basic skills required. Education and learning are essential for this. If they are experts, it lifts the outcomes to delightful levels.

Working together to achieve goals needs both capacity and complementary skills. We need more than one person to drum-beat a man-eating tiger out of the jungle. A sales team needs enough members to cover the territory. A farmer needs a smith for tools. An architect needs an engineer to realise his building design. Millions of such sets and combinations are at work in our world, making our lives better and increasing our numbers. The education system provides this quantity and variety.

The system also inculcates co-operation through various activities in school and college. We make students sing together, do group projects, clean up in squads, play team sports, etc. Spending time together for twelve to twenty years in class and breaks is bound to make most of us good at working with others. It is another vital benefit of education.

Community

Education creates communities right from the time we begin schooling. We feel we belonged to something well defined and empowering — our school, college, house, fraternity or sorority. There is the sense of being one with the batch that studied together, with a shared experience of the same teachers, culture, national and world events, and generational attitudes. School and college are among the most long-lasting memories and bonds we have in life, from the many years we spend in the freshness of youth as friends and mutual witnesses of our lives.

Education’s lacunae and misuses

Rote learning

In many regions of the world, education descends into a business or is state machinery. Their aims are at odds with the development of knowledge and skills. The students are made to learn the set curriculum without concern for connecting with the information or its practical utility. These systems churn out batch after batch of students passing predictable exams.

There is little interest and often downright discouragement of curiosity, exploration and independent thought about the subjects. It produces graduates with low-quality skills. While this meets the requirement of quantity for a developing country, it defeats many goals of education. Water supplies don’t work, electricity fails, roads disappear, buildings deteriorate rapidly, bridges fall, sanitation barely works, etc. And poverty reduces at a snail’s pace, if at all.

Imbalances between demand and supply

How many doctors do we need? Engineers? Scientists? Chartered Accountants? Chefs? Welders? Artists?

Governments dedicate considerable time and effort to this analysis. However, the reality is that economic changes usually outstrip the pace at which we adjust educational capacity and disciplines. Where there is excess demand, the skilled resources' price can make businesses fail. Where it is the opposite, unemployment can run through large swathes of the population.

Disparities

Educated people are more likely to succeed. It is the design and intent of education. If it were equally accessible to everyone, there would not be much to complain about. But it isn’t. The difference in access to quality and extent of education leads to disparities in income. This inequity transfers from generation to generation unless we address it consciously.

The politics of education

Despots, extremist governments, missionary religions and political parties have long used education as a powerful and ready-made tool to drive their agenda. They have applied it for the indoctrination of the youth in their countries.

Education in Nazi Germany introduced a component of race-related distortions and propaganda. It created a version of history that justified its expansionism. In communist China, the experiments with education have been legendary for their excesses and wild fluctuations. Schooling and higher education mirrored the economic and cultural ideological swings. These ranged from doing away with a generation of teachers to banning subjects remotely aligned with independent thought, particularly in humanities, arts, philosophy, economics, and literature.

Missionaries mostly ran British colonial schools. There was a focus on English and creating a class of Anglicised locals to assist with the colonies' administration. Several countries still have curricula with a significant component of religious teaching. They may also segregate classrooms for boys and girls.

Recently there have been right-wing regressive revisionist influences on school curricula in several countries. These trends show distinct elements of bigotry, insularity, religiosity and jingoism.

Among humanity’s best features are critical self-awareness, acceptance of differentness, and rationality. When education doesn’t care for them, it is worse than illiteracy and plays into the hands of our worst enemy, ourselves.

How education needs to evolve

We can put the same power of the education system we saw above to more positive use. There is an excellent opportunity in the school and junior college (pre-university) years to bring out our best aspects. Here are ten measures we must take right now.

1. Introducing Psychology

We should teach psychology in the ninth or tenth year of schooling. Understanding how our minds work during childhood, puberty, adolescence, and adulthood will enable us to make better choices in higher education, lifestyle, behaviour and partners.

2. Increasing Emotional Intelligence

We need to include a course on emotional intelligence in either of the two years of junior college. It will set us up nicely for entering the world of social life and work.

3. Including Philosophy

Introducing philosophy and metaphysics in the second year of junior college will open our minds to higher thoughts, imagination, the beautiful variety and complexity of the universe, and the world of life. The perspective and detachment of philosophy improve us significantly in many ways.

4. Teaching Morality and Ethics

What can replace religion and external laws in giving us clear guidance on good and evil, right and wrong? Secular education can supply this. We don’t need scriptures or priests. We are intelligent enough to know from our observations and thoughts about fairness, justice, civic and social responsibilities, and rights. Educating our children and young on these aspects in school is glaringly absent or trivial in most countries today. There should be a class on morality and ethics from year seven to ten of schooling. It does not need to deride religion or other belief systems. An independent education on these principles will allow us to adopt the best of other systems un-blindly.

5. Quality as a subject

The experience of high-quality thought and work delights and satisfies us all. Quality is care. Care for quality must begin early in us. (We will explore the fascinating subject of quality in Chapter 22.) We should include a course on quality consciousness in pre-university years. It will be transformative for the students and humanity.

6. Ecological studies

If we had started thinking decades ago about our impact on the world’s forests, oceans, air, rivers, soil and other life forms, we would not be at the brink of ecological disaster today. It is urgently necessary to create environmentally responsible children and young adults from our education systems. We can cover it from class five to junior college. There are many aspects to learn, from the damage we have done, recovery from it, and preventing the further ruin of the world we share with all its plant and animal life.

7. Better Teachers

In many places and cases, teaching is ineffective. Teachers are not directly productive for us, and we do not pay them well. But considering their impact, we need to attract better talent into teaching. We need to enhance teachers’ capabilities in communication, motivation, emotional intelligence, and leadership. If we spend time and money regularly upgrading their soft skills, it will repay itself handsomely. A one-hour ‘teach the teacher’ class per week by expert teachers would be the way.

8. Independent thinking

The more governments make education uniform and dogmatic, the greater the divisions they create between countries and peoples. Freedom to think differently makes us more alike.

We all arrive at the same universal truths when we consider things for ourselves without fear or favour. Humans have the most complex brains we know, and it goes hand-in-hand with differences. But in our fundamental desires, goals, and capabilities, we are incredibly alike.

Democracies with constitutions based on personal freedoms are alike globally and work well together because they allow their citizens to express their natural inclination for openness, tolerance, and peaceful symbiosis. Hammering nationalism, religion, communism, culturalism or any other ideology into our minds is not sustainable in the long run.

If all countries become democratic and base their constitutions on liberty, equality and friendship, humanity will not all of a sudden become noble and wise. But we will attain a common foundation of self-understanding based on a shared view of humankind’s best and worst features. From there, we can rise together while sorting out territorial, trade, migration, environmental, and other issues. Unfortunately, we are still mired in disputes at a banal level — ideological, economic, and religious.

This global meeting of minds can happen if critical thinking and self-actualisation are encouraged in youth worldwide. From the ninth year of schooling through junior college, there should be a one hour class each day on Free Ideas, Thinking, Invention and Discovery-’FITID’. It should be an unregulated time to explore whatever interests them, using books, the internet, experts and labs. The subject will be of their choosing: history, arts, palaeontology, psychology, humanities, economics, science, anything. The institution can facilitate and publicise the students’ work. There should be wide latitude while ensuring it meets the usual ethical standards.

9. Global education standards

Like incentivising lower trade barriers, we should do the same for countries that adopt a common primary minimum education curriculum. We can base the standard on universally agreed literacy, numeracy, science education, ethics, principles of personal freedoms and social tolerance norms. Its impact will extend far beyond the borders of all countries.

10. Financial Investment

Ignorance and poverty form a vicious cycle. Education increases Gross Domestic Product, but the increase is not translating into the necessary expansion and quality of education. The division between haves and have-nots is growing, with a critical problem for the latter being poor education.

We all accept education’s value, yet the figures show its appalling shortage, especially in large parts of Africa and Asia. It is also well below the level it could be in many developed nations. (See). The shortfall in primary education balloons by the secondary stage from high drop-out rates. 260 million children are out of school across the world. When primary education is so far from where it should be, we cannot expect high-quality self-learning or thinking.

The only way to break this is to invest differentially in education, especially in the least educated parts of the world. Simultaneously we need the urgent measures above to make learning enjoyable and personal for our children.

Self-learning and wisdom

Education does not make us wise. That’s up to us. And the way to wisdom is through learning and thinking for ourselves.

Curiosity, observation, inquiry, introspection and study are the essence of learning.

Some of us have an inborn drive to know things. Others can develop it. All we need is reading and primary maths, and we can learn anything we wish to. While we go through formal education, we should also be on a parallel path, learning on our own what interests us.

Here’s what we gain from self-learning.

• Because we do it from within, we retain better what we learn.
• We get new ideas and discover or invent things.
• Once we start, our knowledge builds on itself. Being an independent learner provides high levels of satisfaction and confidence.
• Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and adapt to new situations. When we seek understanding on our own, we define the problem, see the alternatives and arrive at a logical conclusion. Self-learning strengthens the mechanisms of intelligence in our brain for use in any circumstance.
• The more we learn for ourselves, the better we do in life. It is especially true for young people, but applies to everyone, at any stage of life.
• To be happy, we need to stop making the same mistakes again and again. Studying ourselves gives us the self-realisation that is the key to inner joy.
• Leadership needs self-learning. Great leaders such as Alexander, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Gandhi were voracious readers and keen observers of life and the world.
• Wisdom combines knowledge, experience, seeing the big picture, having insight, and sound judgement in action. The wise person sees patterns from the past and creates general rules from them to predict the future. It is the ability to know what will be most widely accepted that is right and good from a higher level. Wisdom emerges only with the effort to observe and learn for oneself.

Let’s find ways to learn constantly and help others to learn.

Conclusions

We, humans, have a pretty good opinion of ourselves, individually and as a species. But we are still beasts in many ways. Education and learning shift us towards our ideal conception of ourselves.

If all the world’s people are educated and learn with freedom, it will transform us jointly. We will achieve the critical mass of mental quality for a splendid future for ourselves and all living things on the planet.

© 2020 Shashidhar Sastry. All rights reserved.

(As each chapter of the book is published, its link is updated in the ToC below.)

Table of Contents

Part I Metaphysics of The Life Instinct

Part II Philosophy of The Life Instinct

Part III The Life Instinct and The Future

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