I am often asked as I talk about the disruption of technology and how it changes our society, what is the right age to introduce people to these concepts and shouldn't we, rather than talking to executives or people who are founding startups actually target high schoolers or even sooner children in elementary school so that they understand the power of exponential technologies and what is happening in society sooner rather than later. This is an important challenge.
16208026160000000
Of course, the younger the mindset, the more dynamic it is and the more readily it can accept the new rules that are driving our societies rather than having to demolish the dogmatic assumptions that have been accrued through decades of experience being exposed to more traditional places at the workplace or at the college a little earlier, and having demolished to these a dogmatic assumptions, reconstruct a worldview. We had a great effort, but also with the, the danger that comes from having glossed the roots supporting us. So on the surface it would look that the advantage is to actually start sooner. Starting in high school, starting elementary school. And is this true? Is this the case?
16208026160000000
There are certainly skills that are not innate that we can learn very early. How we learn to walk is biologically programmed in what we are, eh, we have legs and all our muscle movements the ways that we learned to grab chairs and then in a magical moment for the parents that look, let go of the chair and take the first steps unaided on, on our two legs. Well, these are things that are unstoppable and natural for, for all of us. There are other, the skills that we can learn very early. For example, riding a bicycle that are much less natural and actually much less intuitive. The fact that we are moving our legs in a certain way and the world around us moves in a way that is completely different from what would it be natural to expect with respect to movement of our legs is something that we have to understand.
16208026160000000
Reprogramming our brain, reprogramming our intuition, reprogramming our muscle memories and demonstration of the plasticity of the brain that can be experienced, that at any age is linked to this. If you go on a treadmill and maybe you watch a screen or you work, there are now treadmill desks for working while walking gonna on a treadmill, presumably not running. And you do this for an extended period of time and let's say an hour when you get off the natural and traditional movement of walking will be misaligned with the expectations of your other sensor input. Most importantly, your vision. Because during that hour your brain got accustomed to the fact that even though you are walking, the world is unchanging. So for a few moments when you get off the treadmill and you walk, the fact that the world is coming closer is interpreted by your brain as if you were much faster than not what your legs are telling you.
16208026160000000
It is quite to disconcerting. And other and example of the same kind of brain plasticity that all of you can experience is Klein being on an escalator that he's not moving. We are accustomed to the little jolt of a dynamic acceleration when we step on the first few stairs of the escalator. And then either we extend steel or we keep walking upwards, but we are in motion. And then when the escalator ends, as we get off, there's the same kind of a jolt of negative desolation. And then we resume walking normally. However, when the escalator is not moving because maybe it's broken but you still walk up it, the first few steps again, are incredibly disconcerting because the expectation of change that is not happening in our state of motion at Misa lines, our muscle memory with our brain as it has been previously programmed.
16208026160000000
The ability of learning skills is there whether we are young or or older. The question really is should we expose very young people to the uncertainty and to the stress of a worldview that is based on these ruptures that is based on accelerating change? Is it the right thing to do?
16208026160000000
In the past we decided that it definitely wasn't, not only we structured the educational system in a manner that is resisting change as every bureaucracy does, but even more so because the protagonists of the educational system, the teachers themselves in a position of authority and respect that they need to maintain towards their students cannot afford to say that they are confused or they don't know something or that what is going on in the world is hard to decode. And the tools that we have available may not be sufficient to do so. But we went even beyond. We created all kinds of fairytales and metaphors and magical explanations that are old air to pretend knowledge when the knowledge is missing and pretend explanations when the explanations are potentially too complex or would require a chain of knowledge that is, that is lacking.
16208026160000000
So in the past, this wasn't the case. Can this be the case today? How can we go from here to there? How can we achieve an educational system that is able to admit its own ignorance, that is able to experiment in front of the unknown that is putting teachers and students potentially on the same level in front of the task of a decoding the path of our interactions with new technologies and, and new ways of acquiring and managing and deploying knowledge. I am skeptical because just as the proactive attitude and the courageous experimentation on the side of adults in the population is in general is available only to a very small percentage that must be more or less the same among teachers as well. And we would want the school system to adapt in a uniform manner to this challenge. If we tell teachers, hey, don't pretend you know, everything, tell the kids that you are as confused as a anybody else and start experimenting. That kind of organization would be extremely different from school
16208026160000000
to school and we wouldn't want that to happen. And parents very importantly, wouldn't want that to happen.
16208026160000000
And in our current educational system, the three components of students and teachers and parents must all agree how to implement any kind of change.
16208026160000000
And the parents are of course a key here. There could be some who are very open and say, well, I don't want to lie to my kids. I don't want to pretend that a, a lot of what we are teaching them is going to be very useful. And a lot of what we do in school is to teach them how to learn but in a very indirect manner. So if we can do without all those, all that indirectness and just teach very directly, these are tools for learning. These are tools for throat in the previous episode of the context that we referred to that very explicitly of how our tools for thinking evolve and become better. So if we follow that in our school system, potentially a lot of time will be freed up. Think about it, how much time is spent in the school to teach the children facts to the point where if they realize and one to start using Wikipedia or other systems that accelerate their ability to leverage facts in order to do something with them often they are punished. And this, this punishment is a clear
16208026160000000
indication of the resistance of the educational system to embrace a new agreement around what should be told and how it should be told.
16208026160000000
And if some parent is not as open and not as ready to start some new educational system where experimentation is constant and the, we are all looking at the results and analyzing them and admit if we fail and we start over, well they could be pretty justified in claiming that the experiments are not only the things that are done at school, but the experiments or the experimental subjects are the student themselves. And they would be able to come and say, sorry, I don't want my children to be experimented upon. I want the school to expose my children to known facts, to known methods in order to achieve the expected outcome of a well educated, well adapted person who can then enroll in college for example, a and go on in his or her life. And the school would have no way of stopping that parent or, or provide a counter argument because if the school is honest, it would have to confirm that the new method has no guarantees of achieving an intended outcome. And indeed the experiments are
16208026160000000
actually done on the students as well.
16208026160000000
Now, what this could mean is that the danger of opening the minds of younger and younger people to the uncertainties of disruption that exponential technologies are bringing in our world is preparing them for a struggle that may lead to them leaving the traditional school system. Because the necessity of conformity could be a prize that they are not ready to pay. They may achieve a level of a self confidence or a self consciousness where the compromise required to adopt the methods that they know are in effective in today's and especially tomorrow's world is, is not something that they want to abide by. And then he's even more important that there is an alignment within a family for the parents to realize that this kind of attitude is the, at least partially the intended outcome of what is happening. That the parent, if he or she is honest must tell the child you are actually right. So in my own family, that is kind of what happened. All three of my children have gone through periods
16208026160000000
of growth and maturity and, and increasing degree of self awareness that led them to leave the traditional school system either later or earlier. And this is, of course, I'm pretty seriously non-conformist. I wouldn't expect a large percentage of families to be able or to want to do the same.
16208026160000000
We don't know what the final outcome is going to be, whether in another 50 years time. And my children will evaluate that this positively or negatively, even if we are crossing our fingers for the, the, the positive. But it is important that they are actually very active in acquiring knowledge, in acquiring tools, in acquiring skills, in different areas that prepare them to be adaptable, that prepared them to cope with the change. And this is kind of the polar opposite of what these achieved through a traditional educational path from elementary school to high school to college to postgraduate programs through a phd and then achieve an extreme degree of specialization and then either follow with various research brands and programs to apply that specialization. And then maybe through some patents and other ways of applying that specialization go forth in an entrepreneurial path or in an academic path to teach and keep researching, adding publications, adding a new findings following
16208026160000000
on that journey.
16208026160000000
I'm sure there are a lot of people who are happy with the path. We know it is not scalable. We know that only a sliver of the children that starts school will end up in that. So what we must keep searching for is scalable solutions, is the ability to teach how to think, to teach, how to learn, to teach, how to adapt to the changes, to teach, how to recognize that the lack of certainty is not lack of respect in a relationship between either peers or even in a more hierarchical relationship. That the value and the gain from honesty, openness and truth is much higher than the false narrative of stable falsehoods.
16208026160000000
So I hope you enjoyed this latest episode of the context and the, Eh, I recorded it in, in the, in New York, and you may see a different background. I didn't know if I will be able to eliminate in the post editing all the noises of sirens and everything else that is going on here. If you enjoyed it, you can support the context on Patreon with as little as $5 a month, which is the suggested amount. As a matter of fact, you can become a supporter for even less. The link is available to name your own level of support. Whatever you believe is the right amount and whatever. You can economically sustain. For me, the pleasure is to continue these and not only record episodes, but to establish a dialogue or conversation. I greatly enjoy the feedback that I receive. Emails, tweets Facebook comments and everything else in the various platforms where we interact. So I invite you to do so. Ask me questions and let's continue the conversation.
16208026160000000
| Word Count | Unique Lemmas | Characters | Lemmas Density |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
| Modularity | 0 |
Influence Distribution | 0 % |
|---|
| Topics | Nodes in Top Topic | Components | Nodes in Top Comp |
0 |
0 % |
0 |
0 % |
| Nodes | Av Degree | Density | Weighed Betweenness |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |