Path to the Future

I groan every time one of my teachers assigns us a Crash Course or Khan Academy video to watch. Not because those videos are bad, far from it in fact, but because of the fact the videos are free, and there's no reason that I couldn't have simply watched it outside of school and saved a lot of effort. This is especially true regarding supplementary educational institutions, where parents pay hundreds of dollars and hour so their children can ...  look things up on the internet. Information is so easy to come by, but education is still so expensive for some reason. A diploma is just a piece of paper, so the students whisper. Thus, the value of formal education must be about things other than the information transmitted from the educational institution to the student.

Any information I may ever need is always one simple google search away. But just because the information is there, doesn't mean I will actually take the time to look it up. In fact, this is actually kind of bad, because there is never a reason to look anything up, right now, at this very moment (something something Aristotle something something books). Google isn't going to go anywhere (and neither are my video games,  nor my social media presence but good luck convincing me to stop), so why not wait a bit before learning. Thus, the purpose of school, for me, is to externally motivate myself to learn. When something is "homework" as opposed to an "extracurricular activity" it is suddenly much easier to motivate myself to do it. The consequences of failing to do the former are short term and therefore more salient, while failure to do the latter has a long term cost and is more abstract.

I connect this idea to a vague memory of my dad asking me if I knew how a zipper functions. "Yes," I had said immediately. Then I thought about it, and realized that I had no idea how zippers work. Then there was something about how people count knowledge that any human knows as knowledge that they know. In a similar way, knowledge on google, is knowledge that is accessible at any time and therefore unimportant. I vowed to try to learn more and reminded myself that I don't know anything.

I still don't know how zippers work though.

I have heard two other perspectives on education.

First, that education is about credentialism and cronyism or alternatively ideology. What all these views have in common is that they see the educational system as a tool that has very little to do with its expressed purpose and is instead a tool of the state or corporations or [insert conspiracy theory here].

Secondly, that education is about the people in it, rather than the institution, that bringing together skilled people in any context produces good results, and that a university is as good a place as any for that.

Either way, it seems education is not about learning.

There's so much existential dread I feel regarding my future when I consider all this. I still do not approve of myself wasting so much time though. Whatever future there may be for me, surely it's better than playing video games all day. Talking and later writing about this has been pretty meaningful.