Educational Exorcism
Determining the Current State, Defining the Ideal, Deleting Demons
Standard Education in the United States is in trouble…
Did you enjoy school? Do the kids pay attention in class? How’s your son or daughter doing? Do they wake up early, excited to get out the door to school? Do they come home brimming with curiosity, inspiration, and enthusiasm? Are they excited about their future?
No? Why not? Questioning the world is how we learn. The goal shouldn’t just be to answer questions, it should be to learn to ask better questions.
When you went to parent teach conference, did their teacher inspire you?
Shouldn’t they? I bet your kids could watch youtube all day, I bet they even see awesome games, tech and gear built with the very foundational topics you want them to learn.
I follow at least 100 channels which provide DIY programming, 3D printing, Electrical, Mechanical, and neuroscience education. These digital educators often get paid better than teachers!
The internet has changed education forever. Information and skills previously relegated to universities, libraries, experts and tenured academic professors are now free or nearly free for anyone to learn on demand.
What does education look like today?
Preface: my personal experience
First I should mention that it’s designed in age based levels. Pre-school, Kindergarten, 1st grade - 12th grade, year by year. That’s called primary education. I was informed that if you graduate high school it drastically lowers the probability that you’ll end up in poverty. (Also don't have kids before marriage and get a job.)
While age matters more while you’re young, it becomes less useful as a metric for level of education the older you get. I can’t even really remember education early in my life.(can you?) I recall most of it was seemingly silly, but not specifically why I didn’t like it. Honestly, I had a tough time all the way through, largely due to my poor social skills I think. I’m probably a little biased, but it’s never matched my experience as an employee, ever.
Most of the skills and knowledge I’ve acquired and littered throughout this article have been of my own search and discovery, driven by the desire to implement an idea in the form of a project.
Mismatch of Traditional Methods for the Modern Student: In today's world, where technology and digital innovation are at the forefront, the traditional education system is increasingly out of sync. The typical 8-3 school day, 8 periods, rotating subjects, homework, structured around textbook memorization learning and generalized education, not only fails to ignite curiosity and passion in students but is antithetical!
The systems actively discourage creativity, curiosity, physical exploration, team building, and self directed learning. This mismatch is evident by poor student engagement and mediocre learning outcomes in critical subjects.
Digital Democratization of Education: With the advent of the internet and instant streaming platforms, the monopoly of traditional educational institutions over knowledge is completely evaporated. Platforms like brilliant.org offer a wide variety of engaging learning formats, contrasting sharply with traditional classroom settings.
Yet, these are underutilized and under appreciated by teachers and parents expecting their kids to obtain similar results as they did in an environment that would be considered utterly alien to people back then. The global interconnected social and news media did not live in your pocket and capture your attention 4+ hours a day while you were in school…
The Skill Gap: This results in a growing disparity between the skills taught in schools and those required in the modern workforce. (What skills do you use? Do schools teach those skills?) Computer skills like email coordination, private company website navigation, coding, networking, writing, researching, are taught as if stuck in the 2000s at best.
Today’s workforce requires adaptability, creative problem-solving, and critical thinking to navigate an increasingly tumultuous digital landscape. Creative communication and attention grabbing web design are in high demand, yet are nowhere to be found in public classrooms. The standard education system is failing to prepare students for modern realities.
What is the Point of Standard Education? What does it declare it achieves?
Common Core is the Technical Term for the Standardization of the Public School system. For English and Mathematics.
These standards actually do a good job addressing the desirable results for their respective subjects, while simultaneously managing to avoid real world applicability.
Alongside a lack of daily/weekly habit frameworks, leveraging mutually human psychological common ground, the school schedule is well know to be antithetical to the classical teenager.
Life is integrated, the subjects are not easily separable, and they require alignment at multiple layers and levels to be effectively utilized. Health, Relationships, Wealth, & Happiness are not subjects available for study in public school.
Human psychology has developed sufficiently to provide everyone the foundational platform which for several other super critical skills and directives can be derived. All people need this kind of foundation to take on their meaningful roles and responsibilities. See Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning or Personality Courses(Yes, that’s a full college level psychology course freely available) Try listening to the first 5 minutes: Intro
In school, the critical subjects are taught in isolation and in a memorization format, making them dead, dry, and unpalatable. Especially for students with access to flashy attention grabbing, bright and colorful screens complete with social psychological warfare ringing in their pockets. A textbook looks like ancient ruins by comparison.
Identifying an Ideal
I’ve been pretty hard on education as it stands, but don’t mistake that for distain. I love learning, I want to to support effective education. I’ve been supported and taught by everyone who I ever met. I bring up problems because that’s the first step to finding a solution!
Often times, the best way to figure out what to do, is to find out what NOT to do, and then do the opposite! Alex Hormozi made a great post and video in that style called 28 ways to stay poor. He was inspired by Charlie Munger.
People are better at identifying what they don’t like, than what they do like. The way to solve that is to learn to invert the dislike into something you like. Then to refine what you like into an ideal.
Learn Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, On Purpose
I was first hooked by TED talks, once I ran out, I discovered “YouTube University” where creative people going through engineering school make videos detailing how to do math, physics, chemistry, writing, speaking, and psychological neuroscience. MIT Open-courseware, Stanford Machine Learning Lectures, Skill Share, History Vault, Khan Academy. Many professors share their experiences and knowledge FOR FREE. Podcasts like Andrew Huberman, Jordan Peterson, or entire books like Zero to One, Think and Grow Rich, As a Man Thinketh, The Strangest Secret and many more.
My grandmother always promoted and supported our learning, there’s often cheap paid courses avalible to supplement any knowledge a person could seek. Master Class, Curiosity Stream, Brilliant.org, and so many others.
Personalized and Blended Learning Models: The future of education lies in a model that is both personalized and integrated. The ideal system is where learning is tailored to individual student needs, incorporating both face-to-face with digital education, and emphasizing critical areas that are societally practical such as STEM, coding, and soft social skills development.
Project-Based and Practical Learning: This approach integrates real-world goals with academic learning, encouraging students to see the practical applications of their knowledge. This aims to foster a more engaging, relevant, and holistic educational experience, preparing students to better predict the uncertainties of the future. This method increases motivation, engagement, and prepares students for real-world challenges.
Comprehensive Curriculum: A well-rounded education goes beyond the basics. Statistics, Civics, Psychology, Biology, and Social Philosophy when built into the underlying curriculum cultivates critical thinking and data driven decision-making skills. Students should be armed with the ability to evaluate hierarchies and governance structures. Maybe also learn a bit about how to do taxes.(do you understand tax code? is tax code understandable? if not, why not?)
Ideology, to Exist or to Erase
Of course, you knew the internet was a game changer, but the standard education system is entrenched, teachers unions, 8-3pm, class periods, bells ringing, school busses, recess. That format originated from the factory worker schedule.
What you probably don’t know is how much it has been hijacked since you were in school. Have you sat in on any classes? Do you know the philosophical attitudes which are taught? Some teachers teach literal Marxism. Some teach obfuscated versions, some teach false history. Some also do their best to teach the materials they’re required. We’re more concerned about the damage than the growth in the following section.
There is a tendency in nature to go through growth and destruction. Some species of trees require their forests to burn before their seeds can root. The cycles of growth and decay are laws of nature, they are not avoidable, but we can synchronize with them.
This is manifest inside the psychology of people as well. We go through periods of growth and periods of burning old, dead, and cancerous elements of our psychophysiological selves like the Phoenix.
Exorcism is an extreme word but think about the last contentious conversation you had, about how rapidly and visceral your emotional response came to the forefront of your experience. Donald Trump is a good example, he bring out a level of emotional response which runs deep. Where does that arise from, what presuppositions form that response within you.
Do you have the wear withal to dig through those emotions to find the root assumptions? What other topics exude similar emotions?
“ A perfectly enlightened mind, cannot be antagonized”
Not only do we have to start digging into our own souls to ensure we can’t be overtaken by overwhelming emotion within us. We have to teach our children to do the same! It’s a lot easier to remove small errors in our assumptions than it is to remove large errors. If too much of you has to die spiritually, you’ll simply avoid doing it, or require an exorcism like event. We need to build a habit of questioning our own beliefs to ensure we have the most grounded truth and faith.
“Take a small amount of the pain and use it as part of your medicine”
- Tim Ferriss
We cannot allow our political environment to turn Civics, Social Psychology, Biology, and Philosophy into contentious subjects!
Because of the impressionable nature of young students, these subjects are more important than ever. They need the inoculating ground truth of psyco-physical reality more than ever before!
They need to be able to defend against scammers, cheats, and malicious actors. These subjects are already difficult to teach to young impressionable youth filled with energy and passion. Let alone when we can’t regulate our own emotional responses to the controversial topics of the day.
If the quality of communication of information degrades too low, the consequences are anxiety, depression, nihilistic meaninglessness, short term pleasure seeking, hedonism, and uncontrolled outbursts of anger, hatred and violence will reveal their gathered power. Have you seen those videos?
Decades of Psychological research clearly correlates socio-economic disparity with violence and crime. If a locality has a population with too great a disparity, they will simply extract the resources by force. We should not ask government to solve these problems. We should, as community members, be offering the knowledge and opportunity available to us to the deserving young folks who simply need a helping hand.
The challenge comes when, a persons attitude does not allow them to take the necessary corrective actions to become self actualizing. Their culture, community and parents have failed to exemplify a model of how they can better their own lives.
Worst, they’re the only ones who have sufficient knowledge about their own personal complexities in order to overcome their environment. They have to take the first steps before their environment can even make difference. This can be observed by tracking the rich children who are nihilistic, and the poor children who build billion dollar companies. Class resources can help or hurt, depending upon the attitude of the individual.
Deleting Demons
Standard Education in the United States: A Time for Change
Overcoming Systemic Inertia: The resistance to change in educational institutions is a significant barrier. It’s unclear that discussion alone can do anything, every president has made changes to the educational system and it’s pretty much stayed the same or gotten worse. Parents are the defining factor, we need to demand control over the public funding. We need to wield our considerable resources to allow bad schools and teachers to fail and be removed. As well as to empower good and effective schools and teachers. The free market should be allowed to do its job on our behalf.
Semi Self Directed Education: Education should be a tool for empowerment, not just a pathway to employment. This means we need to provide an environment where children get opportunities to examine their natural interests. I think that children’s museums are a micro model which could be used. Gameified, these spaces would provide an arcade of education which provides points and experience unlocking layers and levels of additional learning opportunities! This format of education can help young individuals realize their potential, irrespective of their background or circumstances.
Real-World Application and Skills Development: Integrating real-world applications into the curriculum is crucial. Incorporating internships, team games, hands-on projects, and experiential learning opportunities can make education more relevant and effective. These have yet to be defined, I will attempt to detail them more specifically in a future article.
Learn about the ways that don’t work. Then delete them… Do the opposite. Stand for your principles as if your life depends on it, because it does.
“What should I do?”
First, you should examine yourself, and learn about something you’re curious about! Then share it with someones else, maybe even go to your local school and see if you can help give kids hope and inspiration that their futures can be as bright as the decide to make them!
I want to add a shoutout here to Owen Minick. He sent me down to UVU into the AET program back in 2018 where I learned about electricity and automation. He’s running the electrical engineering courses for high school students at GTI(Granite Technical Institute). I wouldn't be here without his advice and mentorship, thank you Owen! Keep doing the great work!
He inspired me to write this article. I hope to visit his students and to provide them some hope and inspiration for their futures! Electronics is a critical foundation which public education is missing entirely! The subject of electronics while underrepresented, provides an excellent foundation for troubleshooting, creation, critical thinking, and practical real world knowledge. Preparing them to join the American workforce as highly sought after and capable citizens.
The following section is written for those students whom have a bright, fulfilling and honorable future ahead of them in the digital technical engineering fields.
Look, everyone has their own situation and you’re literally, and technically the only one who knows enough about your situation to do anything about it. No government, teacher, parent, can do it for you. Even though other people can help you, provide advice, and resources. You have to think about and come up with, through trial and error, the practices and roles you want to take on throughout your life.
No one else can do this for you. No one will ever be able to do this for you. Anyone who says they can is either wrong or lying and you should hope they’re wrong and not lying…
What you can and should do is look around for people you admire. Who inspires you? See if you can acquire similar traits. Do not take advice from people who do not live the life you want to live. (Do not take advice from poor people on how to get rich…)
You’re going to have to try something, and fail, and fail, until you can succeed. The attitude of fail fast, fail early, gets you much farther than refusal to allow the potential of failure.
You can try things people already do, and you can try things you’ve never heard or seen anyone do. Just keep trying things until you experience the positive feelings of flow and meaning that accompany responsibility and purpose.
Then seek to find ways of doing these thing for other people. First for free, and then if you spend sufficient time thinking about how to provide value to other people, then you may be paid to do those things you love. Purposeful projects.
Project Based Learning
Labs have always been my favorite category of education. When you have a defined goal, which integrates all the topics of necessity and interest we have a reason to learn them. Without a desired goal, we can have no motivation…
Design your own labs, make the robot car follow a line, try to implement and AI algorithm, enter that contest, use your creative imagination to solve problems.
I’ve imagined a project so large, I’ll likely not see it completed in my lifetime:
“The interstellar seed of life"
If life is to evolve beyond this planet earth, like a tree beyond it’s roots, we’ll need to package all the life that’s in a tree into a seed like starship.
The ability to close the cycles of life into a seed are the same capabilities that will allow life to live long and prosperously here on earth. IThat is the same growth and rebirth cycle we need to more regularly cycle mentally, to evolve beyond the problems of today. I’ve always had an obsessive interest in energy, particularity electricity. I’ve followed that interest all the way to Thorium Molten Salt Reactors.
I believe that my life work will be to scale the ability to manufacture and produce these power sources for the Interstellar seeds of life, my home, my family, community, and country. That will fulfill my destiny, and provide me the exploration and adventure that makes the journey of life worth living, despite all the hardships that go along with it.
The Cautionary Tale
You should be careful to live your life fully, and marriage and children and grandchildren, and all the trouble and heartbreak that accompanies all of that, is much of what life has to offer. Miss it at your great peril.
The Dream
Create a morning that you enjoy waking up to. One that launches you into a successful day. One that doesn't make you want to stay up late, numbing your mind, so you can avoid waking up for the next. Mornings set the scene for the quality of your life, future, and mental health.
Conclusion: The Path Forward
There is a need for a radical rethinking of how we live life, in education, in our lives as we live them today. I call you out, to shift your mental and physical paradigms from traditional methods to more dynamic, responsive, and holistic approaches to education, living, governance, and family.
Students don’t just need a career, but life worth living, in an ever-changing world.
Genetics and Environment
I’ve been reliably informed that on average you’re between 60-80% genetics and 40-20% environment(on average). What you WANT, is to increase the positive influence the environment makes possible. YOU are the only one who you can truly change, changing the world is impossible, changing yourself is just hard.
The alternative, is to let the environment take advantage of your genetics, and accept the hand you’re delt. This is a sad, bitter, and resentful life which is considered a tragedy.
HOWEVER. I believe, that with sufficient personal responsibility, proper attitude, and persistence, that 99.99% of your life outcome can be determined intentionally by you, if you were to take sufficient action.
This is of course an outlier case, but when we adopt the attitude that EVERY person on earth has UNLIMITED potential and worth, we unlock for them and for us the potential of overcoming both our genetics and environment, we can overcome, and lift up everyone around us simultaneously.
I consider genetics to be a form of environment. You mind lives in the environment of your genetics.
Your job is to continuously increase the influence your own intentional conscious choices have on your life.
We Become What We Think About
It’s past midnight, forgive me if I missed some things. I’ll come back around to these ideas again. Namaste