Photographic Education & The Way Out.

I have always, somehow, throughout my life wondered about the knowledge I never once used aside from the textbooks, and certainly I’m not alone here.. Yet those scary formulas, those complex taxonomic names: those are the exact things a high school student goes through. The argument is not about the importance, since IMO exploration, and width too are the fundamental pillars of a learning process. I will first discuss the two bases of educational systems, the limitations of photographic education, and its alternative which is dynamic education centered towards a dynamic pov. Then, we will go through the EdTech landscape, and hope for the future.

Schools serve two purposes: to give students a chance to explore the knowledge mankind accumulated throughout its existence, and to equip them with tools to make them useful for society. We can use the metaphor of stem cells in our bone marrow differentiating into several cell types to fill their specific role in the larger system. Although plausible, there exists an interesting design problem which is strange to the point of outrageousness. We have a consensus here that no one can, will or want to dump all the knowledge in their brain. So, schools are failing here. Even if someone argues that school uses selective history, I do highly doubt that this does make any difference. Now comes the second purpose: which is to equip students with something which would be useful for society. In summation, we are making them specialists just like the stem cells transform into the specific body cells. Ta-Da! Our first purpose was to make them generalist, and our second purpose is to make them specialists, what exactly do we want to begin with? This tug-of-war creates a very devastating rift within early career professionals facing a serious identity crisis, since they are too broad, but not enough to remember facts clearly, and too shallow to be called an expert.

Let us now come to the mechanism of knowledge delivering itself. The question is: so what is the significance of learning frog's biological taxonomy, or remembering the periodic table or Physics's units which my school or even university does not have instruments to measure let alone standard environment. What was the purpose of those pretentious books that told us all along only one thing: the world is a fair & square game with B/W morals? What was the purpose of schools if at the end, the kid ended up hating the education despite spending a decade? It is ironic that schools are supposed to teach us something, but all they do is pretend. None of that above seems reasonable to memorize in my head for a straight year, & write it up in the exams. What is more ironic is that we are told to dump tons of factual knowledge at school time, but in careers, and universities, it hardly is the case. I personally think in 1-of-n problems is the way we perceive knowledge. Its static perception is the problem aside from the other systematic complications I will quote Sylvia Plath here:

“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world.”

Our curiosity as humans is driven by experience, not by memorization. The brain must experience knowledge just like it experiences human love, nature's peace, God's fear. The question is, if we can experience the abstracts, why not the reality that is logically proven? For instance, we never say to a child 2 + 2 = 4. We give him/her the trick of how to experience, and that experience is a "+" operator. The very first principle in every operation/process, system is an anchor for experience. Indeed, some form of knowledge is dissected from the top-down approach, and this can be a hindrance, but in that case, we must go for hybrid methodologies. Since our modernization has led us to believe that so far each and every knowledge is highly overlapped, the first principle of one discipline can be a potential anchor for the other which is top-down centric. The best example is the engineering being used in biology. The question should not be how many mitochondria are in the cell, but rather why are they? Changing them does what? Can we replace them whilst maintaining their products constant? Each concept in knowledge is a movie, with characters contrary to photographic/factual representations we’re used to. We are bad at memorization, and our education system should have been built on the principles, methodologies which were more likely to make us productive for society in our mid-fifteens.

This dynamic concept of education with processes as the central approach can significantly boost the overall credibility of our educational systems. What is more interesting is the rapid development of DL models, personalized bots. Though the technology is new, and the adoption will certainly take time, they have immense potential in bearing the memorization part of a learning process, and thus humans can actually experience the knowledge, ask questions, and focus on what actually matters.