This past weekend I saw this on the back of a young man’s shirt:
Learning Is Natural
School Is Optional
Had I designed the shirt I might have expanded the quote with:
Learning from Experience Is Natural for Survival
School Is an Optional Tool for Learning from Experience
Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t design shirts. All kidding and wordiness aside, this is a topic I have touched on before, the times I have championed empiricism over scholasticism. We naturally learn and adapt from the experiences of changing environments, otherwise we would not have migrated over the entire globe. Schools, and schools of thought, came along with the advent of civilization, and is merely optional for survival of our species.
School is optional as a tool for learning, like capital is a tool for market exchange. There is a tendency to use capital as a tool for greed, rather than enhance the merits of a free market exchange; schools can be used as a tool for reinforcing dogma, rather than prepare someone for the merits of learning from experience. This brings to mind think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation.
As a young pup, before I knew much about epistemology or other dry topics, I thought that “think tanks” must be filled with great thinkers. To a certain extent that may be true, but these “great thinkers” carry on a lineage that extends back to the “great thinkers” before the time of the Enlightenment. This was a time when universities were the places where scholars practiced deductive reasoning and rhetorical persuasion to convince people of infallible axioms, particularly the religious kind. They cherry-picked information to reinforce dogma at the highest, most intelligent, levels. Yet in retrospect all dogma or schools of thought, from Aristotle to Austrian, has proven to be fallible.
The Scientific Revolution came along during the Enlightenment and spoiled the dogmatic party for natural inquiry. The brilliant, dialectic cherry-pickers were pushed aside by ordinary empiricists that used experience and experiments to formulate flexible beliefs called theories. Universities now became places where the scientific method and empiricism dominated. Some say that the clock is being turned back at universities as fixed beliefs are being promoted in greater proportion once again. But even if universities remain steadfastly committed to empiricism there is an alternative outlet for dogmatists — the think tank.
Medieval universities served the elites of society. These archaic schools of dogmatic thought were funded by concentrations of wealth from these elites, typically the Church. Now concentrations of wealth for elites are promoted by archaic schools of dogmatic thought born again as think tanks. Think tanks are to education what capital is to laissez faire economics, a means to serve elites at the expense of the many.
The young man with the profound shirt is connected to a home schooling initiative in Amherst, Massachusetts. I wish them well.
Tags: Cultural Misinformation
