Latest / Mechonomist Podcast / Why My 2 Year Old is Smarter than Your Grad Student
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to come on here and tell y'all why my two-year-old is smarter
- 0:04SPEAKER_00: than your grad student.
- 0:07SPEAKER_00: The thing about my two-year-old is he learns.
- 0:11SPEAKER_00: He learns naturally.
- 0:13SPEAKER_00: There's nothing that I do to make him learn.
- 0:19SPEAKER_00: He was three months premature.
- 0:21SPEAKER_00: He had to learn how to breathe, for Christ's sake.
- 0:24SPEAKER_00: And he picks up everything in his environment.
- 0:27SPEAKER_00: He studies his cars and The people around him, and he's very observant.
- 0:33SPEAKER_00: And he picks up everything, every single stimulus that comes to him.
- 0:40SPEAKER_00: And this is what learning is,
- 0:41SPEAKER_00: is what being smart is, is the ability to learn and pick up information quickly.
- 0:46SPEAKER_00: And the question, even though I do nothing, I support him.
- 0:50SPEAKER_00: Of course, he can't do everything.
- 0:52SPEAKER_00: He can't change his own diaper yet, but he will learn.
- 0:55SPEAKER_00: He can't.
- 0:57SPEAKER_00: You know, cook a meal yet, but he will learn he can kind of wash a car.
- 1:03SPEAKER_00: But he picks up these things naturally because human beings are learning animals.
- 1:11SPEAKER_00: And the reason I say that my two year old is smarter than your graduate student is
- 1:19SPEAKER_00: because at some point in time,
- 1:24SPEAKER_00: Institutional education becomes anti-learning education.
- 1:29SPEAKER_00: Once we get into primary school in most places in the United States,
- 1:37SPEAKER_00: we sit them in chairs and we drill them and we test them.
- 1:41SPEAKER_00: This is anti-learning education.
- 1:44SPEAKER_00: Human beings don't learn that way.
- 1:45SPEAKER_00: They learn by experimenting with their environment.
- 1:49SPEAKER_00: Human beings have learned this way for a billion freaking years.
- 1:54SPEAKER_00: And the institutions teach us that that is the incorrect way to learn.
- 2:00SPEAKER_00: Why?
- 2:01SPEAKER_00: Because institutions, educational institutions, are primarily not about learning.
- 2:06SPEAKER_00: They're about installing work discipline or preparing people culturally to
- 2:15SPEAKER_00: operate
- 2:17SPEAKER_00: with their class.
- 2:18SPEAKER_00: So as Borja argued,
- 2:21SPEAKER_00: The primary,
- 2:22SPEAKER_00: the family and education systems were about
- 2:27SPEAKER_00: teaching people the cultural capital
- 2:31SPEAKER_00: to be able to operate within their specific class.
- 2:34SPEAKER_00: This is all a part of teaching work discipline.
- 2:36SPEAKER_00: It's just you teach one type of work discipline to lower class kids and you teach
- 2:44SPEAKER_00: a different type of working class to middle class,
- 2:46SPEAKER_00: different kind of work discipline to middle class kids.
- 2:49SPEAKER_00: And you teach a different kind of work discipline Wealthy kids.
- 2:53SPEAKER_00: But this is not about learning, right?
- 2:56SPEAKER_00: This is about preparing you for the world or whatever the fuck that means.
- 3:02SPEAKER_00: So by the time somebody has dealt with the first 18 years of their life,
- 3:09SPEAKER_00: for 13 of those being this rigorous work discipline,
- 3:14SPEAKER_00: they've learned to hate learning or what they think is learning.
- 3:19SPEAKER_00: So your graduate student has unlearned how to learn,
- 3:26SPEAKER_00: which was natural to them as a two-year-old.
- 3:30SPEAKER_00: A two-year-old learns faster and more information than
- 3:36SPEAKER_00: a 27-year-old graduate student,
- 3:40SPEAKER_00: not because the two-year-old Is necessarily smarter,
- 3:45SPEAKER_00: but because the two-year-old hasn't been instilled with work discipline over more
- 3:52SPEAKER_00: than half of their life.
- 3:54SPEAKER_00: They've unlearned what it means to learn,
- 3:58SPEAKER_00: but they have learned what it means to work in a capitalist society.
- 4:05SPEAKER_00: So in all this crap about preparing people for the world, yeah, that worked.
- 4:10SPEAKER_00: I mean, this model, this drill and test model of education is a holdover from Fordism.
- 4:17SPEAKER_00: And yeah,
- 4:18SPEAKER_00: that worked when the bargain was,
- 4:21SPEAKER_00: you know,
- 4:22SPEAKER_00: learn this work discipline, work at a corporation and live a good middle class life.
- 4:29SPEAKER_00: But that bargain is gone now.
- 4:31SPEAKER_00: The value of a college education is not nearly what it was in 1970, if it has any value at all.
- 4:42SPEAKER_00: And what a young person needs now is not work discipline
- 4:48SPEAKER_00: because those jobs don't exist and are going to be destroyed.
- 4:52SPEAKER_00: What a young person needs now is what honestly the working class has gotten
- 4:56SPEAKER_00: the entire time,
- 4:57SPEAKER_00: which is apprenticeships,
- 4:59SPEAKER_00: mentoring,
- 5:00SPEAKER_00: the ability to experiment and fail, the ability to learn through trial and error.
- 5:09SPEAKER_00: You know, I've,
- 5:10SPEAKER_00: Lucky enough that my first experience
- 5:14SPEAKER_00: with post-secondary education was working class education.
- 5:18SPEAKER_00: And in that situation,
- 5:20SPEAKER_00: they would say,
- 5:21SPEAKER_00: every mistake you make in the first year,
- 5:23SPEAKER_00: if you put a marble in a jar for every mistake in the first year,
- 5:28SPEAKER_00: and you take a marble out for every mistake you make after that,
- 5:32SPEAKER_00: you will never remove all the marbles.
- 5:34SPEAKER_00: Well, you're expected to fail.
- 5:37SPEAKER_00: And you're expected to learn by trial and error and working in this sort
- 5:41SPEAKER_00: of working class institutional environment.
- 5:44SPEAKER_00: But that's not failure is seen as bad in this drill and test model.
- 5:52SPEAKER_00: It's not about experimentation or novelty or curiosity or creativity.
- 5:58SPEAKER_00: It's about getting the answer right.
- 6:01SPEAKER_00: And that works.
- 6:03SPEAKER_00: Under Fordism, but we don't live under Fordism anymore.
- 6:06SPEAKER_00: Some people say we live under techno feudalism,
- 6:08SPEAKER_00: and what young people are going to need now is the ability to be creative,
- 6:11SPEAKER_00: innovative,
- 6:12SPEAKER_00: flexible,
- 6:14SPEAKER_00: think on your feet,
- 6:16SPEAKER_00: do a lot of different things,
- 6:20SPEAKER_00: and be able to learn continually throughout their life and pick up new ideas
- 6:25SPEAKER_00: and learn quickly throughout their life,
- 6:27SPEAKER_00: just like they did when they were two years old before they went
- 6:32SPEAKER_00: through all this Bullshit education system.
- 6:38SPEAKER_00: I've been lucky.
- 6:40SPEAKER_00: When I was at Berkeley, I was allowed to direct my own studies.
- 6:48SPEAKER_00: I don't think most institutions of higher education are like this.
- 6:52SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
- 6:53SPEAKER_00: I've never been to another institution of higher education.
- 6:55SPEAKER_00: They never allowed me to have a career in But when I was at Berkeley,
- 6:59SPEAKER_00: I was lucky and I was allowed to learn on my own and learn
- 7:02SPEAKER_00: the way human beings learn.
- 7:04SPEAKER_00: And I just assumed that that was valued everywhere, but it's not.
- 7:11SPEAKER_00: It's this drill and test model that is supposed to prepare people for a world,
- 7:15SPEAKER_00: but it's a drill and test model that's preparing people for a world
- 7:18SPEAKER_00: that no longer exists.
- 7:20SPEAKER_00: So academia needs reform.
- 7:21SPEAKER_00: Our education system needs to be reformed and it needs to match.
- 7:28SPEAKER_00: The current conditions of the world.
- 7:31SPEAKER_00: And that's for an uncertain future.
- 7:36SPEAKER_00: The deals are gone and the future is uncertain.
- 7:40SPEAKER_00: And we need to be as smart as a two-year-old.
- 7:42SPEAKER_00: We'll see y'all next time.
- 7:43SPEAKER_00: Peace, y'all.