“E” is for “Educated”

Published January 24, 2025,

the 7th annual International Day of Education

AWESOME

I. Introduction: Common Ideas about Education
II. Education as Civic Symbiosis
III. Educated Adults
IV. Edu-Readiness
V. How Kids Get Edu-Ready
VI. Today’s Crisis Point
VII. Sources

I. Introduction: Common Ideas about Education

Of all the words that make up the AWESOME acronym, it seems that more has been said about Education than all the rest combined.  Almost any day, you can search the news and find impassioned town-hall meetings about grade school curriculum and high school choice.  One of the main fault lines in partisan politics is an educational divide. ² People with more schooling seem to have all the advantages:  higher incomes, safer neighborhoods, happier marriages ³, and even longer lifespans. ⁴ 

The unstated and unquestioned assumption seems to be that schools – especially prestigious schools – teach children how to be successful.  That would explain why parents scramble to get their children into Harvard and Yale at all costs.  The tacit belief is, “Those schools teach the secrets of success.”

From my perspective, that is clearly not the case.  I have three degrees, which places me at about the 98^th percentile on the worldwide “years of education” distribution.  I do have many qualities associated with education, such as emotional resilience and good time management skills, but I never took classes on these subjects.  School certainly didn’t pave me a road to riches; I still live month-to-month!

Why is it, then, that people with more years of higher education, on the aggregate, seem to think and live so differently from high school graduates?  I will argue that a lengthier school career is actually the result of being an “educated” person, not the cause.  People who stay in school longer are already predisposed for success before they get there.

This analysis will take us into much deeper territory than the standard debates about politically correct curriculum or college admissions policies.  If not school, then what does it mean to be “educated”?  Why do we find education so important in the first place?  How is it related to success?  How does the concept of education vary with place and time?  We live in an age like no other.  Are our concepts of education keeping up? 

II. Education as Civic Symbiosis

Many philosophers have offered their thoughts on education.  Their messages have a common core, which I paraphrase as:

Education is a civic symbiosis.

A civilization can last for centuries or more, yet its vessels are people with limited lifetimes.  To survive, culture must be poured anew into the vessels of each generation.  Meanwhile, any person who wishes to become a well-balanced, self-supporting adult within her society must understand how that society works. 

Confucius, for example, described an ideal education in terms of self-improvement toward the end of public service. ⁵ Aristotle also defined education in terms of realizing personal potential. ⁶ It’s interesting to note that the subjects taught in ancient civilizations are almost entirely disjoint from what students learn now, yet the abstract goals are similar.   

In a healthy cycle of education, society benefits its citizens so that the citizens can benefit society.  Educated people take care of themselves to the best of their ability and let others do the same.  Stoppages in this cycle lead to serious problems.  A flawed educational system may unfairly benefit some citizens more than others.  There might be too many free riders trying to exploit the system, taking gains by fraud or crime.  This is uneducated behavior even when it is sophisticated or lucrative.

III. Educated Adults

Education has fact-based and skill-based components.  Important facts will include an understanding of how natural and human-made systems work.  Obviously, this is highly culture dependent.  In a hunter-gatherer society, education might involve small-group etiquette, plant identification, stellar navigation, and folklore about local spirits.  Agricultural civilizations need to know much more about economics, war, and power relations.  Today’s WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) ⁷ are so competitive that our education is usually associated with high-demand professional skills. 

The universe of knowledge is far too large for any person (or culture) to know.  Our minds can illuminate large portions of our immediate life, several broad notions about wholesale society, and a few details in between.  These lucid spots are interconnected by many “black boxes”.  For example, I have a vague understanding that some of the money I earn is siphoned away from me for taxes, and that this tax money is nominally used for public spending.  Between me and the federal budget are quite a few black boxes of ignorance in my mind. 

This patchwork visibility of the world can lead to some self-defeating delusions.  We might deny the ignorance and feel self-assured that “I” or “we” have got it all figured out.  Alternatively, we might cynically give up hope because “they” control all the black boxes (in fact, they keep them black because “they don’t want us to know”!)  At the very best, an educated person can only hope to recognize these illusions as misguided instincts. 

The “secret knowledge” myth is a widespread and popular delusion.  It might be fair to say that this is an uneducated view of what education is.  Secret Knowledge is a seductively simple tidbit of information that could make a major difference in someone’s life, but it is jealously guarded behind a wall of privilege.  This is an ancient instinct.  Adam and Eve were punished for eating from the forbidden “tree of knowledge.”  Cults, religions, and scam artists are still getting rich selling us the “secrets” of salvation, happiness, wealth, youth, and attraction. 

If there is a “secret”, it is that there is no secret.  True factual knowledge is available to everyone, but we have to work hard for it.  One must climb many branches of the knowledge tree before understanding the full context of a complex fact.  Most people don’t climb that tree very far, not because it’s forbidden, but because it’s a daunting challenge. 

Skill-based education includes economic skills (“how to install plumbing”) as well as social skills (“how to prevent and resolve conflicts rationally”).  Social and economic skills often involve rational decision-making about how to pursue factual knowledge.  An educated college graduate in California is likely to do some job market research.  He’d find that California today has a glut of lawyers and a serious shortage of therapists.  The latter will be deemed much more valuable – both for himself and the state – for a roughly equal investment in school and training.  

IV. Edu-Readiness

One of the hardest challenges in the educational cycle is getting students engaged in the first place.  The students who benefit most from education are those who are interested and ready to participate.  The quality of being edu-ready is the first and most important criterion in an educational career.  The student who best understands and respects the cycle of civic symbiosis will be most educable.  She recognizes the part she plays in helping others (even people she doesn’t meet) as well as the long-term benefits for herself and her descendants.  For these reasons, I have come to define edu-readiness as

The capacity to conceptualize and care beyond the self, here, and now.

A person with this quality is more likely to:

• Be patient ⁹ and make sacrifices now for future payoffs ¹⁰
• Listen actively to others ¹¹
• Persist through long, difficult, or complex tasks ¹²
• Tolerate different points of view ¹³
• Manage time ¹⁴ and money ¹⁵ well
• Have strong long-term memory ¹⁶ and sense of personal history ¹⁷

When someone has limited capacity to conceptualize or care beyond the self, here, and now, he is more inclined to satisfy his own immediate desires without concern for consequences to others.  He can even act with stunning disregard for his own future self.  He might:

• Work less ¹⁸ in favor of entertainment (TV ¹⁹ , video games ²⁰ , hanging out)
• Mistrust others ²¹ and have a short emotional fuse ²²
• Smoke, ²³ drink problematically, ²⁴ and use illicit drugs ^{25 26}
• Become obese ²⁷
• Get large or provocative tattoos that he may later regret ^{28 29}
• Seek quick fixes and feel entitled to favors ³⁰
• Have multiple unplanned children ³¹
• Resort to crime ³²

Now, which list do you suppose the following trait belongs to? 

• Do well in high school and pursue a college education.

Of course, we’d expect this to fit in the edu-ready list.  In fact, all of the traits above have been shown to correlate with educational success or attainment in at least one study (as cited).  The causations behind this correlation can run both ways; for instance, education about the risks of sex ³³ and drugs ³⁴ can reduce problematic behavior.  However, I find the reverse causation to be much more significant.  Edu-ready students are naturally inclined toward educated behavior, which includes persistence in school.

I’ll go a little further out on a limb.  My proposed definition of edu-readiness would predict other qualities that should correlate with education. 

• People with more education should be better at cooperating, sharing, making plans, and keeping them.
• People with less education should be more inclined to littering and polluting, including noise pollution with loud music or cars. ³⁵
• As a major tradeoff, people with less education should be better at spontaneity, and their peers would probably regard them as more “fun”. 1Anecdotally, nerds like me lament the reality that women are so much more strongly attracted to “bad boys”, their term of endearment for men with low edu-readiness.  When they explain the attraction, women regularly describe these men with adjectives like “fun” and “unpredictable”.  You’ll find plenty of first-person commentary to this effect with a quick web search of terms like “women attracted bad boys fun”, and even a few peer-reviewed articles quantifying the phenomenon through Google Scholar.

The qualities that I’ve used to describe edu-readiness overlap strongly with what psychologists call empathy and executive functions.  If you think of a mind as an office building full of thoughts and emotions, the executives are the bosses: a few powerful thoughts, emotions, and personality traits that manage all the others.  Executive functions are often described in terms of attention, emotional control, memory, ³⁶ goal setting, and planning ³⁷.  These traits are also associated with empathy ³⁸ , which is itself understood along two dimensions.  Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately understand another person’s perspective.  Emotional empathy is the experience of emotions that mirror someone else’s.  It is easy to see that a person with well-developed executive functions, cognitive empathy, and emotional empathy will have a strong capacity to conceptualize and care beyond the self, here, and now. 

V. How Kids Get Edu-Ready

People exhibit a broad range of executive functioning skills.  That’s because there are numerous genetic and environmental factors that influence this emotional development.  Think of plants growing around the outside of a building.  As seeds, they all have the same genetic potential for growth.  But only those that get enough sunlight, water, good soil, and shelter from hungry animals will achieve their full potential.  Imagine the difference between an infant who is raised by attentive parents in a safe home and one who gets overlooked in a household of chaos.     

Executive functions can be improved in any person at any stage of life. ³⁹ However, mental and emotional maturation are slow, gradual processes, ⁴⁰ especially in chronically unhealthy environments.  K – 12 education is not enough time to close 3^rd grade achievement gaps. ⁴¹ Besides, remember that the point is to get children edu-ready – prepared for their first day of school.  Therefore, “earlier is better.”  Schools are important, but the vanguard of education are the parents and caretakers of pre-school children.           

What should caretaking adults do?  The good news is that it doesn’t take trilingual parents or toilet-time trigonometry training.  Nor do parents need to be wealthy.  Rules, routines, adult social role models, reliable relationships with attentive adults, and proper sleep and nutrition lay a strong foundation. ⁴²  It is also important for children to socialize and play with their peers ⁴³ and to learn from their own mistakes. Neglect, abuse, and instability can interfere with executive development. ⁴⁴ At the other extreme, overly sheltered children can grow up with a weak sense of self-regulation. ⁴⁵

VI. Today’s Crisis Point

The cycle of civic symbiosis relies on an unstated assumption:  that society isn’t changing much from one generation to the next.  Today’s unprecedented pace of change is leading to at least two related educational crises:  the crisis of fractured shared reality and the crisis of generational segregation.  

A. Fractured shared reality

B. Generational segregation

A. Fractured shared reality

Each person can only know a tiny fraction of the world’s workings.  A good education system standardizes a culture’s collective knowledge into mind-sized packages so that most people in that culture can theoretically “know” the same world.  To function well socially, the standard educational package does not have to be particularly accurate or complete.  Almost every culture that has ever existed was based on a religion different from yours.  I’m sure you’d agree that they all practiced false religions, yet they got by.  What’s most important is that their beliefs were standardized.  Such a standard is called a shared reality. ⁴⁶

Just imagine how much easier it was to maintain a shared reality when people learned in person, and when it was difficult to travel far from home.  There was no way to “fact check” word-of-mouth common knowledge, and there was no concept of comparative culture.  It only made sense for children to learn what their parents and neighbors taught.

Now that information blankets the entire planet like an atmosphere, it is getting harder and harder to agree on a simple, mind-sized shared reality.  Is it more important to let each person pursue their own personal truth, or to stick to a convenient common narrative?  In a globalizing world, whose narrative shall we follow? 

The crisis of fractured shared reality creates serious stress-tests for large modern nations, from Europe’s 19^th century kulturkampf to our present “culture wars”.  It plays itself out vociferously in schools, where parents and school boards debate just exactly what shared reality we are trying to pass on to today’s children.  Until recent centuries, organized religions have been the strongest proven unifying shared realities.  But they are poor fits for the modern world in two ways.  First, state religion clashes directly with the modern value of religious liberty.  Second, no religion is demonstrably true to non-natives or us pesky AWESOME thinkers.  In sum, future shared realities will have to be secular frameworks that accept religious diversity. 

B. Generational segregation

The cycle of education requires continuous generational integration.  Adults must introduce children to society, and children must appreciate their stake in that same society. 

What happens when norms, knowledge and beliefs, pop culture, and everyday life are revolutionized on a decadal basis?  In this crazy world, the older and younger generations struggle to understand each other.  Children retreat into escapist youth culture portals.  Senior citizens, at a loss, pray to a forceful and angry god to Make Society Old-Fashioned Again.  Young adult opportunists are in a unique position to exploit both the older folks, who can’t live with today’s technology, and the younger generations, who can’t live without it.

Interestingly, families now spend more time together than at the turn of the century.  However, most of that increase has been “alone together” time. ⁴⁷ Family members are under the same roof, but partitioned into separate rooms, paying attention to different screens.  Shall we measure family time together by quality or quantity?   

Can we really blame Jenzie, the alienated teenager, for being attracted to artificial fun zones rather than boring, complex reality?  We adults complain about screen addiction, but what are we doing to make school, work, and “adult culture” more compelling than youth culture?  Jenzie’s pleasure relies on many hidden forces: her parents’ wealth, the engineering behind her technology, and the legal / economic systems that allow her favorite brands to reach her.  But maybe she’s perfectly content taking all that for granted.

In this world, education is no longer just for children.  A lifetime of continuing education is more important than ever for adults to keep pace.  We can’t take our place for granted, either.  We can’t expect the world to do us a favor and reward us for the skills or knowledge we had decades ago.  And we can’t expect to have meaningful conversations with Jenzie unless we are well-versed in the apps and social media that consume her time.  How well do you understand social media’s ad-driven revenue model?  For tech companies and their advertisers, attention equals profit.  It’s no coincidence that Jenzie is addicted to her phone.  It was deliberately engineered for that purpose. ⁴⁸

Parents and children are growing up in different worlds.  It’s taken decades to see the problem.  Now the time has come for parents, schools, and policy makers to ask how we can re-integrate the generations – not just in person but in mindset.  Social media must be part of the solution. ⁴⁹ For millennia, educators have been asking:  “How do we get kids’ attention?”  Boy, have the tech companies figured that out quickly!  Maybe schools could learn a few lessons from Instagram – and vice versa.  Social Media 2.0 must be a more generationally integrated version.  Parents have a right, if not a responsibility, to regulate or accompany their kids online.  Teens will grumble about it.  But that’s usually a sign that parents are doing something right.

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VII. Sources