Why educate?

Where I try to understand a simple question: What is an educated person?

Bell Labs: John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain, the inventors of the transistor, 1948.

When I first took over my son’s education, I only had 2 frames of reference. One was the schools that had failed my son. The other was my education. Neither of them were good enough.

My education was by all measures a good one, in the sense that I was accepted into a good college and had a reasonable base of knowledge and skills for intellectual success, both in college and after. And yet I remember being uninspired, bored, even downright disheartened by school. Having talked to many educated people, or at least people who I admire for what they’ve done with their lives and who I want to be around, I don’t think that’s unique. Many of us admit to being happy now in spite of our education, not because of it. Considering my son will likely spend the next 9 years with his education (and my daughter 11 years), it seems like a travesty to perpetuate that experience. 

Knowing only what I didn’t want, I set out to help my boy. I had read The Well Trained Mind, and a classical education sounded rigorous and inspiring. As I’ve shared, it worked wonderfully —until it didn’t.

When my son revolted (in one of those moments that looking back I’m immensely proud of him for but at the time I was furious), we switched to a project-based approach. That approach also was inspiring — nurturing passion and creating real artifacts outside of the antiquated curricula of school. And for the first first few weeks, it was great. My son was engaged in building model boats. He was excited to do experiments that led to more understanding of what went wrong. I couldn’t wait until the moment we got to introduce Archimedes’ Principle and the naval engineering laws of displacement hulls. I was excited for science in action.

But his interest changed tack and we never did the science lesson. Slowly I started to have a creeping feeling that something still wasn’t right. It was easy to get excited about any philosophy of learning when all I had to compare them to was what I’d known. Anything was better than the schools he and I had known. 

That didn’t mean it was good.

The problem, it seems to me now, is that I wasn’t taking education seriously. I don’t mean that in some tiger mom “if only you’d try harder you could get into Harvard” way. That’s the opposite of what I’d consider taking education seriously. I had never asked myself what I wanted his education to do. What would it provide for him? What might success look like? 

I don’t know many people who have taken education seriously enough to ask those questions. The ones I do are looking at the entire system. I think that leads to all sorts of tradeoffs and perverse incentives that I don’t want for my child. Instead, I wanted to design a single education. But I needed to figure out what that education should be.

The question turned out to be surprisingly hard to answer. All questions of values are. Did I value what the last 150 years of education research had to say on the topic, or was I courageous¹ enough to embrace un-researched theories of education? I romantically like Whitehead’s conception of the ideal educational system as something which avoids producing the modern intellectual, or as he called them: “the greatest bores on earth.” Still, it seems a huge gamble to embrace a pithy quote and a non-studied theory of education. I may be out over my skis, but I know one thing for sure: even those theories that have been studied don’t seem to be working for my own child. Something is amiss. 

Answering that question ended up being more of an exercise in intuition than I was originally comfortable with. But I did have a process. I looked at successful, high performing, and seemingly (from the outside) happy people to try and understand what life was like at the pinnacle of education². I spoke to friends who I admire and consider successful³. I read everything I could find about those people who seem to be the best in their fields⁴ — biographies about them, essays many of them had written, interviews they had given, even advice they had shared publicly for their students — looking for patterns that could point to something. To some truth about the potential of education.⁵

This essay is my attempt to answer a simple question. What is an educated person? 

They know the beauty of the forest

Most people who have reached the frontier of knowledge come back talking about the beauty of it all. Paul Lockhart⁶ calls mathematics “the music of reason” and equates doing mathematics with “being awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive dammit.” Francis Su⁷ talks about the mathematical YAWP (with a wonderful reference to Dead Poets Society) as the expression of surprise and delight at discovering something new. And it’s not just mathematicians that are seeing beauty. Einstein described physics as the “pursuit of truth and beauty.” Marilynne Robinson⁸ describes storytelling as “essentially a new discovery of the joy of consciousness—and, of course, the perils of it.” J.R.R Tolkien loved philology so much he invented entire languages of Middle-earth.

So why don’t we introduce our children to it?

There’s a way these people are seeing that I owe it to my children to help them experience. I don’t want to talk about making math more practical or the utility of literature. I don’t want them to learn history to become better citizens. I want them to know the joy of getting to play with ideas, to plug them into the lineage of great thinkers and explorers and even subversives. My job is to help them see the awe-inspiring beauty that exists when you start to see the forest for the trees. 

My takeaway: don’t teach them everything; show them the beauty in anything.

They know how much more is possible.

John Tukey was a wunderkind mathematician famous for inventing the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm and laying the foundation of modern data science. He worked on a wide range of questions, everything from pure math to government panels, national defense to health and environmental concerns, and even education. The man was a genius. And he had incredible drive. Richard Hamming once asked a colleague how Tukey could possibly know so much (and at such a young age), and the response was “you would be surprised how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” Tukey just knew how to do excellent work, in the same way that some artists just know how to make excellent art.⁹

So why don’t we teach them what excellence looks like?

You see it again and again looking at those who are happiest and are most successful . They all work incredibly hard, and they know they are capable of more. At some point they realize there is no speed limit. But they don’t just work obsessively (they do that and more), they are obsessive over things that seem unimportant to others. The cleanliness of a shop, the perfect placement of a comma, just the right note a 3 minutes and 47 seconds into a song, and the precision inside the first Macintosh computers. Excellence leaves clues.

Learning what excellence feels like is important for children. So is seeing excellence modeled. We should help them test themselves against the world. We should show them how much they are capable of, even if we’re not sure they can do it. Our children are capable of far more than we believe.

We should also show them what excellence feels like. We should show them how we have chosen our work in the world, talk to them about how we chose, and introduce them to others who made different choices. We owe it to them to take their choice of work as seriously as we take their education.

In the end, learning how to be excellent helps them choose what they want to be excellent in.

My takeaway: teach them what they’re capable of. Show them what it means to do excellent work, and model choosing what to work on with them.

They don’t collect tools; they master them.

John Frankl¹⁰ is one of the most impressive martial artists I’ve ever met. He has trained in Karate, Kuk Sool Won, Serrada Eskrima, Thai boxing (Muay Thai), and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Tall and lean, he looks like a throwback to the bushido days of samurai. He happened to be in town this summer, and dropped in to teach a class to twenty of us. Most of the students were young, fit, and liked to show off their flashy moves. Not John. 

“I only really have a few tools I use. If I’m passing your guard, this is the only technique I ever use. I just have a thousand ways to funnel you into a position where this will be successful.” Over the next hour, he walked us through how he positions his hips, moves his chest, plants his feet, or even slides his head down to get his opponent into this position that he’s mastered. There was nothing fancy or flashy about it.

It’s not just martial arts. The best math competitors are successful with only a few techniques. Artists will spend an entire career exploring one gripping question. Theologians will spend their life understanding a single book in the Bible. Why?

It’s only when you deeply learn something that you start to see what’s possible, and what’s interesting. To quote Matthew Crawford: “When we become competent in some particular field of practice, our perception is disciplined by that practice; we become attuned to pertinent features of a situation that would be invisible to a bystander.”

That’s the opposite of the way school teaches anything. Schools teach a subject as if it’s solved, and we expect a student to just use that bit of knowledge. When you look a little deeper, very little is truly “solved.” All knowledge has required context, nuances, edge cases, and times when it just doesn’t work. All knowledge connects to other knowledge, if you know how to look. But we hide all that from children. We never teach them how to see.

Once you learn what you’re looking for, you start to see it everywhere. It’s how a model ship can teach you about songs which can bring you to the history of the whaling industry and right back to the engineering of ships for whaling in New Zealand vs. the Americas. It’s how an airplane can teach a boy to work with his hands while encouraging a love of poetry, the myth of Lazarus, and Bernoulli’s principle. Knowing one thing deeply teaches you how to know everything else deeply. My friend Alex taught me that there’s a word for this idea: paideia.

My takeaway: don’t teach a hundred things; teach a few things really deeply. 

They seek out others to do great things

High performing people seem to naturally have a passion for education. They’re life-long learners, in the truest sense of the phrase. They obsess over it. 

When they talk about their most rewarding, highest growth experiences, they were often passionately pursuing something they cared about, with other people they respected and enjoyed being around. It’s often the other high performers they loved: the shared passion, the time spent learning from other people, and the ability to grow and be useful in the process.

The highest-growth intellectual experience I’ve ever had was during my time at Rigetti Computing. I was surrounded by 150 of the smartest people in the world all working towards building a general quantum computer. Every day I would spend lunch asking questions of the brilliant people I worked with. It was a physics apprenticeship like I’d never had before or since. And I loved it. I still talk about those moments of learning, in spite of what else happened during my time there.

At its best, education should open opportunities like that. 

Louis Pasteur said “luck favors the prepared mind.” But we don’t teach preparation. Not really. I owe it to my children to prepare them. I owe it to them to see what learning and contributing looks like, so that when an opportunity comes along they can learn and contribute in ways I can’t. I want to teach them to hold intellectual conversations, to question and inquire rigorously, to have courage and to serve a goal larger than themselves. That’s what creates a prepared mind.

My takeaway: don’t prepare them to get a job; prepare them to learn with the best

They plant acorns to grow oaks

There’s a lot of talk about teaching children problem solving skills. I’m not doing that.

Look at people who do great work, and what you’ll find is an almost uncanny ability to find interesting problems to work on. They become obsessed with an idea, with a question, with something that just doesn’t make sense to them, and they can’t let it go. Sometimes they see what others don’t. Other times they just refuse to let go, even to the level of having a gut feeling that something is worth continuing with. Rather than looking for problems they can solve, they look for what’s interesting.

The most successful people seem to have really good taste. 

Richard Hamming called it planting acorns. The best scientists and engineers constantly have a few small, interesting questions to work on. They are always asking new questions, planting the seeds for a new idea, and they’re culling ideas that aren’t interesting any more. More important than how well they solve a problem is how well they formulate it.

I’m confident my children will be able to learn a specific problem solving skill when they need to. My job then is to teach them to find interesting problems. It’s to teach them to trust their gut when deciding what to work on, and to have the courage to switch if they need to. It’s to cultivate their taste for good work.

My takeaway: don’t teach problem solving; teach them to pose interesting problems.

This is an ideal for how to live. And it’s within reach if we want it.

This vision of an educated person isn’t an educational philosophy. But it points to what I want for my children. It helps me to view my relationship with them differently than I did before. I’m not trying to create anything out of my boy; I’m trying to help him achieve his potential — as we both see it. 

I don’t think it is possible to nurture this vision at scale. It’s too individualized and requires too much context to work in anything but the smallest groups. And it’s a lot of work even then. But I do believe it’s possible. And I believe I owe it to my child to try; maybe I owe it to myself. After all, I set out to do something radically different. 

There’s a touching reflection at the end of Derek Sivers’ essay There is No Speed Limit¹¹ that I think about often. Derek is a musician, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and modern philosopher. At 17, about to enter Berklee College of Music, he happened to meet Kimo Williams, who offered to teach Derek two years of theory in a few lessons. During their fist meeting, he taught Derek an entire semester of harmony in 3 hours, and they kept going. 

Before I met Kimo, I was just a kid who wanted to be a musician, doing it casually. Ever since our five lessons, I’ve had no speed limit. I owe every great thing that’s happened in my life to Kimo’s raised expectations. A random meeting and five music lessons showed me that I can do way more than the norm.

I want to be more like Kimo. I want to give my kids those same gifts. I hope you do too.

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Thank you to Jackson Edwards and Alex Michael for the many conversations that helped make this what it was. My thinking would not be half as deep as it was if not for you both.

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1. Courageous, foolish…take your pick. Or let’s go with courageous. I love the discovery that science can offer, but I also believe that science will always be downstream of values. And this is ultimately a values question. To some extent the question of courage is also a question of how many looks of confusion I am willing to endure when I explain to people what I’m trying to do. It becomes easier to just not tell people. Except, you know, here on the internet.

2. Such a list is ultimately a sort of homage to the people that helped me shape my world view. I may not have agreed with all the people I looked at in the sense of wanting to live my life as they did, but I learned something from every one of them. Some of the people not mentioned elsewhere include Paul Graham, Shane Parrish, Kieran Egan, Cal Newport, Carol Black, Admiral James Stockdale, and many others.

3. Many who have material wealth but as many who lack material success but make up for it with joy in their life

4. Just to say it: I wasn’t trying to reverse engineer someone’s education. Those same high achievers were a product of a specific time and place, and likely had personal advantages that helped them become who they are. Picasso never would have become Picasso outside of Barcelona and Madrid and Catalonia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We ignore the context at our own peril. And again, I’m interested in the person they became: what they know and care about and spend their time on.

5. I am aware that I have created a rather subjective list. It wasn’t always easy to identify the best in their field. In business or entertainment areas, it’s easy enough to use money as a substitute for quality, and this is likely to be very close to correct. In more intellectual fields — writing, art, math, science, history — money is no longer a good substitute. Nor, I believe, are citations. My study defaulted to people who had written and shared more, and so likely tends to skew towards extroversion instead of purely intellectualism. I mostly looked at fields which are traditionally included in education. The intuition could look different had I looked at fields such as eg cinema or gambling. I readily admit there is bias in my group selection. However, since I chose based on people I respect and admire, and since the education I am creating has to accommodate my values, I stand behind the answers. 

6. Lockart’s Lament has inspired much of my thinking about how I want to teach subjects like math and history to my boy. I recognize it’s controversial, but it seems to me that a lot of that controversy has to do with classrooms, and less with the ideals he advocates for. I’ll save it for a later essay to explore how I want to blend instruction with discovery, because I haven’t found either approach to be entirely satisfactory.

7. Francis Edward Su: Teaching Research: Encouraging Discoveries

8. Marilynne Robinson: On Beauty, as shared by The Marginalian. Maria Popova is another example of what I would consider someone who sees the beauty at the frontiers of knowledge.

9. Richard Hamming: You and Your Research, which has inspired me in my own work many times throughout my life. I only wish I’d read it earlier.

10. For more about John Frankl, you can read a bit of his biography on BJJ heroes. Honestly, it doesn’t do him justice though

11. Derek Sivers: There is No Speed Limit. I was recently reminded of this by Mario Gabriele, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since (not that I really want to stop).