Students and Teachers

After repeated exposure to all things academic (as well as things posing as things academic) one tends to notice an emerging pattern in the student-teacher relationship. This pattern can be generalized to any explainee-expounder situation. The pattern is as follows: the student presents a sequence of rather random buzzwords or concept fragments that the professor interprets as logical thought, praises the student, and the cycle continues ad infinitum.

This pattern emerges strictly because the student refuses to think and the professor refuses to believe that. Wishful thinking creates an unintentional pattern of intelligence on random gibberish, and praise creates an inflated sense of self-worth resulting in more random gibberish. Being a graduate student should not be the sole qualification for being considered a thinking person. While on the other side, arriving at the correct answer once does not in any way validate the solution, even if praised by a person higher on the academic ladder.

A lot of people in academia seem to possess a skill that is quite hard to comprehend. They are able to solve problems using learned behaviors as opposed to critical reasoning. The system, with its quadratic formulas and calculators, is partly to blame. Yet, it seems people are able to go through their entire life without understanding a bit about it. They don't miss it since they never had it. They don't even notice that they do not know or understand anything. Is it negative? Perhaps not. But this lack of understanding and perspective seems to culminate and explode in people's faces at one junction in the universal space-time. That junction is television and related equipment. Specifically VCRs, which are quickly becoming defunct and obsolete. Apparently one can attain a PhD in mathematics but not figure out that the VCR can't record off of clearly labeled OUTPUT A/V cables going into the TV. Nor is a Masters degree in Engineering sufficient to understand that if you change the channel on the VCR, it does not tell the cable box to change its channel via the clearly labeled INPUT A/V cables.

The example might seem offensive and trite, but it is the most clear one. Trying to teach such a person how a VCR works is pointless. Their brains are excellent at storing and linking patterns and associations, otherwise they wouldn't have their degrees or high-paying jobs. It's the abstraction to a higher level that doesn't seem to happen. Maybe not even the abstraction itself, but rather inference based on abstraction.

It is often fascinating to watch the educational process. Where the expounder fumbles at delivering information in a useful fashion, yet the explainee's brains keep churning out patterns for them to memorize, templates for things that are going to be on the test. A lot of them are capable of simple abstraction, but they almost nearly always require permission to do so. As if without some higher power to support it, an analogy is going to crash through the floor and make your neighbors downstairs rather ticked off.

Consider the infamous Murphy's Law. It roughly states "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." A pretty useless statement in of itself, especially since we don't know what "wrong" is. It can't be the objective "wrong" because, even if there is such a thing, then it leaves no room for the objective "right". It can't be the subjective "wrong" because then it wouldn't be consistent person to person, and what kind of a law is that? The constitution clearly guarantees equal pro... Regardless. If anything, Murphy's Law is a logical statement. Can be decomposed into P = Anything that is in A, will be in B. Where A is things that can go wrong, and B is things that did go wrong. (Mathematically, A is a, possibly improper, subset of B) . This statement is logically equivalent to "Anything that isn't in B, hasn't been in A", regardless of what A and B are. However if you ask a person, even a graduate student (audience Ahs and Oohs), if "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." is equivalent to "If it hasn't gone wrong, it couldn't have gone wrong in the first place" and the sad answer you will most likely get is "Of course not!"

This is a failing not of only of our education system, but of our society in general. The examples might seem simple and irrelevant, but they are just tiny symptoms of a huge underlying problem of misuse of brainpower. We pay way too much attention to knowledge and critical reasoning without ever developing "perspective" and "wisdom". A lot of people claiming to be relativist will concede that things like ethics, values and understanding are subjective. But proper perspective allows one to see that ethics, values and understanding are not only subjective, but also subjectively irrelevant. And unfortunately, only few see that.