Facts about Education & Interesting Ideas about Learning

College degrees can add significant wealth. The more education you have, the more you’ll earn and the less likely you are to be unemployed. And if you can keep debt low while getting the degree (and there are reliable ways of doing this), then it’s almost guaranteed that getting a college degree is a good deal.

As climate change, population growth and technological development bring fast and drastic changes to our world, educational programs that encourage discovery and innovation become ever more necessary.

These programs teach that discovering brings not just good grades, or a financial reward. It brings the satisfaction that one can realize dreams, and thrive, in a world framed by major dramatic questions.

Expert-level performance is primarily the result of expert-level practice, not due to innate talent.

Learning requires frequency and persistence in performing the same skill over and over again, until you can do it subconsciously, without having to think about it.

Despite having easy access to information, few people take full advantage of the opportunity we have for self-directed learning.

We still believe that in order to learn something, we need to be formally educated on it, when in fact we're able to educate ourselves.

Self-education is the core skill for the 21st century.

Our ability to respond to changes in the landscape of work and technology will be dictated by how skilled self-educators we are, how well we can take full advantage of the information available to us to grow our skillset.

For 12 years, you’re been trained to apply information that’s pre-packaged for you.

But if you want to do anything independent (entrepreneurship, creative work, etc.) then you have to be able to figure things out without being handed the knowledge beforehand.

This is an ongoing process of self-development and learning, that recognizes that we don’t need to memorize facts, formulas, instead, we need to develop an intuitive understanding of our skills, expose ourselves to different information about the skill, and constantly push ourselves to improve.

1. Build an area where you can freely play around with the skill you’re trying to learn - Your Sandbox. It should be: low-cost or free, low stakes and public.
2. Research: Resources exist, you just have to figure out what’s worth reading, watching, or listening to (books, blogs, MOOCs etc).
3. Implement and practice purposefully.
4. Get feedback.

• Honestly assessing your limits to figure out where you need to improve.
• Setting a goal just beyond your current ability to motivate yourself to stretch beyond your comfort zone.
• Practicing with intense focus.
• Getting feedback, in whatever way you can, and incorporate that feedback into your practice.

Maintenance learning refers to you keeping current with your field.

Reading an occasional book and keeping current with blogs and newsletters is not equivalent to adding to your education. Maintenance learning involves a higher frequency of slightly challenging studying and practice that keeps you prepared to begin to tackle the new challenges of your field but doesn’t make you proficient on them.

It is the kind of learning that adds new knowledge and skills to your repertoire. With growth learning, you’re acquiring new information that enables you to do things that you could not do previously.

You can discover great ideas by listening to podcasts, reading blogs, and reading books.

Shock learning is learning that contradicts knowledge that you already have. That’s the kind of learning that generates innovation

If you don’t ignore or resist the unexpected, this “shock” can give you insights to enable you to take advantage of a major change in the marketplace or guard against a serious reversal. 

Knowledge is the primary source of value in our world today. 

Your ability to expand your mind and devote yourself to lifelong learning is the key to breaking any success barriers that may be in front of you.

Learning is the minimum requirement for success. Information and knowledge about everything are increasing every day, and so must your knowledge in order to keep up.

The most successful people read an average of 2-3 hours per day. And they are always on the lookout for new information that can help them to be more effective in what they do.

A sabbatical may be the time to pursue a higher level of education. 

Don’t stop at traditional education avenues either - invest in e-courses, read more books, listen to podcasts (or start your own).

Learning how to learn is a meta-skill. It is a critical skill for everyone who needs to pick up and master new concepts frequently.

Understanding what is learning and how our memory works will help you understand why certain techniques work and how to use and adapt the techniques to your advantage.

Learning is hard and takes effort on a personal level. It requires attention and physical energy.

• When you start learning, you need to pay careful attention to bring that information into your short-term memory. Lack of sleep can make it difficult to pay attention to. Even memory champions can only hold 5-7 pieces of information at a time.
• When you sleep, short-term memories are moved to a different region in the brain for long-term storage. Your brain then consolidates the information and select what information to forget.

Learning and memory benefit from active involvement. When you add speaking to it, the content becomes more defined in long-term memory and more memorable.

Most of us can type very fast, but research shows writing your notes by hand will allow you to learn more.

Taking notes by hand enhances both comprehension and retention.

Studying over a period of time is more effective than waiting until the last minute.

Distributed practice works because each time you try to remember something, the memory becomes harder to forget.

According to research, regular exercise can improve memory recall.

Exercise also increases a protein (BDNF - brain-derived neurotrophic factor) that supports the function, growth, and survival of brain cells.

Research shows that those who teach, speed up their learning and remember more.

Even just preparing to teach means that you will seek out key points and organize information into a coherent structure. 

An individual can be changed through education.

We have so little control over the biology that determines our desires. But the part of our biology that is more malleable is our brain.

Real education comes to shape if we are respecting the importance of self-education, and not just happy being spoon-fed the pre-determined syllabus.

We need to expand our boundaries of imagination and learn at the edge of our knowledge.

The education section is mostly put at the end of the resume unless your job is a professional job that requires a specific education. 

• List the level of the degree, then the field of study, then the name and general information of the institution.
• List your highest degree of education first, then follow in descending order.
• Only list educational honors and achievements that are notably exceptional or associated with your graduation.

Until two decades ago, the general goal of colleges was for academic pursuits and teaching individuals to become more well-rounded. The general thought was that colleges were not vocational institutions.

Now, and possibly in the future, colleges will have to focus more on training and change their curriculum to meet the demands of employers.

Learning is a journey, not a destination. It's a process of self-discovery, fueled by curiosity.

Learning is an investment that usually pays for itself in increased earnings. And in a fast-changing world, the learning skills quickly is becoming a necessity.

Adopting an adaptable mindset (or growth mindset) means cultivating the belief that you can improve intelligence and performance because they are not fixed features.

This will have a significant impact on your motivation and on the process of searching for new opportunities in life.

Our brains naturally decline if we do nothing to protect them. With the right diet, we can slow the decline process.

The health of our brain can significantly change how your record, process and retrieve information.

Online learning gives us a choice and is a flexible virtual approach to learning, but it is not easier or faster, and one still has to learn. It is convenient due to zero commute time, no parking hassles and savings in daily expenses, but it still requires time and effort.

It requires more discipline and good study habits, along with enthusiasm and time management skills.

Are online books as good as physical books in terms of reading?

Reading on paper (physical books) is slightly better than online, but it comes down to personal preferences. In most cases, students have a choice.

If you want to develop skills in any area, don't just buy a book. Put yourself in situations where you are forced to learn by doing. 

If you want to become a good communicator, join organizations like Toastmasters and take up any opportunity you can to speak.

• Online training has certain toolsets of evaluation, recording, and sophisticated analysis of attendance, feedback, and even emotions, which was never possible in an actual classroom.
• Course materials can be downloaded instantly, as opposed to printing and shipping books every semester, reducing costs and environmental impact. The content is also updated easily and can be scaled at minimal costs.
• As information is real-time, many complex, time-sensitive models of learning can be developed, the speed of which could never be a reality in traditional methods of learning.

Online education is a modern version of distance learning, which started as mail assignments in Great Britain over 170 years ago.

Back then, instructors sent lessons and received the assignments of students by email.

• In 1960, the University Of Illinois created an intranet, a closed system of linked computer terminals for students to access shared material. This evolved into PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), which expanded the same technology across the globe.
• Apple software released (1979) an innovative computer game, Lemonade Stand, which was played in a multi-player format, enabling people sitting in different places to play and learn with computers, in a virtual environment. This promoted the idea of learning with the help of computers, in a virtual environment.

The heady 80s had the Electronic University Network (EUN) started providing online courses to colleges and universities.

It used the DOS software and Commodore 64 computers and later collaborated with American Online (AOL) a popular online service in the 90s.

• CALCampus offered the first truly online courses with real-time instruction and live interaction. This was a time when the world-wide-web was only available through a dialup modem and extremely low speeds compared to what we have today.
• The California Virtual University(CVU) opened for a few years as a massive warehouse of online educational resources.
• The Journal Of Asynchronous Learning Networks was the first peer-reviewed journal for academic research on online education.

In 2002, MIT began providing course materials and lectures for free, anywhere in the world.

The number of students for online courses jumped to about 5.5 million by 2007, and many corporates began to realize the quality of education provided remotely, even though initially they were reluctant to recognize the same.

The perception of online education has drastically changed as compared to the initial correspondence courses.

It is now an accepted education choice and is set to quadruple due to the ongoing crisis which leaves it as the only option for most of the world. Advances in hardware, software and connectivity will further facilitate the upcoming explosion.

Parents have more power and choices in educating their children than they realize.

Many parents are concerned about the changing world and uncertain futures their children face. They are anxious about education, a narrow curriculum, that schools are not cultivating curiosity. They worry about their children being medicated for "learning problems." However, many educators share the same concerns and are campaigning for change.

Parents have three options:

• They can work for changes within the current system.
• They can press for changes to the system.
• They can educate their children outside the system.

Governments are desperately trying to improve education using strategies such as standardization, testing, and competition, especially in literacy, mathematics, and science. But it is generally not successful.

Finland is following a different path. They don't have a mandated curriculum; they encourage a broad curriculum and seldom do standardized testing. Consequently, they are more successful in education.

Eight out of ten teenagers experience extreme stress during the school year. Parents can help in three ways:

1. Learning to recognize the signs of 'toxic' stress
2. Encouraging more downtime.
3. Work with the school to reduce the avoidable causes of stress such as excessive homework and testing.

The purpose of education is to enable students to understand the world and the talents within them so they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.

The role of the government should be to create the best conditions to encourage such an education. Some ways include adopting a broad and balanced curriculum and developing guidelines and resources to support it.

94% of countries implemented some form of remote learning during the pandemic. And this is not the first time that educators have made use of remote learning.

During a polio outbreak in 1937, the Chicago school system used radio to teach children. During other communicable illnesses, schools typically halted formal learning. Some kids played more while others went back to work at home or on family farms. School sometimes compensated for lost education by shifting the academic calendar or mandating Saturday attendance.

The current pandemic has highlighted the burdens of the digital divide. Children in high-poverty communities don't have access to technology. It highlights the need for funding to address technological inequalities in schools.

Pandemic teaching could ultimately improve education. It could reshape education once school moves back to the classroom. Digital tools could enrich the curriculum and could create new ways to connect with students beyond the traditional modes of learning.

Mind Framing or the personal growth framework uses the PARI method:

1. Pact: A public commitment to learning something new.
2. Act: Studying, practicing and experimenting.
3. React: Sharing of progress and building of projects.
4. Impact: Work towards something new using the acquired skill and move towards a new pact.

By 2020, 65% of all jobs will require postsecondary education and training beyond a high school diploma. But with the cost of college education, this is out of reach of many people.

A college degree has increasingly become something only available to the wealthy. The rest have to take out a student loan which makes it harder to amass wealth.

It is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge. Ultralearning is a potent skill for dealing with a changing world. It has 3 main characteristics:

• It is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one.
• It's self-directed. It’s about how you make decisions about what to learn and why.
• It's an intense process. Ultralearners always search for and take unusual steps to maximize their effectiveness in learning.

Learning is no longer something that stops when you graduate. Life long learning is a valuable skill because of:

• Economics: Average is over. But even if the economic landscape is rapidly changing may, we can engineer our response to it by aggressively learning the hard skills we need to thrive.
• Education: Ultralearning can fill some of those gaps when going back to school isn’t an affordable option.
• Technology: The space of learning possibilities is immense, just waiting for ambitious autodidacts to come up with new ways to exploit it.

1. Meta-learning: Start by learning how to learn
2. Focus: Carve out time in your day
3. Directness: Learn by doing.
4. Drill the weakest points: Break down complex skills into small parts.
5. Retrieval: Test yourself to grow
6. Feedback: Don't let your ego get in the way
7. Retention: Understand what you forget and why
8. Intuition: Develop your intuition through play and exploration.
9. Experimentation: Get outside your comfort zone by cultivating an experimental mindset.

Distractions (a lot of them driven by technology) are the biggest blockers in the way of your knowledge accumulation. What to focus on?

• Your environment: be aware of what environment you work best in, and test it. Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning.
• The task you’re trying to learn: certain activities, due to their nature, are harder to focus on than others.
• Your mind: negative emotions, restlessness, and daydreaming can be some of the biggest obstacles to focus.

You can't improve without feedback. But not all feedback is the same. Learn to distinguish between the 3 types:

• Outcome feedback: this tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse.
• Informational feedback: this feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.
• Corrective feedback: the best kind of feedback to get is corrective feedback. This is the feedback that shows you not only what you’re doing wrong but how to fix it.

Homeschooling is a progressive movement around the world where parents educate their own children at home.

The homeschooling movement began in the 1970s when researchers and authors such as John Holt and Dorothy and Raymond Moore started writing about educational reform. They promoted homeschooling as an alternative educational option.

Homeschoolers have access to an array of resources and social networks.

Home educators form co-ops, in which families group together to have classes. Home educators also arrange social events such as lectures, field trips, art classes, music instruction, sports, and playdates.

Homeschooling - defined as parent-led home-based education - is an age-old traditional educational practice.

• It is growing at an estimated 2% to 8% per annum in the United States but increased drastically from 2019-2020 to 2020-2021. Over 9 million Americans had experienced being homeschooled as of February of 2020.
• Homeschooling is also growing around the world. (e.g. Australia, Canada, France, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, Russia, Mexico, South Korea, Thailand, and the United Kingdom).

• In the 18th-century, Common schools emerged and provided education to students of all ages. Parents paid for their chid's tuition and provided housing for the teacher.
• By 1900, 31 states required students between the ages of 8-14 to attend public schools. By 1918, all students had to complete elementary school.
• In the late 18th-century, European factory-type education came to the surface and was adopted in North America in the mid19th century. Student outcomes were designed to meet societal needs.

In The US, there is a growing movement towards Hip Hop education, with the music style which is generally associated with breakdance and graffiti being used for self-expression, better social life, fitness and professional development.

Hip hop music has mostly been a patchwork of sample tracks from other songs, and the same philosophy has been a part of various schools and universities in the US, where it is encouraged to pick and choose ideas from other places rather than sticking to a rigid formula.

It doesn't. School is hardly eduction.

Education is derived from two Latin roots.

• Educare, which means to train or to mould.
• Educere, which means to draw out or to lead out.

The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education

Children are capable of making their own connections with a vast number of things and experiences.

We should ensure the child learns about nature, handicrafts, science and art, reads many living books and is physically active.

At first, corporeal punishment was the primary tool in the education process. In the 17th century, philosopher John Locke urged parents to use praise to stimulate children to learn and behave well.

The fashion then was for a wet nurse to feed a newborn, and then the child was passed on to grandparents or poor relatives for a salary. The child would return home around age five and be educated by the biological mother. Rousseau condemned all of this. After Emil, it became fashionable for the mother to breastfeed her child.

• We achieve excellence. Achieving excellence for the first time is only the start.
• We contemplate. Next, we observe what's good and how to apply it to a craft.
• We act. When we apply what is good to our craft, our craft becomes a medium for expressing excellence. It means that we make something for others to experience.

At times, we should take a break from action and return to contemplation. We should continue to refine our understanding of excellence and apply it to what we do.

We get better at thinking when we put our knowledge into practice. Doing and thinking work together. You learn something, and then you use that information to do something. The result is that you learn something new. It is a powerful feedback loop.

Better thinking takes strength. You have to be able to switch off to the noise around you and walk away from distractions. You also need strength to face the results and find better ways to do something.

Anything less than 30 is just not enough, but anything more than 50 is too much information for your brain to take in at one time. Once you’re done, take a five to 10 minute break before you start another session.

Online education is a form of education where students use their home computers through the internet. For many nontraditional students, among them all those who want to continue working full time or raising families, online graduations and courses have become popular in the past decade. Often online graduation and course programmes, some of which are conducted using digital technologies, are provided via the online learning portal of the host university.

"This is the 'new normal' that is introduced to the students when the pandemic started." -Alliah

• In the first section, put down where you got educated. This information not only serves as an indicator of your successes but informs the recruiter that you are invested in learning and education. 
• Include only relevant coursework to the position you are applying for.
• The primary purpose of a résumé is to highlight your knowledge, skills and accomplishments. Include things that will impress as you want to show yourself in the best light possible. 
• Only include your GPA if it is above 3.2

Education serves two purposes:

• Teaching valuable knowledge and skills. This is known as the human capital theory.
• Ranking students according to their ability, conscientiousness and ambition. This is known as signalling theory.

If an apprenticeship is costly, it makes sense to only focus on top applicants. A school could serve to filter students who can learn the best. However, signalling also increases competition. Students may go deeper into debt to get an MA so that they can gain an edge over the competition.

Education is a kinetic form of learning, whereas awareness is a receptive form of it. It requires a focused acquisition of information through sustained habits and practices, whereas you can become aware of something simply by being in the right place at the right time. And most importantly, education allows for the application of learned information, which is the ultimate way to transform it into knowledge.

Inert knowledge is learning information without understanding it, which means you have a limited ability to recognise, express or use it.

• For example, memorising a math formula without understanding its meaning or implication. Students can learn stuff, pass examinations, and not understand what they have memorised.
• Inert knowledge in language learning is memorising a grammatical rule without understanding what the rule means or how to use it.

Bloom's taxonomy describes six major types of abilities based on educational goals:

• Remembering: Recalling the relevant information from long-term memory.
• Understanding information: Interpreting it, summarising, explaining, and giving relevant examples.
• Application: Implementing information.
• Analysing, such as organising it and understanding how these parts relate to each other.
• Evaluating: Critiquing the information and making relevant judgments.
• Creating new things based on the information.

There are two main approaches in education to avoid inert knowledge:

Teach in a way that encourages the development of active knowledge. When teaching students about a certain concept,

• help them to understand what it means,
• how it connects to other things, and
• how to apply the information in practice.

Encourage people to learn in a way that encourages the development of active knowledge.

• Explain the concept of inert knowledge to students.
• Explain why it is a problem
• Encourage them to ask themselves guiding questions when they learn new material.

• Our educational systems have become 100% informative - there is no inspiration.
• Without inspiration, no human being raises beyond the limitations in which he lives.
• Making the whole education system purely informational has caused an enormous damage, and that time of life when you are youthful, when you are capable of many things, that span of life unfortunately goes to waste simply because the necessary inspiration is not there.

There is a grain of truth to the myth. Namely, people do differ in their abilities and preferences. The VARK learning model, for example, classifies people as either visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinesthetic (hands-on) learners. Each method is part of the learning process, and people will have their favourites. Such preferences are as true in education as anything else in life.

Many proponents believe learning styles are inheritable, emerge early in childhood, have a physiological basis, predict learning outcomes, and are immutable.

Recent studies found no supporting evidence that learning was enhanced by a slavish dedication to a student’s learning style

In fact, despite broad acceptance, studies continued to show no benefit to a learning-style approach. As one study’s authors so aptly put it: “The most important finding of this study is, in essence, a non finding.”

Why then does the learning styles myth survive despite the evidence and experts’ red-faced arguments? Because like all neuromyths, it tells us something we want to believe.

The classic music myth gives worried parents a sense of control. The 10-percent myth tells us we’re secretly super-geniuses who just need to unlock our potential.

People prefer brain-based accounts of behaviour, and they like to categorize people into types. Learning styles allow people to do both of those things.

It may also tie into common misconceptions of success.

Success is complicated. It requires the right mixture of education, resources, skill, and luck. But we tend to streamline this equation into specialization equals success. 

• The purpose of education within the Fastlane is to amplify the power of the money tree and business system.
• Skills and expertise are waiting just for you. No one drops a book on your lap and gifts knowledge. You have to seek it, process it, and then use it. The acquisition and application of knowledge will make you rich.

Education is more than just an organized system of learning. Education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds.

In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

Children are instinctively predisposed to educate themselves. Watch any child left alone with an iPhone, and you can see the drive to self-education.

Learning drives are:

• Curiosity drives the child to know what the apparatus is, how it works, and what they can do with it.
• Playfulness causes the child to examine the apparatus. They pass it from hand to hand, turn it over, rub it, shake it, drop it, throw it. They are running little experiments to test the apparatus' properties and capabilities.
• Sociability drives the child to talk to people about this fascinating apparatus.

Hundreds of studies conducted with children show that they gaze longer at new scenes than familiar ones. They look longer at events that they find intriguing and lose interest as soon as there is nothing new to learn from it.

Children are relentlessly drawn toward anything that runs counter to expectations.

If you're always successful, you won't know what to improve. If you always fail, you won't know what works.

We learn the quickest when the success rate is 85 percent.

Despite fears of automation destroying jobs, history shows us that new technology often ends up creating new jobs and opportunities.

If you want to take advantage of these new jobs, then you’ll need to be able to teach yourself new things. Traditional classroom education is simply too slow to catch up with the changing pace of technology, so it’s up to you.

Some of the new jobs that tech advances have created in the past ten to twenty years:

• YouTube video editor
• Podcast producer
• Head of blog content (my job)
• Social media manager
• Drone operator.

The first step to learning something new is to pick a skill or subject. You probably have a vague idea in mind already, to make it more specific. This way, you can better track your learning progress.

Besides being specific about what you want to learn, you should also determine why you want to learn it. As with building good habits, you shouldn’t decide to learn something just because your friend or mom or some guy on the internet said so. Rather, you should choose learning goals that are personally meaningful. This could be to help you advance in your career or pure curiosity.

• Focus on resources that make few assumptions and focus on teaching absolute beginners. This way, you don’t miss fundamentals or develop bad habits that could come back to haunt you later.
• Beyond that, pick whatever learning resources work best for your style.
• One caveat for learning physical skills: get a teacher. With physical skills such as sports or music, a teacher can help you avoid bad habits or even injuries that come from improper technique. Even if you’re taking lessons virtually, the live feedback from a teacher is invaluable to starting off the right way.

Spaced repetition is similar to traditional flashcards, with one important twist. Instead of spending equal time studying every flashcard, spaced repetition systems focus your studies on the information you struggle with the most.

Meanwhile, spaced repetition also has you review information right before you’re about to forget it. This ensures you retain all the information you need without wasting time reviewing things you already know.

There isn’t a straightforward answer. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in a discipline, but the reality is more complex.

• To start, is your goal actually to become an expert? In many cases, you can benefit immensely from learning a subject even to a basic or intermediate level. In other words, how long it takes to learn a subject depends on the level you’re looking to reach.
• Furthermore, it also depends on how much time you can devote to learning. If you can put full-time effort into learning something, then you can progress very quickly.

One of the hidden functions of education is to signal intelligence and conformity rather than solely to acquire knowledge.

"Education serves as a signal of intelligence and conformity, often more so than as a source of practical knowledge."

This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students).

The teacher talks about reality as if were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable.

He expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students.

His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration.

Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

Education becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.

Students become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store.

The interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the opressed, not the situation which oppresses them”.

The educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. People “receive” the world as passive entities. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world.

Everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.