A Thought Experiment: Remove Education

We have been looking at the child who arrives late.

Then we imagined the impossible opposite.

A child arriving early.

Before there was much to inherit.

Before schools.

Before textbooks.

Before the enormous accumulated world waiting for us.

That helped me see one possible reason education exists.

But there is another way to test the thought.

Don’t remove civilisation.

Leave everything exactly where it is.

The roads.

The hospitals.

The phones.

The trains.

The books.

The mathematics.

The laws.

The computers.

The supermarkets.

The internet.

The machines.

The music.

Leave all of it.

Then remove education.

What happens to us?

Not to civilisation in some distant, theoretical sense.

To you.

To me.

To the child standing in front of all of it.

The World Would Still Be There

This is important.

Nothing has vanished.

The traffic light still changes colour.

The MRT still arrives.

The medicine is still sitting inside the packet.

The bank account still contains numbers.

The phone still lights up.

The book still contains words.

The piano still has keys.

The computer still runs code.

Everything appears normal.

Except you do not know what any of it means.

That is a very different kind of disaster.

Not an empty world.

A full world you cannot enter.

Imagine Yourself Without Education

Remove everything you learnt from someone else.

Not merely school.

Everything.

No one teaches you language.

No one shows you how to hold a spoon.

No one tells you that the red light means stop.

No one explains money.

No one shows you how to count.

No one reads a story to you.

No one tells you what is dangerous.

No one shows you how to cross a road.

No one explains why you are washing your hands.

No one teaches you how to use the thing in your hand that everyone else calls a phone.

How far do you get?

That question makes education feel rather less academic.

Even “Obvious” Things Stop Being Obvious

We forget how much of ordinary life was taught to us because, once learnt, it feels natural.

A door handle.

Of course you turn it.

A chair.

Of course you sit on it.

A tap.

Of course water comes out.

A toothbrush.

A pedestrian crossing.

A queue.

A calendar.

A clock.

A price tag.

A password.

A receipt.

A staircase.

Nothing about these objects contains a complete instruction manual for a new human.

Someone, somewhere, closed the gap.

Sometimes deliberately.

Sometimes just by being watched.

Sometimes with words.

Sometimes with a hand gently moving ours into the right position.

That is education too.

Remove Language First

This may be the easiest place to feel it.

Imagine the world is exactly as it is now.

But nobody ever teaches you language.

Everyone around you is talking.

Signs are everywhere.

Books are everywhere.

Instructions are everywhere.

The internet contains more information than any previous generation could have imagined.

And most of it is inaccessible to you.

The information has not disappeared.

Your route into it has.

That is a very different problem.

A library without literacy is not really a library to the person standing inside it.

It is a room containing patterned paper.

Then Remove Numbers

Now the shop becomes strange.

“$4.50.”

What is that?

Bus 83.

Which one is that?

Level 6.

How do I know where that is?

10:30.

What does that tell me?

Medication: two tablets, three times daily.

Dangerous now.

The mathematical world was already there.

But until someone helped construct the meaning of number inside us, the symbols did very little.

Again:

the information existed.

The usable capability did not.

Now Put Us Inside a Hospital

This makes the problem much sharper.

Imagine walking into a modern hospital with no education.

It is a highly sophisticated human environment.

Everywhere there is accumulated knowledge.

Machines.

Chemistry.

Biology.

Software.

Protocols.

Specialised language.

Years of medical research.

Layers of accumulated medical knowledge and practice.

It is all there.

But what can you do with it?

Very little safely or independently.

Without the relevant knowledge, even confident action can be unsafe.

The civilisation around you can be extraordinarily capable while you remain unable to access that capability.

That is an uncomfortable thought.

Education Is How the World Becomes Legible

Maybe this is another way of seeing it.

The world we inherit begins almost completely unreadable.

Education gradually makes it legible.

light
→ traffic signal
marks
→ words
symbols
→ mathematics
sound
→ language
metal object
→ tool
behaviour
→ social meaning
diagram
→ instruction
question
→ problem
experience
→ pattern

It is not that the objects change.

We change.

The traffic light was always there.

But eventually we can read it.

The equation was always on the page.

Eventually we can interpret and use it.

The music was always written.

Eventually someone can hear it before playing it.

The world slowly acquires meaning because the human acquires the means to interpret it.

And Then Something Even Stranger Happens

Eventually we forget that we ever could not do it.

Reading is a good example.

Once you can read, it is extraordinarily difficult to look at a familiar word and see only shapes.

Try looking at:

APPLE

and refusing to read it.

Almost impossible.

Reading becomes so automatic that the marks become meaning almost immediately.

Which means education eventually becomes invisible inside us.

We stop experiencing:

symbol
↓
decode
↓
meaning

We simply experience:

meaning

That is perhaps why it is easy to underestimate education.

The better it works, the more natural the result feels.

Remove Education From an Adult

This thought experiment gets even stranger if we do not imagine a child.

Imagine somehow removing education from me now.

Not my memories of school buildings.

Remove the capabilities education helped develop.

Language.

Number.

Reading.

Writing.

Cause and effect I have been shown.

Methods.

Judgement.

Social conventions.

Professional knowledge.

Ways of solving problems.

Even much of what I call “common sense.”

What is left?

Certainly a human.

Certainly perception.

Emotion.

Instinct.

Some learning from direct experience would still occur.

But the adult world I currently move through almost effortlessly would become extraordinarily difficult.

I would not merely know less.

I would become less able to access the environment I already live inside.

That feels like a much better reason to take education seriously.

We Do Not Merely Learn About the World

We learn how to enter it.

That is a slightly different claim.

A child learns language and gains access to conversations.

Learns reading and gains access to stored thought.

Learns mathematics and gains access to quantitative systems.

Learns science and gains access to explanations that cannot easily be seen.

Learns social behaviour and gains access to groups.

Learns professional capability and gains access to roles.

Learns judgement and gains access to increasingly complicated decisions.

Each capability opens another part of the existing world.

CAPABILITY
↓
ACCESS
↓
PARTICIPATION
↓
AGENCY

Perhaps education is not merely filling a person.

It is opening doors.

And Without It, We Become Dependent

This is perhaps the part that makes the thought experiment real.

If I cannot read, I need somebody to read for me.

If I cannot calculate, I need somebody to calculate for me.

If I cannot evaluate an argument, I need somebody to tell me what to believe.

If I cannot understand a contract, I need somebody to interpret it.

If I cannot navigate information, I need somebody to choose what reaches me.

If I cannot understand the systems around me, I can still live inside them.

But increasingly, someone else must operate them on my behalf.

So education does something beyond knowledge.

It changes the amount of agency available to a person.

That seems important.

There Is a Difference Between Being Carried and Being Able to Walk

A modern society can carry us surprisingly far.

Push the button.

Scan the card.

Follow the arrow.

Click here.

Accept.

Continue.

The interfaces are designed so we do not need to understand everything underneath.

And that is useful.

We could not function otherwise.

But there is a point where convenience becomes dependence.

If I can operate something only while the instructions remain perfectly normal, what happens when something unusual occurs?

If I only know which button to press, but not why—

I can run the procedure.

I may not be able to repair it.

There is a difference between:

knowing the route

and

being able to find another route when the road closes.

Education may have something to do with that too.

This Is Where It Becomes Personal

Because now we are no longer talking about whether civilisation survives 500 years.

We are talking about Tuesday morning.

Can I understand what the doctor just told me?

Can I work out whether this loan makes sense?

Can I tell if something online is misleading?

Can I learn a new piece of software?

Can I explain what I mean?

Can I recognise when I am wrong?

Can I retrain when my job changes?

Can I help my child?

Can I make a decision when nobody has given me the answer?

These are not examination questions.

They are access questions.

And agency questions.

Perhaps This Is Another Reason Education Exists

Earlier we asked:

Why does education need to exist?

One answer was:

because every child arrives late to accumulated human knowledge.

Now we have another.

Because merely placing a human inside a developed world does not give that human access to the capabilities of that world.

Something must bridge the gap.

Without that bridge, civilisation can surround us while remaining partially inaccessible.

That is a very strange image.

A person standing in the middle of an enormous inheritance—

unable to open it.

Education Does Not Give Us the World

The world was already there.

Perhaps education gives us increasing ability to operate inside it.

Not because the world grants us permission.

Because capability gives us more ways to act.

At first:

someone feeds us

Then:

we feed ourselves

At first:

someone reads to us

Then:

we read

At first:

someone tells us where to go

Then:

we navigate

At first:

someone solves the problem

Then:

we solve it

A great deal of childhood is this gradual transfer.

From being carried—

towards being capable.

And Perhaps That Is Why Education Feels Different From Information

Information can sit outside me.

Education changes what I can do without somebody else doing it for me.

That may be one of the clearest distinctions I have found so far.

A book can contain an answer.

Education can make me capable of finding one.

A map can contain a route.

Education can make me capable of navigating.

A formula can contain a method.

Education can make me capable of recognising when to use it.

A civilisation can contain astonishing capability.

Education can make some of that capability mine.

Not as possession.

As ability.

So Remove Education

Leave the whole world behind.

Keep every building.

Every book.

Every machine.

Every piece of technology.

Every accumulated human achievement.

Then remove our ability to inherit how any of it works.

We would still be surrounded by civilisation.

But each of us would begin becoming a stranger inside it.

And perhaps that is the more immediate Reason for Existence.

Education is not only how humanity carries something forward.

It is how we become able to catch hold of what has already been carried forward for us.

Every child arrives late.

Education is one of the ways we stop them from remaining late forever.