An Autodidact's Bible #3: Deschooling

Reclaiming Your Mind, Chapter 3, part 1

This is the third installment in the serialization of my forthcoming book, Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible

Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2

This is a long post. Your email client may choke on it. Read the whole thing at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com

Chapter 3: De-Schooling

Take a moment with me and think about what knowledge is, and where it comes from.

Start with your own personal life story.

Chances are, you can remember your mom, or dad, or uncle, or aunt, or the old guy that whittled and smoked on the porch a few doors down teaching you things about the world that ranged from the practical (“Be nice to people if you want them to be nice to you”) to the potentially profound (“God is love”) to the unarguably true (“Perfectly nice people can do awful things”).

You’ve been taught from the first moment you can remember, and perhaps before that. But the most intensive learning that you’ve ever done probably doesn’t register in your memory, because it’s not the sort of thing one generally remembers.

Some of it, of course, came before your brain was developed enough to create coherent memories; learning the faces of your parents, or what your crib looked like, or how to scramble across the floor, then crawl, then stand up, then walk. Learning how your milk language¹ sounded, and then learning how to speak it with increasing fluency. Some of you may even have learned to swim on your own, without instruction (a not-uncommon feat among people who live close to naturally-occurring small bodies of water like ponds and lakes and bays and creeks and calm stretches of river).

Of course, people helped you along the way. You got a shortcut on some of your vocabulary by asking “Mom, what’s a cock-knocker?” after getting called that (or something like it) by a neighbor kid. You got helped with pronunciation by adults who laughed when you left the “ni” out of “organism,” and they might even have been kind enough to tell you why they were laughing rather than leaving you to figure it out for yourself.

But, all that help notwithstanding, you learned to speak on your own by observing, experimenting, and iterating:

You heard sounds that seemed to have meaning, so you imitated them.

When your imitation sounded like speech, you were rewarded with more excitement from the adults around you than when it didn’t.

When the speech-sounds became word-sounds, you got an extra load of excitement on top of that, so you did more of it.

Your experiments yielded results, and those results informed the next round of experiments, and, bit by bit, your entire physical being re-organized itself in light of the knowledge you gained by trial and error.

In children (and students), we call this kind of self-reorganization “growing up,” or “rising to the occasion,” or “realizing your potential,” but those are just fancy ways of describing what happens when we notice “Hey, when I push this button, it doesn’t hurt! And when I push that button, it actually feels pretty good!”

And the reverse (“Ow! I don’t like that”) is an even more powerful teacher.

If you’ve been around educators over the last couple decades, you may have heard talk of something they call “participatory” learning, and how that’s really the key to a good education. When this topic comes up (and, alas, it never goes far enough), you’re hearing the bureaucrats accidentally slip sideways toward the one fundamental truth about learning:

You can be exposed to as many different kinds of knowledge as exist, but you will only learn that which you engage through your Type-1 learning system. That which you don’t engage through Type-1, you will eventually forget.

In other words, you can drive a horse to drink, but you can’t make him water.

Which is all well and good, I hear you say, but if all that’s true, what about that pesky Type-2 system from which all of our adult knowledge and understanding derives?

To which I answer:

“Derives? Or...seems to derive?”

Look at the world around you. Put the book down for a moment if you need to. Take a few breaths to really notice the room you’re in, the book (or e-reader, or media player) in your hands. Notice the craftsmanship, the design, the thought that’s gone into everything.

Anyone with any common sense looking out at the world would conclude, in a heartbeat, that this mountain of evidence points clearly toward a world built on Type-2 learning. And yet, if you walk back just one or two steps, the picture changes:

Where did the knowledge to build a wall come from? What about the design of the furniture? How about the tools? Or even that basic spark of creativity, the impulse to put things together to make new and different things?

All of these things were discovered by various people at various times, who were looking for an expedient fix to a problem they were facing. Each problem yielded one of the solutions that forms a part of the world around you.

Easy enough to figure out, right? Practical problems prompt practical solutions (or at least a search for them). It seems silly to even bother pointing it out.

Except that the same holds true for all knowledge, and for every idea there ever was—correct or incorrect, along various axes of meaning and varying definitions of “truth”—all of it was originally a product of Type-1 Learning.

Even history, that great field built entirely of the testimony of dead (or old) people and the evidence they left behind, is a Type-2 discipline that is wholly dependent upon Type-1 events—and the study of history, even as it happens in a largely Type-2 realm, only advances (on both personal and civilizational levels) by the introduction of Type-1-style feedback loops:

The historian forms a hypothesis about something in history and marshals evidence and argument in its service. The archaeologist or papyrologist or paleographologist or another historian stumbles, in their own studies, upon evidence that tends to support or debunk the hypothesis, forcing (in either case) the historian to revise his hypothesis to account for the new evidence, or to abandon his hypothesis entirely.

As goes a (wo)man, so goes the world. Type-1 learning is the foundation of everything; Type-2 is its handmaiden only.

You may not be convinced yet, and that’s okay. I’ll be exploring why in some detail as we go on. More importantly, I’ll be unpacking why this simple inversion changes everything about how you view the world, opening it up to inquiry and discovery in ways both subtle and gross.

And why it’s not for the timid.

Throwing Stones in Glass Boxes

Believe it or not, you already know how to work Type-1 learning into your Type-2 endeavors. In fact, if you’re like most people, you don’t have any trouble learning, as long as what you’re learning has a big carrot in front of it or a strong stick behind it. New certifications at work? All the trivia for your favorite TV show? The family trees of all the noble houses in your favorite fictional universe? The up-to-the-minute political news? The latest-and-greatest technological gadget? Sure, you can learn that—and have, and do.

You learn it because the motivation you feel helps you overcome your own inhibitions; because you don’t have to crack the walls of your glass box to do it.

Glass box?²

Well, now’s as good a time as any to break it to you:

You may not know it, but you live in a glass box.

Don’t worry. It’s not just you. Everyone does. They’re comfortable places. Their biggest charm is that the glass looks so clear that you can’t even see that it’s there. You view the world from inside your glass box. Everything that you can comfortably navigate is inside that glass box—ideas, skills, hobbies, ethics, understandings, and rules.

The glass itself? It gives you that crystal clear view of the rest of the world that you depend on.

Except the glass isn’t as clear or true as you expect. It’s made up of lenses that distort and warp the picture coming in to you. We will talk about ways we can (imperfectly) correct, compensate, and/or grind those lenses flatter later on. For now, the lensing isn’t what we’re concerned about, but the glass walls themselves.

The glass that keeps you boxed in is everything that sets the limits of acceptable thought for you: your values, your morals, your politics, your subculture, your shame, your sense of propriety, your language, your religion, and your personality. Some of these things you’re stuck with, some are flexible, some are optional.

These walls are why (well, half of why) you can learn some things really well, but not others. They are the roadblocks that channel your curiosity into acceptable corridors. They set the limits on acceptable curiosity—even on conceivable curiosity. Your obsession with Star Trek is a no-risk endeavor—no matter what you learn, you won’t crack a window in your glass box—and it feels good, too, because it feeds positive parts of your personality and fantasy life. Your news-junkie habit isn’t just a matter of keeping-up-with-matters-of-vital-importance, it forms part of your identity, and it helps you reinforce the walls of your glass box.

Left to our own devices, we are attracted most keenly to that subset of things that naturally hold our interest and that also strengthen our glass box. We are also disinclined to follow interests that could lead to our bumping into the walls and becoming aware of the limitations they present.

Becoming aware of these limitations—and remaining aware of them as they move, and learning to move through them—is what makes the difference between an autodidact who can learn anything, and an average-Joe who can apply the powerful tools of Type-1 learning only in limited circumstances. In so doing, you will be welcoming into your life some types of stress that most people will go out of their way to avoid (or, indeed, would rather die than endure), but one of the glories of Type-1 learning is that it can help even with the problems presented by the stresses that come with Type-1 learning.

Now, let’s take a look at some of those walls.

Mapping out the Glass Box

OUR CIVILIZATION’S KNACK for institutionalizing Type-2 learning is not unique. Culture exists because we’re capable of Type-2 learning, and all cultures create formalized institutions for curating and passing down the knowledge they think is most important. And it works—spectacularly.

But it can also become a prison. It creates sacred values and taboos—domains where one must not trespass, questions one must not ask. And, because of the way we take the universal knack for institutionalizing Type-2 learning to blinkered lengths, we create power structures (explicit and implicit) that enforce those taboos and sacred values.

Those taboos and sacred values and institutions—nearly invisible to us—warp the glass in our walls. They are the first and most formidable force for distorting everything we experience, and everything we learn. They turn our windows on the world into funhouse mirrors, and we ourselves are none-the-wiser, because we are utterly bound within our boxes.

And, because we are thusly bound, those distortions make it perfectly possible for any of us to hear/see/read the very thing that we’re searching for and never notice that we’ve found it, except (sometimes) in places where we have learned tricks to correct for those distortions.

The glass box forms our base-of-operations. We can’t exist without it. But it also traps us—a problem, especially as imprisonment is not what most people would consider a pleasurable condition. We resolve this tension by simply not noticing that the walls are there—we only become aware of them in a more-than-theoretical sense when we bump into them, which we only do when we learn something that draws our attention to the limitations of our glass box or the distortions it introduces.

However, it is hard for even the most dedicated ostrich to escape learning entirely, and some things you encounter will reveal your glass box to you—an uncomfortable experience. Other things might actually shatter its walls, an experience ranging (depending on the nature of the wall and the temperament of the individual) from disturbing to traumatic to fatal.

Of Silos and Spider Webs

Imagine a prince, standing atop a tower that affords him an unobstructed view of his lands stretching all the way to the borders—a river on the east, mountains to the west, a sea to the south, and a desert to the north. This is his domain.

Any bounded game space is a “domain,” as is any boundable subject, any skill area, any niche—English poetry, finish carpentry, chess, classical physics, French literature, organic chemistry, ethology, the history of the early Roman republic, etc.

The kind of learning you do most naturally—that thing you do for your job and hobbies and curiosities and obsessions—is domain specific. Within these areas, your drives and your incentives all point in the same direction, and you can learn whatever you want to the limits of your natural capacity, without any blocks. You will encounter, difficulty, for sure. Especially where fine skill or artistic expression are concerned, or where you’re grappling with new ideas, you’ll feel the mental muscle-pain and that sense of groping through conceptual fog that comes with a good intellectual workout. Frustrating, even infuriating at times, but manageable all the same.

It’s when you stray outside those domains that you’ll begin to run into things that can crack or shatter the walls of your box—and the better you get at self-teaching, the harder it will be to protect your box (or stay fully within it). Sooner or later, you will shatter (one or more) of its walls.

But what if you protect yourself? What if you choose only specialized fields, sticking firmly within your domain of choice? In this case, you may break your glass walls less often, but eventually, they will break. Knowledge does not comfortably stay in its play pen. The strings on that web vibrate, and cross-contaminate, trembling like a child itching to be let loose to run and play after a long day at school. Any honest path of inquiry will eventually bring you face-to-face with the limits of your own perspective.

In school, we are most frequently presented with knowledge in the form of silos. Chemistry here, biology there, geology here, geography there, history here, politics there, literature here, law there, civics here, drama there, philosophy here, religion there, and so on. We have the arts and the sciences and the social sciences and the practical arts, and these things stay in their silos, never really mixing except when thought-leaders meet at parties hosted by heavy-duty networkers.

This siloing starts in kindergarten, when we’re first introduced to subject-separated learning, and the walls of the silos grow ever-taller throughout schooling and well into adult life. The most-accomplished people in the top levels of academia, in the sciences, and in engineering carry (usually) earned Ph.D.s.

Ph.D.s. Doctorates. The highest awarded degree in academia. In order to win one in the sciences or the traditional humanities (history, psychology, philosophy, etc.), you have to be the singular world expert in...something. Anything, really. You just have to have discovered or invented something, and thereby made an original contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Not an insignificant achievement, considering how vast the sum of human knowledge is.

And it is vast. Unbelievably vast. Mind-bogglingly vast. Even during that brief and glorious window (back in the 15^th century) when it was possible for a person to own and read every printed book in the known world, that leather-bound legacy was a small—a vanishingly small—slice of the sum of human knowledge.

As you can imagine, finding something that’s unknown—and yet that’s knowable enough to identify as unknown—is a hell of a challenge just by itself. Successfully pushing back on that frontier and winning the degree (from a reputable institution at least) is no mean achievement, and it does make you a world expert.

Of just one little thing.

A single point in that vast, vast web of human knowledge.

The finest experts in the world are fully conversant in just a single pinprick of what’s out there. They sit at the top of their silos, having laid the latest layer of understanding on the vast storehouse they stand atop, and they see the entire world from the point of view of that immensely tall tower of highly specialized knowledge.

This is why the world’s greatest experts rarely change the world, and are rarely the world’s greatest thinkers. They are the masters of the Type-2 process, but largely practice Type-1 only within their silo. Beyond that silo, most of the time, they’re just like everybody else: they have families, hobbies, and idle curiosities that are well in the mean of normal, boring, humanishness.

Not that the world’s great thinkers don’t hold advanced degrees (many of them do) but their world-shaping actions come when they do one of two things:

• Build a bridge between their silo and another, cross-fertilizing both to create something new. It’s the domain of tinkerers, artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, dilettantes, and other so-called “interdisciplinary thinkers.” The Torah called this practice “abomination” (i.e. the mixing of categories), and it gave us fusion cuisine, the gravitational constant, the heliocentric universe, and jazz.

• Apply their domain-specific cognitive tools to different domains. If, for example, you applied classical economics to ecology (and what weirdo would do that?) you get the theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection, which turns out to be a far deeper theory of which economics is only a particular manifestation.

These rogue thinkers have a habit of upending our collective apple-carts, so to speak, and usually by accident.

Consider Joe, an average middle-class son of a tradesman who got himself into some hot water in his late thirties. He was a goldsmith on the make who, upon hearing the news that a festival was coming to a nearby town, dropped everything and got all his friends to go in on a scheme with him to manufacture a boatload of trinkets to sell at said festival. Dependable stuff—souvenirs, talismans, jewelry, commemorative medallions and statuettes, the kinds of things that sell really well at fairs, but that nobody really gives a second glance once they get home. Stuff that can be made cheap and sold dear, with a hefty markup that goes straight into the profit column.

Not a bad plan, except that Joe wasn’t the most...conscientious of people when it came to filling out his paperwork. So, when he and his wagon-loads of goods showed up, he found an empty field. He’d gotten the date of the festival wrong by exactly one year—too soon.

Joe needed to do something to assuage his investors before they took him to the cleaners, so he came up with another scheme that he swore would be just like minting money. All he needed was some antimony, some lead, some copper, a spring-loaded box, and a wine press.

This time, he came through. No stupid clerical error could keep him down. And, beginning in 1439, Johannes Gutenberg made a mint printing and selling indulgences (basically get-out-of-hell-free-cards, except that they weren’t exactly free)—and, quite by accident, changed the entire world in ways that we’re still struggling to cope with today.