Education
Evidence-based education is an established field of study working to determine best practices for teaching and education based on proven effectiveness in learning.
Looking to get more educated? The Organizations page contains a number of online resources, courses, and learning tools that promote the ideas and values described in this wiki.
A Common Framework For All Subjects
It's not enough just to teach students an array of disconnected facts about a variety of subjects. In order to really comprehend these concepts holistically, seeing how they relate to each other, to ourselves, and fit together as pieces of the universal puzzle, education must be undertaken with a clear picture of what that puzzle is depicting.
metaculture is designed to be that picture. The fractal serves as a visual representation of the universal whole, with everything it contains fitting into its simple yet infinitely complex pattern. The philosophical grounding in science, reason, critical thinking and universalism make it religiously and ideologically neutral, avoiding conflicts with church/state separation that a purely atheist or religious point of view would raise.
By giving children a vision of what the puzzle will look like when it's finished, children will learn much more easily and eagerly while building a meaningful vision of life's purpose and how to make the most of it.
Filling In The Knowledge Gaps
One of the goals of this wiki is to address the most common knowledge gaps that most people still have after the typical high school or college education. Specifically, the ones that serve as blocks to understanding core scientific concepts like creation and evolution and cause continued reliance on supernatural belief systems.
Other important evidence-based best practices for improved life choices are also provided for a variety of practical subjects not generally taught in schools.
Education Over Ideology
Ideological differences reflect differences in the structure and content of our memes (in the Dawkins sense). Cognitive development theories generally predict ideological behavior at the formal operational level, followed by an integral, universal, post-dialectical stage where conflicting ideologies are resolved (see Kegan, Kohlberg, Integral). This is a learning process, where broadened knowledge and experience (i.e. "wisdom") leads you to adopt a more expansive worldview.
This is a process that anyone can undergo, at any stage in their life, should they have the motivation and access to resources to do so. It is a process that transcends ideology and politics. It is simply teaching and learning. Once you have learned all of the necessary concepts, a rational, inclusive, optimistic, universal worldview will naturally emerge, because that is simply where the facts lead us. See free will.
Peer to Peer Adult Education
You cannot combat polarization and authoritarianism in politics and religion without doing something about the deficiencies in education that leave the majority of adults without critical thinking skills and addicted to social media that is bombarding them with propaganda and misinformation. The public schools should be teaching these things, but there is a chicken or egg issue there. Propaganda and polarization has eroded support for public education to the point where it would be difficult to implement a proper civics or critical thinking curriculum within that institution. Home schooling and private religious education mean that over 15% of children would never see this curriculum anyway. Until we teach the adults whey these things are necessary, they will not vote to teach it in the schools.
Adults love self-help, especially if it is couched in spirituality. They spend billions of dollars each year to learn about kinds of pop psychology mixed with pseudoscience, woo, and other ideas of questionable utility. Pretty much all of organized religion is just ritualized self-help. People have a natural drive to want to improve their lives, acquire knowledge, and be happier. The progressive, secular, and scientific communities have made the educational resources available via libraries and the Internet, but they have completely failed to motivate people to use them. Meanwhile, people with misinformation have huge marketing budgets and shrewdly target the people most in need of that education.
Teach-ins need to make a comeback, but instead of teaching political ideology, they need to teach people the science that will help them understand and navigate the modern world.[1]
For example:
- Civics: How do elections work and what makes them secure? The branches of government. The relationship between local and state governments. Why we have regulations.
- Economics: No, the president does not control gas prices. Here are the things the government can do to influence the economy. All the times the economy crashed and the policies we put in place to prevent it from happening again.
- Psychology: Teach people how the brain really works, not just cliché aphorisms, metaphors, and manifestation. Study the science of reinforcement and addiction, theories of consciousness, AI, and neural networks.
- Mathematics: Why math and logic work. Fractal geometry and complexity theory. Probability and statistics. You don't need to be able to work the equations to know why they work, and how they help us understand the way the world works.
- Critical Thinking: Logical fallacies. Spotting misinformation. Modern forms of grift and how to avoid them.
- Technology: How to use the latest apps and platforms. How to customize your algorithm so your newsfeed doesn't brainwash you.
- Social Norms: Interacting with other humans in ways that aren't off-putting. Manners. Understanding other cultures and the differences in their norms.
- General Adulting: How do perform the essential parts of being a modern adult human that they don't teach you in schools. Routine home and auto maintenance, paying bills and taxes, investing, etc.
None of these subjects is inherently partisan or anti-religious, which should allow these teach-ins to partner with local churches and civic organizations. It adds up to an advanced class on adulting. This term was popularized because there is so much that our parents and schools fail to prepare us for in adult life. It goes far beyond just paying bills and auto maintenance. Proper adulting in the 21st century means having a functional grasp on how things work so you can steel yourself against the many grifters who prey on those that don't, and be a good citizen instead of a contrarian or useful idiot.
Religious organizations teach class after class where they analyze passages from scripture from every possible angle. If they just dedicated half of that class time to teaching these essential concepts, we could see real improvement in the level of discourse, civic engagement, and well-being of average citizens.
Secular organizations gather together scientists, engineers, professors, and other educated people to have erudite and enlightened conversations with each other, but do little to those who would benefit the most from their expertise. Even though teaching can be frustrating, it cannot be done by the uneducated. Secular communities need to be on the forefront of this peer to peer movement for adult education, because they are the ones who both know what needs to be taught, and understand why it's important to teach.
PLEASE: Peer Led Education on Adulting and Social Evolution
Every great movement starts with a great acronym. PLEASE is encompasses the mission and the need for it. Society is evolving at an ever increasing speed. It is no longer possible for a single childhood education to prepare you for many of the things you will encounter ten years from now, much less fifty or more. It also references the deep need we have for this type of ongoing adult education, as well as our need for restored manners and generally agreed upon social norms.
Expanding Education Is Always Good
Expanded access to education is a universal good. Any attempt to limit access to information, books, schools, or any other tool of knowledge, to any person for any reason, is bad.
Limiting access to education by making it unaffordable to some also falls in this category. The public benefit of free access to education will always significantly outweigh the cost to society.
Education enhances our ability to emulate free will by expanding the possible life choices we can make. We cannot choose to do something that we have no knowledge of. Education is a necessary prerequisite for freedom and democracy to flourish.
Education has been shown to naturally reduce the birth rate, the poverty rate, the crime rate, and generally improves every meterstick by which we judge successful policy.
Education is More Than Just Information
Education is not to be confused with information. As Yuval Noah Harari makes the case for in his book Nexus, the spread of misinformation is a necessary by-product of any new technology that improves our ability to communicate. This has led to witch trials, authoritarian regimes, and war as often as it has led to the age of enlightenment. Education is the spread of expertise, not just information; of vetted, evidence-based ideas that have proven to be necessary for the economy, government, and society to function.
Freedom of Speech is related. No information should be suppressed, no ideas are illegal. However, this does not mean that they need to be made widely available through algorithmic promotion on internet platforms.
Education as Behaviorceutical
This study on rats driving cars comes to the fairly obvious conclusion that learning helps improve our mood. It should not be a surprise that when you put a brain to use in its primary function (learning) it results in happiness.
The concept of a "behaviorceutical" is a fun way to describe the manner in which our actions and rituals can naturally produce the neurotransmitters that we experience as happiness. It implies that our chemical imbalances are often the by-product of a life that lacks learning, community, wonder, love, and fun, rather than some genetic condition that needs to be remedied with drugs.
See also: The Placebo Effect.
Public Versus Private Education
Public Education is a natural monopoly where geographic location is the most important factor for determining which school is best. Except for large cities, it is inefficient and redundant to offer multiple school options for children. Programs under the guise of "school choice" end up draining resources from existing schools that are already struggling, and the "alternative" is usually just different, not exactly better.
Another issue is that fundamentalist religious schools are the other "choice" that is most often available, causing public funds to support religious indoctrination and violating church-state separation.
However, there is a good point made by the Libertarians that competition in the realm of teaching methods and curriculum is necessary to allow new ideas to develop and gather evidence of their efficacy. Can this be done without the dismantling of public education?
In order to determine best practices in education, you need to perform experiments to determine which curriculum performs better than others, or which ones fit the needs of certain types of students the best. School systems in large cities can offer multiple types of school within the public system to allow for this without diverting and diluting the public funding that needs to go to those least able to afford a private alternative. Smaller cities and rural schools can adopt the best practices learned from the experimental schools, and offer multiple curriculum tracks to meet student needs.
School curriculum variety, competition, and experimentation are all needed to achieve constant improvement in our education system. Supporters of public education should find more ways to make this possible within the public system, or else lose the argument to those who seek to undermine it.
Can We Learn From Videos?
Let's find out! Watch all the videos on this wiki, go to Khan Academy and take a bunch of courses, or check out these videos on evidence-based education principles.
We actually do need education very much, though we can probably do a lot better than kind that existed in England in the 50s and 60. And the kind that exists now.