Purpose of Education


Education is about skills and (exposure to) ideas. The MIT way of education is to build models. In all departments the default approach is to build models that allow us to understand the world and control the world. - Patrick Winston MIT professor

“We can ask ourselves what the purpose of an educational system is and of course there are sharp differences on this matter. There’s the traditional and interpretation that comes from the Enlightenment which holds that the highest goal in life is to inquire and create, to search the riches of the past, [to] try to internalize the parts of them that are significant to you [to] carry that quest for understanding further in your own way. The purpose of education from that point of view is just to help people determine how to learn on their own. It’s you the learner who is going to achieve in the course of education and it’s really up to you what you’ll master, where you go, how you use it, how you’ll go on to produce something new and exciting for yourself, maybe for others. That’s one concept of education.” - Noam Chomsky

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.” - Tara- author of Educated

Steve jobs on Apple experiences:
"There were a lot of people at Apple that just didn't get it. We fought tooth and nail with a variety of people there who thought the whole concept of a graphical user interface was crazy ... on the grounds that it couldn't be done, or on the grounds that real computer users didn't need menus in plain English, and real computer users didn't care about putting nice little pictures on the screen. But fortunately, I was the largest stockholder and the chairman of the company, so I won.

Apple was a corporation — we were very conscious of that. We were driven to make money. I would say that Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but it had a few big differences from other corporate lifestyles I'd seen. The first one was a real belief that there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped into the hierarchy of the organization. In other words: great ideas could come from anywhere.

Apple was a very bottom-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies — I know it sounds crazy — but a lot of companies don't do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do. We figure we're paying them all this money; their job is to figure out what to do and tell us. That led to a very different corporate culture, and one that's really much more collegial than hierarchical.

I think our major contribution [to computing] was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers. If you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring not only ease of use to people — so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time — but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people, it was to bring graphics to people ... so that they could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or artwork, et cetera ... to help them communicate. ... Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience.

In my perspective ... science and computer science is a liberal art, it's something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It's not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It's something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that's how we viewed computation and these computation devices.”

“I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side.”


The Era of Specialisation:

How much of it is important? to what extent should we care about specialization?there is something beautiful about going down the rabbit whole, learning something in depth. Here are John Carmack's view:

Self-Expression:


There is an arugment that much of work we are doing, we are in some sense trying to express ourselves through that medium. Weather its pure poetry or engineering, the creator tries to put some essence into its creation.
To me, ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself. It's very difficult to do. - Bruce lee

  • “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” - Steve Jobs
  • It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.Pablo Picasso

Systems thinking:


Jessica McKellar in her talk “Breaking The Rules”, PyBay2016 summarised it well:

“Programming changes the way you think about and debug and interact with the world. Programers master a system they know they can change. Everything important and worth fighting for is a system, even if nobody told you the rules or that you can change them. The real purpose of coding was never to learn how to program rather to think in systems. - https://youtu.be/9UnMZYMaosw


Conclusion:


All of this should lead to a potential vision statement for our work. e.g
To nurture the human/scientific curiosity, to express oneself and to ask important/ simple/deep questions which can potentially lead to:

  • new inventions(creations),
  • new discoveries,
  • better understanding,
  • better Design(or redesign),
  • healthy/happy community(or society)

Without thinking in terms of strict disciplinary boundaries, thats the purpose of education ! I recommend watching a documentary on Neri Oxman's work at MIT Media lab. Bio-ArchitectureSeason 2 | Episode 2 (September 25, 2019)Abstract: The Art of Design