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I remember getting mad at a high school English teacher once.
I asked her for career advice when I was in the 10th Grade and she said: “Be patient. You can’t learn anything before your early twenties anyway.”
This hit the wrong nerve and I started reading everything out of spite. The motive? Let me learn about everything there is to know before I turn 20. Let me map out the world before I head into it.
This approach naturally backfired. When I entered my 20s, I was still confused despite years of book learning. Theoretical understanding didn’t exempt me from life experience and the worst part? I discovered that simple life advice I once overlooked was incredibly difficult to implement.
Years later, without knowing it, I started agreeing with that English teacher. It’s true. I’m only starting to learn about life in my twenties. But that question remains: why can’t theory replace life experience?
Why can’t Book Smart replace life experience?
My fatal flaw is that I believe I can theory my way through everything. Even as a teenager, whenever I encountered something, I was always on the hunt for a theory that explained what happened.
I guess this is the philosophical fantasy: to map the world entirely so that we don’t have to live in it. Especially for a young person, there’s an appeal to avoiding suffering & confusion by explaining everything away.
However, this attitude is incompatible with basic developmental psychology. Let me explain.
In 1958, Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed his theory of moral development. He argued that learning isn’t a linear accumulation of understanding. Instead, it leaps through different stages and each stage has an entirely different view of the world.
To him, understanding progresses in three levels:
1: Pre-conventional
We understand the world in terms of feedback, and we learn what to do and what not to do based on physical consequences. In this case, mapping out the world = seeing how the world reacts to our actions.
2: Conventional
We understand the world in terms of standards set up by the community around us. Notions of right and wrong start to emerge, and we see things from a black or white, right or wrong orientation while appealing to authority. In this case, mapping out the world = conforming to the advice from people around us.
3: Post-Conventional
We understand the world via principles instead of rules because firm laws no longer work. We learn that life is a little more complicated than sticking with absolute ideas about what we should or shouldn’t do. We start to entertain complex moral dilemmas and, in this case, mapping out the world = using abstraction to make sense of complex problems.
Let’s apply this model to the limits of theory when we were young.
When we first conceived the urge to understand the world, we were more often than not at the Conventional Level of our understanding. Due to a lack of life experience, reading about how life works is like collecting what we should do without quite knowing why.
A good example: why shouldn’t I be an asshole? Without much life experience, it’s easy to turn this into a black/white rule: I am a good boy/good girl for being nice. I should be considerate because my parents said so.
We can even read books on social intelligence at that age, but life experience inherently limits how much we can comprehend. It’s a hard glass ceiling because we can’t match theory to experience.
But later on, when life experience catches up, we’ll realise that being a doormat could be counterproductive. We’ll also see the real reason why seemingly decent people do evil things based on a deepened understanding of morality & society. When this happens, we’re no longer in the Conventional Level of understanding but the Post-Conventional Level. Moral ambiguity shifts us from rules to exploring universal principles.
This phenomenon applies to many other areas of life: health, personal finance, relationships, etc. If we learn about these things too early on, we run the risk of simply turning knowledge into firm rules. This makes us rigid and unable to progress with our understanding, and this is the inherent limit of knowledge for a young person.
Then… What is education for?
Lawrence gave a compelling argument in a paper titled: ‘Moral Development: A Review of the Theory”. For him, learning isn’t an accumulation of knowledge, but a way of exposing students to greater moral complexity. In other words, it’s about moving people from the Conventional Level to the Post-Conventional Level.
In Lawrence’s own words:
“The aim of moral education should be to stimulate people’s thinking ability over time in ways which will enable them to use more adequate and complex reasoning patterns to solve moral problems.”
This is where the idea of learning how to learn comes in. Education isn’t all about reciting complex mathematical formulae and Shakespeare’s sonnets. Instead, it’s about using theory as a means to an end to develop adequate ways of thinking about a problem.
In sum, learning is never a waste of time regardless of what you study. It’s simply the primer for thinking about the world in a different order of complexity. So, when life does throw you a curve ball, you can think about it adequately and come up with an intelligent solution. In a sense, sometimes we are too young to read certain books, but reading them at the right time will eventually carry us into the world beyond the pages.
Until next week
Robin
So so true - what’s the point of education if we can’t apply it in a meaningful way which at minimum tries to improve or better understand the world beyond the university
Isn't this the strongest point of reading fiction? If you read non-fiction for education as a young person, the implications and lessons will probably fly over your head, because you lack the frame of reference from life experience to hang them on to. In a work of fiction, the narrative structure and the characters aid you in providing this very frame of reference - you gather life experience by proxy, even if it's not the same as experiencing the thing yourself.
Of course, examples in fiction can also fail to connect and fiction often takes on a whole new meaning if you re-read it with more life experience under your belt. But I believe it has a better chance of educating a young person than a work of non-fiction.