I work with developing people. I do this as part of my day job where I develop future consultants to attain technical mastery and working with their customers. I do this as an adjunct at a community college. I do this for myself. I do take a relatively hands-off approach with my children; I had the same experience and we share many similarities in that being overtly directed is not something we accept… so we talk and I provide feedback mostly when asked and now that they’re older, they seek the feedback themselves.
What I have experienced is that we are very much “in the Matrix” with respect to education.
What am I talking about? Are we really jacked into a computer simulation?
I don’t know if we’re actually in a computer simulation, or not; that is an interesting subject to ponder. No, what I am suggesting is that in education we focus on proxies for reality rather than reality itself.
The Matrix was highly influenced by many philosophical concepts. Chief among is “Simulacra and Simulation” by Jean Baudrillard. He opens the discussion outlining a territory and a map. We want a map so that we can understand the territory, but over time, the map becomes so large and detailed that it overlays the territory itself. We are no longer even encountering or thinking about the territory itself, but only the map. In this way, we open ourselves to being deceived because the map can become altered and we will accept it as truth because we don’t even check the terrain.
Many things in our lives are simply proxies. The rings on a smart watch become a proxy for our fitness; I have even caught myself putting off exercising because I don’t have my watch on to track it. Money is a proxy for the value we create yet some people chase money for its own sake which provides diminishing value (sure, adding liquidity is a sort of value that is created when we simply trade stocks for arbitrage, but it is quite separated from value in reality); we often see people chastising billionaires about their wealth not even understanding that they don’t have money in an account, at all… they hold equities that are estimated to have a value. What they hold is a closer proxy to reality than money itself, yet if they were to sell, they actually lose control, especially when they’re effective in execution within that company.
The point is that proxies are not reality. We have reached this point in education.
I experienced this first hand because I put off post-secondary education for a few years. I had practical experience and certifications. However, I decided that I needed to get that degree because the degree would improve my employment prospects. It did indeed improve my employment projects; I doubled my salary between the time I started working on my bachelors degree and the time I was halfway through it. It was a checkbox that I was primarily working on. It is true that it helps. But the purpose is to become educated, not to check the boxes. Too many times we’re simply going through the motions and checking the boxes rather than developing a sense of mastery on the subject matter.
I see this when I am working with others. We see certifications and the goal becomes completing the certification rather than developing mastery over the subject matter. Part of this is due to the way the certifications are created. Some random facts here, some high level questions there. And the training for those certifications are simply teaching to the test. I have never been a fan of this sort of behavior (which is part of the reason I really support the Cloud Mastery Bootcamp at Digital Cloud Training; we develop recorded courses that are principally geared towards the test, but have live courses that supplement that material and focus on doing rather than memorizing).
It is important to ask yourself why when you’re learning. Why do I need to understand subnetting? I can just use a subnet calculator. I can just search Google for an error message. The problem is that this behavior is associative learning. Non-human animals do associative learning. What humans can do is much more complex when we think about integrating our knowledge. We understand some facts and know their implications. We can combine these into more complex systems taking advantage of many facts and properties to achieve something novel.
What is the purpose of subnetting? It is so that a client machine knows whether the server is on its subnet, or not. Does it have the ability to talk directly to that system using ARP to map its IP address to a MAC address? Or, does it need to set the destination address in the frame to its default gateway because the server is on a different network? It is also all of the underlying challenges that have been faced over the past several decades and why we benefit from reducing broadcast and collision domains.
What is zero volts? Zero volts isn’t even really a thing. It is a local reference. What is your grounding mass’s standing voltage? That is what zero volts is. So, zero volts on Earth is different from zero volts on the International Space Station. It is even different than zero volts on your car’s chassis! Why do we care about using high voltage systems? Sure, volts times amps equals watts, our measure of work. 120V times 15A is 1800W… and we could increase the voltage and lower the amperage and achieve the same 1800W. The circuits we build are only rated on amperage, though. So, by using higher volts we can substitute smaller gauged wiring since we have lower amps, which means reducing weight and lowering the costs for the wiring, fuses, breakers, etc. So, a move from 12V for accessory power in a vehicle to 48V isn’t just a gimmick, it is a substantial shift in a system for all of the knock-on implications that are overcome by challenging the status quo (the many decades that we remained satisfied with a 12V system). Yet, in other applications, focusing on lower voltage and higher amperage can be beneficial, such as solar where wiring panels in parallel (increasing amperage, lowering voltage) means that we get fewer implications for a panel being shaded than when we wire them in series (increasing voltage, lowering amperage); when in series, a single shaded panel will decrease the output for all other panels wired in the same series.
We need to wake up. Do not allow the Matrix to have us. Examine what is important to you and why. Then determine what real mastery of the related subject matter means. Ask yourself why you’re learning some set of facts. Ask yourself what these facts really represent and what challenges the questions are solving for.
Also, why do people leave their phone ringers on?
Dustin Dortch 