APURVA HENDIIn an interview with Tim Ferris, Eric Weinstein, MD of Thiel Capital and easily one of my favourite thinkers, was asked how he would create a class for any grade level from ninth grade to the end of college and what would the class be, and when would he teach it. Eric's approach to these questions was phenomenal and made me ruminate on one of my real struggles that surfaced with learning. If you're reading this, I can be optimistic that you're too conditioned like me purely because we all chose the path of conventional education in our early lives. So in response to Tim, Eric's first few questions were — "Where will I be allowed to teach this class? And are you allowed to deeply question your teacher or your school?" Further, Eric spoke about two experiments that he would want to conduct — the Asch conformity experiment and the Milgram obedience experiment, the results of which would prove vital in picking his class.
In the Asch conformity experiment, a person is led into a room and asked simple questions, which a bunch of confederates/ stooges (people cooperating with the experiment of the experimenter) agreed to answer the question. The stooges answer the question in an obviously wrong way, and then when it comes time for the only real participant to answer the question and they often falsify their answer just to conform. Next, in the Milgram obedience experiment, an experimenter appeared to ask the only participant/ "teacher" (or so he's made to believe) to administer a series of increasing electric shocks and was told that it’s really important that most "learners" (stooges) continued to administer the shocks, even when screaming was heard from the "learners". The "teachers" were assured that it was an expected outcome and that they would not be held responsible for their actions.
Point of interest: The Milgram obedience experiment or simply, the Milgram experiment was carried out by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He wanted to examine the justifications for acts of genocide, offered by those accused at the World War II. The prevalent defence of those accused often was based on obedience - that they were just following orders from their superiors.
The real problem, Eric says, is that what we're always looking for is for education which makes students unteachable by standard methods and this is where we run into the trouble, which is we don’t talk about teaching disabilities, we talk about learning disabilities. We label those kids learning disabled to cover up from the fact that the economics of teaching requires that one central actor, the teacher, be able to lead a room of 20 or more people in lockstep. And that’s not a good model.
I thought long and hard about why this resonated so much with me and I think its for more reasons than one. One of the reasons is actually a deeply etched memory from school when I was summoned by the administrative faculty and asked to drop learning Math before my 10th-grade board exam. Because my Math scores were poor and my teachers didn't think I would pass the boards, I was asked to choose Physical Education as a mandatory subject rather than Math. And I carry the baggage from memory till this day. Unfortunately, we are all almost always surrounded by low agency teachers, seniors, superiors at work etc, who in recognizing us choose the easy way out, resign and label/ bucket us under categories that simply enable them to understand the world or do their jobs easily or both. The central point and takeaway from this blurb is Eric's final advice stated verbatim: I guess what I would really like is for those of you who have been told that you’re learning disabled, or you’re not good at math, or that you’re terrible at music, or something like that, seek out unconventional ways of proving that wrong. Believe not only in yourselves but that there are structures that are powerful enough to make things that look very difficult much easier than you ever imagined.