What Is Education?

I've been teaching this stuff since about 1970! (Egad!) I've taught courses in my own commercial studio, and I've had my own little school, complete with ads in Rolling Stone and a thoroughly disreputable dormitory. I've taught in a bunch of different colleges (too many to list) and a bunch of different departments (Music, Physics, Journalism, Mass Communications, Music Production and Engineering, Continuing Education, etc.). I've even fallen far enough from grace to become, y'know, an administrator - one of those guys that makes stupid smarmy speeches at student meetings every now and then and explains how everything is cool even when it isn't, or else will be cool, sometime long after you've finished with the stupid place! Hey! I've even taught in Junior High School! Naturally, I have some ideas on the subject.

Simply put, formal training (education) is accelerated experience, learning that permits you to skip the time-consuming process of "learning-by-doing." You don't have to reinvent the wheel. The theory is, it's cheaper to pay somebody to tell you about the wheel than to reinvent it yourself. So, education can be thought of as actively and quickly learning about the stuff that you want to know about rather than waiting to pick it up on the job. And there are some jobs you just don't want to learn by trial 'n error (medicine and aviation spring quickly to mind!).

There's also a more basic goal to education: learning how to learn. The theory is that the act of learning is what you should really learn while you're getting trained. It is what permits you to leapfrog past those poor unfortunates still busy reinventing the wheel (it takes them quite a while, you see!). They may have saved time and money up front by skipping the training, but you can usually blaze right past 'em a couple of years later because of your enhanced knowledge and, more importantly, your enhanced ability to acquire knowledge. These are what you get from education, if it all works the way it's supposed to. You can pay a lot now or even more later.

Meanwhile, keep in mind that learning isn't easy. The first learning step, deciding you need to learn some particular thing and setting out to do it, isn't too hard. The next step, getting confused, is a corker. As you step off the cliff into the learning of something new, by definition you abandon "what you know." This is replaced by what I think of as a "confusion zone." And until you get there and find that you are lost, you aren't learning anything new! If you take a course and never get confused, you're wasting your time and tuition dollars! I suspect that it's the process of resolving all the confusion that leads to your actual learning. Meanwhile, it's really hard while you're confused. This seems to get worse as you get older, especially if you haven't bothered to try serious learning for a while. I was surprised to find out just how tough it was when I decided to take up learning again. You'd think, me being a teacher and all, I'd know all about this stuff. But (and this seems to be a common problem for older teachers and administrators), I had given learning up in order to be a department chairman at Berklee, and I'd forgotten how difficult the task really is!

This "confusion zone" leads to much of the discomfort and anxiety that occurs while you are learning and getting educated. However, as you get used to being confused, it gets better. You can actually get to enjoy, sort of, the period of confusion (I suspect it's an acquired taste) - it's a little like being stoned or high. Enjoy it or not, you should keep doing it, because it is essential to your professional well-being. Hell, it's probably essential to your long-term mental health - some of the work on Alzheimer's Disease suggests that active learners (who are the ones going around getting confused by things) are less susceptible to the Alzheimer's. You should maintain your mental and physical learning capacity by ongoing conditioning, just like physical exercise. A puzzle a day keeps the brain rot away! Or something like that.