Education

Education, in Ray Peat's framing, is a developmental process tied to freedom rather than to a finished curriculum or to "efficiency." In ancient Greece, "liberal arts" named the knowledge suited to the full development of free citizens; technical training supplied useful knowledge for slaves. Later, science entered upper-class education, and a broad education retained that association with liberation.

Education has been associated with freedom for a long time. In ancient Greece, "liberal arts" referred to the knowledge that was appropriate for the full development of free citizens; technical training provided the useful knowledge needed by slaves.

— Ray Peat

Liberal arts, tracking, and efficiency

Southern states outlawed literacy for slaves once literacy's liberating effect was clear. An analogous attitude appears in advocates of educational "efficiency" who favor ability tracking and vocational-versus-academic splits as cheaper and more effective. Official lip service to Socratic, student-centered development often coexists with standardized achievement testing and with a view of university teaching as transfer of a fixed body of knowledge.

Utilitarian "educational efficiency" in England tied school funding to standardized-test rankings. Twentieth-century US pragmatism was largely assimilated into the same cheapness-and-efficiency arguments. Trade-school mentality entered universities in the nineteenth century; John Henry Newman dissented by defining the university's function as intellectual culture rather than moral impression or mechanical production.

Activating or suppressing mental energy

Education can activate mental energy or suppress it, depending on form: obedience training suppresses it; schooling that creates real social dislocation disturbs mental and emotional energy instead of building it. Play, curiosity, and peer interaction raise intelligence; isolation lowers it. The full physiological framing is on Intelligence.

Summerhill (A. S. Neill, founded 1921) made classes available without required attendance; graduating students' performance, including on university entrance exams, compared favorably with conventional schools. Teachers who refused to grade students found better work than under letter grades; some universities later used pass/fail for the same reason that grades are anti-educational.

Absolutism and academic authoritarianism

Blake treated "mind-forg'd manacles" from governments, churches, and schools as the essential problem, to be met by mental combat and refusal of unexamined opinion. Dewey and Piaget incorporated Hegel's movement toward a final mature state rather than continually stronger capacity for intentional self-transformation. Rousseau's innate goodness and free development (Émile) shaped later democratic education talk; Blake rejected Rousseau's Deist/Cartesian assumptions of inert nature and passive empiricism in favor of a living, interactive universe and the person as an "intellectual fountain."

B. F. Skinner promoted operant-conditioning teaching machines that treated mind as something to remove from the science of behavior; schools applied programmed instruction widely in the 1960s, increasing student irritation and resentment. Illich's warning was that machine-like behavior chained to electronics degrades well-being and dignity.

On academic personality, Bob Altemeyer's authoritarianism scale (conventionalism, submission to authority, aggression sanctioned by authorities) associated high scores with faulty, compartmentalized reasoning and dogma. A 1960s comparison of graduate students' Miller Analogies Test scores with academic grades found students near the average on the analogy test had the highest grades, while those who deviated most in either direction had the worst grades. If analogical thinking ability is inversely associated with authoritarianism, that pattern suggests graduate schools select for authoritarianism (or else for mediocrity).

Critical pedagogy traditions Peat cites as applying a critical mind in an infinite world include Lev Vygotsky, Myles Horton (Highlander), Paulo Freire, and Ivan Illich: education oriented to reality-seeking and opposing oppression rather than to transferring an unexamined curriculum.

Sensory balance

Excessive reading without integral sensory work can leave the organism under-used. Painting was one counterweight. Geometry can use some of the brain's spatial functions, yet without integral sensory stimulation the organism can still remain under-used.

Blake College

Blake College (1962–1965 in Mexico; 1966–1975 in Eugene, Oregon) was Peat's short-lived independent liberal arts college: student-directed learning, academic freedom, and interdisciplinary work in science, philosophy, and art. It is the institutional experiment behind the same freedom-versus-absolutism theme developed in the July 2020 newsletter.

Isolation, standardization, and the 2020 reset claim

The July 2020 newsletter presents pandemic-era school closures and obligatory internet classes as accelerating a long campaign for automated, centralized, uniform instruction. It cites Klaus Schwab / World Economic Forum "Great Reset" rhetoric, Eric Schmidt's role in "reimagining" New York education under Governor Cuomo, and partnership talk with the Gates Foundation about dispensing with physical classrooms, as historical claims from that 2020 text: efficiency and lower cost pursued through isolation and standardization rather than through free development.

The first step toward building a new civilization in which education fosters the free and full development of human beings has to be to stop this mad rush of governments and their masters toward isolation and standardization of everything in the culture and economy.

— Ray Peat

See also

• Intelligence
• Children
• Blake College
• Brain
• Time
• Creativity
• William Blake