Missile metaphor

This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)

The impact of school on intelligence can be illustrated with an intelligent missile metaphor. The metaphor explains how adaptability may lead to maladaptability:

Metaphor. Why use metaphors?

Imagine a perfectly adaptable low flying missile that can learn to navigate terrain obstacles in search of a target. Like the human brain adapts to the environment, the missile adapts to the navigation in a difficult terrain. With each hour of flight, the missile will become more and more efficient in tackling unpredictable situations. However, if we try to control the missile manually, as it happens to brains at school, the adaptation may lead to poor control. Let's imagine the missile flying into a long dark tunnel. Very soon, the missile will master the art of staying on course. In the tunnel, there is no complex control, and no advanced navigation necessary. After many years in the tunnel, when we release the missile back to the freedom of complex terrain, it will likely crash for it will have lost its navigation capacity through years of disuse. At school we do get some knowledge that may assist the learn drive in the process of recovery. However, this knowledge is comparable to taking on board a load of navigation manuals. After leaving the tunnel, the missile needs to navigate. Reading manuals with comprehension may come too late. Intelligent navigation requires fluency in making choices. That fluency does not directly come from textbook knowledge, and requires hours or years of practice.

See also a similar example from the world of animal learning: On the superiority of a rat over a schooled human

The knowledge gained at school has low coherence, low stability, and low applicability. From the brain's point of view, it is burdened with low valuation. This is why this type of knowledge is subject to prompt forgetting via interference. Most of all, knowledge of low abstractness and low applicability will not be too helpful in boosting intelligence.

The flight through the tunnel might be compared to feeding the missile with contradictory data. The learn drive says "learn chemistry", while the teacher says "learn physics". It is as if your wife kept telling you "I love you", "I hate you", "I love you", etc. At some point the wife signal will get ignored as meaningless (the brain will condition it out). This way the brain starts ignoring messages from the learn drive system. It becomes driven by grades and accolades, or perhaps penalties. At worst, the helpless brain focuses on just surviving one more day at school. School with its fake incentivizations is comparable to a noisy guidance input data.

If a missile receives random data, or a signal burdened with heavy noise, its control system will quickly learn to ignore the noise. It is as if the missile flew in the tunnel with nothing interesting on input. The missile loses its intelligence. When it exists the tunnel, it flies at the mercy of wind and gravity.

Paradoxically, at school, we adapt to being controllable by losing adaptability.

Schools hurt adaptability by accelerating conceptualization (e.g. due to the effect of stress). The adaptation goes in the direction of the brain becoming a passive receptacle for knowledge. Recovery of the learn drive in adulthood is hard because the conceptualization process is convergent and hard to reverse due to the average increase in memory stability in time (see: irreversible maladaptability).

When graduates come back to life, they are easily lost without a guiding hand of school. They have lost key ingredients of intelligence. Adaptability at school is used to develop passivity.

After two decades of guidance at school, a student may find it hard to walk out into the real world

Figure: C. elegans has a nervous system made of only 302 neurons. However, this is enough to implement an exploratory algorithm that is reminiscent of human curiosity, creativity, and problem solving. When the worm finds a patch of food, it will explore it. However, on occasion it will take an unexpected dash in a random direction in search of new patches (bacteria). Similar algorithms can be found in other animals, however, human learn drive is far more complex. It is based on knowledge valuation and the exploratory breaks are reserved for period of learntropy dropping well below the expected value. Human creativity is also based on knowledge, while in the worm its only aspect is a random choice of a direction. For the worm, a new patch of bacteria is a problem solved, for a human it might be a new idea for terraforming Mars. Last but not least, the metaphoric tool for inducing learned helplessness (marked as "school") in primitive animals will rather only have the form of drive habituation. Nevertheless, the little worm may present a convincing illustration than the intelligent missile metaphor is far more universal and may be relevant to primitive nervous systems as well. For more on the universality of the learn drive see: The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity

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For more texts on memory, learning, sleep, creativity, and problem solving, see Super Memory Guru