On the Miracle and Scandal of Education

The reason the university has become such a fault line today is not well understood.

There is a true kind of education that distinguishes people—drastically altering their experience of life and material opportunities. Then there is a different conception of education—associated with degrees, tests, and so on. The latter is particularly, scandalously, and demonstrably fake. I consider Bryan Caplan’s work on this convincing. See his 2019 book The Case Against Education.

Education is one of the most important things in the world, and what we call education is one of the fakest things in the world.

Thus, people are right to feel tremendous political passion about this topic, and yet almost everybody is wrong in where they focus their attention and apply their concerns.

The acquisition of true knowledge and the cultivation of rigorous self-understanding is worth more money than exists in the world. So yes, you should do whatever you need to acquire that for you and for your children. How to do that has been written down clearly in the past. IYKYK, as they say—and in this humble, internet-slang neologism the entire real problem of education is perfectly and completely captured!

At the same time, in large part because of dislocations and opportunities introduced by technological acceleration, the organizations and the brand names currently associated with education can truly be forgotten. They matter if you want to pass as educated (and for most people, it is true, this matters a lot), but their value pertaining to the acquisition of true knowledge of the highest things is effectively nil.

What nobody will tell you, or your children, is that you are allowed to go straight to true knowledge of the highest things. It really is just sitting there, in the open. Acquisition of it will solve every single one of life’s greatest challenges. It might not impress the ladies in your HOA, it will not get your paintings into NYC art galleries, and it will not get your child a job at McKinsey in their early twenties. But it will liberate you from craving these things (and give you secret pathways to obtaining them, anyway, should you so choose).

True knowledge of the highest things has never been more available; anyone with an open mind and open heart can begin acquiring it; very few people will have any idea what I’m talking about; we are fast approaching the point where there is not a single institution facilitating its transmission; and yet the country is gripped by a political battle over what is called Higher Education.

What a peculiar complex of social facts, one of the most extraordinary in the Western world right now.