The ReaLearning Insight

The ReaLearning Insight

FREE! Unlimited, Quality Education for Everyone for LIFE

The ReaLearning Insight makes this not only possible but reasonable. Once you understand the difference between education and training and how they work together to create learning, the idea of free, unlimited, quality education for everyone for life is not the impossibility you've been taught to think it is. 

Training + Education = Learning + Time + Work = Wisdom

Training

Training has a very specific outcome. Good training makes the learner able to perform quickly and accurately in a known situation to achieve the best results without errors. 

Training is measurable and easily describes what the learner can do when training is complete, as well as how accurately and quickly they can do it. 

In short, training makes us good at things that have already been tried a billion ways and we are pretty sure we have the best way figured out. 

Examples
  • multiplication tables
  • performing CPR
  • replacing a radiator
  • setting up a network
  • testing a cell tower
  • calculating student grades
  • setting up a spreadsheet
  • making furniture
  • applying existing procedures and strategies to problems (design/engineering)
  • playing a video game

Education

Education is almost the opposite goal of training. Education seeks to slow down the learner's response time, get them to analyze, consider, revise and explore ideas. It prompts learners to develop the thinking and questioning skills to respond to familiar and novel situations in new ways. 

Education is nearly impossible to measure in the short time frames of learning events. It takes years to see an education come to fruition. But when it does we get the most powerful and productive results that move the whole society toward new insights. 

Examples
  • Theories of how the world works
  • Interpretations and applications of scientific discoveries
  • New art
  • Understanding historical influences on modern life
  • Innovating commerce
  • Coming up with applications for new technologies
  • Understanding and explaining the human experience
How does this help make free, unlimited, quality education for everyone for life possible?
  1. Training is nearly useless without education. An over trained and under educated person has a limited range of responses they can access to do anything. Over time their ability to respond to novel situations or solve problems becomes so narrow they almost behave like a machine that can only do very specific tasks. They become more resistant to new stimuli and become less and less trainable on new tasks. 
  2. Education is impossible without training. In order to synthesize information you need to be able to acquire it, remember it, play with it in your mind and recognize how it fits with other things you know. Training is the process that builds that knowledge base you draw on when you partake of education.
  3. The current educational system is based on the idea that all learning is really training and they keep trying to use the metrics of training to measure the outcomes of education. That is a foolish approach and we are suffering for that foolishness. But the reason it's so appealing is that we have made learning into a commodity we buy and sell, and people want to measure the value of things they pay a lot to acquire. 
  4. The answer is charge for training and have training fund education. Rational commerce needs well trained people it can put to work right away. Education takes time to bear fruit and the results are inconceivable because they will be new. So pay a lot of money for training, by all means. But offer educational opportunities without cost. Award degrees for training. Enhance those degrees with education and work experience. People can choose to participate or not in further education. Their employment will depend on degrees for training which can be easily measured for value.
    Companies and organizations will soon realize that a well trained worker, while valuable for a discreet task, is not the same as a well educated one in terms of being able to innovate and create, predict and analyze. People with a penchant for thinking and learning will be free to pursue their natural interests and people whose interests and talents are more concrete will not be forced into academics just to get a good job.
  5. Training and education applied to work that meaningfully contributes to the world eventually distills into wisdom. And don't we want a world that is set up to lead us to wisdom in the end? What else is there to do with a lifetime?  
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