Classes, homework, tests. More classes, more homework, more tests. Does that sound familiar? Nowadays, education is all about classes, homework, and tests. There’s no room for learning, no room for expanding the mind beyond curricular constraints. It has become a monster that destroys enthusiasm. Enthusaism is the very basis of learning, and so it destroys learning.

Martial arts, on the other hand, focus on the personal quest for learning. Kung Fu, if I’m not grasping the concept wrong, is all about having an honest dedication to an activity. It is all about time and patience. Most of the time, it’s about hard work too, but hard work is rarely unpleasant when it is undertaken for the right reasons and in the right circumstances. In a way, Kung Fu is also the concept behind some forms of prayer in Christianity, because it is all about paying attention to whatever task one is doing. And in a way, it is what most intellectual pursuits should be about.

Instead of encouraging self-improvement, school and university are an endless and unpleasant grind that focuses on mindless activities that nobody cares about. They are riddled with busy schedules, useless tasks, and arbitrary rules that anyone with common sense would disagree with. Through standardization comes a lack of freedom of instruction. Teachers can no longer adapt to their students; they are trapped by the curriculum.

The Simplicity of Knowledge, the Complexity of Education

Anyone who masters any field of knowledge has the ability to explain almost any concept in their field to a young child. With enough knowledge, there is no need for jargon, no need to tell them that the concept is too advanced for them. Everything is simple to explain, simple to grasp. Unfortunately, these people usually become so renown in their respective fields that they rarely end up teaching unless they undertake it for other reasons.

Education, in contrast, rarely focuses on the simplicity of knowledge. The higher one goes, the more complex everything becomes. Advanced Calculus becomes a matter of learning endless charts of differential equations, rather than focusing on the application of knowledge to real-world problems. History is frequently focused on learning names, dates, and facts, rather than said facts' causes, effects, and interconnections with the world. The focus of education has become that of rote learning, of lower-level thinking.

Computers can solve an equation; humans need to tell the computer what equation to solve. Anyone can look up a date, famous person, or historical battle online; history should teach us to analyze those facts. Standardized education has the best of intentions, and yet it does more harm than good.

Tai Chi, at least the one I’m learning, is about focusing on important concepts. It is about balancing body and mind, about achieving health. It does not focus on the dancing, the choreography. It does not focus on the pretty aspects, or the easy ones. Some refer to part of the practice as the bitter work, and yet everyone is eager to do said bitter work because of the benefits it confers. That teaching style does not hide the nasty parts within a mountain of filler; it does not distract the mind with unnecessary concepts. Shouldn’t that be the goal of any learning activity? I think it should. And it is sad that standardized education is not closer to that simple transmission of knowledge.

Small-Group Learning

Back when education was not as massive, small towns sometimes had one teacher for all the kids in town. They had different ages, different learning styles and levels, and they all ended up in the same classroom. The teacher could not teach them a standard class, so they had to follow their own books on their own. The teacher was not there to lead during learning, but to answer questions and offer support as required.

It’s funny how many kids from those small towns ended up with incredible academic careers. At university, they frequently ended up at the top of their class. I’ve heard enough anecdotes about this to consider it frequent, rather than a statistical anomaly. Now that I see how teaching in martial arts is generally adapted to the learner’s level, I wonder if standardized education should focus more on that, rather than on trying to make every student learn the same concepts by the end of a school year.

Martial Arts: A Different Universe

When practicing Tai Chi, I find myself surrounded by people who come from an entirely different universe. Or do they? More and more, I find myself at home in the universe of martial arts. I acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the people who practice them. And I cannot find flaw in the way it is taught, in the way its different concepts are prioritized, or even in some of the concepts that I did not initially understand. When done correctly and with an open mind, the experimental evidence of the benefits of Tai Chi is undeniable, and that silences any possible debate on my part.

On The Quest for Knowlege

I grew up believing in the ideal of embodying the Renaissance personality, on the thought that knowledge sets us free, on the ideals of social justice and self-improvement that came from the 18th Century Enlightenment. I believed in this, and I assumed that every other person with an honest intellectual inclination believed it too. Knowledge, in a way, is its own form of Kung Fu. It is about learning from every field, devoting one’s life to expanding one’s knowledge. The quest is never-ending, and I believed that others pursued it too. Few do.

The way standardized education is structured clashes with everything that knowledge is about. It focuses on test preparation rather than the expansion of knowledge. It focuses on regurgitating ideas that the professor agrees with, rather than developing one’s capacity for independent thought. It focuses on specialized knowledge in a single field, rather than on learning to connect the many areas of knowledge in order to acquire a bigger picture of our lives and the world. And in contrast, it rarely focuses on logical deductive reasoning, the scientific method, and self-initiative. There are exceptions to this, of course, but I now see them as beautiful anachronisms. Standardized education is no longer what it once was. It is now dysfunctional, obsolete, and counterproductive.

University professors, once enthusiastic about their fields, end up disenchanted with them. Their careers depend on publications, and publications depend on so many economic and business factors that the expansion of knowledge can no longer be selfless. This is a product of our times, a product of standardization. We have turned education into fast food. It is akin to fast food in the results that it offers, even though a person has to spend decades of their life in the academic system. Like fast food, standardized education is lacking in substance and quality, but it offers pretty degrees that look great on the wall.

The Quest is Personal

There is little to do with the educational system. One can’t turn education into a martial art. One can’t expect the behemoth of education to shift, to change, to suddenly inspire people to learn, rather than quelling any kind of interest in knowledge. But everyone can, with some time and dedication –with some Kung Fu–, start expanding their mind. It might be about reading a little bit more each day, about learning something new, even about acquiring a new hobby. Every human being is intellectually curious at birth, but the educational system ruthlessly destroys said inclinations.

Self-directed learning can reconcile us with our inner nature. If enough people realize that learning can be pleasant and enriching, rather than torture, the educational system will be forced to change.