On Education: Are we addicted to learning nothing?

Wed Sep 03 2025

Context

I learned early what passes for “education” in a rigid system.

As a child I sat in a small church-run classroom, rows of desks in a hall that doubled as a sanctuary. We used the A.C.E. curriculum, Accelerated Christian Education, a system designed less to teach than to indoctrinate. The Bible was our textbook, the pastor the final authority, and curiosity was treated as rebellion.

One day, I asked a question that had been gnawing at me: If God knows everything about me, loves me, and sees the whole of my life, how could He send me to hell forever if I slipped up? How does love coexist with eternal torture?

It wasn’t philosophy. It was a twelve-year-old’s attempt to process contradiction.

The response wasn’t dialogue. It was punishment. A plank on my backside for “insolence.” A “deliverance session” with the youth pastor to cast out my “demons of doubt.” Weeks of public shaming among peers, branded arrogant and prideful for daring to ask.

That was my first real lesson: in this system, questions were dangerous because they threatened the script. Education wasn’t about metabolizing contradictions into wisdom; it was about memorizing appearances and reciting the “right” answers. Input straight to output, furnace fire doused.

I didn’t have the language back then, but I know now what I was running into: binary amputation of the educational triad.

Because in its natural form, education is a triad. Education requires Input: Knowledge, information, the raw material of experience. It facilitates Transformation: The messy middle of trial, error, dialogue, doubt, paradox. And it produces Output: Wisdom, coherence, a life reshaped by what you’ve metabolized.

That middle stage is the alchemy, the fire that turns knowledge into wisdom.

But what I grew up in was not alchemy. It was an assembly line. Information in, credentials out. Appearances and intellect looping endlessly, but no furnace in between.

And it’s not just religious schools. That was only my front-row seat to a larger collapse. Our civilization has built entire institutions of education on the same amputation. Schools, universities, training programs. All perfected versions of the same loop: performance over essence, credentials over transformation, the appearance of learning over its lived reality.

This has resulted in a culture that confuses being taught with being educated. That treats degrees as brands, not as transformations of mind. That rewards memorization and regurgitation, not metabolization.

I know this because I lived it first-hand. I learned to doubt myself before I learned to think. I learned to fear paradox and contradiction before I learned to understand it. And I’ve spent years undoing that damage, trying to rediscover the furnace that was doused in me.

This exploration is about that furnace. About education as it should be: alchemy that transforms, not assembly lines that perform.

The Natural Triad of Education

If you strip away classrooms, curricula, and credentials, education is one of the most natural processes on earth. It isn’t something institutions invented, it’s something life itself does.

Every child comes into the world as a learning engine. Watch a toddler long enough and you’ll see the triad unfold in real time.

When my son was just about 18 months old we were in the garden together, he was sitting on the lawn. I had looked away for just a second, I swear, and when I looked back at him he was happily munching on a millipede. His entire mouth was black and he had a very disgusted look on his face while he stared incredulously at the, now half, millipede in his hand, also coated in the same black goo.

A fond-ish memory, sure. But what happened there?

Input: He encounters the world. The taste of dirt, the sound of language, the sight of a parent’s face or in this case the taste of a millipedes insides.

Transformation: They play, repeat, fail, and improvise. They metabolize the raw input through trial and error, through meaning-making. That bad taste was recorded in memory forever.

Output: They walk, speak, laugh, problem-solve. Not by memorizing facts but by embodying new capacities. He has never, to my knowledge, eaten another millipede.

This is education as alchemy: the furnace of curiosity transforming chaos into coherence.

And the same pattern scales. Apprenticeships in craft traditions worked this way for centuries. An apprentice didn’t just memorize a manual; they watched, tried, failed, absorbed correction, and eventually metabolized not just technique but the essence of the craft. A carpenter doesn’t just know wood. They know what kind of wood wants to do what, where it resists, where it bends. They know what it smells like, how it handles, what it can tolerate. How it feels.

That is education as transformation, not performance.

At its best, education has always meant this:

• Knowledge as input (facts, skills, observations).
• Paradox as furnace (struggle, experimentation, contradiction, failure).
• Wisdom as output (capacity, coherence, insight).

The furnace isn’t optional. It’s the whole point.

Without it, we don’t metabolize. We can recite, but we can’t create. We can credential, but we can’t transform. We mistake “knowing about” for “knowing how to live.”

This is why every tradition that has taken education seriously, from Socratic dialogue to Zen practice, from apprenticeship guilds to scientific method, built structures to preserve the furnace. They forced students into the paradox, where knowledge is unstable until you metabolize it into something alive.

That’s what makes education sacred. Not the books, not the exams, not the credentials but the furnace of transformation in the middle.

The Amputation: From Alchemy to Assembly Line

Somewhere along the way, the natural triad of education: input → transformation → output, got amputated. The furnace of transformation, the messy middle where paradox and curiosity metabolize into actual knowledge, into wisdom, was cut out. What’s left is a binary loop: input → output.

Information in, credential out. Curriculum in, grade out. Lecture in, test out. The student is no longer a participant in a living experience. They’re a conduit in a production line.

The industrial hijack

This wasn’t an accident. The modern school system was designed alongside factories. The 19th and 20th centuries didn’t just need thinkers; they needed workers who would show up on time, obey bells, follow instructions, and produce measurable outputs.

So schools borrowed from the factory model. Standardized inputs became the same curriculum for all. Elimination of the furnace meant removing paradox, curiosity, or questioning, too messy. And the standardized outputs became the grades, certificates, ranks and degrees.

Education became industrial training disguised as enlightenment, development and growth.

The ledger logic

Once the furnace is amputated, something has to fill the gap. That something is the ledger. So every question becomes an item to be scored and every effort becomes a grade to be tallied. Every student becomes a transcript, a quantified “record” of worth.

Ledgerism takes over where alchemy used to live. Memory, guilt, punishment, reward: all encoded as numbers on a page. The student isn’t metabolizing knowledge; they’re servicing a balance sheet.

The hollowing effect

The result is an education system that teaches for performance, not transformation. A student learns to pass the test, not to wrestle with the question. They learn to perform correctness, not metabolize complexity. They emerge with credentials, not coherence.

This is why students graduate with degrees but feel unprepared for life. Why learning feels like drudgery, not discovery. Why curiosity fades as schooling advances.

Education, amputated of essence, becomes spectacle and certification. We get workers and performers, not creators or citizens.

Restoring the Furnace in Education

If the diagnosis is amputation of essence, then the restoration is simple to state and hard to enact: bring the furnace back. Put meaning-making at the center again.

Education must shift from performing knowledge to facilitating the experience of metabolizing it. From rehearsing appearances and certifying intellect to cultivating actual lived essence.

In the Classroom

The classroom is the smallest unit where culture learns itself. Right now it’s often a theatre for testing: appearances (worksheets, grades) certified by intellect (scores, rankings). Essence is truly absent.

Restoration means practices that metabolize, not just display. So perhaps replace rote regurgitation with dialogue that tolerates paradox and contradiction, conversations where there isn’t one right answer but many partial truths, forcing students to wrestle with the mechanics of making meaning. Perhaps shift from covering material to uncovering meaning, fewer bullet points, more lived experiments, more personal application.

Let failure be digestion, not disqualification.

In Universities

Universities brand themselves as engines of intellect but too often amputate essence. A degree becomes a surface signal, a credential purchased rather than a transformation lived.

Restoration means re-centering universities as furnaces of experience. How about apprenticeship over abstraction. More laboratories, studios, communities where students metabolize knowledge in practice. Or cross-pollination over siloing. Put philosophy majors in physics labs, engineers in ethics seminars. Essence thrives at the edges and often sits at the borders of two things that do not belong together. Or narrative over credential. A graduate’s story, what they wrestled with, what they created, should carry more weight than the piece of paper.

In the Digital Sphere

Digital platforms are the new teachers, but they’re built to amputate essence. Algorithms reward speed and surface: appearances (content) validated by intellect (likes, comments). Essence is filtered out.

Restoration here means slowing the metabolism. Platforms that encourage reflection over reaction (delayed posting, context prompts) or tools that capture process, not just product, showing the drafts, the dead-ends, the dialogue behind the polished essay or video. Perhaps communities that reward coherence over virality, where what counts is whether something deepened you, not whether it spread.

Education without essence produces performers. Education with essence produces creators.

What Now?

If education is the furnace of a civilization, then ours is running cold. We’ve built vast systems of appearances and intellect: schools, universities, platforms. But we left out the essence that metabolizes learning into wisdom. The result is a culture of credentialed exhaustion, where people carry degrees, certifications, and endless “content,” yet feel hollow, unprepared, and unchanged.

Restoring essence isn’t optional. It’s the only way to break the loop.

This doesn’t mean scrapping schools or abolishing universities. It means rewiring their core process. Returning to the triad: appearance → essence → intellect. Let appearances show up (the facts, the skills). Let essence metabolize them (through dialogue, practice, paradox, embodiment). Then let intellect refine them into story, coherence, and contribution.

If we can restore the furnace, education stops being a performance and becomes a transformation again. Not the rehearsal of answers, but the creation of selves. Not the memorization of history, but the metabolization of experience into wisdom.

Without essence, education trains us to perform what we already know. With essence, it trains us to become something we have never been.

And that is the point of education: not to reproduce the world as it is, but to generate the people who can transform it.

Case Studies of Alternative Models

If education is supposed to be alchemy, then history and culture give us plenty of working examples. They show what happens when the furnace is preserved, and what happens when it’s amputated.

The Socratic Method: Dialogue as Furnace

In ancient Athens, Socrates refused to hand out answers. Instead, he asked questions that destabilized his students’ certainties. Knowledge was not a commodity but a process of wrestling with paradox. The “exam” was never a grade, it was whether you could metabolize contradiction into deeper coherence.

This is the opposite of rote memorization. It’s dangerous, disruptive. So dangerous, in fact, that Socrates was executed for it. Because furnace education threatens systems that depend on docility.

Apprenticeship Guilds: Embodied Transmission

For centuries, blacksmiths, carpenters, and painters learned not from textbooks but from living inside a craft. An apprentice swept floors, observed, copied, failed, and tried again. Knowledge wasn’t abstract, it was embodied, lived, metabolized over years.

The guild model embedded essence directly: you couldn’t fake your way to being a carpenter. The wood itself would expose you.

Zen Monasteries: Training in Paradox

Zen education pushes students into koans: paradoxical riddles that can’t be solved by intellect alone. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” isn’t meant to be answered; it’s meant to burn the intellect until essence wakes up.

Zen preserves the furnace by refusing to amputate paradox. Instead of resolving it prematurely, students are forced to metabolize it into transformation.

Finland: Education Without the Whip

Modern Finland offers a striking contrast to industrial schooling. No standardized tests until late teens, minimal homework, long recesses, and teachers given autonomy. The result is that they’re consistently among the world’s highest literacy and numeracy rates, alongside some of the lowest stress levels.

The furnace here is built into the structure: kids are trusted to metabolize at their own pace.

The Test-Prep Industry: The Amputated Furnace

For contrast, look at cram schools in South Korea, China, and Japan. Students spend hours memorizing for high-stakes entrance exams. Success rates are staggering, but so are depression and suicide statistics.

This is education amputated, a closed loop of input/output that produces performers rather than creators.

The furnace is not optional. Cultures that preserve it produce citizens capable of metabolizing paradox into wisdom. Cultures that amputate it produce exhausted performers servicing the ledger.

The Psychological Costs of Amputated Education

When education loses its furnace, it doesn’t just fail to teach. It wounds. It leaves marks that follow students long after they leave the classroom.

Curiosity Killed Early

Every child is born with relentless curiosity. Why is the sky blue? Why do ants carry crumbs? Why do we die? In a furnace, these questions ignite transformation. In an amputated loop, they are liabilities. Teachers pressed for time, curricula designed for coverage, parents anxious for grades: curiosity becomes noise to suppress.

Over time, the child learns: don’t ask, just answer. Don’t explore, just recite. The habit calcifies. As adults, we call it “burnout” or “boredom,” but it’s really curiosity starvation.

The tragedy isn’t that children stop asking questions. It’s that they learn that asking questions are dangerous.

Fear of Failure

In an educational furnace, failure is digestion. Mistakes are the mechanism by which raw input metabolizes into skill. But in amputated education, failure is disqualification. It’s a grade on a report card, a shame signal, a narrowing of options. A permission slip, denied.

The result is a psychology of avoidance. Students stop taking risks. They stick to the known path, the safest assignments, the least imaginative answers. Entire lives get built on fear of failing, when the only real failure is not metabolizing at all. Hence stagnation as a cultural cornerstone.

Identity as Performance

In a credential-driven system, identity collapses into surface signals: GPA, degrees, LinkedIn skills. Who you are gets reduced to what you can perform for approval. The furnace, that slow metabolization of who you are becoming, is amputated.

This is why so many students leave school with imposter syndrome. They’ve learned to perform knowledge, not metabolize it. They carry the credential but feel hollow inside, always fearing exposure.

Credentials certify performance. Essence certifies coherence. Without essence, identity becomes a mask.

Addiction to External Validation

When intellect validates appearance without essence, the reward system shifts. Approval, grades, claps, likes, these become the only signals of worth. Students learn to chase points, not meaning.

This doesn’t stop after graduation. It mutates into adult addictions: chasing promotions, likes, status, endless certifications. An amputated education is the training ground for a lifetime of needing to be seen, rather than a lifetime of being alive.

Shallow Relationship to Knowledge

Perhaps the deepest wound is that amputated education severs our relationship to knowledge itself. Knowledge becomes a commodity: something to acquire, trade, display. Not something to metabolize into being.

We know about things, but don’t know how to live them. We can describe justice, but not practice it. We can analyze love, but not sustain it. We can compute risk, but not metabolize fear.

The furnace was never about information. It was about turning information into transformation. Without it, knowledge is weight, not light.

The Psychological Costs of Amputated Education

When education loses its furnace, it doesn’t just fail to teach. It wounds. It leaves marks that follow students long after they leave the classroom.

Historical Contrasts: When the Furnace Was Intact

The idea of education as transformation isn’t new. Many traditions knew that knowledge without essence collapses into performance. They built their systems to preserve the furnace until industrial modernity amputated it.

The Socratic Furnace

In ancient Athens, Socrates didn’t hand out lectures or grades. He asked questions. Questions that unsettled, embarrassed, destabilized. His students often left more confused than when they arrived. But that was the point. Confusion is the furnace. It forced them to metabolize their own assumptions, to wrestle until new clarity emerged.

Socratic dialogue was deliberately inefficient. It wasn’t about covering material but uncovering meaning. It was slow, messy, and transformative. No credential at the end, only coherence and understanding.

The Monastic Scriptoria

In medieval monasteries, young novices didn’t just copy manuscripts. They lived with them. Transcription wasn’t performance; it was meditation. Each word inked was metabolized into memory, embodied through chant, prayer, and ritual.

The triad was intact: input (scripture), furnace (daily ritual metabolization), output (a changed monk, not just a copied text). Whether or not you agree with the theology, the pedagogy preserved essence.

Apprenticeship Guilds

For centuries, trades were learned not in classrooms but workshops. An apprentice didn’t just read about carpentry or blacksmithing. They failed in front of the master. They burned wood, bent metal wrong, ruined projects. The furnace was the workshop itself: a space where failure was metabolized into skill.

The credential wasn’t a certificate but mastery. A journeyman became a master not by passing a test but by embodying the craft so deeply that others recognized it.

The Early Universities

When the first universities arose in Bologna and Paris, they weren’t factories. They were communities of scholars and students arguing in taverns, debating in halls, wrestling with Aristotle until dawn.

The furnace was dialogue. Disputation, formalized debate, wasn’t a performance for grades, it was the crucible in which intellect metabolized through paradox. Students often failed, but failure was digestion, not disqualification.

The Scientific Method

The early scientific revolution preserved the furnace explicitly. Galileo, Newton, Boyle: they didn’t just memorize authorities, they tested them. Experiment itself is the furnace: input (hypothesis, observation), transformation (trial, error, paradox), output (new law or theory).

The system was designed to metabolize contradiction, not avoid it. Which is why it produced real transformation, a reordering of how humanity saw the cosmos.

The Industrial Turn

And then came the industrial age. The need for obedient workers, the efficiency obsession, the cult of metrics. The furnace was amputated and replaced with the ledger. Where Socrates confused, schools standardized. Monasteries metabolized meaning and schools measured output. Apprenticeships valued failure but schools punished it. Disputation metabolized paradox, schools avoided it or didn’t tolerate it. Where science embraced trial and error, schools taught settled “facts”.

The result wasn’t education but training. Not transformation but compliance.

History shows that education is either alchemy or assembly.

Alchemy is slower, messier, and harder to control, but it transforms.

Assembly is faster, cheaper, and easier to scale, but it hollows.

Practical Blueprints for Restoration

If education has been amputated into performance, then restoring the furnace means building structures where essence is unavoidable. This doesn’t require tearing everything down, but rewiring how learning happens at the personal, institutional, and systemic levels.

Personal Practices: Reclaiming your Furnace

Education doesn’t start in schools. It starts wherever curiosity is metabolized. To reclaim the furnace consider simple things. Have true dialogue instead of monologue. Seek conversations that unsettle rather than affirm. Ask questions you don’t know the answer to and let paradox stand without rushing to resolve it.

See failure as digestion. Treat mistakes not as disqualifications but as raw material. Write drafts, build prototypes, break things. Reflection always turns failure into coherence and understanding.

Practice embodied learning. Don’t just read about it, go and do it. Cook the meal, build the shelf, play the instrument. The body metabolizes in ways the mind cannot. The body makes it actually real. The mind can stay in a ‘real’ state forever thinking it’s “done a thing”, it lies. Step over into action from intent.

Grant yourself a process of slow learning. Resist the algorithm’s demand for speed. Sit with one book for months instead of consuming ten summaries.

A personal furnace is built by choosing contexts where essence can’t be bypassed.

Classroom Designs: Turning Performance into Process

At the classroom level, restoration means redesigning how learning is staged. Some possibilities

Have Paradox-centered dialogue. Replace rote answers with questions designed to destabilize assumptions. The point isn’t to be “right” but to transform tension into new perspective. Create project-based furnaces. Let students work on projects that can fail. Make the process visible and reward iteration. A finished product isn’t the only outcome, the learning lives in the attempts.

Foster cross-pollination. Bring disciplines into collision. Let math students wrestle with ethics, art students with biology. The furnace ignites at the borders of domains.

Incentivise narrative over numbers. Ask for stories of what was wrestled with, not just scores. A reflective journal reveals metabolization in ways a multiple-choice test never will.

Universities: Restoring Alchemy at Scale

Universities once existed as furnaces of disputation; now they risk becoming credential factories. To reverse that drift possible approaches are numerous. Revive apprenticeship! Pair students with mentors in lived practice: labs, studios, communities. Less lectures, more embodied presence and experience.

Create and promot interdisciplinary furnaces. Create spaces where disciplines collide in structured paradox: engineers in philosophy seminars, poets in physics labs.

Assessment is not done just by scores but by measurement of transformation. Replace GPA worship with capstone narratives: What did this student metabolize? How did they change? What new capacity do they carry?

And perhaps above all: Value curiosity, not throughput. Fund slow research, messy inquiry, even apparent dead-ends, the places where paradox metabolizes into new discovery.

Digital Platforms: Slowing the Loop

The digital world now functions as the largest classroom, but it amputates essence at industrial speed. Restoration means fundamentally changing the need for the economic model as a backstop to the motivation of the platform’s existence. This is much easier said than done, unfortunately.

Policy Level: Education Beyond the Factory

At the systemic level, restoring essence requires courage and political will. It requires redefining success to move beyond test scores and job placement and measure transformation in terms of critical thinking, resilience, creativity and coherence.

Insist on institutional humility. Encourage schools and universities to admit what can’t be measured, to create room for mystery, paradox, and slow growth.

In closing

If we want a civilization capable not just of repeating itself but of transforming, we can’t keep running our schools as factories. We need furnaces. Places where appearances meet essence, and intellect refines what emerges into coherence.

Not the rehearsal of knowledge, but the metabolization of meaning. Not the reproduction of what is, but the generation of what might be.

That is the point of education. And the choice is still ours.