The Importance of being Educable

The Importance of being Educable

Leslie Valiant

This book brings a new theory of human uniqueness in respect to how human beings are able not only to learn but much beyond that to create belief systems and this, according to the author, is a civilization enabler. 

Educability is different from the regular concept of education in the sense that the second is a specific ability to acquire information and use it. Being clever is not enough to acquire beliefs and to apply them in specific situations. This information acquisition process includes learning from others and taking it by a generalization from individual experience to collective information. In young children this is astonishing, they can learn what a giraffe is in a book, go to the zoo or see that as a statue and recognise it by the book drawing first experience.

This aspect of generalization of knowledge allows human beings to accumulate knowledge apart from their individual life and applying to situations never experienced before. Educability is indeed helped by printing, books, tablets, internet and all technology available, but the crucial element is the computational approach of our brain in the sense we establish processes of learning and recollecting information.

Human brain is unique when compared to apes for example and the difference is quantitative instead in organization. Meaning, the human cortex is three times larger than any living apes and the number of connections per neuron and the synaptic strengths of connections is much larger. That is the quantitative component which has influence on the computational power of the human brain.

Educability is in a nutshell learning from experience and being teachable by instruction along with the ability to combine and apply theories in both modes. According to the author, with that humans are able to create belief systems. 

Personally, this book had a deep touch in my way of seeing things due to the fact that education is different from QI and the generic idea of intelligence. It is symbolism, the ability of teaching and learning instead of the use of logic or IQ. 

The author defends the concept of integrative learning in which all information is useful if applicable to a specific context and explains the fundamental difference between our brain and computers (which is my best quote for this book):

“An important aspect of digital computers - which, as far as we know, brains lack - is that they have an addressing mechanism. Each location in a computer’s memory has a numerical address (...)”. 

In the final part the book poses some questions about the use of AI in education and how technology can help (or disturb) the process of learning and being educable including the fact that belief systems can be highly dangerous and the best invented so far by human beings is scientific belief systems.