Internet Gives Access To Elite Education, But We Seem To Be Lacking Geniuses More Than Ever. Why Is That?
With This Much Information Available In 2023, Shouldn’t We All Be In-Shape-Millionaire-Philanthropists By Now?
I was born and raised in a city that has the shape of an airplane.
No kidding.
And this is not by chance. Brasília is the result of an architecture competition led by the Brazilian government in the ’50s.
The winning project became the new capital of the country.
Now the city hosts over 3 million people spread in its “corridor and wings”.
Crazy right?
Yes, but why is this relevant?
Well, personally it’s just a great example of how we don’t give a damn about things that are too close to us.
It was only when I moved to Italy in 2018 that I started to give Brasília its deserved credit.
I was surprised by a large number of Romans that admired Brasília’s architecture.
I also had the airplane city pic saved on my phone and whenever I showed it to a new person, they thought that was nuts.
I believe the same is happening now in the educational field. We “lost track of how crazy it is to be living in an airplane city”.
Snapping Out Of Hypnosis
If you Google “free courses of Ivy League Universities”, you will find thousands of hours of content. This, until recently, was a privilege to the very 0,001% elite.
That little club that often drives the world has allowed a sneaky peek at what they do.
Sure, critics will say that it is still very little compared to the full syllabus. Also, the most valuable part of those institutions is the networking, not the information itself.
Yes, they are right. However, think again about how crazy it is:
A young girl from Senegal with an internet connection can learn the same thing that the daughter of an oil tycoon attending Harvard.
And sure, the Ivy League is just a symbolic example that involves educational status. Free educational information is abundant all over the internet.
It is known that 300 hours of video are uploaded on Youtube every minute.
Doing some basic math, it is likely that the platform has now 1.918.440 years of available content.
Yes, almost 2 million years of unstoppable footage and growing just for you.
If only 10% of that is educational, you have access at your fingertips to almost 200 thousand years of educational content to learn.
Still, it doesn’t look like people are learning much more than they learned before this revolution, especially before the 2010s.
After working with education for some time, I started to know a few counter-forces that might be preventing it from happening.
Reasons Why We’re Not Having A Boom Of Geniuses
Information Is Only a Small Part of The Equation
Accessing information isn’t enough to be successful in a learning project.
For that, a person needs to fulfill enough progress in 3 different areas:
1. Skills
Ex: Coding, French, Music Production.
2. Character Traits
Ex: Planning, Consistency, Discipline
3. Beliefs
Ex: Anyone can code if put in the hours, There is logic in french.
The information is key for forming new skills, but it’s not enough. After accessing the information and making sense of it, it’s necessary to test it in the real world. So a piece of knowledge gets transformed into a new skill.
It is very unlikely that the person builds a new skill with high mastery if it doesn’t have supportive character traits.
For example, someone who is inconsistent and relies on motivation to get things done is unlike to become a high-level coder in 6–12 months. Simply because they won’t learn and practice enough, only when motivation hits.
Finally, if the person doesn’t have beliefs that support the progress of their project, they will take bad decisions.
Attention Span Is Digging A Hole In The Ground
Recent studies show that the global attention span (meaning how long a person can sustain a single focus) is going down. This is a direct consequence of the growing abundance of information. A side-effect.
Those seem to be inversely proportional variables.
It means that, even if a bold teenager decides to become the next Mark Zuckerberg and have free classes with Mark Zuckerberg at the Harvard CS50 online free course, his brain just won’t have the stamina to focus on it for 50–60 minutes per lesson.
When he notices, his brain has put him back where he is used to: 15 seconds to 3 minutes Tik Tok videos full of loud noises and bright colors.
People Despise What Is Taken For Granted
At last, we come to the first argument of the airplane-shaped city: we don’t value what is close to us, we take it for granted.
Since Youtube videos and other types of free knowledge are abundant online, people tend to believe that “the golden nuggets” are in paid sources (a paywall makes them scarce).
This is nothing but a bias. It is very unlikely that a course will provide new information that you won’t find free on the internet.
Normally what happens is: someone wants to be successful in a project, learn it from free online resources, have the right character traits and beliefs, apply it and eventually succeed.
They say they have “cracked the success code” and if you want to take a shortcut they will guide you through it.
You just need to buy 4 hours of video (divided into 53 clips to look organized) that took them one weekend to record two years ago. All that for the bargain of 1499$!
It might be a form of procrastination.
The information is just out there. If you’re not able to retain it, it’s unlikely that a more good-looking paid teacher will do the work alone. Something must be done about the other variables, such as attention span.
Buying a new course will re-do the only part of the equation that you already have: access to information.
Your character traits and beliefs will remain the same, avoiding real progress.
Conclusion
Accessing information is easier than ever. However, other variables that are key to succeeding in projects are becoming harder to get, like sustaining attention.
Different forces seem to be fighting each other, but the benefits of information abundance are clearly winning.
Humanity is developing at a fast pace. Surely, it could be faster (and especially, in a better direction) if character traits and beliefs were running together.
It’s up to us to fill those gaps, we are the ones running earth in 2023. Our management equals our responsibility.
We’ll nail it.
If you enjoyed it, please subscribe to my newsletter about Learning Skills for Businesses: Gui Renno’s Newsletter
