Education and learning are generally considered as the same thing.  They are not.

Education is something that is done to a person.  It is how the prevailing social norm is indoctrinated into children.  Of course, this is the teaching of ‘life skills’ as everyone needs the knowledge to interact with the society in which they live.  But it is also socially acceptable mass thinking inscribed into young and malleable minds, inculcated into thirty children per class, thousands of children a year, etc.  There are different modes of education, of course, such as parents teaching children manners or adult classes; but it is always someone telling you from a supposed position of superior information and knowing better.   There is minimal room to question what you are told and plenty of programming of ‘facts’.

By contrast, learning is something you do for yourself.  Whether derived from formal education or independently in an auto-didactic way, learning grows actual understanding in a person.  Every day, we encounter difference and change, and learning helps us to adapt.  It is not hide-bound and strict like education, but responsive and constantly updating itself.  Sadly, because education is a form of indoctrination, there is a general insistence in most people of trying to impose a structure that has been educated-in onto life, imposing an artificial order onto everything from routine to unexpected phenomena; but true learning is to explore and dig into the things we encounter to see what makes them tick, without pre-judgement or pre-conception, with the aim of trying to understand properly; and we all do this to differing extents in an ongoing manner throughout our lives.

I frequently wonder if someone has actually learned something or is simply parroting something they were taught, without proper understanding.  Are they a socially pre-programmed missile or an independently thinking being, defusing the missiles with understanding of how they work?  Usually, they are somewhere in-between, with few at the rarefied ends of the curve.

Learning is personally useful and rewarding; but education is a means to an end and not necessarily positive, despite the constant refrain that people need education to improve themselves (which usually means the sanctioned, preferred type of education).  You can be educated to be a robot.

I have sometimes referred to schools as sausage machines, churning out large numbers of members of society from impressionable youngsters.  It is a provocative image, and people have occasionally reacted negatively to the comparison of children to lumps of meat.  But children as lumps of meat is how the education system is set-up, as a factory system for producing thousands of socially functional workers each year.  And hidden within the foundations of education is the implicit assumption that society is correct as an agreed norm is taught, hidden and unquestioned.

Therefore, the education system has a twofold purpose.  Firstly, it gives each youngster the basic skills and knowledge to cope with the world into which s/he is born.  Secondly, it inculcates the prevalent moral codes and conventions of the surrounding society.

This has resulted in the well-educated idiot.  By this, I mean someone who knows a lot of information and facts, but only knows this information through the prism of inculcated beliefs and understanding.  A person who has been absorbed by the mainstream of opinion, who often refers to their education many years after they have ceased to study anything.  Does an exam / piece of paper show you are clever or that you have a good memory and know how to play that particular game?  Is working your nuts off to climb the greasy pole intelligent, when you could have less work and more fun and still be comfortable?  Is an anachronistic classical education better than something that is rooted in the modern world (given the elitist snobbery around such courses, you would think so)?

A sensible person learns, adjusting their views as they have new experiences or new information arises, and does not rehearse lines from education like a good soldier.

I shall illustrate what I mean with a children’s game and a sofa.

The children’s game is the one where you have various holes of different shapes – circle, square, triangle – and the child fits the correct object into the same-shaped hole, the cube into the square hole for example.  I have deliberately placed the word ‘correct’ in the preceding sentence, as this is the moral judgement.  Why can the round object not fit through the square hole?  In fact, it is usually easier with these games to fit the triangular object into the square hole, as opposed to the cube.  The fit is not exact but there is more space for manoeuvre.  So, what is the game teaching?  The exact spatial fit?  What goes with the other and fits ‘right’?  A judgement about the ‘right fit’?

To exemplify this further, place it in an adult context.  If I have a sofa delivered to my house, I would like the door to be as wide as possible.  The last thing I want is a sofa-shaped door space so it can fit through exactly, as this will make it much harder to get the sofa into my house.  My spatial awareness is practical in that I can tell whether the doorway is big enough to allow the sofa passage into my house, and there may be only just enough room at which point my learning about fitting a cube into a square hole will come in handy, but generally I want lots of spare room.

In short, the best hole for a cube is a hole much bigger than it, irrespective of the hole’s shape.

Therefore, the children’s game is teaching two things.  Firstly, the practical function of spatial awareness, how to fit something exactly when necessary.  Secondarily, but very important in social and mental development, judgement about rightness and discrimination (as in differentiation).  The primary function is always useful; but the secondary function can lead to poverty of thought in adulthood (e.g. judging quite harmless things, or something outside your norm, a wrong ‘fit’) as the child is indoctrinated into a proscriptive way of thinking in a Freudian way.

Don’t be a square peg in a square hole, you will miss out on the circular.