118. Polishing symbols
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Just about everything that happens in school after second grade involves rearranging symbols. We push students to quickly take the real world, boil it down into symbols, and then, for months and years after that, analyze and manipulate those symbols. We parse sentences, turning words into parts of speech. We refine mathematical equations into symbols, and become familiar with the periodic table.
The goal is to live in the symbolic world, and to get better and better and polishing and manipulating those symbols. That’s what academics do.
[see the PDF for the illustrations]
I love stuff like this. The manipulation of ever increasing levels of abstraction is high-octane fuel for the brain; it pushes us to be smarter (in one sense).
But at another level, it’s a sort of intellectual onanism. For a few math students, it’s a stepping stone on the way to big new insights. For everyone else, it’s a distraction from truly practical conversations about whether to buy or lease a car, or how to balance the Federal budget.
The reason we make fun of advanced research papers with titles like “Historic Injustice and the Non-Identity Problem: The Limitations of the Subsequent-Wrong Solution and Towards a New Solution” is that the academics are focusing all their attention on symbol manipulation—and since we, the readers, have no clue how the symbols relate to the real world, we’re lost.
Symbol manipulation is a critical skill, no doubt. But without the ability (and interest) in turning the real world into symbols (and then back again), we fail. Pushing students into the manipulation of symbols without teaching (and motivating) them to move into and out of this world is a waste.
It doesn’t matter if you’re able to do high-level math or analyze memes over time. If you’re unable or unwilling to build bridges between the real world and those symbols, you can’t make an impact on the world.
Back to the original list of what our society and our organizations need: we rarely stumble because we’re unable to do a good job of solving the problem once we figure out what it is. We are struggling because there’s a shortage of people willing to take on difficult problems and decode them with patience and verve.
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