How many times have your heard this one? "We need more trained people." What they should be saying is that we need more "smart people" or more "competent people". That is what this blog is all about.
First off, is it better to be nice than honest? I vote for honest. If you have to lie to be nice, then that is not very nice! For years our school teachers and many of their victims have been claiming that "more training" is the solution. It would be nice if that were true, but I will show that it is clearly not.
Look at one of our sports teams like foot ball or basket ball. The players are talented and well trained, but does that mean that training is what made them so good? NO! These people were not selected randomly. They were good athletes in the first place and their talents were further developed thru training. Training was not the primary cause, because we are talking about a select group of less than 5% out of the general population. It would be "nice" if any person could become a top athlete just by training, but we all know that it does not happen that way. Most of us are honest about it.
I enjoy music and have made several classic guitars, but no matter how much training and practice that I have endured, I still can't play music. I have friends who have never picked up a guitar before who see one of my classic guitars and immediately can pick it up and pick out a tune. It is clear that it was not training that gave them the ability to play. It was some basic talent they were born with. I think that it points up that all people are "not" created equal. They might have an equal opportunity to "try", but that is all.
When I was in school, my reading class was divided between three groups, Red Birds, Blue Birds and Yellow Birds. The best readers were in the Red Bird group. Since we had not been seriously exposed to reading training before, the only reason for the difference must have been some kind of talent that we were born with. Why do you think that top colleges only accept top students? Is the reason that they graduate top students the quality of their teaching or is it because they started out with the top students in the first place? What do you think?
It would be very nice if everyone was created equal, but we are not. If it were so there would not be any 7 foot tall basket ball players because we would all be 5 foot 8 inches tall. Training clearly has a roll to teach people algorithms invented by others so they can apply them, but some of those algorithms are so complex that only a few can be trained to apply them. We seem to have plenty of people who can be trained to apply simple algorithms, but only have a limited supply of those who can apply the more complex algorithms.
I have blogged before that value in our current society is being driven more and more by our intellect vs our physical abilities and just like the physical abilities that I pointed out above, our intellectual abilities are limited too. The best that we can hope for is that training will allow us to maximize the talents that we were individually born with, Training as the "total solution" is a myth!
First off, is it better to be nice than honest? I vote for honest. If you have to lie to be nice, then that is not very nice! For years our school teachers and many of their victims have been claiming that "more training" is the solution. It would be nice if that were true, but I will show that it is clearly not.
Look at one of our sports teams like foot ball or basket ball. The players are talented and well trained, but does that mean that training is what made them so good? NO! These people were not selected randomly. They were good athletes in the first place and their talents were further developed thru training. Training was not the primary cause, because we are talking about a select group of less than 5% out of the general population. It would be "nice" if any person could become a top athlete just by training, but we all know that it does not happen that way. Most of us are honest about it.
I enjoy music and have made several classic guitars, but no matter how much training and practice that I have endured, I still can't play music. I have friends who have never picked up a guitar before who see one of my classic guitars and immediately can pick it up and pick out a tune. It is clear that it was not training that gave them the ability to play. It was some basic talent they were born with. I think that it points up that all people are "not" created equal. They might have an equal opportunity to "try", but that is all.
When I was in school, my reading class was divided between three groups, Red Birds, Blue Birds and Yellow Birds. The best readers were in the Red Bird group. Since we had not been seriously exposed to reading training before, the only reason for the difference must have been some kind of talent that we were born with. Why do you think that top colleges only accept top students? Is the reason that they graduate top students the quality of their teaching or is it because they started out with the top students in the first place? What do you think?
It would be very nice if everyone was created equal, but we are not. If it were so there would not be any 7 foot tall basket ball players because we would all be 5 foot 8 inches tall. Training clearly has a roll to teach people algorithms invented by others so they can apply them, but some of those algorithms are so complex that only a few can be trained to apply them. We seem to have plenty of people who can be trained to apply simple algorithms, but only have a limited supply of those who can apply the more complex algorithms.
I have blogged before that value in our current society is being driven more and more by our intellect vs our physical abilities and just like the physical abilities that I pointed out above, our intellectual abilities are limited too. The best that we can hope for is that training will allow us to maximize the talents that we were individually born with, Training as the "total solution" is a myth!
