When I began my first internship, it was daunting.  No matter how much education I had, on the job I soon discovered that I knew nothing.  I was more of a hindrance to my mentor than a help.  I was a bumbling mess.  I had all the abstract, formal knowledge I could possibly want, but none of it prepared me for actually doing my job.

How I did learn how to do my job was by observing and doing, by being in-the-moment and getting my hands dirty.  I didn’t learn through sitting and thinking, I learned through watching and doing.  There is no other way to learn a skill, and there never has been.

If you want to understand baseball, you don’t read rulebooks and pour over Newtonian physics diagrams for 4 years.  You just grab a bat and go play.

Once you’ve mastered the basics of hitting a ball and running around bases, you can start to worry about the finer points of the game, like how to throw a curve ball, when you should try to steal a base, and how to maximize the effect of your swing.  Reading, studying, and doing physics might help you improve your game after the fact, but you had to play first so that you would know what knowledge you needed and so that you would care about that knowledge.

It’s the same with any job you want to do.  Education is no substitute for actually doing the job, and until you’ve got some real-world practice, education will float in one ear and out the other, since it has nothing meaningful to connect to.  Education doesn’t reach its full fruition until it is grounded in practice.

I remember in high school asking my Trigonometry teacher “What good is this?  I’m not going into engineering, when am I ever going to use this knowledge?” and the answer I received was something like “it is good to have a broad knowledge base; this will help your thinking no matter what you go in to.”

This is the justification for why every student needs to know: the old doctrine of formal discipline.  Back in the early days of education, teachers thought that every student should learn Latin and spend hours doing rote memorizations.  The theory was that the mind is a muscle, and school should basically just exercise that muscle by making it do hard work, and as a result the person would become smarter.

But it turns out that this theory didn’t pan out.  Making students learn Latin early did not make them any better at Physics later.  Knowledge doesn’t transfer like that.  It turns out that if you want people to be good at Physics, it’s best to just teach them Physics.  You can’t just teach people Latin, Calculus, and Shakespeare until they are such geniuses that all other disciplines come easily to them.  Unfortunately.

The attempt to create great minds through formal disciplines was probably doomed to fail from the beginning, because that’s just not how humans are wired to learn.  Humans evolved in tribal bands, where the primary knowledge was tool-making and tool-use techniques, and these techniques were passed down from generation to generation.  For thousands of years, humans have learned by following around their elders, watching what the elders do, and trying to help them.  Our natural learning mode is observing and imitating, not ruminating and reading.  The abstract, formal approach to education is a very new experiment in human learning, while the apprenticeship approach is a lot more in-line with the way that humans have learned since time unmemorable.   In short, apprenticeship is the natural way for people to learn.

In an apprenticeship, the knowledge you develop is real to you in a way that abstract, formal knowledge is not.  When you learn by apprenticeship, the knowledge is meaningful because you use it for getting your job done.  Your knowledge becomes grounded in your body and situated in the context of use.  You don’t just learn facts, you learn why you need to know facts, the facts themselves, and how to use those facts.  You also learn a whole host of physical and social skills that you might not even be able to articulate in words, but which are still crucial parts of the knowledge it takes to do a job successfully.

The real knowledge that practice can produce should be the goal of education.  Knowing a list of facts about something is never a complete knowledge.  You can study facts about Guatemala all day long, but you never have a complete knowledge until you actually go there, see places, do things, and form opinions and feelings.  Education can never substitute this real-world experience, it can only supplement it.

The best education would focus primarily on internships, with the occasional class just to augment students’ knowledge.  Unfortunately our educational system still seems to be clinging to the abstract, formal approach, but where you can find opportunities to do internships, you should jump at them.  It is the only way to make your knowledge real and to find out if your career path is even what you really want to do.