Heuri: Performing Intelligence
During my practice as a math tutor, one of the major coping strategies among students dealing with arduous equation solving is to learn the required minimum to pass on to the ‘next level’ and forget that it happened in the first place. More generally, I’ve been noticing a steady pattern in my students: they are smart and adaptive, but they just don’t care.
Such resistance is perfectly understandable, especially given their youth: there are much more joyous things happening in their lives than memorising the quadratic formula, discovering the past tense of cleave, counting the bones in a human body, remembering Hemingway’s birthdate, or pinpointing when World War II started.
The other emerging coping strategy related to education, sitting on the opposite side of the spectrum, is something I like to call diploma arrogance, which I’d like to discuss in this article. By diploma arrogance, I’m referring to the notion that having a university diploma implies being intelligent.1
Complex math problems are a subtle, yet still a good example of institutionalised instructional math education I very often refer to as “merchant math”. Even though such problems sometimes do require thinking outside of the box, one learns the few tricks that can be applied to a very large degree of success. Integrating in one’s free time is more of a specific nerd hobby than a manifestation of one’s intelligence. Image source: Reddit
The first generation of European universities arose from cathedral schools and monastic centres. The parallel to draw with modern secular universities is that dogmatism still plays a major role in shaping their identity. The prevailing “secular dogma” is the unquestionable notion that a diploma is a direct confirmation of one’s intellectual capacity, and that any graduate is a gatekeeper of human knowledge and expertise, passing the flame of truth-seeking to younger generations.2
By graduating, one also unavoidably undergoes a transcendental and untransferable experience through which one is enlightened and becomes a better version of themselves for the rest of their lives. As one might expect, such an experience is deemed unattainable through other means because if you put so many years into something, it must, by definition, be valuable.
I hope it’s obvious I am exaggerating for effect. Yet, we shouldn’t forget how quickly this institutional elitism sours into outright bigotry, like the genuine belief that people living in Africa are generally less intelligent because they score lower in IQ tests.
The commodification of intellectualism is on the rise, further amplified by social media. Here, one can observe only a few counterarguments to diploma arrogance that are repeated ad nauseam, an irony in itself. Let me address them.
But… you learn how to network!
Proponents of the massification of university education often claim that studying at university is no longer about the “prescribed curriculum” of the major: you also learn to socialise, meet new people, and form important relationships. Isn’t this, however, a naturally emerging consequence of doing absolutely anything in the company of others?
Framing peer socialisation as a primary benefit is an admission of failure: it implies the university’s main value is merely providing a physical room for people to meet. Furthermore, not everyone gets the same experience. Elite campus networks in China deepen stratification by socioeconomic class, as low-income students are systematically excluded from the informal, high-prestige connections that actually lead to top-tier employment. Even if the situation isn’t as extreme everywhere, it points to the same tendency: modern universities still aren’t build to handle this many people without providing completely different experiences to students from different backgrounds.
But… you learn how to learn!
The other objection is that university teaches you how to learn, and that during your uni studies, you realise how few things you actually know. Shouldn’t this be the purpose of any educational institution? I make sense of this phenomenon again through the lens of diploma arrogance: if primary and secondary education fails to foster independence of thought and the capability to solve complex problems, that is a grave indictment of the educational system itself. Instead of fixing it, we turn this systemic failure into an institutional virtue. Not very intelligent, at least in my eyes.
There are many resources online, many of them entirely free, through which you can learn about almost any topic you want. If knowledge and truth-seeking were our highest values, wouldn’t that source of information suffice for most of us? Or are we approaching universities as institutions that need to give us a pat on the head for being good boys and girls? Image source: Picryl
But… you make more money with a diploma!
Let’s grant that a university graduate makes twice as much money as a person without this academic qualification, no matter the field. What does that imply, though? That you’re entitled to graduating from university so that you can pay down a mortgage? That it’s a modern person’s right to have a diploma to be able to afford a high standard of living?
You may argue that graduates earning more is caused precisely by the expertise that the university passed onto them. If expertise and knowledge are what is generally valued, there should be no ifs to attaining a high income, provided you have a solid academic portfolio. How come, then, university employees are quite often underpaid, even as the trend of adjunctification3 is persistently criticised throughout Western universities?
If raw expertise and truth-seeking were truly what society valued, we would see massive investment in research as a public good. To me, “I’m officially smarter and that’s why I make more money than you” is just another empty brag. Technologically oriented universities increasingly operate as prep schools for big tech corporates rather than acting as a base for independent researchers and scientists. This brag just proves those corporate priorities right.
To be frank, I also initially chose my major because it was known for high salaries and gatekeeping newcomers behind a credential. Therefore, I’m not exempt from applying this very argument myself in the past; to me, however, that’s just one more reason to now consider such a worldview intellectually dishonest.
Ultimately, this economic argument is routinely shielded by a romanticisation of the inquisitive young mind. It is a bad faith that only masks selfishness in the end: how can this university benefit me? It also touches on the overreliance of employers on academic credibility: they’ve got a diploma, they can’t be that dumb, let’s give it a try.
But… you hone your intellect a bit longer!
Studying at university is a good idea because working a 9 to 5 corporate job is what’s ahead of you your whole productive life. Extend your youth and youthfulness by studying for X more years!
This argument is the most personal to me. Let me elaborate why.
At the end of one of my school years of elementary school, we decided it’s time to create a yearbook. Apart from taking an obligatory mugshot photo, we were also prompted to share what we like doing in our free time. Later, I realised I was the only one to answer: I like to learn. However, to my confusion at the time, I was met only with disdain and apathy.
I feel some of this schoolyard malevolence bleed naturally into young adulthood:
I don’t need no education, but having no responsibilities for just a bit longer is not that bad!
Loads of people have diplomas these days. Therefore, I must have one too.
Have you heard that Linus, the nerdiest guy from our high school, makes a fortune as a lawyer now? I want THAT too, it can’t be that difficult.
My schoolmate making a custom “<MY SURNAME> IS A NERD” sign ‘for me’ is one of the many niceties I experienced as a kid. Image source: Picryl
We should stop showing adolescents that education is a necessary institutional evil, a civilian equivalent to military service where you go through the chore as soon as possible and then, a pinnable reward—pay rise, new job, external validation on social media, sense of moral high ground—appears.
Summa summarum
Andragogy and life-long education should be a much more common part of any developed society, and we should stop equating tertiary education with studying at university.4 That way, we can also reach genuine humility.
That said, I don’t like beating a dead horse without providing alternatives. I want to show at least a few more people that liking learning in your free time isn’t something to be ashamed of or even wasteful, and that you don’t need a diploma to make sense of your learning.
That is also why I’m building Heuri, a platform that invites anyone who wants to understand how things work, namely how math works, by leaning heavily on the constructivist concept of informal knowledge: it’s the grappling with concepts that matters more than knowing formulas and exact definitions that would be useful to know only for a test.
Even though memory is an important aspect of learning, Heuri keeps rote learning at a minimum. Remembering things by heart is something I have always sucked at, but that never stopped me from learning. I want that freedom to be a reality for every math student.
Happy learning!
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For the purposes of this article, let’s define intelligence as the ability to adapt to new environments and to solve complex problems. ↩︎
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In the Czech environment, this dissonance is perfectly illustrated by the sheer number of university students, which reaches hundreds of thousands yearly—an astounding figure relative to Czechia’s 10 million inhabitants. ↩︎
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In short, adjunctification refers to the practice of universities to cut down operating costs by relying on part-time, contingent faculty rather than full-time, tenured professors. ↩︎
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Even though I’m aware many countries have already embraced alternative ways of tertiary education, it is unfortunately not the case in many countries, including Czechia where I live. ↩︎