What is a good education?

by August Harper · 7 min read Free to read

What is education? I mean what is it? What about intelligence, what is that? These are questions that often come up when speaking with people. Comments like she is really intelligent or he is really clever - what does that even mean?

The reason I am occupied with this at the moment is because of my youngest son's school, Si Ri Panya International School, on the beautiful little island of Koh Phangan in Thailand. The school is very traditional in that they follow the Cambridge curriculum and all students must wear uniforms. In other words, it is no different from any other traditional school in e.g. the UK, only that this school is on Koh Phangan.

Traditional schools like Si Ri Panya, or any other school, do testing - a lot. A couple of times a month my son shares with us that tomorrow there is an assessment to which we respond that's fine, just do your best. Personally I don't think that traditional, binary assessments that test whether you know a fact or not provide much value, as retaining facts without learning them within the context of the study material, is tough to do and often results in them being forgotten. Additionally, they introduce massive amounts of stress. One morning after I dropped my son off at school, during assessment week at Si Ri Panya, I went to use the toilet. In the stall next to me I could hear two young girls talking, one of them crying and vomiting due to the stress they were experiencing that day.

Weighing a pig doesn't make it lighter

Does constant testing even make you smarter? I suppose that conversations shortly after an exam, would perhaps see fun facts being tossed around with great ease, but the same conversation, months or even weeks may not exhibit such facts. This is one of the problems with cramming for exams, is that there is nothing to hook facts onto unless you already know something about the subject matter before you consume new knowledge. One of the many benefits of experiential learning is that you engage more of the senses in the learning process so what is learned is also typically linked to a sensory impression experienced while learning the new material.

When learning how to drive a car, you find yourself in a novel situation, where there are noises, smells, there is potential danger and thus emotions, so the whole act of learning the new skill, namely the act of driving, stays with you far more profoundly than learning to drive by reading about it in a book. The whole mind/body is involved, which is what makes all the difference. This is why learning by doing is often much more powerful than reading about how to do it with text. It rarely sticks, and stickiness is when knowledge becomes skill, which when practiced, becomes intuition.

Learning versus Performance

One of the biggest misconceptions in education is that performance and learning are the same thing. They are not.

A student who scores 95% on Friday's mathematics test may genuinely understand the material, but they may also simply have retained enough information to perform well for a short period of time. If the same student is tested three months later, after the information has not been used, the score is often dramatically lower. Educational psychologists have spent decades distinguishing between performance, what a student can demonstrate today, and learning, which is what remains months or years later.

This distinction matters enormously because schools overwhelmingly measure performance while claiming to measure learning.

The irony is that the methods that produce the highest short-term scores are often not the methods that produce the strongest long-term understanding. Cramming, rereading notes, memorising facts the night before an exam, and repeating the same questions over and over can all produce excellent immediate performance. Unfortunately, they also create what psychologists call an illusion of learning. Everything feels familiar because it was encountered recently, not because it has become deeply understood.

The Difference Between Remembering and Understanding

Anyone who has attended school has probably experienced this.

The night before an examination you memorise twenty definitions. The next morning you reproduce every one of them perfectly.

Ask yourself how many you could still recite six months later. Probably very few. Now think about riding a bicycle. You may not have ridden one for ten years, yet within a few minutes your balance returns almost automatically - the difference is profound. The first is memory that was temporarily stored for assessment, and the second is knowledge that has become integrated into your nervous system through repeated experience.

Education should aim for the latter.

Does Testing Make You More Intelligent?

This depends entirely on what we mean by testing.

Research over the past several decades has consistently shown that retrieval practice, asking students to recall information without looking at their notes, can significantly improve long-term memory when combined with spacing and meaningful feedback. In other words, using quizzes as a learning activity is beneficial. However, this is very different from saying that frequent high-stakes examinations make students more intelligent.

There is remarkably little evidence that repeatedly preparing students for standardised tests increases their ability to reason, solve novel problems, think creatively or transfer knowledge into unfamiliar situations.

In fact, educational researchers have repeatedly found that schools, under pressure to maximise test scores, often narrow their curriculum. Teachers spend more time teaching students how to answer exam questions and less time exploring ideas, asking questions, carrying out experiments or engaging in open-ended discussion.

Students become better at taking tests, but whether they become better thinkers is another question entirely.

The Cost of High-Stakes Assessment

Examinations do more than measure knowledge, they also change behaviour. When a school's reputation depends heavily upon examination results, teachers naturally devote increasing amounts of classroom time to preparing students for those examinations.

Students quickly learn that the goal is no longer understanding but performance.

Questions become:

"Will this be on the test?"

rather than

"Why does this happen?"

Curiosity slowly gives way to compliance, and learning becomes transactional. The reward is the grade rather than the knowledge itself, which is perhaps one of the greatest unintended consequences of assessment-driven education.

Stress: The Hidden Variable

My experience at Si Ri Panya reminded me that there is another cost to constant assessment that is much harder to measure - Stress.

Watching a young child cry and vomit before school because of examinations should give every educator pause. Some stress is inevitable. Life contains deadlines, challenges and uncertainty. Moderate stress can even improve alertness - but chronic stress is something entirely different.

When the brain perceives threat, stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline prepare the body for survival rather than learning. Attention narrows. Working memory becomes less efficient. The parts of the brain responsible for reasoning, planning, and flexible thinking become less effective, which from an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense. If a tiger is chasing you through the forest, your brain should not be worrying about algebra.

Unfortunately, many classrooms unintentionally place students into a similar physiological state—not because they are in physical danger, but because the consequences of failure feel overwhelming, and the result is a paradox, as the very environment designed to maximise academic performance may actually reduce the brain's capacity to learn.

Why Strict Classrooms Often Miss the Point

Strict classrooms undoubtedly produce orderly classrooms, but whether they produce curious learners is less clear.

Children learn best when they feel psychologically safe enough to ask questions, admit confusion, make mistakes, and explore ideas without fear of embarrassment.

A classroom built primarily around obedience, silence and the avoidance of failure teaches something, but it may not be the thing we actually value. It teaches children to minimise mistakes - but innovation, however, requires making them - lots of them! Every scientist has conducted failed experiments. Every entrepreneur has launched unsuccessful ideas. Every artist has produced terrible work before creating great work.

If children are punished for failure rather than encouraged to investigate it, we should not be surprised when they become adults who avoid risk.

What Real Intelligence Looks Like

This brings us back to the original question.

What is intelligence?

It cannot simply be the ability to reproduce facts under pressure. Modern computers outperform every human being at storing information, yet nobody would argue that a calculator is intelligent would they?

Intelligence is surely something richer, it is recognising patterns where others see randomness. It is applying old knowledge to new situations. It is questioning assumptions. It is changing your mind when presented with better evidence. It is solving problems that have no answer sheet.

These qualities are difficult to assess with standardised examinations precisely because they are messy, contextual, and deeply human.

Towards a Better Definition of Education

Perhaps education should not be judged by how much information students can reproduce, but by who they become after learning it.

If the answer to those questions is yes, then education has succeeded, regardless of whether every historical date or chemical equation has been remembered - because ultimately, education is not about producing children who are good at school, it is about producing adults who are good at life.

Thanks for reading.