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In the natural state, humans form ideas based on their observations of the world. Experience comes before learning – this is how humans make sense of the world around them. When ideas are generated in this way, there is an obvious link between an observation and the subsequent idea.

Traditional education flips this dynamic on its head. In traditional, or, articifical education as Schopenhauer calls it, the idea precedes the experience.

What happens when you learn the ideas, before you have the necessary experience, is you will apply those ideas wrongly as soon as you step out of the classroom into the real world.

The teacher is busy cramming the head of the student full of ideas, instead of teaching the student how to think in the first place. Children will then grow up with a worldview that is based on hearsay and opinion, and they are rarely equipped to handle the real world.

Children are submerged in a ready-made apparatus of opinion and prejudice, and if the real world conflicts with this web of ideas – which is bound to happen as the child grows up, then he will not change his opinion but rather lash out at the world instead. Although lacking the proper term, Schopenhauer is describing here what we would call cognitive dissonance today.

Education should seek to put observation before ideas and thus mimick the natural way in which humans learn things.

However, Schopenhauer also notes that during youth, our faculties of judgment are not yet fully developed. This is why he proposes that in the first years of a child’s education, there will be no subject matter that falls into what we would call “the humanities” today. So no philosophy, no religion, no matters of opinion.

Until age 16, a child should be taught only those subjects in which objective errors are possible, for example, mathematics or languages. Schopenhauer also mentions history here, but only the kind of history that is concerned with memorization, such as remembering dates.

The added benefit of this approach, says Schopenhauer, is that our memory is the strongest during our youth. And those things we memorize when we are young, we often remember for life.

Therefore it’s of great importance that these youthful years are used to let children soak up as much quality information as possible. Schopenhauer proposes that a group of experts from every branch of knowledge comes together every 10 years, to decide on a canon of essential knowledge.

Schopenhauer argues that maturity must come with experience. Today, we might say this is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. For Schopenhauer, engaging with the real world is of extreme importance.