Note, this is unfinished and will be added to over time. --- As I procrastinate, I have been listening to Rory Sutherland a tad too much. He is one of those speakers that is effortless to follow where I can't help but be rapt in attention. He seemingly has an uncountable amount of fascinating examples and stories through which he conveys a myriad of insights that mix psychology, sociology, technology and marketing. While there are pedagogical insights that could be gained through analysing how he convinces millions to voluntarily engage in complex educational ideas in their spare time through short-form content, here I will take some of his thoughts around value and explore a different direction concerning the purpose of education. It is also more freeing given that it does not necessitate producing value in pursuit of monetary gain, can produce value for the sake of value and can have deeper levels of direct instructional intervention. # Laws of conservation are not found in subjectivity: this allows for alchemy Alchemy aims to change forms of material, such as from iron to gold, without some kind of expensive or burden that must be endured. Though, we think that such production is ridiculous and hence fictional media often portrays alchemy as involving severe tradeoffs, such as that of animal or human sacrifices where soul covers the worthiness gap to justify an equal trade of material. This idea that things do not come for free is embedded within *physicalist* thinking with concepts of conservation of energy and momentum. But digging deeper what does gold even represent? It is the ability to exchange it for money, goods, and services. Whilst gold is physical, its value lies in the constructed social imaginaries that our society shares. Digger even further, what do goods and services provide a person ...? With repeated questioning we continue traversing this chain, but at the end we arrive at some notion of value or utility that is experienced by the consciousness, such as: the feeling of love, the joy from getting that acceptance letter, the satisfaction of drinking a hot chocolate on a cold winters day, the feeling of flow as you play a sport, the gratification from purchasing something or the peace of sitting on a bench in nature watching the world flow past. However, unlike 1kg of 22 carat gold, we see from these examples that the notion of value (or utility) is neither well defined nor can be measured in objective ways. Whilst some areas are more so linked to biology such as sugar, many are socially constructed ideals that are formed through the education system and informal learning in exposure within our environments. That is, our parents, friends, social media, advertisements signal to us what should be valued, and beliefs are so strongly encoded that actions abstracted from biology like graduating or buying a Lamborghini can deeply stimulate our emotions. Many interpretations of the world are non-conscious: try to close your eyes and listen to the sounds around you, can you hear them as noise without implicitly interpreting its origin? If our experience of utility is not objective following rules of conservation, can we not define, teach and **learn** how to increase our conscious feeling of experienced value, without incurring material costs? That is, at its core alchemy represents the production of value out of nothing, and if we can define value however we wish, we can indeed produce it out of nothing. Hence, the ideal represented by alchemy exists! --- **the following I am in the middle of writing, please ignore ...** # How is efficiency translated in value? Five hundred years ago the majority of the population were farmers, though through technological innovations we have had increases in efficiency to where less than 1% of the UK workforce are farmers. However, are our economic efficiencies actually made use of and converted effectively into value? That is, many go to work at jobs they do not enjoy to produce economic value, where efficiency gains are used for activities like buying a BMW that gives ego-related gratification, which is primarily used as a means of commuting to and from work! That is, economics is based of objective definitions that can help us make sense of the larger picture, but we should not forget that these are proxies to subjectivity of real value. that act as are proxies giving us some objective base on which the larger picture can be made sense of, however it is laden with reductiveness where at its core, value is tied to our conscious experience that is highly flexible. Efficiency is not bad, but we need to get to the core of what we want to be efficient about. We focus on proxies that significantly divert us from the goal at hand. # Subjectivity does not mean that all is wishy-washy That is not to say that all value exists within pure subjectivities and that experiences are created equal. There is biology ... but the us In the past or even in some areas of life, our struggle is tied to the basic necessities. Whilst i posit the existence of alchemy, there are still basic things that we need to live and survive in our life. Such struggle for necessities is justified at the cost of value. But now, we struggle attempting to increase economic production from our figures of 1000x to 1100x to produce more goods or services in an attempt or proxy to value. But does such an increase in economic production translate to any increase in real tangible value? Of course we have graphs of earning/happiness etc ... but this is with respect to a population that has been socialised to accept value in particular forms. Rather than producing such contrived forms of value where we play a variety of stupid games, why not go straight to the source? # The role of education in performing alchemy Some things are difficult, they counter aspects of current social norms, and parts of human nature if left to the most low-energy effort ... but education exists in a strange spare where you can have dedication and commitment to time ... that can counter efforts of social norms Whilst marketing is powerful in forming our values, education has significant potential in pushing back ... Education is positioned uniquely in that it sits in a space where it can effect the formation of what is deemed as value within the child, as well as principles that can aid in governing the direction of a society to focus on maximisation of value. Rather than teaching a child to perform the quadratic equation 0.2 seconds faster, or being able to increase efficiency through more effective engineers who can increase the technical specification of a car by 10%, which fails to translate to real value when averaged across time. Could education instead focus on teaching the child to be able to derive value within themselves, that is through meta-cognitive control of thoughts. Or through enjoying simple social experiences with friends. Or through providing value, thereby creating a reinforcing loop of deriving value through providing value. As well as civic skills of how to participate in a democracy to lead a nation in a direction that converges to maximising the true value at its very root, and not simply economic value. Let's go straight to the source. Urie Bronfenbrenner (1977, p. 528) “Most of our scientific ventures into social reality perpetuate the status quo; to the extent that we include ecological contexts in our research, we select and treat them as sociological givens rather than as evolving social systems susceptible to significant and novel transformation.” * Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977). Toward an experimental ecology of human development. American Psychologist, 32, 513–532. * given the social development of value, wouldn't it be more effective to nudge the development and experience of values themselves?