Education is like the gym. No one lifts weights because they from the floor because they are trying to move them. They lift weights because they’re strengthening their body to meet challenges they don’t know about yet. Education strengthens the mind for mental challenges we haven’t anticipated.
That’s not a new analogy. I’m sure you’ve read it before. I mention it because Dan Rockmore1 has a nice essay in The New Yorker making the point again: “Should the classroom be more like the gym?”
The great challenge of teaching is not to transmit information—machines do that cheaply now—but to engineer those moments of genuine understanding reliably enough that students come to crave them. The intellectual equivalent of the body’s feedback is real and, when it arrives, more powerful than any endorphin.
- Rockmore is the William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science at Dartmouth. https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/daniel-rockmore ↩
The gym analogy really lands for creative work too. AI image tools like Inkspira can produce a finished-looking tattoo concept in seconds, which is great for exploring ideas fast, but the moment of real understanding — working out placement, proportion, how a design will actually sit on skin — still tends to come through the slower back-and-forth of sketching and revising. Treating the AI output as a first draft rather than the final answer seems to be what preserves the gym-like part of the process.