Learn Voraciously (2015)
arbing.co.uk
arbing.co.uk
Because most people don't go to college to "get an education." They just go there as a hoop-jumping prerequisite to hopefully get "a job" and with that, a middle-class lifestyle. It's not that they want to know Shakespeare (running towards an academic milestone), but rather, they simply want to avoid "flipping burgers" (running away from a miserable economic existence).
The author appears to be from Spain. I don't know how the culture there perceives higher education but in the USA, the vast majority of students go to college to "get a piece of paper" as a signaling mechanism.[1] As another comparison, Germany doesn't seem to have as much of a social stigma for young adults pursuing the apprenticeship track instead college. In America, the "trades" of plumbers/electricians/welders are lower social rank than office workers with a degree.
For most (especially those not pursuing STEM), any education received -- is a side effect and not the primary purpose of school. This is not a negative judgement about those students. They do want to learn ... they'd just rather not learn about Shakespeare at college just so they can copy paste numbers from one Excel spreadsheet to another in their post-graduation professional job. Those people do continue learning but the topics they pursue on their own don't match the typical university curriculum. (e.g. they learn more about cooking, travel destinations, or other hobbies that interest their minds.)
The university was originally for well-off children of aristocracy or those training for religious studies. Perhaps those students pursued "education" purely for education's sake... along with the "grand tour" of Europe, etc. Those young adults didn't have to get a job so the "purpose" of university schooling wasn't intermingled with impure motives of economics. (E.g. I get my rich dad's inheritance regardless of how well I learn Greek/Latin). However, over the last few decades, higher education became a sorting mechanism for employers (e.g. this job application with no college degree gets rejected) so it's perfectly logical that students these days just go to college to check off that box for potential employment.
[1]http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/04/educational_sig_...
As an example, take analytical reading, writing, and discourse. They used to be a key component (the trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) of higher education, and they are still valuable skills. Being able to dissect, evaluate and challenge an argument is the basis for making informed choices. The clashing of dogma that stretches from politics to tech discussions might just be down to us not knowing how to argue. So we lob things past each others heads like that makes sense.
As of now, it's been relegated to being touched gingerly at the end of highschool, and taught hush-hush on a need-to-know basis during graduate studies.
It's a pity because we could fit that in and a dozen other things. Cut the fat. We go through 12 to 20 years of education at tremendous costs. I sincerely believe that we could get an order of magnitude better value. We retained the means of higher education but lost sight of its ends.
Schooling is about doing what you have to do to get that piece of paper that signals you are worthy - anything beyond marking time and checking the boxes is your own responsibility. Once you've learned to read (which should only take through 1st or 2nd grade), the world and all the accumulated knowledge of mankind opens up to you, as long as you're willing to go after it.
And have the time and access, two things that are lacking for many who are willing to go after it.
I could have learned twice what I did in college were I not working 40 hours a week to pay my rent and feed myself.
I'll restrict this comment to education for the aristocracy rather than religious functionaries. Its traditional function is well-understood, and bears little relationship to what you might think of as "education", the development of knowledge, today. The purpose of elite education is to acculturate the elite into a harmonious social group, with shared values and a shared cultural background -- such that, when two elites meet for the first time, they can interact comfortably and don't come across as off-putting to one another. So you have things like classics education; it doesn't really matter which texts are "classics", and their content is of no use in itself -- but as long as everyone has read the same "classic" works, they'll get each other's references and feel that they're all part of the same group.
How do I prioritise learning against using what I've already learned? Is it better to learn things I already know in more detail, or completely new things but only to a shallow level? Is it OK to learn from YouTube videos or should I register with a proper education establishment? And how do I balance learning against other demands on my time like networking and spending time with my family?
I doubt anybody wakes up one day and says "OK, I've learned enough now, I'm not going to bother learning anything new." so advising against that seems a bit pointless.
I realized a while back that I tended to get defensive when someone presented information that I was wrong. Initially I felt that this was because people tend to disagree with other people in a way that can be considered, at best, a little dickish. However, I also felt attacked even when the information was presented in a fairly neutral manner. This was a bit of a shock to me, because I like to think of myself as open-minded.
After some self-reflection, I found the reason I felt attacked was because I felt that any time someone presented me with information that conflicted with my worldview, it attacked my self-identity as a reasonable and observant person. When someone told me something that didn't seem possible based on my worldview, I almost took it as if they were attacking my worldview itself.
This defensive behavior would present itself in how I told my stories to other people as well. So, while I felt attacked when other people presented information that conflicted with my worldview, I'm sure they felt equally attacked when I shared my worldview with them, even if I didn't outright say they were wrong at any point.
It took me a while to figure out how to avoid this behavior, since I was effectively putting up emotional barriers against what felt deep down like an attack. (Perhaps this step is easier for people who are in tune with their emotional side, rather than their analytical side.) I just started thinking about everyone as having their own world (myself included), and their stories being true in their world. In a sense, sharing knowledge was a bit like they were taking me inside a bit of their world.
It freed me from having to immediately evaluate whether what they said was true or false. I could keep their ideas in their world and evaluate them there, and compare them to how things worked in my world. Sometime other people's ideas explain what is going on in my world better than my own ideas. At that point, I ditch my old ideas and accept their ideas as the new truth in my world.
It sounds kind of weird, and it probably is a bit. I've kind of created a analytical system for empathy, which allows me to evaluate world views in a scientific manner. Regardless, I've learned so much more since I stopped worrying about whether I was right in any given situation, and instead worried about listening instead. There's always time to evaluate later.
Many of us live in a culture which is decidedly anti-intellectual, e.g. where showing genuine interest in learning will get you derided as "weird" or "nerdy" and lower your overall social status. Humans tend to respond pretty strongly to social incentives, so this causes people to study less than they otherwise would. Conversely, positively reinforcing learning really does cause people to spend more time on it.
pg's "Cities and Ambition" covers this topic pretty well: http://paulgraham.com/cities.html
This applies to my learning "Slow down to speed up".
is not really the best way to try to convince me with statistics.
I spent 5 minutes poking around the internet and nobody seems to have the actual study, just summaries of it. The closest I could find to a real discussion was at [1]. One survey with data there said that 12% of college graduates had not read a book in the last 12 months, which is very different from 42% not reading a book ever.
[1] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9446/do-33-of-hi...
I have always felt this. When I joined my new workplace, I spent quite a lot of out of office hours on learning more in my field. To be honest, it really paid off. Studying after uni really matters.
Maybe the author is right, though.
Crazy times.
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Personally, I found the discussion about flossing quite interesting.
You should check out the latest episode of the Surprisingly Awesome podcast.