> "But when am I actually going to use this?"
I was as guilty of this as anyone in my school days, and yet not a single teacher ever pointed out to me that I was at school to learn how to learn, so in a sense the subject matter was irrelevant.
I was as guilty of this as anyone in my school days, and yet not a single teacher ever pointed out to me that I was at school to learn how to learn, so in a sense the subject matter was irrelevant.
Hell, I was a somewhat troubled teen with problems and when I was about 14, I outright refused to go to school for a year and my poor mother couldn’t do much to make me go :/ BUT in that time, I taught myself to program, first in Visual Basic, then in python and finally I settled on C++. Sure, my knowledge was quite limited compared to what it is now after years of practical experience and a computer science degree, but that year of self study largely shaped my approach to life, exposed me to a lot of things just because I was interested, gave me drive and ambition and set me up for a career in software development.
I’m not saying school was completely useless to me, but it was a rather inefficient way of learning the things I do find useful.
In school, I hated most subjects like history, geography etc but nowadays I’ll happily Wikipedia binge for days on end learning about the finer points of other civilizations past or present (I’ve even started reading books on Sumerian tablets), chemistry, biology, physics, maths.. I’ve recently been binge watching YouTube videos on quantum mechanics...
Then there were things I really enjoyed while in school: English essays for example were something I enjoyed writing, but I got little encouragement or help in doing so and my passion for writing fizzled out...
I often found that my interests were there, but misaligned. I may have been intensely interested in some aspect of history -- but not the anything on the current curriculum. If, by chance my interests aligned with a class topic, I excelled without much effort.
My other gripe was the lack of integration between topics -- You didn't learn much about the history of science or math in science or math classes. Nor did you learn much interesting stuff about mathematical and engineering history in History classes. Art was the exception to this and I really enjoyed both the historical and practical aspects of Art classes for this reason.
My school days are well in the past and I understand it's a little different for high-schooler's these days. At least I hope that's true.
Oh, I’m not saying it was without value, just that it was a very inefficient way of learning, which in turn means I learned a lot less in the time I spent on it than I could have or was otherwise unhappy with my school years when they could have been amazing.
> I often found that my interests were there, but misaligned. I may have been intensely interested in some aspect of history -- but not the anything on the current curriculum.
Yes, absolutely. Or even just that I wasn’t interested at that particular moment. Somebody recently explained to me that Montessori basically lets kids choose what to learn any any particular time (in a self learning way). I feel this would have been extremely suited to me. I was always an intuitive person who had to learn how or why things work, I’m pretty sure that I would have found myself interested in most school things at some point.
> My other gripe was the lack of integration between topics
Yeah I agree with this too. Also just not being very hands on. Other people mentioned the “when will I ever use this” question. School (and even uni) was pretty bad at teaching ways that you might actually want to know this thing aside from general interest. For example, I hated statistics in uni and did bad in that course (didn’t help that the lecturer was ab alcoholic but anyway), until some time later when I needed it for a project I wanted to do and I found that not only is it useful, but also quite interesting. When something is thought purely in the abstract it’s boring and seems not that useful but when you put it into practice it can be really fun and interesting.
Even if transfer learning did exist that’s not the reason for school that any substantial portion of people believe in. If we look at the institutional history of school teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school.
[1] “Besides just plain forgetting, people commonly fail to marshal what they know effectively in situations outside the classroom or in other classes in different disciplines. The bridge from school to beyond or from this subject to that other is a bridge too far.”
“Salomon, Gavriel, and David Perkins. 1989. “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanism of a Neglected Phenomenon.” Educational Psychologist 24 (2): 113–42.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning
> Today, transfer of learning is usually described as the process and the effective extent to which past experiences (also referred to as the transfer source) affect learning and performance in a new situation (the transfer target).[2] However, there remains controversy as to how transfer of learning should be conceptualized and explained, what its prevalence is, what its relation is to learning in general, and whether it exists at all.[3]
Citation needed. But transfer learning is a term specific to the ML field anyway, so I'm not sure why you used it.
> teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school
I don't think most people believe this is the purpose of school, not even nationalists.
Re: schooling as a means of promoting nationalism
> Education and Military Rivalry
> Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By con- trast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic politi- cal institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commod- ity prices or rivalries in a certain country’s immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence.
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27759015/educati...
The paper is too narrow to be a 'better sell' than transfer of learning, as dubious as that is.
Yes, that happens when ethnic cleansing is completed so that what were previously multi-ethnic empires are now mono-ethnic nation states.
So let's erase all borders and see how we get on.
Orwell: 'men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.'
That'll be the same France that has nuclear weapons?
Now consider how many people are hurt every year over enforcing laws that have just as imaginary lines drawn about other issues. Things like not being able to vote because of an imaginary line. Not being able to buy alcohol. Being forced to go to school where you have no rights to protect yourself from being harmed.
Those imaginary lines drawn on soil determine how resources are allocated, for example, enabling cheap energy and customers for the US’s military industrial complex, or cheap spices and labor for the British, and so on and so forth.
Even the most advanced mammals use tribes to maximize chances of survival, and humans are no different.
This is a skill I use to this day, especially when debugging, and when I have a hard day, I remind myself that if I was able to solve 100 linear equations over christmass when I was 10, I should be able to find this bug!
If anything I'd say school hindered me in this regard! I think I learnt dogged persistence through playing videogames.
I have to admit, that I did mention my mum on purpose, for first two years she literally sat by my side to help me concentrate.
Videogames either reqiured too good reaction time for me, or were too entertaining to need dogged persistence on my part :)
I transferred between schools mid-semester and discovered despite being weeks ahead of class at my old school I was weeks behind at the new one. I asked my teacher for help and she said "If you're so smart, you'll figure it out, and if you don't then you don't deserve to be here."
This is of course the exact opposite of what gifted students need to learn. Lots of smart kids go into high school or college used to powering through everything via sheer intellect and equating being smart with instantly grasping any new concept.
They're set up for a terrible fall the first time they're confronted with something they can't solve without help because their self identity is so wrapped up in "I'm smart and I can do anything!". Learning to learn, learning to be persistent and that challenges are not failures are just as important as the material.
I sometimes wonder why I put my 7 y/o in school at all, I wonder how far he would comes with his own natural curiosity. Luckily he likes school (although he recently re-did a year because he really was getting depressed about the the sheer amount of things he had to do and was failing at.)
High school is usually around ages 14-18.
History taught me how to analyse sources, accounting taught me how to write up a budget, english taught me how to write better, math taught me how to create graphs.
These skills are timeless and some of them I use daily.
I can remember much of where and what I learned in K-12, and who helped me to learn it (and how much they helped). It may (or not) be trendy, but it would be damned thankless of me to take that help for granted.
Learning anything is a discipline. Self-discipline isn't something we're born with, and great teachers model it for us. If we don't learn it, the prognosis for us is dim. Once we acquire it, to the extent we're able, we can accomplish whatever we 'set our minds to'. Coding, for an example. Compassion, for another.
Is spaced repetition still almost never taught in school?