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Earlier quoted context omitted.
He also said he would try hard to forget that the earth went round the sun, so that he could reuse the memory space for other things.
If he'd spent some space on neurology, he'd know that forgetting things doesn't create space for new memories.
There's a lot of selection bias here - the majority (all?) of the readers of this site are far more intelligent than the majority. So all (most? many?) of us will probably agree with her (at least as regarding our own schooling). I know I do. But the trouble, the reality, is that most students can't do what she suggests, using our minds for creativity, and not rote work. There really is a difference in intelligence,…
>But the trouble, the reality, is that most students can't do >what she suggests, using our minds for creativity, and not >rote work. There really is a difference in intelligence, and >the sad truth is that for most students school is exactly >right. I disagree. I don't think we're that smart, and I don't (usually) think the rest of the world is that dumb. Besides, is memorizing soon-to-be-forgotten dates and listeni…
Well, I don't like speeches about the evils of money given by rich people, nor do I like speeches about the broken education system given by valedictorians.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory I agree with you, but in practice I don't. For most of the people I've seen delay college, they only life experience they gain in the meantime is in waiting tables. (Which they usually already had from jobs in highschool anyways.) The only positive effect I've seen is that people realize they don't want to work a shit job for the rest of their lives, and get some motivation for education. On the margin this…
Delaying college by going into the military for 2-4 years seems to work out pretty well. Some of the best students I've met have been on the GI Bill. An approximation for non-military-inclined people would be spend a year or so traveling, and then learn some relatively straightforward but non-trivial skill (say, photography, or field service engineering for a certain kind of hardware), and then traveling around to do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why? You can develop grit by doing things that really suck, but ultimately get you somewhere you want to go, or that leads to some sort of innovation down the line. But to force people to do things that are completely unrelated to what they want to do in life, just for the sake of doing it, is a huge waste of time. You gain grit by doing things that need to be done, hopefully in pursuit of some greater goal (more…
Interesting to consider the zen statement. What if you ignore the goal and focussing just on the path?
ok, for all you school-haters out there on HN, one thing that i think is often overlooked in the 'discussion' of how public schooling is such a mind-numbing rote memorization grind is the fact that it is a way of developing grit, discipline, whatever you call it ... the ability to endure through boring or tedious tasks to achieve some measurable goal. i think that for most people, the biggest determiner of 'success'…
ok, for all you school-haters out there on HN, one thing that i think is often overlooked in the 'discussion' of how public schooling is such a mind-numbing rote memorization grind is the fact that it is a way of developing grit, discipline, whatever you call it ... the ability to endure through boring or tedious tasks to achieve some measurable goal. i think that for most people, the biggest determiner of 'success'…
I can spend 8 hours programming a computer with just 1 or two 20 minute brakes for eating or a mug refill, but i found it impossible to concentrate for a 40 minutes high-school chemistry class. Could it be that school is just BORING? I can read a thick book on a hard subject(programming, philosophy, history), but could never finish a fucking chapter from a high-school text book, without falling asleep. Could it be th…
This is so true. I realized this very thing myself in the second year in high school. I thought: what the hell am I doing trying to get good grades—from every subject?
I had been doing precisely that just because I could and with the eerie awareness of the fact that I would forget 95% of anything deemed uninteresting right after the course. When it came to subjects tangential to my interests, I realized that I was certainly not going to learn something in school that I couldn't learn by myself.
If I ever needed to cross check which European country invaded which other European country in the 1600's, how to translate "dear girl, I want to marry you for the rest of my life" to German should the opportunity arrive, or desperately need to exercise in some molecular calculations, then I was convinced that I would still have the chance to learn that stuff.
Except for the subjects of my interest, I then dropped all my effort to the very, very minimal level and as a result my grades dropped slightly. It was probably the 20% of effort, 80% of results scheme in action. In some subjects that I had decided to completely ignore, like religion courses (yes, we had those in Finland...), I let my grades drop to the minimum that was required to avoid flunking and was actually pretty proud of that result.
I graduated with good grades in everything I cared about. My high school diploma then exhibited real value for the period of a mere month until it claimed its purpose and I got accepted to the university. I've never needed it after that.
And, by the way, except for mathematics, 99% of what I learned in high school I have never ever needed since. I'm 32 now and I'm glad my teenage realization turned out to be correct.
ok, for all you school-haters out there on HN, one thing that i think is often overlooked in the 'discussion' of how public schooling is such a mind-numbing rote memorization grind is the fact that it is a way of developing grit, discipline, whatever you call it ... the ability to endure through boring or tedious tasks to achieve some measurable goal. i think that for most people, the biggest determiner of 'success'…
I get your larger point, that a sour-grapes excuse of "Well, school was booooring" doesn't necessarily indicate a successful individual - but just because losers also hate the system doesn't mean the system actually works for any real purpose.