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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#41

Post by username90 »

manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

> He hates homework (as do most kids)

I just didn't do my homework and got bad grades. Luckily in my country you can always get in via standardized tests instead of grades so I did well in life anyway. I'm not sure why homework is weighed so heavily in grades, it mostly just shows how much free time the students are willing to sacrifice. The biggest cost this had for me was the guilt that I hadn't done what I was supposed to do, which made me feel like a bad person, but in hindsight I did much better than most of my more studious peers so it really wasn't all that important.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#43

Post by anonytrary »

> The real problem is grades

Bingo! The real problem is the using incorrect metrics. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its entire life thinking it is stupid!

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#44

Post by anonytrary »

manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

> Btw, Gates, Page, Brin - all were not in a conventional school.

This is Anecdata^3, you probably shouldn't make rash decisions about your children based on 3 successful technical entrepreneurs.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#45

Post by tomjen3 »

volume wrote: post #39
manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

"The capacity to just build things without fear of being judged is invaluable" For me, I had to unlearn self judgement. This has helped so much over the last few years.

How did you do that? It seems to be a big stumbling block to many.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#46

Post by matwood »

esotericn wrote: post #8

Not sure I agree with this. The real world is very much about optimizing for and beating tests. It might be producing a specific CV or preparing for an interview whiteboard session to land a job. It might be socializing and networking in a specific way in order to land funding. The real world does not commonly reward just being really good at arbitrary things. It's almost always focused on meeting a need that someone…

Agreed. Life is a series of tests. The big difference between life and school, is that it is usually much harder in life to anticipate what is going to be tested. That is where the real skill lies.

When a startup prioritizes feature A over feature B, they are making a decision on what is going to be tested by customers. The startup then optimizes for passing the anticipated test.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#47

Post by volume »

fhennig wrote: post #24

This is a very interesting thing to think about, I thought about it a bunch of times already, and have a couple of thoughts about it too. First of all, once you're 55, it's easy to say stuff like that, because you won't be tested anymore. And I think there is a good chunk of survivorship bias: "Hey, I made it without worrying about tests, so you can, too!" Although that is probably not true for a big chunk of the pop…

> The problem is exactly how deeply it is ingrained in everything

You can you use "test" as a proxy for the impression you want to make on your boss and peers. Maybe even friends and family.

It's up to you to redefine that test (or create a complementary one) based on your own goals and your own timeline.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#49

Post by watwut »

manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

> but as long as he is in school, we have to take care that his interest doesn’t go south. [...] During school holidays, he actually starts to do school exercises for fun; those are the very same exercises he would fight against doing for hours on a regular school day. Go figure.

That does not sound like exercises themselves would be bad or that he would cease to be interested in learning overall.

It more sounds like after many hours at school, he wants to do different things that day. But when school is not present, he seeks similar activities and his willingness to learn is not deteriorated. That kind of sounds healthy and not wrong at all. In school, kids spend a lot of time learning or doing focused activities, a kid wanted to just play after that should not be sign of something grave.

The only thing that is wrong or unusual is the hours long fight against homework. I dont think that is normal for majority of kids. Only some parents I know report that much daily fights, most have fight here and there once in a while only.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#50

Post by jpm_sd »

> At this point I've told the founders something you'd think would be completely obvious: that they should make a good company by making a good product.

Sure, ok. How do you make a good product? That definitely is not "completely obvious"

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