The Master said, “To learn and at due times to repeat what one has learnt, is that not after all a pleasure?”
I think it is. Unfortunately, most kids would probably answer Confucius’s question with something like “It’s a fucking pain in the ass, man, that’s what it is. I got up at 6:30 every morning for 18 years, I barely went out on weekends, I sat through literally hundreds of hours of tests, I came this close to killing like six people, all so I could reasonably claim to some asshole when I turned 22 that I’d be an ‘asset’ to his company. Fuck learning, grab me a beer, and for God’s sake change the channel.”
Obviously, there’s something wrong with school.
I’ve compiled a list of ten commonly held beliefs about the “system,” in order of increasing importance. I’ve tried to point out why they’re largely off-base. Hopefully it’ll shed some light on the whole situation.
10. Foreign language classes work
I read Le Petit Prince, a classic French children’s book, twice in my life: once in Kindergarten and again in 11th grade. I understood it a lot better the first time around.
I had to learn French before English as a kid growing up in bilingual Montreal. When I moved to London in the 3rd grade my French education - eight years of immersion - was annihilated by three years of formal language classes in a very good British school. When I came to the States the situation only got worse, as I eventually worked my way through to the AP level in high school through the standard track.
What went wrong? Simply put, it’s basically impossible to teach kids to do more than order a sandwich and find their way to the train station in a “foreign language class.” Ten years and I could barely read the same children’s book I loved as a six year-old.
If you want to learn the language, go. Hop on a plane and spend some time at an American-friendly university for a couple of weeks to study the basics, and then throw yourself completely into the culture. If you’re really committed to real proficiency or even fluency, it’s the only way.
9. Wikipedia shouldn’t be used as a source.
The unfortunate message when teachers insist you can’t cite Wikipedia is that somehow it can’t be trusted. But it’s not some hackneyed collection of Geocities pages - it’s the intellectual’s wet dream, an essentially boundless stream of ideas linked together by meaningful contextual relationships that tempts you to “follow the footnotes,” which happens to be the modus operandi of the truly curious. So, Educators, don’t stifle that because you can’t figure out how to conform a complicated website’s bibliography entry to MLA style guidelines.
8. You can teach kids to write by assigning papers.
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The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens. - Paul Graham, “The Age of the Essay”
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Graham’s point is that real writing has almost nothing to do with the writing you’re taught in high school and college. Writers figure this out on their own, of course, which is why you have Fishing magazines and newspapers and Finance books. But I think that if schools finally extricated themselves from this anachronistic mess of a “Language Arts” curriculum we have now, a lot more kids would grow up writing about things they find interesting, and would probably be a lot better at it.
7. The smartest kids are born that way.
The smartest people I knew in high school might have the best hardware - brains that can do more calculations per second or process more in parallel - but I’d be foolish if I left it at that. They also watch less TV, read a lot, and are generally more interested in ideas than your average person. They have better software.
So don’t sweat the fact you’re in a dumber class than Joe 4.0 and get programming.
6. You should experiment with a wide variety of classes in college.
The unfortunate shortcoming of this romanticized shotgun approach, a.k.a. the “liberal arts education,” is that in college today it means you’ll fall behind all the other kids who go headlong into a major, or rather, that you’ll get caught in the “intro trap.”
The intro trap is the ugly world of big lecture halls and stupid classmates. It’s your 101s, the poorly taught but strictly graded classes (that whole “weeder” mentality) you have to literally escape to get to the stuff you’re interested in. The problem is that for each field you experiment with - sociology, math, computer science, economics - you’re stuck with at least one more intro, one more battlefield. I’d rather take the fast track and dabble on my own. That’s why we have libraries.
5. You can’t teach x in high school.
I know you can’t just throw the Wealth of Nations at a bunch of preteens and expect them to infer Keynesian dynamics or the Stolper-Samuelson theory of international trade, but you really shouldn’t force them to de-learn things they thought mattered in high school just because you didn’t think they could handle the real stuff.
Chew on this: do the best schools have higher expectations for their students because the kids are smarter, or are the kids smarter because their school has higher expectations?
4. The professor doesn’t want to talk to you.
I go to a really big school (25,000), and I’ve been in some really big classes (550). Yet when I visit my professor for a chat or a question, it’s almost always empty. Where the hell is everybody?
It’s not obvious, but talking to your professors, who are almost guaranteed to be the smartest people in a ten-mile radius, is usually a win-win. He gets some attention, for once, and you get to stand out from the crowd. What’s more, you usually learn something!
Regularly visiting professors and grad students (believe it or not) has been one of the most valuable things I’ve done at college.
3. You should attend every class.
Some asshole at every school tries to arithmetically derive the value of every class, something like: “tuition’s $28,000, there’s about 15 hours of class a week, about thirty weeks of class - so each hour of class that you sleep through or blow off costs 65 bucks!” What this guy fails to realize is that by his logic, every shit I take on campus property is worth like $10. But that’s sort of beside the point.
Yes, it’s a good idea to go to your classes, for the simple reason that it almost guarantees you a B if you pay attention. But sometimes class can be the worst way to learn. Simply downloading the PowerPoint presentation that you probably would have dozed through anyway and studying it - textbook, homework, and Internet by your side - usually works better. Lectures, compared to reading the book, have a very low information density - you learn less per minute.
Smaller classes, seminars and discussions, can be a lot of fun. But if your classmates don’t read and your TA’s a loser, they can also be a waste of time. The point is, there’s no sense in categorically asserting that every class is valuable; sometimes a little sleep is a lot better for you.
2. Where you go to college is really important.
Most of the time I spent with the college admissions process wasn’t with my essays, or interviews, or campus visits. It wasn’t even with the applications themselves. It was the hours on end I spent talking about the damned thing. With kids, it was “who would get in where,” with parents, “why I’m applying here,” with teachers, “what does it all mean?”
To save everybody a lot of time: as long as you don’t go somewhere really shitty or really small, you won’t know the difference. Worst-case scenario you’ll end up in easy classes with pretty girls. Otherwise it’ll be all GPAs, internships, and grad schools anyway, and you’ll see, in full living color, that the admissions process is as random as you thought it was: there are dumb kids and prodigies no matter where you go, and everyone else is a couple standard deviations away from each other.
1. You need a good teacher to learn.
The best teachers don’t usually teach you a lot of stuff. All they do is get you interested enough to actively seek things out. As Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson put it, they ignite some “inexplicable inner imperative” to explore.
The beauty is, you don’t have to wait around for that graying guy in a sweater-vest to spark your curiosity. You can do it on your own.
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Comments.
You have some gems here, in this post and in this blog. I predict you will go far some day.
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