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Having been a student with good and bad teachers, I can see your point. However, many of the things that you are being taught (at least I hope this is still th

Having been a student with good and bad teachers, I can see your point. However, many of the things that you are being taught (at least I hope this is still the case) that don't appear to be needed for the "job" are actually important because they are needed for the understanding of the background for why and how the "job". The failure of teachers that we faced as students was that the reasons for learning something were often not explained and only became obvious when learning about other subjects in later years. Having the relevance of the knowledge explained to us would have made it easier for us to learn. One of my favourite examples was the subject of Karnaugh maps (or K-maps) which is used in logic circuit minimisation for small circuits. We learned all about and didn't use it again for the rest of my engineering undergraduate days. However, a number of years working with a colleague on trying to solve a particularly pernicious software problem, I asked him why he hadn't used the concept of "don't cares" in short-circuiting the logic mess that was required to solve the software dilemma we were facing. He had never heard of the concept as he had never been taught about K-maps in his undergraduate programming course. One he understood the concept and it didn't take him long, he was able to write 5 lines that solved the problem, instead of the hundred's that he had already had written (with many more to follow) to test for the problem throughout the program. I have been surprised at how often over the years, where theoretical knowledge or other knowledge has come to the rescue in finding a solution for specific real-world problems, even though it has (on the surface) no relevance to the job at hand. I have worked with some very smart people over the years (much smarter than me) who have been stuck for a solution because they didn't have that "irrelevant" piece of knowledge from their undergraduate days, but I did and so a problem was solved. The one piece of advice I will give you is to learn as widely as you can so that you basic knowledge base will be broad enough for you to keep adding to as the years go by.

cookiecaper 9y ago
Theoretical knowledge is absolutely extremely useful, but the way we teach it is pretty much a non-starter. We need to humanize our education systems. The concept that we all sit around in school for 20+ years and then go out and find something to do with all of that knowledge is based more on maintaining rigid financial/power structures than it is based on effective information discovery and utilization, and there's no reason that a useful piece of information recovered partially-intact from the caverns of memory here or there should continue to justify such a lumbering, monolithic system. There are no guarantees that the system will provide even what you've enjoyed; as you said, a peer with similar education had either not been taught or had not remembered the needed concept. Humans need it "on-demand". We learn and master a trade experimentally, most naturally in the context of an apprenticeship. We can't compartmentalize book learning and practical employment, putting years-long gaps between them, and expect the eviction algorithm in peoples' brains to have not pruned much of the relevant information. We need it cemented with immediate, meaningful, recurring experience, and we need systems that will make it easy for us to remember and reference as necessary. The existing educational apparatus is none of this. It is just a cash cow for the banks and universities, enslaving most of its "graduates" to decades of debt servicing. That, IMO, is the primary reason it continues to be enforced, because there is very little that is rational about it.
- rikkus 9y ago
  It's also childcare for working parents. I know it's not supposed to be but it's a side effect that's widely taken for granted. I believe you're correct about young people being turned into debt slaves. The rich and rich-aspirational in the UK are encouraging/implementing this here as quickly as they are able.
tasty_freeze 9y ago
Likewise, as an EE I studied differential equations, La Place transforms, z-transforms, s-transforms, the fourier transform, and the dft transform. I'm a digital logic designer and have never had to directly do any of that stuff, but understanding the duality of time domain and frequency domain has been invaluable to me over the years.
jamescostian 9y ago
I definitely agree that learning things that seem irrelevant to your job pipeline can be good, just like your K-maps example. But I also think there are plenty of seemingly irrelevant things that end up not helping you at all, ever. That's why I don't think teachers ought to be in charge of teaching those extra things like K-maps, but rather, students should be asked to study things on their own (both inside and outside their comfort zone), in hopes that students will "learn to learn" and be able to teach themselves. You're right, this method would not have given you K-maps in school, but it also would have wasted less of your time in school, and empowered you to learn about things on your own (such as don't cares in K-maps, or even just the general idea that you can assign whatever value you like to outputs you never expect to see).

cookiecaper 9y ago

Theoretical knowledge is absolutely extremely useful, but the way we teach it is pretty much a non-starter. We need to humanize our education systems. The concept that we all sit around in school for 20+ years and then go out and find something to do with all of that knowledge is based more on maintaining rigid financial/power structures than it is based on effective information discovery and utilization, and there's no reason that a useful piece of information recovered partially-intact from the caverns of memory here or there should continue to justify such a lumbering, monolithic system. There are no guarantees that the system will provide even what you've enjoyed; as you said, a peer with similar education had either not been taught or had not remembered the needed concept. Humans need it "on-demand". We learn and master a trade experimentally, most naturally in the context of an apprenticeship. We can't compartmentalize book learning and practical employment, putting years-long gaps between them, and expect the eviction algorithm in peoples' brains to have not pruned much of the relevant information. We need it cemented with immediate, meaningful, recurring experience, and we need systems that will make it easy for us to remember and reference as necessary. The existing educational apparatus is none of this. It is just a cash cow for the banks and universities, enslaving most of its "graduates" to decades of debt servicing. That, IMO, is the primary reason it continues to be enforced, because there is very little that is rational about it.

rikkus 9y ago
It's also childcare for working parents. I know it's not supposed to be but it's a side effect that's widely taken for granted. I believe you're correct about young people being turned into debt slaves. The rich and rich-aspirational in the UK are encouraging/implementing this here as quickly as they are able.

tasty_freeze 9y ago

Likewise, as an EE I studied differential equations, La Place transforms, z-transforms, s-transforms, the fourier transform, and the dft transform. I'm a digital logic designer and have never had to directly do any of that stuff, but understanding the duality of time domain and frequency domain has been invaluable to me over the years.

jamescostian 9y ago

I definitely agree that learning things that seem irrelevant to your job pipeline can be good, just like your K-maps example. But I also think there are plenty of seemingly irrelevant things that end up not helping you at all, ever. That's why I don't think teachers ought to be in charge of teaching those extra things like K-maps, but rather, students should be asked to study things on their own (both inside and outside their comfort zone), in hopes that students will "learn to learn" and be able to teach themselves. You're right, this method would not have given you K-maps in school, but it also would have wasted less of your time in school, and empowered you to learn about things on your own (such as don't cares in K-maps, or even just the general idea that you can assign whatever value you like to outputs you never expect to see).