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They are selecting for people who are book smart, because most professionals engage in a system where memorization is a key component of the field. Engineering,
by jorblumesea 8y ago
They are selecting for people who are book smart, because most professionals engage in a system where memorization is a key component of the field. Engineering, law and other professions work similarly, to some extent. It's not necessarily wrong, I want my doctor to have a thorough knowledge of their subject area and be able to have the mental capacity in the right places.
But surely, we can be selecting for people who are better rounded as opposed to human robots. You actually see the same thing in engineering interviews. Regurgitating leetcode answers etc but ask them a question that's not exactly what they studied for and it all falls apart.
As you said:
> being selected for their memorization skills, not for critical thinking
- loceng 8y agoThe argument is that memorization is the leading metric to learning. If critical thinking - which is what counters indoctrination - is the leading metric, then things are learned much more deeply than merely remembering information in contextual silos, devoid of interconnectivity that critical thinking allows and builds for. A physician's "subject area" is "all" areas, and they too will refer to Google or other resources to confirm to themselves - similarly with medical advertising rampant in the US, it's often the patients who put ideas into the doctors' minds. Do they need 12 years of schooling to "know" everything - which will likely be outdated knowledge by the time they learn it? Or should we be training people to become experts at navigating systems of learning and specifics protocols to follow, so they are efficient and fluid? Specialization is valuable for many reasons, though we don't seem to leverage or engage with that properly, yet.