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> "But when am I actually going to use this?" I was as guilty of this as anyone in my school days, and yet not a single teacher ever pointed out to me that I w

> "But when am I actually going to use this?" I was as guilty of this as anyone in my school days, and yet not a single teacher ever pointed out to me that I was at school to learn how to learn, so in a sense the subject matter was irrelevant.

abecedarius 7y ago
> to learn how to learn Is spaced repetition still almost never taught in school?
barry-cotter 7y ago
That means school was irrelevant. The evidence for transfer of learning is weak to the point of non-existence[1]. Even if transfer learning did exist that’s not the reason for school that any substantial portion of people believe in. If we look at the institutional history of school teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school. [1] “Besides just plain forgetting, people commonly fail to marshal what they know effectively in situations outside the classroom or in other classes in different disciplines. The bridge from school to beyond or from this subject to that other is a bridge too far.” “Salomon, Gavriel, and David Perkins. 1989. “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanism of a Neglected Phenomenon.” Educational Psychologist 24 (2): 113–42.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  For those who don't know, transfer learning is a term from ML where you train a model on one task, then train it more on other tasks...
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    The keyword you’re looking for is “transfer of learning”, especially “far transfer.”
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Sorry, meant transfer of learning, edited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning > Today, transfer of learning is usually described as the process and the effective extent to which past experiences (also referred to as the transfer source) affect learning and performance in a new situation (the transfer target).[2] However, there remains controversy as to how transfer of learning should be conceptualized and explained, what its prevalence is, what its relation is to learning in general, and whether it exists at all.[3]
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  > The evidence for transfer learning is weak to the point of non-existence. Citation needed. But transfer learning is a term specific to the ML field anyway, so I'm not sure why you used it. > teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school I don't think most people believe this is the purpose of school, not even nationalists.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Sorry, meant transfer of learning. Re: schooling as a means of promoting nationalism > Education and Military Rivalry > Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By con- trast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic politi- cal institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commod- ity prices or rivalries in a certain country’s immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27759015/education_and_military_rivalry.pdf?sequence=1 https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27759015/educati...
    - friendlybus 7y ago
      That paper is a decent description of how autocratic or militaristic governments invest in education, the purpose of a school is a separate meaning though. The paper itself states that threats to democracy increase enrolment and not funding, showing that parents or kids find value in applying to school even when it is not invested in. The paper goes on to note that expansion into studying economic threats as a motive for investment into schooling could be explored. The paper is too narrow to be a 'better sell' than transfer of learning, as dubious as that is.
  - paganel 7y ago
    Nationalists most certainly believe that, for example every small change to our children’s history books that can be seen as not conforming to our glorious past (or what the nationalists see as our “glorious past”) is seen by our local nationalists (I live in a Eastern Europe) as potentially the end of the world as we know it. Europe can be interesting like that, good thing that we (almost) stopped killing each other after WW2 over stupid things like imaginary lines drawn on soil.
- a-saleh 7y ago
  I don't think we are talking about transfer. My mam had the concept of exercising zitsfleish, the ability to sit down and concentrate at a mentally taxing boring task for uncertain reward. This is a skill I use to this day, especially when debugging, and when I have a hard day, I remind myself that if I was able to solve 100 linear equations over christmass when I was 10, I should be able to find this bug!
  - growlist 7y ago
    > the ability to sit down and concentrate at a mentally taxing boring task for uncertain reward If anything I'd say school hindered me in this regard! I think I learnt dogged persistence through playing videogames.
    - a-saleh 7y ago
      How did it hinder? Peergroup? Teachers? I have to admit, that I did mention my mum on purpose, for first two years she literally sat by my side to help me concentrate. Videogames either reqiured too good reaction time for me, or were too entertaining to need dogged persistence on my part :)
WilliamEdward 7y ago
Not only that, but you actually do use the things you learn if you paid attention well enough. History taught me how to analyse sources, accounting taught me how to write up a budget, english taught me how to write better, math taught me how to create graphs. These skills are timeless and some of them I use daily.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  This ought to be so self-evident here that having to point it out is unnecessary. I can remember much of where and what I learned in K-12, and who helped me to learn it (and how much they helped). It may (or not) be trendy, but it would be damned thankless of me to take that help for granted. Learning anything is a discipline. Self-discipline isn't something we're born with, and great teachers model it for us. If we don't learn it, the prognosis for us is dim. Once we acquire it, to the extent we're able, we can accomplish whatever we 'set our minds to'. Coding, for an example. Compassion, for another.
whatshisface 7y ago
A lot of people graduate highschool with severely damaged ideas of what it means to "learn" (cramming for tests, teasing out hints from the exact wording of multiple choice questions, highlighting keyword-y sentences in textbooks based on the expectation that test makers will be lazy.) So school may not even be teaching that.
- shantly 7y ago
  Being good at quickly figuring out the intended correct answer of multiple choice questions has two actual uses in adult life: personality & behavioral screening tests for jobs in the lower tier of the economic pyramid, and corporate/government mandated "training".
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    Of course, school is literally training people to hold these types of low level roles.
technofiend 7y ago
>I was at school to learn how to learn I transferred between schools mid-semester and discovered despite being weeks ahead of class at my old school I was weeks behind at the new one. I asked my teacher for help and she said "If you're so smart, you'll figure it out, and if you don't then you don't deserve to be here." This is of course the exact opposite of what gifted students need to learn. Lots of smart kids go into high school or college used to powering through everything via sheer intellect and equating being smart with instantly grasping any new concept. They're set up for a terrible fall the first time they're confronted with something they can't solve without help because their self identity is so wrapped up in "I'm smart and I can do anything!". Learning to learn, learning to be persistent and that challenges are not failures are just as important as the material.
teekert 7y ago
In my school (I was 12-19, would that be high school in the US?) we had specific classes on how to learn. They taught things like planning home work, chopping op large assignments. I hated it and constantly wondered why I was going through this. I am now 37 and my "high stress, high productivity at the last moment" attitude has never ever failed me and I embrace it now, it feels empowering. Whereas being forced to make a plan and doing only small bits still makes me procrastinate like my 13 year old self. I consider myself reasonably successful in life. I sometimes wonder why I put my 7 y/o in school at all, I wonder how far he would comes with his own natural curiosity. Luckily he likes school (although he recently re-did a year because he really was getting depressed about the the sheer amount of things he had to do and was failing at.)
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > I was 12-19, would that be high school in the US? High school is usually around ages 14-18.
dkersten 7y ago
Except school never thought me how to learn. School learning was always an uphill battle for me and using schools ways of learning was a hindrance to me in uni and later life. I had to figure out for myself the best ways for me to learn, but unfortunately didn’t really have a good grasp on it until much later (after uni). Hell, I was a somewhat troubled teen with problems and when I was about 14, I outright refused to go to school for a year and my poor mother couldn’t do much to make me go :/ BUT in that time, I taught myself to program, first in Visual Basic, then in python and finally I settled on C++. Sure, my knowledge was quite limited compared to what it is now after years of practical experience and a computer science degree, but that year of self study largely shaped my approach to life, exposed me to a lot of things just because I was interested, gave me drive and ambition and set me up for a career in software development. I’m not saying school was completely useless to me, but it was a rather inefficient way of learning the things I do find useful. In school, I hated most subjects like history, geography etc but nowadays I’ll happily Wikipedia binge for days on end learning about the finer points of other civilizations past or present (I’ve even started reading books on Sumerian tablets), chemistry, biology, physics, maths.. I’ve recently been binge watching YouTube videos on quantum mechanics... Then there were things I really enjoyed while in school: English essays for example were something I enjoyed writing, but I got little encouragement or help in doing so and my passion for writing fizzled out...
- satori99 7y ago
  I had a similar experience, though I still value skills I was forced to learn. Even things like cooking skills, that held little interest for me at the time. I often found that my interests were there, but misaligned. I may have been intensely interested in some aspect of history -- but not the anything on the current curriculum. If, by chance my interests aligned with a class topic, I excelled without much effort. My other gripe was the lack of integration between topics -- You didn't learn much about the history of science or math in science or math classes. Nor did you learn much interesting stuff about mathematical and engineering history in History classes. Art was the exception to this and I really enjoyed both the historical and practical aspects of Art classes for this reason. My school days are well in the past and I understand it's a little different for high-schooler's these days. At least I hope that's true.

abecedarius 7y ago

> to learn how to learn Is spaced repetition still almost never taught in school?

barry-cotter 7y ago

That means school was irrelevant. The evidence for transfer of learning is weak to the point of non-existence[1]. Even if transfer learning did exist that’s not the reason for school that any substantial portion of people believe in. If we look at the institutional history of school teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school. [1] “Besides just plain forgetting, people commonly fail to marshal what they know effectively in situations outside the classroom or in other classes in different disciplines. The bridge from school to beyond or from this subject to that other is a bridge too far.” “Salomon, Gavriel, and David Perkins. 1989. “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanism of a Neglected Phenomenon.” Educational Psychologist 24 (2): 113–42.

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
For those who don't know, transfer learning is a term from ML where you train a model on one task, then train it more on other tasks...
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  The keyword you’re looking for is “transfer of learning”, especially “far transfer.”
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Sorry, meant transfer of learning, edited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning > Today, transfer of learning is usually described as the process and the effective extent to which past experiences (also referred to as the transfer source) affect learning and performance in a new situation (the transfer target).[2] However, there remains controversy as to how transfer of learning should be conceptualized and explained, what its prevalence is, what its relation is to learning in general, and whether it exists at all.[3]
WilliamEdward 7y ago
> The evidence for transfer learning is weak to the point of non-existence. Citation needed. But transfer learning is a term specific to the ML field anyway, so I'm not sure why you used it. > teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school I don't think most people believe this is the purpose of school, not even nationalists.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Sorry, meant transfer of learning. Re: schooling as a means of promoting nationalism > Education and Military Rivalry > Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By con- trast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic politi- cal institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commod- ity prices or rivalries in a certain country’s immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27759015/education_and_military_rivalry.pdf?sequence=1 https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27759015/educati...
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    That paper is a decent description of how autocratic or militaristic governments invest in education, the purpose of a school is a separate meaning though. The paper itself states that threats to democracy increase enrolment and not funding, showing that parents or kids find value in applying to school even when it is not invested in. The paper goes on to note that expansion into studying economic threats as a motive for investment into schooling could be explored. The paper is too narrow to be a 'better sell' than transfer of learning, as dubious as that is.
- paganel 7y ago
  Nationalists most certainly believe that, for example every small change to our children’s history books that can be seen as not conforming to our glorious past (or what the nationalists see as our “glorious past”) is seen by our local nationalists (I live in a Eastern Europe) as potentially the end of the world as we know it. Europe can be interesting like that, good thing that we (almost) stopped killing each other after WW2 over stupid things like imaginary lines drawn on soil.
a-saleh 7y ago
I don't think we are talking about transfer. My mam had the concept of exercising zitsfleish, the ability to sit down and concentrate at a mentally taxing boring task for uncertain reward. This is a skill I use to this day, especially when debugging, and when I have a hard day, I remind myself that if I was able to solve 100 linear equations over christmass when I was 10, I should be able to find this bug!
- growlist 7y ago
  > the ability to sit down and concentrate at a mentally taxing boring task for uncertain reward If anything I'd say school hindered me in this regard! I think I learnt dogged persistence through playing videogames.
  - a-saleh 7y ago
    How did it hinder? Peergroup? Teachers? I have to admit, that I did mention my mum on purpose, for first two years she literally sat by my side to help me concentrate. Videogames either reqiured too good reaction time for me, or were too entertaining to need dogged persistence on my part :)

WilliamEdward 7y ago

Not only that, but you actually do use the things you learn if you paid attention well enough. History taught me how to analyse sources, accounting taught me how to write up a budget, english taught me how to write better, math taught me how to create graphs. These skills are timeless and some of them I use daily.

8bitsrule 7y ago
This ought to be so self-evident here that having to point it out is unnecessary. I can remember much of where and what I learned in K-12, and who helped me to learn it (and how much they helped). It may (or not) be trendy, but it would be damned thankless of me to take that help for granted. Learning anything is a discipline. Self-discipline isn't something we're born with, and great teachers model it for us. If we don't learn it, the prognosis for us is dim. Once we acquire it, to the extent we're able, we can accomplish whatever we 'set our minds to'. Coding, for an example. Compassion, for another.

whatshisface 7y ago

A lot of people graduate highschool with severely damaged ideas of what it means to "learn" (cramming for tests, teasing out hints from the exact wording of multiple choice questions, highlighting keyword-y sentences in textbooks based on the expectation that test makers will be lazy.) So school may not even be teaching that.

shantly 7y ago
Being good at quickly figuring out the intended correct answer of multiple choice questions has two actual uses in adult life: personality & behavioral screening tests for jobs in the lower tier of the economic pyramid, and corporate/government mandated "training".
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Of course, school is literally training people to hold these types of low level roles.

technofiend 7y ago

>I was at school to learn how to learn I transferred between schools mid-semester and discovered despite being weeks ahead of class at my old school I was weeks behind at the new one. I asked my teacher for help and she said "If you're so smart, you'll figure it out, and if you don't then you don't deserve to be here." This is of course the exact opposite of what gifted students need to learn. Lots of smart kids go into high school or college used to powering through everything via sheer intellect and equating being smart with instantly grasping any new concept. They're set up for a terrible fall the first time they're confronted with something they can't solve without help because their self identity is so wrapped up in "I'm smart and I can do anything!". Learning to learn, learning to be persistent and that challenges are not failures are just as important as the material.

teekert 7y ago

In my school (I was 12-19, would that be high school in the US?) we had specific classes on how to learn. They taught things like planning home work, chopping op large assignments. I hated it and constantly wondered why I was going through this. I am now 37 and my "high stress, high productivity at the last moment" attitude has never ever failed me and I embrace it now, it feels empowering. Whereas being forced to make a plan and doing only small bits still makes me procrastinate like my 13 year old self. I consider myself reasonably successful in life. I sometimes wonder why I put my 7 y/o in school at all, I wonder how far he would comes with his own natural curiosity. Luckily he likes school (although he recently re-did a year because he really was getting depressed about the the sheer amount of things he had to do and was failing at.)

saagarjha 7y ago
> I was 12-19, would that be high school in the US? High school is usually around ages 14-18.

dkersten 7y ago

Except school never thought me how to learn. School learning was always an uphill battle for me and using schools ways of learning was a hindrance to me in uni and later life. I had to figure out for myself the best ways for me to learn, but unfortunately didn’t really have a good grasp on it until much later (after uni). Hell, I was a somewhat troubled teen with problems and when I was about 14, I outright refused to go to school for a year and my poor mother couldn’t do much to make me go :/ BUT in that time, I taught myself to program, first in Visual Basic, then in python and finally I settled on C++. Sure, my knowledge was quite limited compared to what it is now after years of practical experience and a computer science degree, but that year of self study largely shaped my approach to life, exposed me to a lot of things just because I was interested, gave me drive and ambition and set me up for a career in software development. I’m not saying school was completely useless to me, but it was a rather inefficient way of learning the things I do find useful. In school, I hated most subjects like history, geography etc but nowadays I’ll happily Wikipedia binge for days on end learning about the finer points of other civilizations past or present (I’ve even started reading books on Sumerian tablets), chemistry, biology, physics, maths.. I’ve recently been binge watching YouTube videos on quantum mechanics... Then there were things I really enjoyed while in school: English essays for example were something I enjoyed writing, but I got little encouragement or help in doing so and my passion for writing fizzled out...

satori99 7y ago
I had a similar experience, though I still value skills I was forced to learn. Even things like cooking skills, that held little interest for me at the time. I often found that my interests were there, but misaligned. I may have been intensely interested in some aspect of history -- but not the anything on the current curriculum. If, by chance my interests aligned with a class topic, I excelled without much effort. My other gripe was the lack of integration between topics -- You didn't learn much about the history of science or math in science or math classes. Nor did you learn much interesting stuff about mathematical and engineering history in History classes. Art was the exception to this and I really enjoyed both the historical and practical aspects of Art classes for this reason. My school days are well in the past and I understand it's a little different for high-schooler's these days. At least I hope that's true.