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For the people who you categorise as “thinking they don’t need it but they do”, do they really? It’s not like the majority of the folks around you remember an a

For the people who you categorise as “thinking they don’t need it but they do”, do they really? It’s not like the majority of the folks around you remember an aorta of anything they learned in HS. The only things they remember are probably the things that happened outside of it. Not saying it’s justified that they skip HS but I feel like there’s more thought needed.

dcolkitt 6y ago
I agree that most of higher education is wasteful signaling. But in my (admittedly limited) experience, the typical American high school dropout lacks functional literacy, numeracy and basic factual knowledge. I don’t think trigonometry or foreign language is an essential skill for 99% of people. But explaining simple ideas in writing, or being able to compare the costs of a yearly vs monthly billing plan, or knowing how birth control works are pretty important life skills.
selftest 6y ago
I don’t know that that’s true for most people; often the topics being taught aren’t as important as the skills you’re being taught/exposed to. Many people, especially Americans, never attend college. High school is the only chance before adulthood to socialize with your peers and learn what it means to interact with people of various upbringings. Anecdotally, my sibling graduated with a class of nine from a private Christian school and they are very far behind from a social and educational standpoint when compared to me, who graduated from a normal public high school with a few hundred of my peers. She also never read any of the books I was made to read in high school... I could not fathom the blank spot that has created for my sibling. Maybe I was fortunate to go to school before Common Core, or lucky I had more good teachers than bad but 20 years out from HS I might not remember everything I learned there, but the stuff I do remember helped mold how I think about things.
lelanthran 6y ago
> It’s not like the majority of the folks around you remember an aorta of anything they learned in HS The ones who did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aorta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aorta) biology might remember it :-)
nosianu 6y ago
What I concluded, especially I took a few neuroscience courses, after was that the computer/database/memory model is not good to explain school and learning. . My take: You don't learn to remember what you learn. You learn to build roads, pretty much literally inside your brain (it constantly rewires). It's more like unpaved paths before road building: First there is wilderness, then there is a lot of traffic, and increasingly that traffic concentrates on more and more clear paths. The learning of "stuff" is creating paths. The things - ideas, knowledge, facts - that you learn are like the carts travelling the paths. They may be gone - but the paths remain. So even after every single thing is forgotten - every single traveler and cart is no longer there - what remains is the paths. The wiring inside your brain changes in the learning process. You may not remember much of what traveled through your brain, what created the paths, but your brain nevertheless remains changed. Even if you forget every single thing, the way you think and react will have changed forever. . Using the metric "what I remember from my courses" is the wrong metric. Instead, it should be "how did my way of thinking change". I took a lot (really a lot) of (mostly university level) courses long after university, in fields unrelated to my career and previous study. That's when I noticed far more clearly than ever before, despite very good success (I was even made TA a few times), the concrete things I was able to recall even just a year later was really small. Then I noticed it's the same with my core field really. The concrete things we know is actually rather small. I forgot sooooo much. Only things I use regularly are available in a way that I could pass an exam (school or university). Still, I changed quite a bit, but it's all "meta". I now know the path I have to take instead of being lost. Even if I don't understand the concrete items e.g. in a medical paper (e.g. names of some genes or proteins), instead of feeling lost I have a "feeling" what it is about, and I can easily look it up and understand very quickly because I have a framework ready to receive what I read. Our actual "memory" is pretty small, it's all about the paths. Literally, in the brain.

dcolkitt 6y ago

I agree that most of higher education is wasteful signaling. But in my (admittedly limited) experience, the typical American high school dropout lacks functional literacy, numeracy and basic factual knowledge. I don’t think trigonometry or foreign language is an essential skill for 99% of people. But explaining simple ideas in writing, or being able to compare the costs of a yearly vs monthly billing plan, or knowing how birth control works are pretty important life skills.

selftest 6y ago

I don’t know that that’s true for most people; often the topics being taught aren’t as important as the skills you’re being taught/exposed to. Many people, especially Americans, never attend college. High school is the only chance before adulthood to socialize with your peers and learn what it means to interact with people of various upbringings. Anecdotally, my sibling graduated with a class of nine from a private Christian school and they are very far behind from a social and educational standpoint when compared to me, who graduated from a normal public high school with a few hundred of my peers. She also never read any of the books I was made to read in high school... I could not fathom the blank spot that has created for my sibling. Maybe I was fortunate to go to school before Common Core, or lucky I had more good teachers than bad but 20 years out from HS I might not remember everything I learned there, but the stuff I do remember helped mold how I think about things.

lelanthran 6y ago

> It’s not like the majority of the folks around you remember an aorta of anything they learned in HS The ones who did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aorta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aorta) biology might remember it :-)

nosianu 6y ago

What I concluded, especially I took a few neuroscience courses, after was that the computer/database/memory model is not good to explain school and learning. . My take: You don't learn to remember what you learn. You learn to build roads, pretty much literally inside your brain (it constantly rewires). It's more like unpaved paths before road building: First there is wilderness, then there is a lot of traffic, and increasingly that traffic concentrates on more and more clear paths. The learning of "stuff" is creating paths. The things - ideas, knowledge, facts - that you learn are like the carts travelling the paths. They may be gone - but the paths remain. So even after every single thing is forgotten - every single traveler and cart is no longer there - what remains is the paths. The wiring inside your brain changes in the learning process. You may not remember much of what traveled through your brain, what created the paths, but your brain nevertheless remains changed. Even if you forget every single thing, the way you think and react will have changed forever. . Using the metric "what I remember from my courses" is the wrong metric. Instead, it should be "how did my way of thinking change". I took a lot (really a lot) of (mostly university level) courses long after university, in fields unrelated to my career and previous study. That's when I noticed far more clearly than ever before, despite very good success (I was even made TA a few times), the concrete things I was able to recall even just a year later was really small. Then I noticed it's the same with my core field really. The concrete things we know is actually rather small. I forgot sooooo much. Only things I use regularly are available in a way that I could pass an exam (school or university). Still, I changed quite a bit, but it's all "meta". I now know the path I have to take instead of being lost. Even if I don't understand the concrete items e.g. in a medical paper (e.g. names of some genes or proteins), instead of feeling lost I have a "feeling" what it is about, and I can easily look it up and understand very quickly because I have a framework ready to receive what I read. Our actual "memory" is pretty small, it's all about the paths. Literally, in the brain.