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I read these rationalizations a lot. "What college degrees teach you mostly is how to think." "We miss the actual point which was learning to memorize." "Playi

I read these rationalizations a lot. "What college degrees teach you mostly is how to think." "We miss the actual point which was learning to memorize." "Playing chess teaches you how to plan and think." Well no. These were never mentioned as the goal. If the goal is to learn how to study, how to memorize, how to learn, then present it a so, focus on it. The goal of memorizing the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English, definitely wasn't to learn how to memorize. Maybe that was a secondary or tertiary goal. It definitely would never be mentioned as a goal in itself. It seems like now that we had to invest our time in close to useless things, we try to find reasons why it wasn't so useless. School is extremely inefficient. I studied way, but WAY more things I'll never use, or want to use in my life again than the opposite. Education nowadays is like using a shotgun to kill an insect. One thing that's good in software engineering, as opposed to other engineering fields is that it's maybe more focused and applied. But in Mechanical, I studied so much stuff, and now I use less than 5% of it. And the argument that I hear from my colleagues "Oh but you learned how to do complicated math, how to study hard, and understand difficult concepts" just doesn't stick. It's been shown that this kind of training helps you at that task, and little else. From a 2016 review by Simons et al: “We find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.” See https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/13/brain-training-doesnt-work/?ck_subscriber_id=389192016 https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/13/brain-training-d...

mlyle 4y ago
> These were never mentioned as the goal. I teach, among other things, robotics classes. I'm rather explicit that students will learn things about kinematics and mechanical construction, programming, etc. But that these are also the easy parts. The class is really about organization, project management, dispute resolution, and time management. It's about being systematic and making small changes and figuring out where to pitch in to improve the team's progress. And yah, there's a lot of time spent studying and memorizing rules in a rulebook. Because it helps our performance in our season... and because learning and juggling lots of requirements is stuff students will likely have to do later. Most of these students will never use inverse kinematics again. It's the "hook" that interests them right now and gets them to practice the other things. They definitely will not use the FIRST rulebook again. But I feel like the students are learning a lot of the things that helped me solve real world engineering problems and complete large projects successfully. > From a 2016 review by Simons et al: Why do you link a review about the effects of brain-training on adults? It's very well documented that practice in memorization improves performance at memorization tasks (both similar and unrelated) in children and young adults. This is some of the earliest rigorous ed-psych material we have that is also some of the most durable and well-reproduced.. e.g. this paper from 1932. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195 It's a bit silly of an argument here. Do you understand just how much humans develop ability to e.g. memorize musical passages and texts by memorization practice? I don't think it should be a primary thing we "train" in youth, but it's probably not great to neglect it completely, either. Here, memorizing poetry is all about building an efficient encoding for its structure. Learning the poetry's structure is a primary aim. Getting good at memorizing small passages of text to be able to recite them is a secondary goal (and a useful one).

mlyle 4y ago

> These were never mentioned as the goal. I teach, among other things, robotics classes. I'm rather explicit that students will learn things about kinematics and mechanical construction, programming, etc. But that these are also the easy parts. The class is really about organization, project management, dispute resolution, and time management. It's about being systematic and making small changes and figuring out where to pitch in to improve the team's progress. And yah, there's a lot of time spent studying and memorizing rules in a rulebook. Because it helps our performance in our season... and because learning and juggling lots of requirements is stuff students will likely have to do later. Most of these students will never use inverse kinematics again. It's the "hook" that interests them right now and gets them to practice the other things. They definitely will not use the FIRST rulebook again. But I feel like the students are learning a lot of the things that helped me solve real world engineering problems and complete large projects successfully. > From a 2016 review by Simons et al: Why do you link a review about the effects of brain-training on adults? It's very well documented that practice in memorization improves performance at memorization tasks (both similar and unrelated) in children and young adults. This is some of the earliest rigorous ed-psych material we have that is also some of the most durable and well-reproduced.. e.g. this paper from 1932. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195 It's a bit silly of an argument here. Do you understand just how much humans develop ability to e.g. memorize musical passages and texts by memorization practice? I don't think it should be a primary thing we "train" in youth, but it's probably not great to neglect it completely, either. Here, memorizing poetry is all about building an efficient encoding for its structure. Learning the poetry's structure is a primary aim. Getting good at memorizing small passages of text to be able to recite them is a secondary goal (and a useful one).