3 ms·

If you're going to repeat this cliche I think you need to explain how colleges are teaching people to "learn how to learn," how that differs from the way they w

If you're going to repeat this cliche I think you need to explain how colleges are teaching people to "learn how to learn," how that differs from the way they would teach them "something," and why you think the idea of one without the other is coherent. Since I went to school too and I observed teachers at all levels laboriously explaining something, testing students carefully on their specific knowledge of something, and awarding them diplomas and degrees in something, I am skeptical of the assertion that they were actually doing something else.

jballanc 15y ago
To take a common CS example: sorting. You can teach someone how to use a library sort function. That's teaching a trade. You can teach someone how to write a quick sort. That's still teaching a trade. Alternatively, you can teach someone how to analyze the big-O runtime and space requirements of a variety of sort functions. You can teach them how to recognize best-case and pathological-case inputs and what that means for the runtime. You can teach them the difference between a conservative and non-conservative sort. The student that learns how to write a sort function will know how to write a sort function. The student that learns how, when, and why to do detailed algorithm analysis will be able to write all kinds of algorithms, even ones that don't yet exist. That's the difference between "learning" and "learning how to learn".
- mquander 15y ago
  I think your example is mostly the difference between learning a lot and learning just a tiny bit. It's also the difference between being curious and being a dimwit. Only a dimwit would learn a hundred library calls without ever finding anything out besides how to invoke a hundred functions. If a curious student spent an equal amount of man-hours learning about sorting algorithms as another curious guy learning about the design of the XYZ standard library, I bet the guy who learned a lot about the library would have learned many abstract and generally applicable things, too. I get the sense that you are trying to draw a line between "things that are directly useful" and "things that are not really useful, but only provocative and interesting" but I think it's mostly a fake line. Having a deep understanding of sorting is both useful and interesting. Having a deep understanding of the different ways that libraries choose to expose functionality on collections is also useful and interesting. Almost everything to do with computers that I've found in my life is both useful and interesting if you think about it hard enough.
  - jballanc 15y ago
    I don't think it's a fake line at all. It's the same as: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll never be hungry." Or, if you prefer: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." It's the difference between tools and knowledge. If you teach knowledge, then a student can learn as much knowledge as you can cram into their brains in 4 years time. If you teach tools, then a student will be able to continue learning the rest of their life.
    - mquander 15y ago
      I feel like both tools and knowledge coincide more often than not, most of all in programming; so everyone should just teach both tools and knowledge simultaneously and there is no dichotomy to worry about.

jballanc 15y ago

To take a common CS example: sorting. You can teach someone how to use a library sort function. That's teaching a trade. You can teach someone how to write a quick sort. That's still teaching a trade. Alternatively, you can teach someone how to analyze the big-O runtime and space requirements of a variety of sort functions. You can teach them how to recognize best-case and pathological-case inputs and what that means for the runtime. You can teach them the difference between a conservative and non-conservative sort. The student that learns how to write a sort function will know how to write a sort function. The student that learns how, when, and why to do detailed algorithm analysis will be able to write all kinds of algorithms, even ones that don't yet exist. That's the difference between "learning" and "learning how to learn".

mquander 15y ago
I think your example is mostly the difference between learning a lot and learning just a tiny bit. It's also the difference between being curious and being a dimwit. Only a dimwit would learn a hundred library calls without ever finding anything out besides how to invoke a hundred functions. If a curious student spent an equal amount of man-hours learning about sorting algorithms as another curious guy learning about the design of the XYZ standard library, I bet the guy who learned a lot about the library would have learned many abstract and generally applicable things, too. I get the sense that you are trying to draw a line between "things that are directly useful" and "things that are not really useful, but only provocative and interesting" but I think it's mostly a fake line. Having a deep understanding of sorting is both useful and interesting. Having a deep understanding of the different ways that libraries choose to expose functionality on collections is also useful and interesting. Almost everything to do with computers that I've found in my life is both useful and interesting if you think about it hard enough.
- jballanc 15y ago
  I don't think it's a fake line at all. It's the same as: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll never be hungry." Or, if you prefer: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." It's the difference between tools and knowledge. If you teach knowledge, then a student can learn as much knowledge as you can cram into their brains in 4 years time. If you teach tools, then a student will be able to continue learning the rest of their life.
  - mquander 15y ago
    I feel like both tools and knowledge coincide more often than not, most of all in programming; so everyone should just teach both tools and knowledge simultaneously and there is no dichotomy to worry about.