[ExI] jarring change

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 7:57 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> if you read Bryan Caplan's book on education, I'd also wonder if
> it matters. One of his theses is that most education is simply
> forgotten or has little impact once the degree is achieved.
>
> This reminds me of how many people approach learning and education:
> memorizing trivia.   Dan
>
> There are many areas, psych not one of them, that do require extensive rote memory, though not of trivia - anatomy for one; many science classes.  But I am not a fan of rote memory, being poor at it.  Would have flunked anatomy big time.  But here's a couple of thoughts:  things learned tend not to be forgotten.  Oh if you give them their final from two years ago they probably will flunk it - some studies have shown that.  But that's not the point:  the point is that when they have to deal with the thing or process, it will come back to them when they re-read that material.  (Thus the theory of open book tests.)  Re-learning is far faster than learning.  A learned person cannot just pull out of his head everything he knows.  He takes a book off the shelf, reads a few pages, memories come back, and he can talk expertly about it, or do it if it's a process.  The original learning was not wasted at all.  To me, a lot of education is about learning how to learn.   And what you have to learn in the future might not be anywhere near the same as what you learned in school, but the process of learning it is.
>
> Do not get me wrong.  I am a strong critic of education at every level, and teaching trivia is a small part of that.  bill w

Foreign language classes often require rote memorization too. And most
US-Americans have had to fulfill a foreign language requirement for a
college degree. And most promptly forget almost all of that, though to
be fair proficiency is always low in that area even during lessons. (I
had a slight leg up with grandparents who spoke Norwegian and German,
but I never really became a proficient speaker of either despite years
of classes. I did enough to get through college. And, yeah, I can
understand a tiny amount of dialogue in film.:)

Caplan's point isn't that some memorized stuff might not be useful. No
doubt, it is, though note the example you used: anatomy. For most of
us, it's not useful in everyday life and what little is learned might
as well be trivia. But other areas, like history taught in school,
seem to be just trivia. What matters it if one knows or doesn't know
the names of Columbus's ships? It's memorizing the state capitols: you
remember it because it might be on the test. Maybe you can recall some
of it later in life if prompted (do you really think you can recall
all the bones in the hand or the foot if prompted? why would you even
need to?)

In many cases, too, the time spent memorizing these things doesn't
teach you how to learn better... How many pieces of trivia do you need
to learn too to learn to learn better? Most of it is about getting the
degree. What it really does, according to Caplan, is show one is both
smart (or at least cognitively capable) and willing to conform to
laborious tasks and rules. Both are important, in his view, because
education is used to decide who gets jobs. And employers want
intelligent conformists. His basic argument is education is an
extremely wasteful way to do this. Huge amounts of effort and time are
expended to figure out someone isn't a dolt AND will basically follow
orders.

As for relearning, a problem here is that works well if the stuff is
ever useful. I've been fortunate, for example, to get a math degree
and sometimes I stumble onto math stuff at work -- usually statistics,
though that wasn't my area of specialization -- and it's easy to get
up to speed or refresh my memory. But many areas that simply doesn't
happen and seems a waste. After all, time spend learning one thing
could be used learning something else or doing something else. At the
limit, you have people getting degrees simply to get better jobs where
aspects of the degree are just stuff chucked in because an accrediting
authority thought it was needed. The foreign language one seems a
great example, especially since a few classes in college are unlikely
to make someone useful in that language without lots of extra effort.
(And, in my personal example, I choose the language I already had some
proficiency in. Were I really serious about learning a useful foreign
language -- if the choice of language really matter as opposed to
merely fulfilling the degree requirement -- I'd have chosen Spanish or
Mandarin.)

Regards,

Dan
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http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/