[ExI] jarring change

[William Flynn Wallace]

For a long time the pro basketballer Jerry Lucas had a book on
memorization.  If I were 50 years younger I would have every class buy it.
Few people can come up with more than one or two memory tricks which can be
extremely useful and far faster than the typical student would use on his
own.  A good rote memory saves time even over a smartphone for names and
numbers.  Memorize them once and never have to look them up again.  No more
lost passwords.  Etc.  (this has nothing to do with how much rote memory
teachers are asking for)

I hate history because there were no theories presented to try to make
sense of the things we were supposed to memorize.  I can remember ideas
just fine:  names, dates, places, not so much.  Huge waste of time for
something one can always look up.  Also, why put all that stuff in your
head?  I am a master gardener but never tried to memorize the bugs.  So I
have a book.  Look at the bug, find it in the book.  Waste of brain space
to memorize all those critters.

College is for getting a rounded education featuring the basics of Western
Civilization.  No, that does not help a person get a job.  Trade school
does that.  Increasingly I think a person will take some online courses in
what they are interested in, say banking, and that will be the only
education they need.

Some years ago I read of medical schools wanting their students coming into
medical school not having had all the science courses they can cram in, but
social sciences and humanities.  They don't want their students just to be
science drones.  Interesting.

bill w



On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 7:35 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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
>   Sample my Kindle books via:
> http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/
>
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