Quotation: “I have a theory that the most successful people in life aren’t the busiest people or the most relaxed people. They are the ones who have the greatest ability to commit to something nobody else forces them to do.”
Interesting article, but the title is slightly misleading. What he seems to be complaining are people who mistake picking up a superficial overview of a topic for actually learning a subject, but I rather doubt they’d learn any more in school than by themselves.
Learning is what you make of it; getting a decent education is hard work, whether you’re sitting in a lecture hall with other students, or digging through books alone in your free time.
I partially agree with this. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to learn. I still haven’t really learned how to finish. I think these two features would have been dramatically enhanced had I not gone to school. I think a potential problem with self-educated learners (I know two adults who were unschooled) is that they get much better at fulfilling their own needs and tend to suffer when it comes to long-term projects that have value for others.
The unschooled adults I know are both brilliant and creative, and ascribe those traits to their unconventional upbringing. But both of them work as freelance handymen. They like helping others, and would help other people more if they did something else, but short-term projects are all they can manage. They are polymaths that read textbooks and research papers, and one has even developed a machine learning technique that I’ve urged him to publish. However, when they get bored, they stop. The chance that writing up his results and releasing them would further research is not enough to get him past that obstacle of boredom.
I have long thought that school, as currently practiced, is an abomination. I have yet to come up with a solution that I’m convinced solves its fundamental problems. For a while, I thought that unschooling was the solution, but these two acquaintances changed my mind. What is your opinion, on the right way to teach and learn?
As an interesting anecdote, I was schooled in a completely traditional fashion, and yet I never really learned to finish either. I did learn to learn, but I did it through a combination of schooling and self-teaching. But all the self-teaching was in addition to a completely standard course of American schooling, up through a Bachelor’s degree in computer science.
That’s pretty much where I am; traditional school, up through college and grad school. I think my poor habits would have been intensified, however, if I had been unschooled.
“Why Self-Educated Learners Often Come Up Short” http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2010/02/24/self-education-failings/
Quotation: “I have a theory that the most successful people in life aren’t the busiest people or the most relaxed people. They are the ones who have the greatest ability to commit to something nobody else forces them to do.”
Interesting article, but the title is slightly misleading. What he seems to be complaining are people who mistake picking up a superficial overview of a topic for actually learning a subject, but I rather doubt they’d learn any more in school than by themselves.
Learning is what you make of it; getting a decent education is hard work, whether you’re sitting in a lecture hall with other students, or digging through books alone in your free time.
I partially agree with this. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to learn. I still haven’t really learned how to finish. I think these two features would have been dramatically enhanced had I not gone to school. I think a potential problem with self-educated learners (I know two adults who were unschooled) is that they get much better at fulfilling their own needs and tend to suffer when it comes to long-term projects that have value for others.
The unschooled adults I know are both brilliant and creative, and ascribe those traits to their unconventional upbringing. But both of them work as freelance handymen. They like helping others, and would help other people more if they did something else, but short-term projects are all they can manage. They are polymaths that read textbooks and research papers, and one has even developed a machine learning technique that I’ve urged him to publish. However, when they get bored, they stop. The chance that writing up his results and releasing them would further research is not enough to get him past that obstacle of boredom.
I have long thought that school, as currently practiced, is an abomination. I have yet to come up with a solution that I’m convinced solves its fundamental problems. For a while, I thought that unschooling was the solution, but these two acquaintances changed my mind. What is your opinion, on the right way to teach and learn?
As an interesting anecdote, I was schooled in a completely traditional fashion, and yet I never really learned to finish either. I did learn to learn, but I did it through a combination of schooling and self-teaching. But all the self-teaching was in addition to a completely standard course of American schooling, up through a Bachelor’s degree in computer science.
That’s pretty much where I am; traditional school, up through college and grad school. I think my poor habits would have been intensified, however, if I had been unschooled.