My sense is that the education system struggles with the transition between learning-to-read and reading-to-learn.
Somewhat off-topic: high schools anywhere don’t seem to explicitly teach the only essential skill a college student must need: learning to learn:
How do I figure out what I need to know for a given class, how do I figure out what I do not know, and how do I go about learning it efficiently?
is not a question students learn to ask or answer. Everyone who completes a post-secondary education tends to come up with some sort of implicit heuristics that get them through, few do it consciously.
The International Baccalaureate explicitly acknowledges this as a key issue, and claims to teach these skills specifically.
I can speak from personal experience in saying that they utterly fail at this—the coursework alone might be slightly better, but the implementation is still much too reliant on teachers, and their behaviors has an effect several orders of magnitude greater than the standard material in how much the learning to learn is actually made part of the students versus just giving us a couple more passwords that seem to be about other passwords.
They also completely ignore the recursivity issue (learning to learn to learn to learn … ), which means students are left to deal with this problem on their own, lest they become stuck wasting enormous amounts of time attempting to perfectly optimize their learning methods and never accomplish any actual non-meta learning.
Mind, this is meant to be taken as a rant/anecdote. I might (though I wouldn’t say it’s highly likely) have just gotten the worst of it and the programme generally fares better, for all I know.
It’s even worse than that. I don’t think anyone knows how to teach people to learn. Obviously, individuals have done it, but human knowledge does not appear to contain a process that basically any ordinary teacher can follow to cause any ordinary student to learn how to learn.
That’s one of the top ten things I think we’d have after a good Singularity that we don’t have now. Maybe even top five.
Somewhat off-topic: high schools anywhere don’t seem to explicitly teach the only essential skill a college student must need: learning to learn:
is not a question students learn to ask or answer. Everyone who completes a post-secondary education tends to come up with some sort of implicit heuristics that get them through, few do it consciously.
The International Baccalaureate explicitly acknowledges this as a key issue, and claims to teach these skills specifically.
I can speak from personal experience in saying that they utterly fail at this—the coursework alone might be slightly better, but the implementation is still much too reliant on teachers, and their behaviors has an effect several orders of magnitude greater than the standard material in how much the learning to learn is actually made part of the students versus just giving us a couple more passwords that seem to be about other passwords.
They also completely ignore the recursivity issue (learning to learn to learn to learn … ), which means students are left to deal with this problem on their own, lest they become stuck wasting enormous amounts of time attempting to perfectly optimize their learning methods and never accomplish any actual non-meta learning.
Mind, this is meant to be taken as a rant/anecdote. I might (though I wouldn’t say it’s highly likely) have just gotten the worst of it and the programme generally fares better, for all I know.
Thanks for actually being a little specific on that. I’ve heard it a lot, but my thot is always “but what does that even mean”.
It’s even worse than that. I don’t think anyone knows how to teach people to learn. Obviously, individuals have done it, but human knowledge does not appear to contain a process that basically any ordinary teacher can follow to cause any ordinary student to learn how to learn.
That’s one of the top ten things I think we’d have after a good Singularity that we don’t have now. Maybe even top five.