rotting intelectual teeth

"The Lost Tools of Learning" was first presented by Miss Sayers at Oxford in 1947.
Warning the link goes to a long article. Worth the time in reading it though.

I just read this article, it is fascinating. I wonder if I would have found my early schooling less boring and frustrating had it taken this form rather than that of a bunch of pre-chewed texts which I was to barely moisten in my mouth and spit back at my instructors on tests written exactly to the content of the books. The ultimate training for Teflon learning. The information never sticks. How much time is wasted in elementary and middle school on things of no merit, or on waiting for the slowest children to learn to read, even unto high school. I once gave the same book report in second grade as I gave in seventh. It was still a more difficult book than many of my classmates had read. But 5 years later I was still bored by the process.

While I was inquisitive and stayed into books that others thought well over my head in school, apparently others just floated through at the top of their classes thinking not at all. Because when these floaters arrived at college they had no idea how to study, or learn, or how to get their intellectual teeth around any material that hadn't been pre-chewed. Who took their teeth? Surely they had them when they figured out walking and talking....but somewhere between the first big learning chores, and college their intellectual teeth had been allowed to rot out of their heads. The could produce near perfect scores on standardized tests, but couldn't take a book and pull the content out of a book and do anything with it. They could find the important bits, but they couldn't put them together. They couldn't make anything new. They thought college was hard.

warning whining in this paragraph skip it and miss nearly none of my pointCollege wasn't hard once I figured out my advisor had doomed me to failure as some sort of inspirational activity (she thought by giving me lower grades than she would have given others that I would work harder, unfortunately I am not grade driven). I was forced to give up my major of choice because I couldn't get decent grades in any of my major classes, despite spending 10x the amount of time on them as my electives. At first I spent the time out of pleasure and interest, then in befuddlement trying to figure out why work I thought was good was getting me barely passing grades. Eventually I caved, dropped my CS major and went to History. Maybe I should have gone and asked why kids who copied my homework and turned it in got A's while I got C's, but I was too frustrated by that point. I loved logic. I loved set theory. I loved discrete math. Calculus ate my lunch, probably due to a few critical misunderstandings that nobody could be bothered to help me clear up. That aside I loved college, because I like learning.

I didn't really learn much in college I couldn't have learned on my own. Having the instructors and classes to make me go through the material, and the suggestions of subjects I would have never wandered into on my own were fascinating. I learned things I wouldn't have learned. I would go back to college if I could take my dogs. I could be a student nearly forever if it paid. Once you know how to learn you can learn anything, letting your intellectual teeth rot out should be a capital crime though. Maybe that is why I can't stay out of some sort of schooling 18 months. Because I want the pressure of someone making finish my little tangential learning impulses. I took economics classes at the junior college for a while, simply because I wanted the pressure to finish the books I picked up that weren't in themselves interesting. Once I finished the intro level books full of vocabulary and base concepts I have studied all sorts of tangential material that at first blush before the classes I would have skipped for lack of fundamentals to really understand them. Sure I could have passed a reading comprehension test, but I wouldn't have gotten the point. Sort of like reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and thinking it is a book about riding cross country on a motorcycle (mind you my brother is the philosopher type I tend to prefer more concrete subjects).

I also wonder at our educational system's abilities to produce functional adults. I am lucky to have parents who are wise, intelligent, and interested in helping me learn things. Not everyone is so fortunate. I know this because of the number of people I have helped through the early stages of buying a house. How hard would it be to have worked that content into curriculum in high school?
Figuring out how much loan you can afford
The whole process of bidding, obtaining financing, closing.
How to calculate loan payments, estimating taxes, amortization rates.
How one goes about this, who pays what fees, what is negotiable.
The sorts of things you really need to get by in life. High school prepares people to be minimum wage slaves who rent. I took some required class in high school, I think in Illinois, we did our taxes (well fake taxes) but we filled out the 1040EZ and the Illinois short form. We talked about checking accounts, and other stuff I had been doing for years. Why not include info on housing there? How much can you afford to spend on rent? a mortgage? retirement planning? Time value of money if you invest from 20-25 and STOP you will still end up with more money than if you start at 40, and go for 20 years. If parents aren't passing this stuff on, and I know because everyone I share my knowledge with goes "Where did you learn this?" or "I wish my parents could tell me this stuff." or "Wait until I explain this to my Dad."