[SEQ RERUN] Two More Things to Unlearn from School

Yes. And ignoring the limited time the universities usually have to teach physics. Physics students can't fully go through 400 years of thinking in 5 years course.

Critical Thinking: Why is it so hard to teach (pdf)

People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skills. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge). Thus, if you remind a student to “look at an issue from multiple perspectives” often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives. You can teach students maxims about how they ought to think, but without background knowledge and practice, they probably will not be able to implement the advice they memorize.

I think it's probably a good idea to remember that 'teaching material efficiently' and 'teaching people how to think and discover' are different things and potentially separable. Is there a way we could teach skills in an efficient manner and then separately teach the process of discovering and thinking? Perhaps. In fact schools already attempt this sometimes; just not very effectively. Certain kinds of labs are designed to try to do something like this. Perhaps there are better methods for teaching discovery and uncertainty skills. One obvious improvement would be to emphasize that most of reality looks much more like the discovery process than the efficient learning process.

But I think enforcing a "everyone must figure things out on their own" system would disproportionately reward Less Wrong-ish people in the same way that the current system rewards obedient people. It still doesn't necessarily give everyone what they need.

Indeed.

I'm reminded of what Yvain wrote in Generalizing From One Example:

I only really discovered this in my last job as a school teacher. There's a lot of data on teaching methods that students enjoy and learn from. I had some of these methods...inflicted...on me during my school days, and I had no intention of abusing my own students in the same way. And when I tried the sorts of really creative stuff I would have loved as a student...it fell completely flat. What ended up working? Something pretty close to the teaching methods I'd hated as a kid. Oh. Well. Now I know why people use them so much. And here I'd gone through life thinking my teachers were just inexplicably bad at what they did, never figuring out that I was just the odd outlier who couldn't be reached by this sort of stuff.

And when I asked for details on what exactly worked and didn't work, he elaborated:

Keeping in mind that I taught English as a second language to older elementary school children:

Ordinary teaching methods: constant repetition of unconnected topics followed by endless vapid games. For example, a game of bingo with vocabulary words in each square. Attempts to trick children into thinking something was interesting; for example, calling vocabulary "word baseball" or something like that and dressing up in a baseball cap while teaching it.

Things I predicted would work better: attempts to make material genuinely interesting, have each lesson build on the previous, and create links between different concepts. For example, a lesson on the days of the week including a mini-presentation on the Norse gods after whom they were named, references to previous lessons when we had learned "sun" and "moon" for Sunday and Monday. Attempt to teach how to apply general principles instead of doing everything ad hoc.

You can claw out some space in Middle School. I think elementary school years are pretty booked with teaching them to read, write, and manage small everyday arithmetic and geometry.