I dislike this post for exhibiting really subpar skepticism of some claims that make school look bad. Examples:
I recall reading, though I can't remember where, that physicists in some country were more likely to become extreme religious fanatics. This confused me, until the author suggested that physics students are presented with a received truth that is actually correct, from which they learn the habit of trusting authority.
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So what could you do? Teach students the history of physics, how each idea was replaced in turn by a new correct one? "Here's the old idea, here's the new idea, here's the experiment - the new idea wins!" Repeat this lesson ten times and what is the habit of thought learned? "New ideas always win; every new idea in physics turns out to be correct."
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.
Today's post, Two More Things to Unlearn from School, was originally published on 12 July 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order, so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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