= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
itaibn0 comments on How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (199)
My school was largely about memorizing things and barfing it back. No understanding or practical use required. To be fair, this is part of why places like the US or UK tend to be ahead from most places, because their education is more... life-like? Because mine, in the rougher parts of Europe was pretty much exactly what Feynman wrote about Brazil in Surely You Are Joking. PDF: http://buffman.net/ebooks/Richard_P_Feynman-Surely_Youre_Joking_Mr_Feynman_v5.pdf then Ctrl-F for "I discovered a very strange phenomenon". My schooling was very similar.
But even in the more pragmatic type of US / UK style schooling, it is still purely dry theoretical intellectual academic things. How many highly intelligent geeks there learned at school and by the school how to climb a rock, swim, or not get lost in a forest? Or something far, far more important: to present an idea before an auidence, like they do at Toastmasters?
Show me one school in the world that does something more or less Toastmasters'-like on a mandatory basis... this is one of the most important skills for the intellectuals. A scientist has to be able to give a presentation that convinces the fat cats to give a budget to the research project. Without money nothing moves forward.
That's why I said "supposed to do". The core argument behind schooling is that we can make a person much more capable by exposing them to things they would not otherwise be exposed to, and that it is valuable to give a broad background in many different topics. Fundamentally this is similar to what you're suggesting, and the differences you point out just indicate that school has a bad choice of curriculum and teaches it badly. The primary novelty in what you're suggesting is that you want "a lot of different type of experience" with a shallow view on each topic ("a different profession... every day"), whereas school typically spends a lot of time on a couple of different topics but with essentially the same type of experience. I do not intend to comment on whether I think this will work better.
For the record, I don't know what Toastmasters does, but the schools I've to had Drama class and occasionally required giving presentations.