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system
current1 education system is not designed to inspire curiosity, and it would keep being this way unless the definition quality of success and quality moves to a more holistic measures.
University should be a place for you to think, not to always be right. It should encourage a form of intellectual playfulness and agency for explore.
teaching
I do think that professor should use more primary sources, less secondary. Secondary sources are curated and compressed the amount of information being given.
Compression can lead to confirmation bias, but saturation of information also overloads the students.
shortification/tiktok-fication of information
The idea of learning is that it supposed to be mentally challenging, not fun and easy. In the process of shortification, we are losing the depth of information, as does any form of compression. Similar to how LLMs is being trained on today.
Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn’t have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that “10 minute full body” workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It’s not that the quickie doesn’t do anything, it’s just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
The process of learning should be enduring, but rewarding. It should be a process of internalizing the concept, and practice to thinking coherently, similar to how we write.
Constructionist critique2:
Too many tools and too much space: Large space should start small, and widen, rather than having everything readily available
Footnotes
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WEF on relevance of education system, written in April 13rd 2020 ↩