And it doesn’t stop at high school. A Bachelor’s in a specific field is only partly about the facts and concepts, and the rest is about how to research and evaluate sources in that field. Does someone with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science know how to implement Shellsort right off the bat from memory? Not unless they did it in a whiteboard interview, and fuck those things. No, they know how to look it up and implement it in a specific language, and can probably figure out its big-O complexity.
Knowing what a good source looks like is a skill, and must be learned.
Agree, but there are still some fields that are taught in detail at university (instead of “here’s the basics, figure out the rest by yourself”) - like medicine for example.
Medicine is kind of a special case in that there’s pre-med for the undergraduate and then a post-graduate program that mixes classroom work and an apprenticeship program. You obviously have to learn a lot in both of those settings, but doctors look stuff up all the damn time in their clinics and they take plenty of continuing education courses throughout their careers.
Even then, a big part of medical school is learning how to learn. Doctors are (ideally) expected to be lifelong students: always learning as their field advances.
Took me a bit too long to figure out the following: school isn’t supposed to only teach you specific things; it’s supposed to teach you how to learn.
And it doesn’t stop at high school. A Bachelor’s in a specific field is only partly about the facts and concepts, and the rest is about how to research and evaluate sources in that field. Does someone with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science know how to implement Shellsort right off the bat from memory? Not unless they did it in a whiteboard interview, and fuck those things. No, they know how to look it up and implement it in a specific language, and can probably figure out its big-O complexity.
Knowing what a good source looks like is a skill, and must be learned.
Agree, but there are still some fields that are taught in detail at university (instead of “here’s the basics, figure out the rest by yourself”) - like medicine for example.
Medicine is kind of a special case in that there’s pre-med for the undergraduate and then a post-graduate program that mixes classroom work and an apprenticeship program. You obviously have to learn a lot in both of those settings, but doctors look stuff up all the damn time in their clinics and they take plenty of continuing education courses throughout their careers.
Even then, a big part of medical school is learning how to learn. Doctors are (ideally) expected to be lifelong students: always learning as their field advances.