"What college degrees teach you mostly is how to think." "We miss the actual point which was learning to memorize." "Playing chess teaches you how to plan and think."
Well no. These were never mentioned as the goal. If the goal is to learn how to study, how to memorize, how to learn, then present it a so, focus on it.
The goal of memorizing the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English, definitely wasn't to learn how to memorize. Maybe that was a secondary or tertiary goal. It definitely would never be mentioned as a goal in itself.
It seems like now that we had to invest our time in close to useless things, we try to find reasons why it wasn't so useless. School is extremely inefficient. I studied way, but WAY more things I'll never use, or want to use in my life again than the opposite. Education nowadays is like using a shotgun to kill an insect. One thing that's good in software engineering, as opposed to other engineering fields is that it's maybe more focused and applied. But in Mechanical, I studied so much stuff, and now I use less than 5% of it. And the argument that I hear from my colleagues "Oh but you learned how to do complicated math, how to study hard, and understand difficult concepts" just doesn't stick. It's been shown that this kind of training helps you at that task, and little else.
From a 2016 review by Simons et al:
“We find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.”
See https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/13/brain-training-d...