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I was disappointed with that section as well. Thought it could have been written clearer to differentiate the two.

学 - study

字 - character

So the author actually meant boring teaching of 'characters' with the section on 字 but I don't think it came across well.

In my point of view, as a native Traditional Chinese user (I'm from Taiwan)

THIS ARTICLE IS SO WRONG!

学 is actually the simplified version of the character 學. And the character 子 in both of these characters doesn't really have much connections

The character 子 (literally means children) in 學 stands for "student", but in 字 it is just a rebus (phonetic loan) character.