Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

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It had been 20 years since my last calculus class when I returned to college

The greatest problem with our educational system is to neglect the fact that students begin to forget immediately after graduation. All these years in k-12 education gradually turns to dust until only reading, writing, and some basic agelbra are left, and some career related knowledge.

Trignometry? Biology? Chemistry? These are subjects that all adults once know in their high school years, now all forgotten.

Instead of documentaries assuming we know chemistry, or trignometery, or biology, they introduced "DNA" as if we never been in a biology class. They only skims the top of the scientific knowledge cake because they never assume everybody knows.

Imagine the complexity and increased believablity of fiction and non-fiction if they have to wrestle with an audience that know those things by heart, even if they only took a chemistry class that single semester?

Alas, we forgotten and our educational dollars disappeared in a puff of smoke.

You seem to think education should be like putting music on an iPod. As with all skills, what doesn't find use decays. I believe education should create well rounded people by exposing them to the the breadth of human achievements in the arts as well as sciences. I don't remember all the books we read in English class either, but I appreciate literature more in general having been there.

The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.

I believe education should create well rounded people by exposing them to the the breadth of human achievements in the arts as well as sciences. I don't remember all the books we read in English class either, but I appreciate literature more in general having been there.

I don't particularly care about English literature or any <subject x> for the sake of building a well rounded education. The more important thing is retaining what you learned and building on that.

The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.

To think memorization is bad is incredibly short sighted and stupid. Would you like to look up a book every time you do programming? No. You remember certain methods and certain part of the standard library so that you don't have to spend 10 minutes googling method x to accomplish result y.

Principles is nice and all, but what make you an efficient problem solver is because you have access to an inner world of factoids and knowledge.

Sure, memorization for the sake of memorization is useless. That's why you learn critical thinking skills that you love so much so that memorization will be useful.

I don't understand your tone. I never said memorization is "bad" or that I "love" critical thinking skills.

I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.

I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids".

Of course it does matter, because latency of lookup matters. He could spent it one hour googling things up or he can spend one minute remembering something and using it. That requires memorization.

The wisdom part to use the standard library instead of implementing something something from scratch is just extra efficiency.

Rarely, however, does one need to spend extra time memorizing things. Memorization happens naturally as you solve problems, and see and use the same things over and over.

So what? It's still more efficient to just memorize your multiplication tables.

Many see formal education as mostly learning facts and procedures. Of course we will forget these when we don't use them often. However, I think the goal of education should be deep learning of concepts. Although we'll forget the procedures and details, when we truly learned a concept, we will always have a good idea what the concept is about, what it means, how to apply it, and, most importantly, where to go to learn more about it.

Of course, deep learning is difficult to teach and assess on a large scale, so it is easier to test for knowledge of facts and procedural skills and teach children to perform well on these kind of tests.

I don't see this as a problem at all. I don't know if remembering the entire body of knowledge by heart is even possible for the average human being. I like to compare learning in University and schools similar to how memory works in computers. When you are taking a course it is similar to transferring data over a slow 28 kbps modem onto the computer, the process is slow and frustrating however as the course goes on and you understand the material better it starts to percolate up to faster caches. When you write a final exam the material is in the L1 cache, you can instantaneously rattle off answers to complex problems like it's no one's business, there's a question on Red-Black Tree deletion- no problem, question about quick select - too easy! 5 years go by and you've not touched the subject in any meaningful way so of-course if someone asks you to write a Red-Black Tree or implement Quick Select you probably will not be able to do it from the top of your head. There's a cache miss as the material is no longer in the L1 cache, you have to go down to perhaps the harddrive, which involves dusting off that copy of CLRS and reviewing what all the cases of a Red-Black tree insertion and deletion are and within a couple of hours you'll be able to start implementing it. Sure it's not the same as writing the answer in 15 minutes on the exam but it's significantly faster than learning the material for the first time which would the equivalent of getting data over a network. This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.

This property of brain to forget less use facts to make room for what you use more often has been acquired over a very long period of evolution. I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.

I don't see this as a problem at all. I don't know if remembering the entire body of knowledge by heart is even possible for the average human being

It's possible, if you practice.

I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.

You can't do this, but adults could take some time out of their days to practice what they learned. That way, they will keep retaining what they learned over decades, and the amount of practices should keep going down.

This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.

Those residual knowledge help make practicing and maintenance of our existing knowledge much easier. We could take advantage of it.

Anyway, if you want to retain everything you learned, you should take a look into spaced repetition which is a learning technique that help make knowledge maintenance an efficient process.

All that is left is our educational system to recognize that knowledge maintenance is important.

> 5 years go by and you've not touched the subject in any meaningful way so of-course if someone asks you to write a Red-Black Tree or implement Quick Select you probably will not be able to do it from the top of your head.

Well, don't let five years go by without touching the subject. Occasionally practice the things you once learned, integrate them into your larger body of knowledge, and you'll never forget how red-black trees and quickselect work --- even if you never implemented them from scratch.

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