This initially began as a response to Brian's latest post on education: http://adeadhamster.blogspot.com/2009/10/information-is-not-knowledge.html

However, it overflowed so here it is:

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The post discusses incorrect learning, not lack of motivation, so we'll stick with the premise that people can be motivated. Given this, is your problem primarily that people aren't stopping to examine their learning more deeply? Certainly this would make their experience more worthwhile. However, I feel that the issue is even simpler than this. Perhaps I'm not qualified to comment (after all, those faulty red moppers are certifiably better than me =P), but it seems that its misconception about what needs to be learned in the first place. Here's an example: in complex, Dr Osborne would have test reviews, and during the reviews, the most common questions was "Are there gonna be proofs? What proofs might be on there?" and he would tell us, and most of the class would go home and memorize the damn proofs. So it's no surprise that when you ask a student to prove the thing a month later, they can't do it. People don't understand that they're supposed to be learning different approaches to proving certain kinds of results and, more generally and more usefully, how to think about different problems. You might think that massive proof based classes in college cure this. False. For the most part, what happens is a few students who like math and have grasped the concepts do the problems and explain the proofs to the others, who write the proofs down, are told what proofs are on the tests, and never take a math class again. The kids who continue to take math are those who have grasped the concepts anyway, so effectively the problem hasn't been cut down at all. In fact, the problem here in particular seems 10 times worse than at TJ. The problem is most visible in math, but it's actually present everywhere. The kind of thinking we need in doing math is in fact the kind of thinking that creates progress in all fields, and yet only in math and physics is there even an attempt being made to promote it.

All in all, I feel that while this is a huge problem, it's not all that hard to tackle. However, this post has gone on for a while, so I'll stop now and finish my HUM paper (whatever MIT might call these terrible classes, certain things don't change in my book =P).

~jnub