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This always surprises me every damn time. How can so many go to school for 12+ years and then forget almost everything they learned?
Like if you ask a highschooler something they might answer "I don't know, I had that class last year so I forgot"
I really wonder, what do people think was the purpose of going to school for twelve years when it is all wasted due to people refusing to remember? School is not about passing tests, it is about getting educated so that you got a firm base to stand on later in life.
How to you combat this bad habit plaguing most of the world? It is easy to say that those persons are just stupid and shouldn't had received the education in the first place but is that really a good solution?
And even in college and higher education steps are people more interesting in getting good grades than actually learning anything and most would not get passed if they retook the tests some year later if they did not get to prepare days before.
 
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Maybe because like 50% of what you learn is useless or boring ?
Oh and because people are obviously dumb compared to you.
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Yeah its because you don't really use it.
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unless you use it very often, you probably won't remember it, especially if you had no interest in it in the first place.
education is still important, though. it helps teens use their brains and challenges them to think differently. of course some of the things taught in school are "useless" and will never be applied to real life in regular situations, like calculus. But if they were to learn the same concepts even as high schoolers, such as arithmetic, they'd never get challenged. By introducing new stuff like physics and stuff, they can go a step further, building on the stuff they knew. And maybe this stuff might interest them and they can pursue further studies in college.
and even for people who major in something they like will encounter courses which they dont like.
also some people go to college because their parents made them do so.
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I think most people never learn to begin with. School systems are so wretched these days that they don't manage to teach anything. The testing is designed to allow as many people as possible to get an acceptable score, so they focus on heaps of non-learning methods of education which will allow the kids to tick the right boxes or go through some fixed process to achieve an answer. I blame socialised education.
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I find that it's usually a matter of how something is taught.
Awful/boring teaching habits = uninteresting subject = unmotivated students = easily forgettable.
On to your point about grades, here's what I think:
While students may "know" that learning in it of itself is important, at the end of the day, getting the grade is perceived to be the ultimate goal (at least in the US imo). You can also insert something about cultural values here.
Anyway, if the perception of learning/university, is predominantly, to pass an exam or graduate with a degree, students will naturally cut corners. Shit, I do it all the time.
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I'm probably one of those.
The system right now is so easy to cheat, at least for those who can pick up things quickly. I studied for all my tests 2 days or 1 day before the actual test in high school, and I basically got the highest grade in all of them. And still, I'd have to really try hard to remember most of the stuff I got really high grades in.
I know it's fundamentally wrong, but the way I see it, some of the stuff was fucking useless anyways. I've still got pretty good knowledge about the things I'm actually interested in, and that'll be enough for the college studies im going to take.
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Its because you think its boring, useless or whatever, i bet you can remember almost everything about that videogame you played when you were supposed to be doing your homework.
And school is about passing exams, its about numbers. Its a business.
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School teaches you how to learn, not what to learn. For the overwhelmingly vast majority of people, finding x isn't important, nor is knowing which king of France was beheaded during the Revolution. It's important to know how to solve problems given incomplete information (math), or recall details which actually are important given too much information (history), etc.
That, and in my humble experience most people are just fucking morons.
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^ Pretty much sums up my opinions as well. The point of school is to learn how to learn. Being able to learn things quickly and on your own is what's important. These days having the technical skills of your profession is a given. You need to have other skills and the ability to adapt (by learning quickly).
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This is a sort of means-end inversion. (something I learned last year!) Let's assume students go to school to "learn." However, their passing (and consequently finishing school) is determined by graded examinations. This means becomes an end for the students and they now strive towards good grades as opposed to learning the field they enjoy so they can apply it later.
Importance has shifted from learning to grades because measurement of goal accomplishment is based on grades instead of learning. Of course measuring learning is probably a little more difficult to do (this is probably why the education system is how it is with respect to this issue).
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In school you can also learn how to do critical/abstract thinking. This is particularly true in college. Being educated has more to do with your ability to think analytically and your ability to find information than the facts that your remember.
Also, having learned something once, if you need to learn it again, it comes back super fast.
But ya, forgetting stuff is annoying. I wish a had a photographic memory.
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because you, respectively your brain filters information and if you, respectively your brain decides these information are useless/unimportant/boring they are being deleted.
that's why autism is a disability and not a fortune
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On January 17 2009 00:47 Klockan3 wrote:
And even in college and higher education steps are people more interesting in getting good grades than actually learning anything and most would not get passed if they retook the tests some year later if they did not get to prepare days before.
It depends what you mean by "learning". What you're describing here is just someone's inability to memorise a large amount of information for a long time. But surely, if they could do the test given time to prepare, haven't they therefore "learnt" how to study something?
But if you mean something like maths, where some people just memorise techniques to solve particular exam problems and don't actually "understand" it. Then that's just them not learning properly in the first place, rather than forgetting what they've learnt.
In the end the important part of learning isn't simply what you know, but how you would go about knowing more things.
I think passby20 said it pretty well.
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There should be more focus on understanding the process, on how things connect whit each other, and less on data. Some random information is useless, and much easier to forget then data that is part of some logic.
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On January 17 2009 00:47 Klockan3 wrote:This always surprises me every damn time. How can so many go to school for 12+ years and then forget almost everything they learned? Like if you ask a highschooler something they might answer "I don't know, I had that class last year so I forgot" I really wonder, what do people think was the purpose of going to school for twelve years when it is all wasted due to people refusing to remember? School is not about passing tests, it is about getting educated so that you got a firm base to stand on later in life. How to you combat this bad habit plaguing most of the world? It is easy to say that those persons are just stupid and shouldn't had received the education in the first place but is that really a good solution? And even in college and higher education steps are people more interesting in getting good grades than actually learning anything and most would not get passed if they retook the tests some year later if they did not get to prepare days before.
So im guessing you are some kind of genius who remembers every little detail you have ever learned? ;p
But really, people will remember the things most important/interesting to them, its impossible to remember everything.
And you say school isnt about passing tests but rather getting educated. I wish this was true but the way schools grade based almost purely on test results I'd say it is about passing tests. Tests arn't always the best way to judge an understanding of the material ethier. At least its like this in highschool moreso than college because the classes don't really matter that much. In college obviously people are going to be more focused on learning their major.
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On January 17 2009 02:50 Pengu1n wrote:Show nested quote +On January 17 2009 00:47 Klockan3 wrote:This always surprises me every damn time. How can so many go to school for 12+ years and then forget almost everything they learned? Like if you ask a highschooler something they might answer "I don't know, I had that class last year so I forgot" I really wonder, what do people think was the purpose of going to school for twelve years when it is all wasted due to people refusing to remember? School is not about passing tests, it is about getting educated so that you got a firm base to stand on later in life. How to you combat this bad habit plaguing most of the world? It is easy to say that those persons are just stupid and shouldn't had received the education in the first place but is that really a good solution? And even in college and higher education steps are people more interesting in getting good grades than actually learning anything and most would not get passed if they retook the tests some year later if they did not get to prepare days before. So im guessing you are some kind of genius who remembers every little detail you have ever learned? ;p
Almost, stuff I heard on discovery 10 years ago helps me pass exams sometimes or things I learned in elementary which I haven't used since comes back when I need it, usually with the context i heard it in and who said it etc.
I believe that others could do the same thing, just that they are going about things in the wrong way. Edit: But of course the things that I never learnt is impossible to recall, like the kings of sweden or such, I would not have been able to answer such questions even if they asked right at the lesson about it since I do not care at all about it. That is what not caring about something is to me, then I just do not learn it at all in the first place but the things that I do learn sticks.
On January 17 2009 02:08 Ghardo wrote:
because you, respectively your brain filters information and if you, respectively your brain decides these information are useless/unimportant/boring they are being deleted.
Probably, but when people who really want to learn the subjects since they will need them later and they know that they will need it why do they forget? Do they just not want to learn it enough? Or is the want imaginary and they really is indifferent about it?
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
b/c they usually memorize into short term memory.
Even if they "forget", they'll pick it up 10x faster than the guy who hasnt covered it in the past, so all is not lost.
+ Show Spoiler +No, i definitely don't remember how to do circuit analysis anymore lol
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This topic revolves around psychology. I read this a while back that our brain only seems to want to remember things that interest us or involves wanting to learn more about the subject. For example(just for myself) if we used Starcraft and C&C: Red Alert. Even thou they are categorized in the same genre I only played C&C a few times and wouldn't have no interest in having a good conversation over it. Unlike if we spoke about SC I can probably name more then 80% of the units and mechanics. My brain has more interest in SC then C&C but thats meh.
So yea this topic involves alot of psychology which I don't have any expertise in.
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On January 17 2009 03:35 thedeadhaji wrote:
b/c they usually memorize into short term memory.
I really wonder how the memory works.
There are so few studies on long term memory and all of these memory tricks just helps the short term. I have a hypothesis that the short term memory is mutually exclusive to the long term memory, I have a quite bad short term memory but my long term memory is good.
Its like, if you learned something using your short term memory it is very hard to get it in your long term, the best way is to learn it long term from the start.
On January 17 2009 03:41 Kennelie wrote:
This topic revolves around psychology. I read this a while back that our brain only seems to want to remember things that interest us or involves wanting to learn more about the subject. For example(just for myself) if we used Starcraft and C&C: Red Alert. Even thou they are categorized in the same genre I only played C&C a few times and wouldn't have no interest in having a good conversation over it. Unlike if we spoke about SC I can probably name more then 80% of the units and mechanics. My brain has more interest in SC then C&C but thats meh.
So yea this topic involves alot of psychology which I don't have any expertise in.
But I remember a lot of shit which I was completely uninterested in.
Kinda like in elementary one of our teachers corrected us when we said "The moon circles around the earth" which he harshly refuted with "No, the moon and the earth circulates around their combined center of mass, I get tired of all these "The earth circulates around the sun" blabla", which I did not understand at all what it meant then but when I was in college and we were doing mechanics of astral bodies I recollected it and could therefore answer a question made by the professor nearly instantly.
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EPT
