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September 16, 2003
Maturing Education
For me, higher education was more of an exercise in regurgitation than that of actual learning what I was being taught. Deadlines, research papers, exams, laboratory exercises and dealing with the paperwork involved in attending school was counter-productive to the actual learning process.
I learned the most when working as a student and working on individual/team class projects where we were given nearly carte blanche. I was free to develop my own ideas and see them to fruition without the constraints of fighting with a topic I had little to no interest in.
It was with the personal projects that I really got to use, understand and create with the rudimentary foundation that is only the first few classes of a discipline. Over the many years since I've been out of school and utilizing my education, bits and pieces of that foundation have crept back into my normal repetoire of skills--but really only those that I used in a free project. Because I was interested in the project during school, I actually learned the skills rather than memorized enough to spit back on an exam.
It's a shame that so much of education isn't focused on learning. I won't deny that there is value in the exposure gained by hearing, noting and then rewriting on a test, but that value is considerably diminshed when compared with actual retention learning.
Posted at September 16, 2003 01:11 PM | Life and Work
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