1. Personalization
1.1. Ownership of your worldview
1.1. Ownership of your worldview
4. Prioritizing construction
The system is structured such that it is not necessary or intuitive to take ownership of your learning. What does taking ownership mean? I’m using it to mean bringing the self back into learning. The prevailing ethos of education is that there is a brain who learns, and a human who lives, and the two are disconnected. But fundamentally, they should be intimately tied. Reconnecting the two means:
Beyond ownership of your models, the concept of reintroducing self into learning also points to the kinds of things that are useful to learn. The Greek conception of learning (paideia) focused on developing ideal members of the state, with intellectual, moral, and physical training. While I make no claims about the instantiation of this in the context of the Greeks, I think it’s broadly true that education that helps one live a better life is valuable, and that education today has become divorced from the concept of flourishing as a good human. This concept merits more depth, which I’ll explore in a later post.
It is quite liberating to realize you have control over what you learn. Two of my most influential classes at college emphasized the concept of a personal intellectual agenda. The thrust was basically: in readings and seminars, focus on the things you’re interested in, and don’t bother about the rest. The level of autonomy this gives prompted me to invest a lot more effort into figuring out what I wanted to learn, how and why I wanted to learn it, and be thorough in ensuring I understood the concepts (rather than nominally learning because someone told me to). The world is unbounded, and the process of learning in an unbounded way looks different to the constrained learning we often do in classes. I’ve noticed, at least for me, doing this (when the default is to just follow the existing learning narrative) can require a slight nudge – it’s easy to forget to do first principles thinking, because you have to remember to question what you’re actually trying to achieve rather than just accepting the default framing.
I recently spoke with someone who said that every day, they wrote down as much as they could remember about everything they learned that day as a way to consolidate and integrate the knowledge into their own existing frameworks. I was really impressed with both the level of dedication, and generally just the concept of this as a strategy. The more you own your learning, the more consolidation becomes relevant; this then feeds into more owned knowledge, and the cycle continues.
This is something I think is neglected and incredibly powerful as a tool for learning. The better your understanding of the landscape of a topic, the easier it is to slot in and remember new knowledge on that topic. A pretty compelling case of this is historical knowledge. It’s difficult to remember the details of a battle 200 years ago in isolation, and much easier to remember it if you know where it fits into the country’s history, the context of the larger war, what was happening economically at the time, etc. This has a couple of key implications.
The more angles you use to provide context on something, the better you understand it. I took a class on romantic literature at Sciences Po in France. We spent a fair amount of time learning about the economic and political cultures, the architecture of the period, etc. They didn’t seem immediately relevant, but I quickly realized that because of the complexity of society and culture, trying to deeply understand one subject without also coloring in the adjacent areas is quite difficult.
This is also an argument for a more structured interdisciplinary curriculum, which Sciences Po did surprisingly well. The American liberal arts system is touted as interdisciplinary, but in reality, it just means you take a bunch of random classes in different topics that you don’t really care about, and forget most of the content. I think much of the benefit of interdisciplinary classes comes from the classes building on each other, relating to each other, and approaching similar topics from different angles such that foundations and a larger structure is built. Perhaps this has been other people’s experience of college – I can only speak to what I’ve noticed from my own classes.
The importance of context goes beyond the content itself, and applies to the paradigms of a discipline or topic. I’ve found it very useful to think about which paradigm I’m being taught out of the landscape of possible paradigms; or the background, biases, and worldviews of authors of books I read. It’s surprising how much we’re taught at school without an analysis of how that particular approach fits into the landscape of different approaches, and why a particular learning narrative has been chosen. As one of my professors once said, a lot of the magic happens before you’re even looking (in the assumptions that are made and the paradigm that is promoted), and this is where you should be most critical.
There’s a lot here, which I think warrants a separate post. Broadly, I think of mental models as principles or heuristics that help you parse through the information you receive, notice patterns, and make decisions. These heuristics are everywhere, and once you start noticing and trying to concretize them, you realize how generalizable they are. A mental model formed based on patterns you see in one area of your life can often be really helpful in seemingly unrelated areas of your life. They’re heuristics, so aren’t perfect frameworks, but are incredibly useful in helping you structure your thinking.
There are many great resources on mental models (in particular, Farnam Street’s mental models page and this mental model master list). I’ve found that beyond collecting mental models and integrating them into my thinking process, the act of training myself to notice and make explicit generalizable models out of patterns in one domain has been incredibly valuable for my thinking.
One of the best ways to study for an exam is to practice doing exams, because outputting content is a very different process to inputting content. Similarly, outputting content in an exam is a very different process to using the content to create something. Disciplines such as computer science have exploited this, and prioritize project-based learning. This has the benefits of:
Almost all of the best classes I’ve taken have culminated in a project that requires me to use the knowledge I’ve learned in a process of creation, and gives me the autonomy to shape the project in directions that interest me. I think this should be prioritized a lot more across all disciplines.
1. Personalization
The system is structured such that it is not necessary or intuitive to take ownership of your learning. What does taking ownership mean? I’m using it to mean bringing the self back into learning. The prevailing ethos of education is that there is a brain who learns, and a human who lives, and the two are disconnected. But fundamentally, they should be intimately tied. Reconnecting the two means:
1.1. Ownership of your worldview
Bringing the self back into learning means updating your own worldview in light of what you learn such that it changes how you live, even minutely. In the first class of one of my seminars, my professor, refreshingly, instructed: “Think about how everything in this class applies to your own life, otherwise it won’t be relevant to you and you’ll forget it.” This is easy in, e.g. philosophy classes where the content is more or less focused on how to live life, but I think it also applies more broadly. I’ve found it surprising how frequently I can pause in the middle of learning something and realize that I haven’t thought about what my model of that topic or discipline is. If I haven’t owned some conception of the framework around what I’m learning such that I viscerally feel when I need to update something, I’m much less likely to remember it or feel that it’s important to remember. I’ve heard this framed in terms of owned knowledge versus borrowed knowledge, which I think works well as a handle. This is not to say that one has to generate one’s own model of everything learnt. Rather, it’s a qualitatively different style of learning to spend time thinking about why you’re learning something, what your own conception of it is, and what that conception says about you the person. Ownership of models of what you’re learning means a lot more content becomes important to your life. My current strategy to train myself to do this better is to frequently ask myself what my model of a certain topic is (which involves thinking through why I’m learning it, where it fits into a bigger picture, etc), and to be on the lookout for concepts that can be generalized to apply to other parts of my life.
1.2. Learning to improve your life
Beyond ownership of your models, the concept of reintroducing self into learning also points to the kinds of things that are useful to learn. The Greek conception of learning (paideia) focused on developing ideal members of the state, with intellectual, moral, and physical training. While I make no claims about the instantiation of this in the context of the Greeks, I think it’s broadly true that education that helps one live a better life is valuable, and that education today has become divorced from the concept of flourishing as a good human. This concept merits more depth, which I’ll explore in a later post.
1.3. Freedom to choose your own intellectual agenda
1.4. Consolidation of learning
2. Build the trunk first
2.1. Add more angles
This is also an argument for a more structured interdisciplinary curriculum, which Sciences Po did surprisingly well. The American liberal arts system is touted as interdisciplinary, but in reality, it just means you take a bunch of random classes in different topics that you don’t really care about, and forget most of the content. I think much of the benefit of interdisciplinary classes comes from the classes building on each other, relating to each other, and approaching similar topics from different angles such that foundations and a larger structure is built. Perhaps this has been other people’s experience of college – I can only speak to what I’ve noticed from my own classes.
2.2. Examine the assumptions
3. Mental Models and Critical Thinking Tools
There are many great resources on mental models (in particular, Farnam Street’s mental models page and this mental model master list). I’ve found that beyond collecting mental models and integrating them into my thinking process, the act of training myself to notice and make explicit generalizable models out of patterns in one domain has been incredibly valuable for my thinking.
4. Prioritizing Construction
- Training students to be able to do projects, which is far more important than just memorizing the content, and
- Providing a source of competence/grit signaling that is more accurate and useful than GPA.
Almost all of the best classes I’ve taken have culminated in a project that requires me to use the knowledge I’ve learned in a process of creation, and gives me the autonomy to shape the project in directions that interest me. I think this should be prioritized a lot more across all disciplines.
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