Great post, basically all of this fits with my inuitions/experiences from teaching high school biology for the last 5 years. I’ll share a few scattered thoughts
The distinction of “just in time” vs. “just in case” learning seems relevant here. Discontinuous learning is all “just in time” and like you say this creates a totally different mode of learning and teaches very different attitudes/skills vs. continuous, progressive, just in case learning.
There are two really valuable lessons that you will only get from self-directed discontinuous learning – you learn how to identify your weaknesses/blind spots and then fill them – which (as you say) is easy because you then have this natural motivation to find that missing piece of your personal knowledge puzzle. You also learn an intuition for identifying what is not essential to the larger picture, which in our age of information overload is also an essential skill.
I’ve written about the lack of curriculum diversity in science before – it’s asinine that continue to insist that we need non-conformists who think outside the box and bring new perspectives yet we still teach science (and everything) in a one-size-fits-all, lowest-common-denominator paradigm
"Education can be reformulated for scientific discovery if we conceive of each student as a unique experiment in the recombination of knowledge and opportunity. From this perspective, the lack of diversity in scientific education is a significant limitation on our ability to innovate - it is as if we are running the same experiment over and over again and hoping to get different results (the definition of insanity). I wrote about this in “Exploring the Landscape of Scientific Minds”; modern science education is highly homogenous - the vast majority of students are funneled through educational systems in which the same subjects (biology, chemistry, physics) are taught in the same sequences (either biology first or physics first) and students take the same assessments (AP, IB, SAT, etc.) with the same goal of getting into a top university - and we would do well to create educational systems that allow for students to develop more idiosyncratic sets of knowledge and skills. One thing that has always struck me is our insistence on teaching the natural sciences before psychology and the social sciences - might flipping the sequence lead to some unique experiments in the landscape of scientific minds? Why do we even teach science in classes in the first place? Why even teach scientific content (e.g. facts about biology or psychology) anymore? Why don’t we just teach students experimental design, data science, a little history of science, a little philosophy of science, and then tell them to go learn about the scientific disciplines that most interest them? (sorry rant over)"
There are many reasons why we can’t reform for curriculum for more open-ended, discontinuous learning is that we are painfully risk averse when it comes to education (except as you say, there isn’t really a risk). We are for some reason scared of the thought that a kid might have not taken history classes or never taken chemistry/physics by the time they graduate high school, which is stupid because it ignores the fact that (1) you forget most of what you learn anyways and re-learn what you actually care about or need to know, (2) if you realize that you are weak in a subject then you will be motivated to learn it on your own and will do it better/more efficiently because you are motivated.
The problem with discontinuous learning is that you actually might develop some gaps in your knowledge – these gaps will eventually be filled or will be inconsequential in the real world, but they might hurt your SAT score and then you don’t get into a top college and then your life is ruined forever (/s).
Great post, basically all of this fits with my inuitions/experiences from teaching high school biology for the last 5 years. I’ll share a few scattered thoughts
The distinction of “just in time” vs. “just in case” learning seems relevant here. Discontinuous learning is all “just in time” and like you say this creates a totally different mode of learning and teaches very different attitudes/skills vs. continuous, progressive, just in case learning.
There are two really valuable lessons that you will only get from self-directed discontinuous learning – you learn how to identify your weaknesses/blind spots and then fill them – which (as you say) is easy because you then have this natural motivation to find that missing piece of your personal knowledge puzzle. You also learn an intuition for identifying what is not essential to the larger picture, which in our age of information overload is also an essential skill.
I’ve written about the lack of curriculum diversity in science before – it’s asinine that continue to insist that we need non-conformists who think outside the box and bring new perspectives yet we still teach science (and everything) in a one-size-fits-all, lowest-common-denominator paradigm
"Education can be reformulated for scientific discovery if we conceive of each student as a unique experiment in the recombination of knowledge and opportunity. From this perspective, the lack of diversity in scientific education is a significant limitation on our ability to innovate - it is as if we are running the same experiment over and over again and hoping to get different results (the definition of insanity). I wrote about this in “Exploring the Landscape of Scientific Minds”; modern science education is highly homogenous - the vast majority of students are funneled through educational systems in which the same subjects (biology, chemistry, physics) are taught in the same sequences (either biology first or physics first) and students take the same assessments (AP, IB, SAT, etc.) with the same goal of getting into a top university - and we would do well to create educational systems that allow for students to develop more idiosyncratic sets of knowledge and skills. One thing that has always struck me is our insistence on teaching the natural sciences before psychology and the social sciences - might flipping the sequence lead to some unique experiments in the landscape of scientific minds? Why do we even teach science in classes in the first place? Why even teach scientific content (e.g. facts about biology or psychology) anymore? Why don’t we just teach students experimental design, data science, a little history of science, a little philosophy of science, and then tell them to go learn about the scientific disciplines that most interest them? (sorry rant over)"
https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/blind-spots-in-science-and-culture
There are many reasons why we can’t reform for curriculum for more open-ended, discontinuous learning is that we are painfully risk averse when it comes to education (except as you say, there isn’t really a risk). We are for some reason scared of the thought that a kid might have not taken history classes or never taken chemistry/physics by the time they graduate high school, which is stupid because it ignores the fact that (1) you forget most of what you learn anyways and re-learn what you actually care about or need to know, (2) if you realize that you are weak in a subject then you will be motivated to learn it on your own and will do it better/more efficiently because you are motivated.
The problem with discontinuous learning is that you actually might develop some gaps in your knowledge – these gaps will eventually be filled or will be inconsequential in the real world, but they might hurt your SAT score and then you don’t get into a top college and then your life is ruined forever (/s).