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One might equally say that fabrication is about making sure the right atoms are in the right places. And equally, that would be a decent goal, but just as equally, we don't have the tools to do it.
You can absolutely teach people how to think, to at least some degree. The degree you can achieve this goal, in a general population sense, using the existing tools of the educational establishment, is so extremely limited that no value is gained from trying. The system evidently works for ideological indoctrination, and it conceivably could function to teach basic skills, were it reformed. There is no evidence supporting the idea that it can actually mass-produce "well-rounded individuals", or "teach people how to think" in any meaningful sense.
Right. I'm amenable to the argument that the system can't be reformed in its current state, or that brainwashing/indoctrination is in fact the point and thus we shouldn't even care about producing well-rounded individuals.
It just seems like whatever your proposal for improving education is, there should be some component that actually addresses how to assess and learn new information and gives students the tools to learn more efficiently and hope that at least some of them use them.
Even if this is literally just teaching the students to use tools like Spaced Repetition to enhance their study.
Not including this is a bit of an admission of defeat.
Yes, and? What's wrong with admitting defeat and moving on, anyway?
Nothing, but in this context it's politically unacceptable to just throw in the towel.
So we keep getting proposals to fix everything, and things continue to decline.
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