joshuago’s education Bookmarks

In the chaos of the liberal free-market, we tend to lack not so much freedom, as the chance to use it well. We lack guidance, self-understanding, self-control, direction. Being left alone to ruin our lives as we please is not a liberty worth revering.

The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?

A proposal for a better way to learn, as explained through the analogy of learning to draw. Don't learn by tracing: find (or invent) those pencil structures. Seeing the pencil lines makes the idea become your own: you can modify it, combine it with others, or just appreciate it at a deeper level. And that's the joy of learning.

As more documents are scanned and go online, many works of historical scholarship will be exposed as flimsy and haphazard. The existence of modern search technology should push us to improve historical research.

Key variable in education is quality of teacher, not quality of school. Teach For America has been tracking what makes some teachers great. Basic quality seems to be "relentlessness."

A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn't what we need.

How it happened and what can be done to reverse it. There are several causes, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.

By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

The most important thing is to have good examples on which to hang the abstract ideas. If the example takes too long to explain or is too much tied to a particular application, I might lose the interest or attention of too many readers. Thus I spend a great deal of time trying to find examples that are simultaneously easy to grasp and quite instructive.

Why educational performance is critical to a society's wealth and how the modern university is not appreciably improved over the template established in 1088. Proposes some simple changes that should greatly improve the effectiveness of undergraduate education.