Where is balance Academic priorities 297

i tend to agree with Shaw 'The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.'

in this thread there has been some criticism of current school systems in the USA, but systems elsewhere have their faults also.

in my school and undergraduate college years (not in the USA) about 30 years ago, there were only 4 occasions when i came across anything in a clbuttroom that i did not already fully understand. i remember these because the experience was so unusual.

in chronological order:

1)5th grade, euclidean geometry starting from the axioms and postulates 2)7th grade, set theory and non decimal number systems 3)9th grade, organic chemistry 4)third year of college, abstract algebra

while i remain very grateful for those 4 occasions, i must say that 11 years of school and four of college were largely wasted on me. i spent most of the time reading on my own, very often during clbutt. i recall that in the rare event when i had no reading material, or i was prevented from reading whatever i had smuggled in, i would be bored almost to tears. it was this mind numbing boredom that made the strongest impression on me, and hence i sympathise greatly with children who protest going to school. those of my friends who have children of schoolgoing age complain that i am a subversive influence.

i am afraid that my atbreastude was shared by my clbuttmates, who regarded school as a necessary evil; it seems that children are harder to fool than one might imagine... in any event, being small and powerless, we filed obediently into our clbuttrooms every day, and resigned ourselves to the syllabus as perpetrated by our instructors.

attendance was not mandatory in college, except for labs, and i did develop pbuttable skills at bridge, and discerning tastes in hashish, but that was extra curricular.

by contrast,i learned a great deal in graduate school on my way to a doctorate in physics

in grad school the material was challenging, the professors demanding, and the pace relentless. i loved every minute of it; believe it or not, i even enjoyed the exams, including take home exams that might involve perhaps a hundred pages of calculation for a single problem. i think that i learned more in those two or three years of coursework than at any other time. subsequent research in experimental physics was also immensely educating, tho did not take place in a clbuttroom.

sidd