I think the (justified) doubt about research comes from personal experience. Everything I have ever learned in my life I have learned through deliberate mundane practice. I didn't go to school for comp sci, but I learned programming through copying countless tutorials, making edits, breaking things and learning from my mistakes. I have never learned anything any other way and I am yet to meet someone that learned any other way
> not a single study has ever supported the folk wisdom that homework teaches good work habits or develops positive character traits such as self-discipline, responsibility or independence
This I know is wrong because, again in my experience hard work is incredibly rewarding. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, whether I'm painting a house, going for a run, or focusing on programming, I feel much better about myself and act with more dignity. The most miserable people I have met have no purpose or drive.
> You can’t “reinforce” understanding the way you can reinforce a behavior
Hard disagree. First you have to mimic, only later you gain an understanding. I remember copying code over and over again, just following the same patterns and then one day it just clicks. It's happened to me in a lot of different domains.
This is a great high signal article, not because it's true, but its exactly false. Everything about it is exactly opposite of the truth. I wish we should push more homework and more arbitrary rote memorization. A lot of religious groups in the US get great benefits from studying their holy books, only to apply that focus and energy on commercial tasks with great success.
We should bring back memorization of poetry, or calligraphy. Because at least then children had some purpose in their studies. Today we purport to teach logic or reasoning that can't be referenced easily by google, but today's students are worse in these fields than people in the past. And at least long ago, children knew some poetry to boot.
I see it a little differently: Everything I've learned I found was either critically necessary to my life or was just god damn fun.
No amount of homework or practice or whatever you want to call it has helped me learn something whose value I could not discern nor find fun. Same goes with lectures.
I am unconvinced of my views, and interested in evidence the contrary. The modern academic journal paper is not evidence, it is one step below a newspaper opinion piece. The most obvious piece of evidence, among many, of academics descent into psychopathy, is the recent firing of Harvard president Claudine Gay, who was ultimately not fired for the obvious errors in her study, but for plagiarism that amounted somewhere between a clerical error and her having it zero original thoughts. She was fired as a scapegoat, not because she had lost the faith of any of her peers, whose Faith is thereby rendered meaningless.
I don't deny that she was in violation, but if the firing had been genuine, it would have been concurrent with an investigation into academic fraud, at several levels.
She had to be fired, that was clearly the only option. It also should have raised the question of how she got the job in the first place.
> So you are convinced of your views and uninterested in evidence to the contrary
Yes I am convinced in my views. Am I uninterested in evidence to the contrary? It depends, what's the evidence?
If research comes up with a conclusion that significantly diverges from common sense I don't pay much attention to it unless it's been replicated and the experiments are well designed.
Mate, please tone it down a notch, this is not reddit. You make some good points, which will likely get downvoted and hidden just for the writing style that has nothing to do with your argument. My 2c.
