[SEQ RERUN] Two More Things to Unlearn from School

Today’s post, Two More Things to Unlearn from School, was originally published on 12 July 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

School encourages two bad habits of thought: (1) equating “knowledge” with the ability to parrot back answers that the teacher expects; and (2) assuming that authorities are perfectly reliable. The first happens because students don’t have enough time to digest what they learn. The second happens especially in fields like physics because students are so often just handed the right answer.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we’re going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order, so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.