Stop Making Kids Reinvent Math

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The idea that students should discover everything for themselves is one of the biggest wastes of human potential that I’ve ever seen. Thing is, we have thousands of years of accumulated knowledge.

Entire civilizations of thought compressed into things that can be taught and learned efficiently, quickly. I mean, that’s the whole point of instruction, right?

is to get you to inherit all sorts of insights and knowledge and discoveries that took other people lifetimes to figure out. And not just like other random people.

I mean like literal geniuses the brightest minds of each century grinding away for lifetimes through thousands of years, handing the baton and extending human knowledge. Just take the baton and run with it!

You don’t have to rediscover all of that on your own from scratch. It’s gonna take you forever, and you’re gonna be spinning out doing years of research on things that are already known.

So just suck it up, learn your foundations, and then build new discoveries on top of them where it’s actually novel, where your inventions are actually pressing forward human knowledge.

Further reading: Why I’m So Against Discovery Learning .

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