Watered-down Courses? Part II

That last post didn’t really come out the way I originally intended. I spent my time wondering whether it’s better to learn on qualitative concepts or lower-level calculations, or if it’s even possible to do the former without doing the latter. Which is a fun thing to debate, but it leaves out one part of the puzzle, which is, ok, maybe you learn some stuff in the course, but what do you actually take away with you when the course is done and gone? What resides in your memory a year later, and is it worth anything?

When you look at things this way, I would argue that it’s easier to learn and remember concepts instead of calculations. I don’t get the sense that most people retain calculation techniques all that long without intensive drilling, especially if they don’t understand the underlying concepts. So from that perspective, a watered-down curriculum can work out just fine, if – if – the material is presented in a way that makes it easy to understand and remember down the road.

This line of thinking leads to something I’ve always wondered about. Is there any point in taking a course if you’re going to forget it all a few months down the road? Ditto for reading non-fiction books – if you read it and the contents vanish from your head soon thereafter, should you have bothered? If you don’t remember anything about it, was there anything to make the experience worthwhile?

I can come up with some reasons why taking a course and subsequently forgetting it completely can still have value:

1. Most obviously, if there is some short-term goal that has passing the course as a prerequisite. Like, for example, a college degree.
2. You don’t know anything about a subject, but want to explore it to see if it’s interesting or valuable. If not – forget it.
3. The experience at the time is fun (more applicable to reading books than taking courses).
4. You might need the subject matter in the future. Even if you forget it all, learning it once will make it easier to re-learn it on demand.

Am I missing any? Obviously, reason #1 is the most compelling, and the reason why most people take courses, but it’s not very satisfying from a philosophical standpoint.

I’m a bit more uptight on the subject than most people – I hate the idea of wasting my time, so if I spend it on a course, or reading a book, I’m damn well going to try to get something lasting out of it. This is where my habit of trying to write down notes after I read a book comes from. I hate to spend time reading a book only to realize down the road that I remember next to nothing from the experience. At the same time, this attitude can be a drawback in that if a book is boring or otherwise pointless for my interests, I’m not good at cutting my losses and not caring whether I forget things or not.

I’ll end this on a cynical note. I always wonder about how valuable college is, in the sense of how much you actually learn. (Aside from the question of how much you learn and remember, there’s the issue of how much of that is applicable to anything in the real world, but we won’t go into that now.) I get the sense that most students don’t remember much from a course a year down the road, especially if they haven’t reinforced the material somehow. Seems like the overall process is pretty inefficient for most people.