Zompist Bboard Again

During a political discussion here on the ZBB about education, I just posted:

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 9:13 am

Well, as zompist put it in his old page on learning languages (https://zompist.com/whylang.html),

The basic fallacy here is to take learning as an irreversible process. Because someone learned something in school, whether it's Latin or trigonometry or the exports of Venezuela, it doesn't mean that they still know it.

Honestly, how many bits of knowledge can you think of where all of the following are true:

1) You learned them in elementary or secondary school;

2) You still know them; and

3) You didn't learn them again later, during college/university, or as a part of job or additional training, or on your own, because you find the topic in question interesting?

Basically, I can think of the three Rs and the English language, and that's pretty much it.

I thought we could have a new thread where people can answer that question.

Preschool and grade 1 – 12¹ taught me a lot that was both practical and retained. Particularly strong in my mind is that we had to do budgeting² and got some knowledge of French.

What it didn’t prepare me for was the Real World experience. I already had the drawback of social ostracism but being in that bubble didn’t help—when I went to college and stepped out of the primary-school bubble, I went insane (that is not much of an exaggeration, if it even is one at all). I don’t hold ill will towards my parents—they were doing what they felt was best for me—but there was a lot of reality that I was never exposed to then, and in the unlikely event of my having children, I will send them to public school so that they don’t suffer as I did.

1. I skipped kindergarten after two weeks.
2. A mock marriage, complete with ceremony, was part of senior Bible class. Ridiculous “proposals” were mandatory. Mine was a send-up of Lord of the Rings that was a coöp between me, three other seniors, and four sophomores (who were Orcs). Sadly the video no longer exists. It was a blast.

Hm, as non-real-world-related as your education may have been, budgeting is arguably more real-world relevant than most of what I was taught in school.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 10:12 am Hm, as non-real-world-related as your education may have been, budgeting is arguably more real-world relevant than most of what I was taught in school.

We also had a speech class, for which mock job interviews were part of the course.

Fronted Adverbials. They were a supposedly crucial ¹part of my education in the English language, and I can still explain them, but I have never seen any formal syntax that treats what Michael Gove² would call a ‘fronted adverbial’ as a discrete or meaningful class of some kind, although I haven't particularly looked. Even ‘Adverbial’ is horribly fuzzy⁶. In terms of wider knowledge, as pretty much the same as Raphael minus the foreign language – I learnt French in primary school, although my (terrible) French knowledge nowdays is based more on some common words, knowing English and its multitude of French loanwords, and guessing based on Latin & German, and how little of a language you actually learn in school is often joked about.

¹ Maybe half the non-spelling part of SPaG was spent on them, at least
² The architect of the most recent curriculum reform. I assume he wasn't personally responsible for fronted adverbials, but we tend to blame anything objectionable in the curriculum in the direction of meaningless rote learning and excessive examination³ on the spirit of Michael Gove, because it is ultimately his fault
³ Especially in formal exams. ‘Non-Exam Assessment’ is limited until A-Levels to practical subjects, where it forms a maximum of 60% of the qualification, and the speaking exams in Modern Foreign Languages⁴⁵, with a really narrow definition of practical – even computer science doesn't have any coursework at GCSE anymore, you write computer programs on paper in the exam. At A-Level you get I think 20% of some essay subjects as coursework, but science practicals are assessed by exam (although not programming. One does not question the wisdom of Michael Gove)
⁴ Yes, a method of assessment with exam in the name counts as ‘Non-Exam Assessment’
⁵ Not to be confused with the speaking endorsement in English Language, which is marked seperately and doesn't count towards the grade
⁶ Although according to the wisdom of Michael Gove, it is extremely simple

Not nearly enough in areas which turned out to be far more important.

I probably learned at school,
between the ages of 9 and 15,
everything I needed,
for semantic primitive conlanging,
what more could I have expected...

not so much the very academic subjects,
but the teachers of the 70s knew,
how to offer you good activities,
and reading choices,
if you have a Martian eye...

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 9:27 am Honestly, how many bits of knowledge can you think of where all of the following are true:
1) You learned them in elementary or secondary school;
2) You still know them; and
3) You didn't learn them again later, during college/university, or as a part of job or additional training, or on your own, because you find the topic in question interesting?

For elementary school, spelling and arithmetic. For high school, add French, algebra, calculus*, driving, and the basics of acting. Obviously these are things reinforced by years of daily or near-daily use. I'm glad they're there; none of them are easy to acquire as an adult.

* OK, never used that past college; but calculus was essential in understanding college physics, and I'm glad I got that far.

More equivocal: the ability to write smoothly in standard English. Probably reinforced by high school essays, but also probably learned mostly by doing it on my own (and by reading).

Arguably, experience with primate social behavior, good and bad. I was never highly social, but I would have turned out far weirder (and probably unhappier) if I hadn't been forced to deal with other kids. Similarly, one of the most useful skills you learn taking classes is how to take classes... including how to sit quietly in a boring environment and how to take tests.

Probably most things I learned early, I learned from books— e.g. I got a lot more history out of Colin McEvedy's atlases, which I found on my Dad's bookshelf, than from high school classes. On the other hand, I'm probably short-changing my school experiences: maybe they only taught the basics, but people who lack those basics are going to have a hard time with any non-school learning.

Oh, looking at your question in its original context reminded me of something else: the list of fallacies our Social Studies teacher went over in 7th grade. That grabbed me for some reason, and I'd say it's been useful all my life. But like most things in education, you can't count on something important getting through to eveyone just because it's "taught in school." It may be quite random what grabs a particular student.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 4:10 pmIt may be quite random what grabs a particular student.

Absolutely. I believe I’ve spoken of it before, but my high-school French class once had Glenn and Linnea Boese, a missionary couple who worked with speakers of Nyarafolo in Côte d’Ivoire, especially around “Ferke” (Ferkessedougou). They explained a bit about the language and were kind enough to take questions. Come 2012 or so, I’m in my Phonetic Description class, as a consequence of nontrivial partiality.

It ended up UNO Reversed, as our final in that class was to write a brief sketch of a natlang of our choice, with more leeway given the less well-documented the language was (at least in a language you spoke). I opted for Nyarafolo and reached out to the Boeses to ask if they would be willing to share some of their research for the purpose. She gave me a treasure trove, so that impressed the professor. Nyarafolo has also crept up in my conlanging; some of you may be familiar with my idiosyncratic noun class systems and their semantic divisions—that has a lot to do with it, because the Nyarafolo system was my first real exposure to non-IE schemas and the criteria they divided their semantic space up into intrigued me.

I still have it as a PDF somewhere.

A hard question. I always liked reading and learning, and it's difficult for me to disentangle what I learnt in school from what I learnt outside. My special favorite was history, where I was always ahead of my class and sometimes even of my teachers. But school did show me things to learn that I wouldn't have come across on my own, and it especially gave me a grounding in things I wasn't too interested in learning more about in later life - higher mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology outside the topics of evolution and ethology... and even for the things I was interested in, like languages, social sciences, and literature, it was often helpful to learn them in a structured environment.

Thank you for your replies, everyone!