Education

On the value of critical thinking.

"How does one learn this art of implicit thinking? It is evident that such skills will never be a part of the curriculum of government schools. Their job is to condition young minds in the establishment mindset, a purpose wholly inconsistent with the development of critical thinking. There is nothing so annoying to the state’s conditioning academies as children who keep asking questions. The word "why?" – and the independent thinking that underlies it – is a constant challenge to a system that has no standards that would appeal to curious minds. The child who persists in questioning what is being taught may soon be labeled "hyperactive" or having an "attention deficit disorder" and be subjected to therapies or drugs to overcome his or her resistance. The words of the late Steve Jobs come to mind, in discussing his response to elementary school: "I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.""

And it must be so much worse today.

Google admits that education and interview scores have no relationship with success.

""In fact, Bock said, Google is increasingly hiring candidates who have no formal education, to the extent that you now see teams at the Chocolate Factory where 14 per cent of the team members have no college background."
The bottom line, he said, is that Google's earlier hiring practices simply weren't effective. When Google studied its employees' performance and compared it to how the same employees scored in interviews, there was no correlation. "We found zero relationship," Bock said. "It's a complete random mess.""

I could have told them this a long time ago.