> a pedagogical environment engineered for optimal knowledge and skill acquisition
I'm not sure how many of those we have available to us. Many are compromised by politics, funding, or the need to act as a daycare.
I learned a lot at the various schools I went to, but the amount I learned seemed to correlate more directly with how invested I was in learning than how well the school was funded. Plenty of schools with better per-pupil funding had significantly worse student achievement rates than where I was.
The only real exception to that is not all schools offer the same curriculum. Back in my day, not every secondary / high school had someone who could teach calculus, though now there's districts that are getting rid of calculus entirely to promote anti-racism. Honestly, I think learning calculus in high school was good for me, even if I've really only needed to calculate integrals once in my programming career.
At University, things were much the same. Undergrad courses focused a bit more on synthesizing than memorizing compared to high school, but not really by much.
All of this is to say that I'm not really sure it's fair to knock the apprentice program since we don't directly experience optimal pedagogy elsewhere.
> Undergrad courses focused a bit more on synthesizing than memorizing compared to high school, but not really by much.
Sorry about that. At Caltech, we were never given formulas. Everything was derived from scratch. I never memorized anything (but I found after a while I simply knew all the trig identifies!).
I'm not sure how many of those we have available to us. Many are compromised by politics, funding, or the need to act as a daycare.
I learned a lot at the various schools I went to, but the amount I learned seemed to correlate more directly with how invested I was in learning than how well the school was funded. Plenty of schools with better per-pupil funding had significantly worse student achievement rates than where I was.
The only real exception to that is not all schools offer the same curriculum. Back in my day, not every secondary / high school had someone who could teach calculus, though now there's districts that are getting rid of calculus entirely to promote anti-racism. Honestly, I think learning calculus in high school was good for me, even if I've really only needed to calculate integrals once in my programming career.
At University, things were much the same. Undergrad courses focused a bit more on synthesizing than memorizing compared to high school, but not really by much.
All of this is to say that I'm not really sure it's fair to knock the apprentice program since we don't directly experience optimal pedagogy elsewhere.