What I learned that day is that at school, or anywhere else where exams determine your marks, you must learn the answers that the examiner wants you to learn. Real understanding and real facts are irrelevant. This sad fact can be seen where "straight-A" students soon forget much of what they were supposed to have learned.
Forty years later I did a course on "How to Study" at an organization that runs courses on a variety of subjects related to life skills. At one point in the course we were shown to make a clay model of a pencil. The purpose of the clay model was to demonstrate how we can get a better understanding of a pencil by making the concept of a pencil more real. We were shown by the instructor a model of a pencil that had an eraser attached onto the one end. When being examined I modelled a more modern pencil without the eraser but I was told that I had omitted to add the eraser. The eraser had nothing to do with the purpose of the model. I was made to add the eraser. In the graduation event I was asked to say what benefits I had derived from the Study Course. I said that it had reminded me that it is not what you understand that counts for exams, but rather knowing what the examiner wants and demonstrating your knowledge of that. I should not have said that, because firstly it was the purpose of the course to teach you how to really understand what you are learning, and secondly it pointed out that the instructor was wrong. She never spoke to me again.
What I have observed, that I find both amusing and disturbing, is that many people have been taught half-truths at school and university and they go on in life believing those half-truths to be absolute facts. Unfortunately, teachers and professors are products of the same education system. Students should be taught that nothing should be believed until verified for themselves by means of critical observation, mathematics or logical analysis against axiomatic facts.
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The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing
almost anything better, faster or more economically has
his future and his fortune at his fingertips.
John Paul Getty
My father said:
"You must never try to make all the money that's in a deal.
Let the other fellow make some money too,
because if you have a reputation for always making all the money,
you won't have many deals."
John Paul Getty
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