Feynman on science education

[shallwedance_]

Fall semester is around the corner, and I'm a GSI again. I dug up a passage of 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' when he discusses the Brazilian science education system. Now that I reread it, I see some of it leaking into the US system, even at Berkeley. Troubling. Bears thinking about.

In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very

Comments

[spamchang]

/nod. and the profs that allow this sort of rote memorization of equations and words tend to reinforce this bad behavior :(

feynman's tricks are kind of funny. i would hope i would not be fooled!

[tokyorose329]

Just try to get them to produce an original thought in a humanities class. Half of them start sweating like you've given them a top hat and told them to pull a rabbit out of it. And if the class is on, oh, say, Buddhism, they'll *all* lose it. They'd be much happier if we stuck to asking them who-what-where-when questions, and left off the why and the how and, god forbid, the dreaded "applying the principle".