Very important article: What Medieval People Got Right About Learning

[Mark Rippetoe]

What Medieval People Got Right About Learning | Scott H Young

Not all classes are this extreme, but the pyramid model still has a dominant influence in academic learning. Apprenticeships, in contrast, often ignore theory altogether. Which is good, because the theories often aren’t as accurate as the practical knowledge anyways.

[Ray Gillenwater]

This is spot on. School was frustrating for me. Too many hours invested in exchange for an inadequate amount of real-world applicable knowledge. That plus the actual cost of an education in addition to the opportunity cost of time that could be spent doing something else? Incredibly inefficient.

As soon as I started working, the ratio of hours invested versus knowledge gained became much for more encouraging. Hands on experience with practitioners providing guidance accelerated my progress significantly. Plus, I made money and could support myself while rapidly learning something new. This is exactly the approach we are taking with the franchise gyms.

[franklie]

A very interesting article
An anecdote in connection with the article.

I was at the university taking an engineering materials science course. A good part of the class was about crystalline lattice structures of metals. Needless to say, it had no meaning for me and I didn't pass the class.

I left the university and went to work in a metal fabrication shop. There I learned about welding aluminum and steels; rolling, machining, bending and finishing metals.

On the advice of my journeyman, I went back to university. I re-took the class on material science and it was easy. Everything now made sense due to my experiences with working with various metals.

BCC, FCC & HCP structures were easy to visualise after having worked with materials of those structures.

Several years after leaving the university and working as a professional I began collaborating with a post-doc in material science on a project. I was working for a small company that was doing seminal work in joining different materials and he was the SME for materials for a Fortune 500 company.

In one of our first phone conversations he asked me if I was a material science engineer. When I told him that I was "but an egg" as Michael Valentine Smith would say because I only had a degree in mechanical engineering and in that discipline only a couple of classes in material science, he at first wouldn't believe me. He told me that my understanding of metallic materials was as good or better than the doctoral students he had as interns.

Most of my knowledge was practical rather than theoretical due to my hands on experiences with welding and other forms of metal fabrication.