www.sixfingeredman.net
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learning

I think all people are capable of understanding ``intellectual'' pursuits given a good enough teacher. The issue comes in the motivation and background.

There is nothing about a lecture that cannot be put into a good textbook except the ability to ask questions. If all the time professors spent in preparing and delivering lectures was instead put into answering questions, you'd have the ideal college.

Teaching is not the inverse of learning. One is always learning, whether one is being taught or not. Teaching is the act of igniting the interest to learn, and providing the materials to do so. Like a gardener does in the garden; but you wouldn't say the gardener is growing the vegetables. Er. You might, but you'd be wrong.

Sherlock Holmes said humans only have limited brain space, so they must choose what they remember very carefully. I was thinking over news stories I read on my Visor last year and couldn't remember a single one. The benefit of such reading is usually very tiny; a fact or two, or an influence on your thoughts and language. I should choose my reading more carefully, reading only those books that are likely to give me long-lasting inspiration.

Being selective doesn't mean you have to be narrow, does it? Couldn't you still study important elements from a wide variety of fields? The thing is, facts alone are just facts; it is humans who have tied them together into fields. Fields are those groups of facts which have been found to be useful together. Interdisciplinary studies aren't bad, but because of the very nature of how "disciplines" are formed they tend to be less productive. When they're not, a new field is born (i.e. sociobiology).