
A new school curriculum - zerobits
https://notes-txt.com/curriculum.html
======
whatshisface
> _there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your
> ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how
> did we miss that in school?_

Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool
tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces
understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I
remember passing classes, the person who understood the least I later found
out had the ability to recall anything the professor wrote on the board.
Clearly with that ability you would never have to learn anything to get As.

Also, the author should add the idea of capitalizing sentences to their
curriculum somewhere. ;)

~~~
shantly
Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in
which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet
certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not
deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor
starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a
leap toward a solution, and discussion of mathematics sure appears to require
having a huge mental mapping (memorized) of names of things to what they are
and what they're used for, not to mention memorization of a large number of
symbols.

On a more practical note, lots of memorized knowledge appears to be the
_primary_ thing the big tech companies want out of candidates, plus highish
general intelligence (ability to quickly spot similarities between one problem
and another so you can apply a memorized solution, chiefly).

~~~
mywittyname
I realized the importance of memorization in math during college calculus. In
high school, exam integrations were easy, so long as you knew the material
covered over the past few weeks. In college though, exam integration questions
were brutal, unless you remembered all of the trig identities and formulae.
Our textbook had a list of 180 or so equations that were required knowledge to
complete the sample questions at the end of each chapter. I just had to
memorize a lot of them, as the derivation was not something I was capable of
doing.

Being able to quickly recall facts is really important for problem solving,
even though we live in an era where you can search online for just about any
fact known to humanity.

~~~
whatshisface
Bear in mind that memorizing trig identities was something you had to do for
_exams_. If you want to get any use out of trig identities in "real life" you
will need the kind of understanding that comes with being able to do the
derivations yourself. In the time before computers there was a lot of value in
being able to do the mechanistic kind of problem solving you're describing,
but now that we have Mathematica, the only useful professional tasks that are
left for humans to do involve the kind of knowledge it takes to do a
derivation.

~~~
mywittyname
I had a professor that loved to make simple substitutions to values in
questions, where the original question would be incredibly difficult, but if
you spotted the substitution, the amount of work you had to do was
dramatically reduced. Think something like integrate cos x + i sin x dx, if
you spot that cos x + i sin x = e^(ix), and perform substitution, the problem
becomes trivial.

Deriving information from facts is a vital skill. But recalling facts is also
incredibly important as well. Having knowledge immediately available for use
allows a person to apply that knowledge in real-time, which is important for
problem solving and thinking on your feet.

~~~
0xffff2
Every college math class I took gave me a sheet with those kinds of identities
on it. If I was doing the kind of work where I actually had to do calculus
involving trig functions, you can bet I'd pull up a similar sheet while I was
working. Sure having it memorized would be a bit faster, but that's true for
_far_ more things than I can actually memorize.

------
wdevanny
This is a common complaint that confounds me. Did other people go to schools
with radically different curricula?

I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits, using a planner, how to
approach reading a book, using mnemonics, and using the internet for research
projects.

I had a health class that discussed good eating and exercise habits.

I remember being encouraged to find an after school club/activity and a day
where career counselors came to class.

We had multiple arts and gym classes.

I remember a section of an English course where we covered professional skills
such as public speaking and drafting emails.

Many of my classes required group projects.

I had multiple science classes that covered evolution and the cell.

Nearly everyone of the author's bullet points raised my eyebrows and left me
wondering what their science/health/gym/English classes covered. I think the
author fails to realize how much of what they want is already incorporated.

Edit: Corrected punctuation.

~~~
jagged-chisel
I'm in the southeast US. Have been my whole life. Went to public schools in
populated wealthy counties, and in a sparse, poorer county.

> I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits...

I had similar, but it wasn't part of the official curriculum, so didn't get
the amount of focus it might have required to get students to take it
seriously. Now that I'm an experienced adult, I know that I had a way of
learning that worked for me, and having a teacher who A) knew what good note
taking looked like and B) could identify my own peculiarities and help me
adapt the techniques for me would have helped tremendously.

> encouraged to find an after school club/activity ...

More time at school? Ugh... didn't want that. Offer me a "job" doing something
I enjoyed? OK, I'm there - I need the money.

> ... career counselors ...

These people talked like my extended family - "Why would you want to do that?
Clearly you're more qualified to swing a hammer..." uh, no thanks. I recall
one specific instance where a supposed mentor replied to one of my stated
career goals with "do you think you're smart enough for that?"

> ... English course where we covered professional skills ...

I think I got a total of two weeks of that in four years of high school. At
least this was part of the official curriculum, but there just wasn't an
actual focus on it.

> ... evolution and the cell

Only AP classes for us. _Elective_ AP classes, which personally I did choose.
(By 'elective' I mean students had to choose these classes - there were
required science credits, and these fulfilled the requirements, but why choose
the harder classes when the easier one will suffice? I was interested, most
other students were not.)

I guess my point is that although you might have had access in your public
school education to these things, they're just not as ubiquitous as the need
to be.

IMO, the entire problem with the US education that I experienced is the
insistence on a bullet pointed list of things to cover, a minimum grade on how
well the students retained that specific knowledge until the test, rather than
gauging students' understanding and ability to learn and adapt.

~~~
wdevanny
> IMO, the entire problem with the US education that I experienced is the
> insistence on a bullet pointed list of things to cover, a minimum grade on
> how well the students retained that specific knowledge until the test,
> rather than gauging students' understanding and ability to learn and adapt.

I 100% agree and I think the educators I've spoken to (several friends are
teachers) would also broadly agree, but that's not what the post advocates.

My understanding of your reply is that your school had many of these elements,
but they weren't quality or weren't emphasized appropriately to students which
is fundamentally different from the post's view that these things didn't
occur.

~~~
jagged-chisel
> ... your school had many of these elements, but they weren't quality or
> weren't emphasized ...

Yes, that exactly. I hope I didn't come across as arguing back in the
direction TFA, just adding my input to your input :)

------
ThePadawan
Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so
they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young
adults are kept so they're busy.

The answer to "Why aren't schools as good as they could be?" is mostly
"Because they are as good as they need to be."

~~~
Dirlewanger
Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in
2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't
want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking.

"It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

~~~
whatshisface
You don't need to resort to a conspiracy to explain the massive dysfunction in
the US educational system. It explains itself: education is a mess, so smart
critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach and even harder
to keep them teaching in the presence of overbearing and awful governance. The
field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology,
and that's not helping the quality of schools either.

~~~
shantly
> The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s
> psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either.

The faddish education "research" stuff that ends up being implemented in
schools and used as material for professional development is often on the
level of bad pop-business books, for the same reasons that bad pop-business
books are so common and so widely read, I suppose.

Actually it's kind of like pop-parenting books and bad pop-business books had
a baby and that baby is education books. They are, in the lingo of our times,
_hot garbage_.

Admin, principal through superintendent, are largely careerist political types
with shockingly poor reasoning and critical thinking skills considering most
of them have been granted a PhD—another problem: for a bunch of reasons
including demand outstripping legitimate supply by a large margin and a whole
pile of bad incentives, education degrees on all levels are about 99% bullshit
and there's no shortage of morons who shouldn't have been able to achieve a
bachelor's in anything running around with graduate degrees and an ego to
match—so they're terrible at evaluating this stuff and quite gullible, while
also being very certain of any decisions they make. It's a recipe for
disaster.

------
nextos
I would also add many things that are taught have a lot of historical cruft.

For example, calculus. What is taught currently by most high schools is a
horrible mess that mixes infinitesimal calculus as devised by Newton-Leibniz
with late 1800s epsilon-delta formalisms. Clarifying this would shed a lot of
light into student understanding.

Same thing can be said about linear algebra, where lots of algorithmic stuff
hides a simple abstraction that is rarely mentioned. Matrices encode linear
transformations.

I was taught way too many algorithmic tricks without proper conceptual
motivation.

~~~
jacknews
Thanks for saying what I was about to.

Yes I find the curriculum often runs in 'historic' order, as if the students
are expected to learn in the same order as humanity discovered things.

Why not teach the powerful underlying principles as soon as they can be
comprehended? For example, it's not until after you've learned about many
kinds of chemical reactions that you actually learn what chemistry is, about
atomic electron shells, valence, etc.

Same with biology, too much naming flower parts, and not enough evolution,
molecular biology, etc.

------
japhyr
I would argue that a well-run school addresses many of the items on this short
list. I learned most of these in my schooling, and I saw most of these things
being taught in the reasonably-run schools I have been a part of in 25 years
of teaching middle school and high school in the US.

That said, I also know there are many schools that are so poorly run that very
little of this comes up. So the larger, and much harder question becomes: What
do we do politically to make more schools well-run?

The answer to that question is critical, but probably isn't covered in a 2-min
read.

~~~
DataWorker
You ignore the problem of inputs. What if the unfortunate truth is that
educational outcomes are mostly determined by the native capacities and
attributes of the students. If the input determines the output and school or
teacher level effects merely mediate some of that, then isn’t it all just a
cruel charade designed to give the illusion that we live in a meritocracy. It
seems like students and our society are the ultimate victims If that were
true.

~~~
njb311
There is certainly a strong influence brought by the student, but then one of
the key influences in that regard is that of the parent(s) and what happens in
early years, especially encouraging kids to read books. That is one of the
most crucial 'learning how to learn' things you can do for a child. And if
kids grow up to be parents themselves without understanding how to learn, the
responsibility is passed even more to schools.

Learning starts in the home and continues there through school life. I've seen
parents complaining to teachers about how their kids aren't doing well enough,
but as though it's nothing to do with them.

------
hereme888
Warning: comment strongly biased towards a specific type of learning
technology :)

At a molecular level, all memory (dendritic spines) declines at roughly the
same rate. Some memories last much longer because the dendritic spines formed
were much stronger (such as traumatic event, a well-formulated memory, or a
memory strongly linked to other things such as a smell). But they all decline
at the same rate nonetheless. I've been a fan of spaced-repetition learning
for a few years. Programs like Anki use a variation of an old algorithm (SM-2)
based on decay-rates for memory extrapolated from data gathered through tens
of thousands of people over many years. I use a similar program for rote
memorization first, and then to remember concepts.

After I grasp the basics of a subject I can eventually delete that flashcard
and create a concept-based flashcard that allows me to understand the forest
for the trees. Example: "very frothy urine is a possible clinical symptom of
what disease? Proteinuria/Nephrotic syndrome" → "what macro-nutrient, when
mixed vigorously in liquid, makes it frothy? Protein". So now I understand the
key concept for both nephrotic syndrome and why I should only add whey protein
to my shakes at the end of the mixing to avoid creating bubbles, etc.

If I had started using these programs when young, I would have saved years of
life not having to re-learn the same thing year after year, because it takes
much longer to re-learn than to remember. And now imagine I hadn't been forced
to rote-memorize useless things just to pass a boring exam. Years of life... I
wonder if spaced-repetition can also be used to remember skills that aren't
practiced often.

The only limitation I know with spaced-repetition algorithms is that the data
shows that it's not very useful for children until they're about 7 yo. This is
because the algorithms are tuned to adult-level memorization, and children
under 7 usually aren't nearly as good as adults at retention (for many
reasons).

~~~
harperlee
Do you have a pointer to where do you get that children under seven have bad
retention? Or is it a personal observation? (this is not a "citation needed",
i'm genuinely interested as I look into spaced repetition from time to time).

~~~
hereme888
Sure. It's from the personal wikipedia maintained by Dr. Piotr Wozniak, the
guy who invented spaced repetition and put it into software back in 1986 (SM-2
algorithm) when computers became available to him.

The relevant part of the article starts here:
[https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Plasticity-
vs-...](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Plasticity-vs-
stability_trade_off)

The summary of the article can be read here:
[https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Summary:_Child...](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Summary:_Childhood_amnesia)

------
j45
You may be interested to learn more about the work of Dr Taddy Bleacher.

While he is not hitting every item on your list, his organization provided
over 600k street children with a highly diverse education based on developing
whe whole student and not just a scholastic portion.

Recent talk:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kvcgBOizjN0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kvcgBOizjN0)

------
n_t
You missed personal finance in that list. I'm not sure if you are recommending
doing away with regular curriculum completely or supporting it with your
curriculum. I am all for latter because that's the change which is feasible,
former is not.

~~~
hoonie12
I'm guessing that'll go under "organization". I think these topics are
intentionally general to cover a bunch of stuff.

------
rbavocadotree
I learned most of this in school. Did everyone else not?

My partner is a grade 2 teacher, and she covers a lot of this. Everything in
learning skills, individual skills, social skills, and most of our world.

You probably just don't recognize it when it's taught at a level
understandable to six year olds, or 14 year old. Before writing posts like
this it's a good idea to go look at a your school board's curriculum. You'll
likely be surprised how closely it matches this.

~~~
mywittyname
People tend to forget a lot of what they learned over the 9-18 years they
spent in school. Then complain that a topic, which is taught in schools,
should be taught in schools.

Example: how interest is calculated. It's been part of algebra for a while now
and most states require algebra to graduate. Thus, if you graduated high
school, someone taught you about interest rates. You just forgot.

I'm guilty of this too. I don't remember much of what I learned in grammar
school. I went back to research the parts of sentences and found that it's a
topic taught in the third grade.

------
heynk
> absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by
> hearing it, can be a massive benefit to a musician. you can learn the skill
> in a matter of weeks, but it can only be acquired before the age of 7. only
> 0.01% of people end up learning it in time!

I find it dubious that you can only learn this by age 7 - although I'm sure
it's easier if you're younger. Is there science behind this claim?

I am not a musician, but I have recently started learning to play piano, and
training my ear is something I'd really like to learn. I've used some apps to
practice ear training, and I'm able to discern intervals decently, but I can't
recognize and identify a single note on its own. I do hope I can get there
with more deliberate practice.

~~~
F-0X
> the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by hearing it, can
> be a massive benefit to a musician

It can also be a curse. I've known a number of people with perfect pitch.
Those who were pianists typically insisted on playing only electric pianos,
because a typical mechanical piano that's not in a performance hall is
probably not tuned until "regular" listeners can tell it is out, but it could
be out enough to make it unplayable to a performer with perfect pitch.

Another thing I noticed which I thought was surprising - they weren't notably
better composers despite their "better understanding" of pitch.

~~~
njb311
I'm probably one of those people that can identify specific notes, but
probably only if they're played on a piano. I play an electronic piano and
what I find amusing/frustrating is if I use the 'transpose' function. So when
I play for example in C but it is D that comes from the speakers, I will often
find my fingers migrating to 'correct' the pitch. And if you wonder why I'd
transpose, it's because - to my ears - a piece of music can sound noticeably
different shifted just half a tone.

------
fiftyfifty
The challenges to the education system go way deeper than just a better
curriculum. I was speaking to a local administrator last week in our fairly
affluent community and she estimated that about 10% of the kids in our
district are functionally homeless. The only decent meals they will get are
breakfast and lunch on school days. That many within this group don't have a
place to wash their cloths. If the goal is to bring up things like test scores
across the board with an improved curriculum then you have to first address
some of these societal issues.

------
jedimastert
Ctrl-f taxes: 0

This might be under "how the world works" but I think there should be a
separate "how to be a reasonable citizen" like how to deal with taxes, voting,
civics in general, that kinda stuff. It has a pretty big impact on day-to-day
life.

~~~
mywittyname
This is part of social studies curricula. Here's an example from Washington
state standards for social studies:

[https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/resources-subject-
area...](https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/resources-subject-area/social-
studies/learning-standards#dexp-accordion-item--2)

There are requirements for social studies, civics, economics, geography, and
world history.

------
vectorEQ
there is lots of work done to improve education, mostly in how information is
conveyed to people, and how they are engaged to interact with subjects. a lot
of current western educational facilities still implement the banking theory,
where people are seen as an empty bank, and filling them with information is
filling the bank with money, i.e. more information provided == smarter people.
now people are realising this is terrible ,and applying different models.

doesn't really have to do with memorisation techniques or other little
nicknacks that can help people in specific domains. more about how people take
in and interpret information, process it and make it their own to apply.

------
njb311
One of my English teachers when I was 13 asked us what 'to educate' meant.
Everyone associated it with being told things by a teacher, in school.

Educate comes from the Latin ex duco - to draw out of. Education isn't about
pushing knowledge in, it's about pulling understanding out.

I think the schools systems worldwide struggle with balancing skills for life
vs qualifications for the next stage of life.

------
emeth
Dorothy Sayers (a contemporary of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, and friend to
both) wrote an essay about this about 60 years ago, titled "The Lost Tools of
Learning" [https://gbt.org/text/sayers.html](https://gbt.org/text/sayers.html)

~~~
hansthehorse
I attended private Catholic schools in NYC starting in 1960. I remember being
told early and often by the nuns, brothers and priests who taught that "you
are going to live 80 years, we will be teaching you for a small fraction of
that time and it's impossible for us to teach you everything you are going to
need to know. What we can teach you is how to learn on your own." And they
did.

------
linuxftw
Public schools are representative of politics: it's all about special
interests. People have deeply held-beliefs that their special interests are
more important than someone else's.

In my state, we had state history class, I believe this to be utterly
unimportant to be a functioning human. How do I know this? Literally every
other place on the planet doesn't teach the history of my particular state and
gets along just fine.

Same with Literature, it's culturally focused, and seems to be self-
perpetuating. Why don't we spend as much time focusing on, say, Japanese
culture as we do on Shakespeare? Well, that's because some self-entitled, rich
rulers of ours decided we should learn about Shakespeare.

I think it's a perfectly suitable system to maintain the status quo of the
world. Public education's format is believed in so dogmatically that the only
choice is to defect and choose home school or private school.

------
jonnycomputer
Seems to me that a lot of things on that list _were_ in my curriculum, at a
fairly typically crappy rural school system. I'm guessing that it was in OP's
as well. Did they just miss it because it wasn't explicit?

------
ZenModeRy
Things that don't change because they've always been that way are thing things
that most need to change.

------
muzzletov
This is neat but plain wrong. xD The premise AND the conclusion (the suggested
solution).

------
vezycash
>How to use the Internet to learn: Google, Wikipedia

About 10 years ago, in my second year CS program, I created a program to
Teaching secondary school students how to use the internet to find stuff
online for free and learn. This was in lieu of a 6-month internship program.

I first spent weeks creating a training manual. (I should have spent time
selling before spending weeks on the manual). I then talked a friend into
helping me send proposals to private schools. A marketing manager friend of
mine proofread the proposal letter - that's when I learned about business
writing - Must Be Straight to the Point.

I approached a number of government secondary schools. The teachers there
loved it but told me a government approval was necessary for the program. I
pursued the approval but it didn't go through.

The private schools were lukewarm. Approached my alma mater and received the
same lukewarm response. The students who I spoke to listened to the pitch and
gave me a response I would never forget. They said, "Google? I know how to use
google."

I didn't expect the naive response. In hindsight, I should have made up a
complicated sounding title for the program. It's just that I'm a, "say it like
it is person."

I sold only one copy of the manual and received a thank-you note (Found it a
few months ago. Unfortunately, there was no name signed to the note and I
don't remember who it was).

Now I work in a school environment and 90%+ of the students hate learning.
They only go through the motions because it's required.

>memory palace, mnemonics, Sleep's role in learning, note-taking

I did teach this when I handled an elective class and my students loved it.
They spread the word, and their classmates who weren't taking the subject
started hanging around my class. I also taught them the difference between
reading for pleasure and reading for exams. And that perfect practice makes
perfect.

Reading for exams simply practices reading. But setting one's own questions,
and answering past questions is much more effective at preparing for exams.

>Meditation

I thought deeply about this but never implemented it. Or I didn't know how to.
Also, it kept skipping my mind.

>Writing of all forms

This was the first thing I tried with the students - their writing ability is
subpar. Out of 30 students, just one did the exercise because I wasn't their
English teacher and that was the end of that.

>reading old literature.

Now I mind the library most of the time (it was locked before). And I've spent
on different occasions up to 5% of my salary on story books and literature.
Wanted to buy 10 used ebook readers from the US (eBay) in October but couldn't
work out my own shipping. Buying from sellers who send directly to my country
means a 5X price increase.

>Our World

Downloaded kolibri late last month. Downloaded 2,007 khan academy videos so
far. Set up one of my laptops as the server and networked it with my phone
wifi with another. Created accounts for 2 senior students who are library
regulars. And they love it. One other student showed interest this afternoon.
Time will tell if their interest is sustained or not.

------
yellowapple
> absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by
> hearing it, can be a massive benefit to a musician. you can learn the skill
> in a matter of weeks, but it can only be acquired before the age of 7. only
> 0.01% of people end up learning it in time!

This seems to be a very problematic paragraph. In particular:

> it can only be acquired before the age of 7

I'm doubtful about how true this is. I can't find anything backing up this
claim (unless you count "being born with synesthesia" or "being blind at
birth" as "acquired"); the closest I can find is Mozart having demonstrated
this ability by age 7.

On the contrary, this seems like the exact sort of thing someone could readily
memorize well beyond that age (maybe not _perfectly_ , but within a given
margin of error, sure), much like one might recognize a given tempo or a given
shade of orange. It's _hard_ , but with practice it's possible.

In fact, most people are able to recognize the pitches themselves; even
amateur singers (and non-singers entirely) can sing songs they've heard in
approximately the right key, and the average person can usually recognize when
a song is pitched up or down relative to how it's "supposed" to be (this is
one of the common traits for both nightcore and vaporwave: shifting the pitch
up or down, respectively). What's missing here is the ability to actually name
that pitch, but just because one can't vocalize what the brain recognizes
doesn't mean recognition/identification doesn't happen _at all_ ; it just
happens through other mechanisms (like singing/playing that note again later).

In my case, I certainly don't have "absolute pitch" as defined by that
paragraph, but if you sang something to me and asked me to play it on a
trombone I could probably do it without having to fumble for a reference note.
Worst-case, I can produce a reference note in my head (usually B-flat, since
most brass instruments nowadays are keyed to it) and extrapolate.

And on that note:

> can be a massive benefit to a musician

I'm _very_ doubtful about how true this is. Usually what's far more critical
is _relative_ pitch - that is, the ability to accurately recreate a pitch in
relation to some arbitrary reference pitch (e.g. singing/playing a note in a
chord or scale). Absolute pitch (in this specific sense, rather than the more
innate/internal sense I described above) helps for music transcription, and...
that's about it. Being able to sing a perfect 440Hz A does jack squat if that
A's supposed to be in an F-major chord/scale.

If anything, absolute pitch recognition can make it _harder_ to perform in an
ensemble, or to perform music with a different pitch convention other than
A=440 (e.g. Baroque music), or to otherwise be able to adapt one's pitch to
match the actual music to be performed.

------
crawfordcomeaux
Post-capitalism skills conspicuously absent.

------
tboyd47
"How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill."

"How to use the Internet to learn: Google, Wikipedia." This is "learning about
learning" to you?

~~~
shantly
Kids used to have to be taught how to use the library. Card catalogue, Dewey
decimal system, all that. The kinds of things one may find at a library other
than books. People aren't born knowing this stuff and may not realize what can
and cannot be gained from a resource, or how to go about getting it, if they
aren't told at some point.

Hell, you have to teach kids about _book features_ like captions and tables of
contents and indices and footnotes and, believe it or not, kids aren't always
great at picking up that knowledge even when taught.

~~~
tboyd47
I get that, it just strikes me as ridiculous that a curriculum about how to
use the internet to learn would be summed up by: "Google, Wikipedia." Maybe
the author is sacrificing too much depth here and I'm missing the overall
point, but I'd rather teach my kids how _not_ to use Google than teach them
how _to_ use it.

~~~
zerobits
yes, this is a starting point. I agree this topic has considerable depth which
I omitted.

there are 100s of great resources (Wolfram Alpha, Khan Academy, GitHub,
Wiktionary, to name a few) and techniques (Google search tricks like using
quotes, site: tag, etc., good habits like avoiding distractions) to augment
Internet learning

you could evenly weight this area like any other class, and expect to spend
many hours on it.

