> If __ are so great, then it should be possible to summarize their benefits in concise, practical terms. It should be possible to demonstrate the power of __ in one hour, not 100. If __ advocates refuse to do this, then we shouldn’t be surprised when __ remain stuck near the bottom of the charts.
This paragraph seems like it would be equally true for almost any subject you filled in the blanks with.
As someone who had to learn a foreign (natural) language in school, I can see the benefit now, but there's no way I could explain it, and certainly not in an hour. It's a type of learning which causes a change in how you organize things you already know. How do you sell that?
(No, I don't believe "so you can talk to people in that language" is a realistic benefit. I don't think even my school thought that. The selection of languages offered is simply not useful. I've never met anyone this side of Stuttgart with which to use my German. Of the top 10 non-English languages spoken in my state, only 1 was offered as a class at my school. It almost looked like they went out of their way to find teachers in less common languages.)
(BTW, that's also the same answer as "If Lisp is so great why isn't anyone using it?" It works for any subject. If trig is so great, why aren't you using it? If music is so great, why did you stop playing after you graduated, and were no longer required?)
I'm not trying to downplay the importance. It's a real problem, for many fields. As a Lisp programmer, it's my nature to try to sell everyone on learning Lisp even if they won't use it, and also to over-generalize problems to nearly the point of absurdity.
How do you get someone to want to learn something when it may have no immediate and apparent practical value to them? Especially today when their whole "learning" slice is competing with Netflix and Facebook and all the rest. I guess the trendy answer right now is something in the neighborhood of "freemium gamification" and for reasons I can't explain that makes me sad.
The problem of people failing top provide empirical evidence for claims of things is indeed universal and common. But it is possible to do so, sometimes it requires a ton of work, but if we want to know things, we have to do that work. Until we do, we don't know things.
> It's a type of learning which causes a change in how you organize things you already know. How do you sell that?
That's potentially a good pitch all by itself.
> Of the top 10 non-English languages spoken in my state, only 1 was offered as a class at my school. It almost looked like they went out of their way to find teachers in less common languages.
This is a great example of language education being frozen in time for essentially cultural reasons. Pre-20th century, and probably up to about WW2, the common choices of foreign languages to study were determined on cultural grounds and largely for ""elite"" purposes. You'd learn German so you could read Goethe and Schiller, or the various scientific papers published there.
Wind forwards to the present day and the obvious choices for US language learners would have Spanish at the top of the list, but that would involve the complex politics of the relationship between the US, the rest of Latin America, and its immigrants. Much easier to carry on pretending that someone might want to read Goethe.
This paragraph seems like it would be equally true for almost any subject you filled in the blanks with.
As someone who had to learn a foreign (natural) language in school, I can see the benefit now, but there's no way I could explain it, and certainly not in an hour. It's a type of learning which causes a change in how you organize things you already know. How do you sell that?
(No, I don't believe "so you can talk to people in that language" is a realistic benefit. I don't think even my school thought that. The selection of languages offered is simply not useful. I've never met anyone this side of Stuttgart with which to use my German. Of the top 10 non-English languages spoken in my state, only 1 was offered as a class at my school. It almost looked like they went out of their way to find teachers in less common languages.)
(BTW, that's also the same answer as "If Lisp is so great why isn't anyone using it?" It works for any subject. If trig is so great, why aren't you using it? If music is so great, why did you stop playing after you graduated, and were no longer required?)
I'm not trying to downplay the importance. It's a real problem, for many fields. As a Lisp programmer, it's my nature to try to sell everyone on learning Lisp even if they won't use it, and also to over-generalize problems to nearly the point of absurdity.
How do you get someone to want to learn something when it may have no immediate and apparent practical value to them? Especially today when their whole "learning" slice is competing with Netflix and Facebook and all the rest. I guess the trendy answer right now is something in the neighborhood of "freemium gamification" and for reasons I can't explain that makes me sad.