Hard News: The Demon E-Word
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The thing with technological change is that it does obsolete certain learnt skills.
When did anyone last do long division? Log tables formed a large party of my high school maths course (although that was basically teaching a transient technology, rather than a fundamental skill that has faded from use).
In 1990, if you wanted to write an essay, you really needed to have memorised much of the material as looking it up in books was slow and impractical. Now, if I want to check the way law education works in the US, wikipedia has the information a click away. I need a framework of knowledge (that someone told me it was different, for instance) but the exact details can be instantly retrieved.
In a few years, we'll have computer software that transforms scribbled notes into readable prose, so I'll be able to type:
??% NZ sch lvrs illiterate
and get the result
5% of New Zealand school leavers are illiterateThat's going to alter education yet again.
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Perhaps part of my anxious insistence on this is based on the fear that my marvellous and currently fairly useful capacity for just soaking stuff up, and making good guesses about what I don't know, might be an obsolete party trick pretty soon.
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Ooo, Minto, better watch out for those nasty social entrepreneurs that are all the rage now, too... oh no, wait, too late...they're already here.
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Perhaps part of my anxious insistence on this is based on the fear that my marvellous and currently fairly useful capacity for just soaking stuff up, and making good guesses about what I don't know, might be an obsolete party trick pretty soon.
You too, huh? I think a lot of adult opinion on the education of their children is anachronistic. It certainly was when I was a child, and my parents reported the same thing.
What you study, how you study it, what skills will be useful, etc, changes over time. Right now I think it's rapidly changing. Which makes me uneasily suspicious that whilst kids these days are less literate than in my day (which was less literate than in my parent's day), they're still smarter than me. They have skills for the modern context.
Just as I didn't really obsess about mastering long division (I can do it, but not quickly) because I always had a calculator, so kids don't need to really know about general knowledge because there is Google. Why waste brain-space (or more accurately learning-time) Also, pottering around is a lot cheaper than it used to be - you don't need to master some arcane text before you learn to do stuff, you can just buy pieces and fool around with it.
Obviously parents are not totally useless in guiding their children, and there's no-one else to educate them but adults anyway, but I think many totally overrate themselves and the value of what they themselves know. I'll probably be retiring when my son hits the workforce, so I really don't know what it will be useful for him to know, other than the broadest lessons. I have no idea how much specialization will be required by then, or what the average amount of time spent educating oneself will be, or what tools will be available to do it with.
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"learn how to learn", as achieved smoothly by learning.
"dont remeber, just derive", or as science teaches; don't try to derive anything unless you already know the answer. Remembering all the answers makes for wickedly easy derivations, which you can also remember.
"problem solving skills are better than memory", the hell they are. Still, awesome backup for the infinitely large memory gaps.
"method is more important than fact", methods are the tools we use to check our all important facts, without which method is meaningless.
"active learning", 'cause doing stuff makes you hungry; just get someone to rote learn you the times table, which is invaluable for basic money management skills.
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3410,
Just as I didn't really obsess about mastering long division (I can do it, but not quickly) because I always had a calculator, so kids don't need to really know about general knowledge because there is Google.
See, this bit I don't get. General knowledge - indeed any knowledge - is not just a big list of facts. It's about building an ever-growing understanding about the world, etc. "Look it up when you need to" is an utter cop out. If the education system gets hijacked by that utterly misguided "theory" we're in serious trouble.
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what it characterised as some innate ability to make snap decisions was in fact the fruit of experience -- or, to put it another way, the inscription of neural pathways.
It's plausible. Likely even. One of my childhood poems:
What is reasoning but step by step intuition?
What is intuition but thousands of reasons?But we don't need a model of the brain to tell us that knowing something is quicker than looking it up. Clearly so, since the outcome of looking it up is the knowing of it in the end, but has the extra step of the lookup. And the lookup can be lengthy.
I'm quite skeptical about the concept of 'reasoning rather than remembering' even in maths. People like to think they're 'deriving' stuff, but the method by which they solved the problem is usually something they've drilled into themselves. If they haven't, there's bugger all chance in an exam that they'll work it out. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, odd savants, but the bulk of people just go on experience. They remember the 'outline of the proof'.
The level of understanding goes through several stages. First there is rote rule/fact learning. Then there is the completion of that task. Then there is the massive improvement of speed of recall. When that's happened the rules can start to be combined in ways that haven't been seen yet. Finally, strangely, mysteriously, there seems to be a total giving up of the rules. This is mastery. How many of us consciously follow the rules of English? Indeed how many of us would even know them?
People who solve problems a lot reason intuitively. The actual recourse to logic/rules is really a double check, or a means of communication if the answer is doubted by, say, a customer, or a student.
Is it the role of school education to give mastery? Seems unrealistic to me. Students will find what they want to be a master of, and a good school will let them, give them resources to, guidance from people who may have followed a similar path. If they don't know what they want to master, then being a generalist of a lot of stuff is sensible, just to find that thing which they are really good at.
It's a very hard job to decide how to educate people. In itself it is a skill that requires mastery. And I think that is usually not entirely transferable, it's limited to educating people within the teacher's own subject of mastery. There are no general life teachers. Just people who claim to be, who will appeal to some and not others.
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General knowledge - indeed any knowledge - is not just a big list of facts. It's about building an ever-growing understanding about the world, etc.
That's a highly disputable point. It could just be a word play where you claim 'understanding' a fact is somehow different to 'knowing' a fact, without there actually being any discernible difference other than when you 'understand' you know more facts about the fact in question.
For example, I 'know' that gravity pulls you to the earth. But do I 'understand' it? What's the difference? Perhaps I know more about gravity, how it seems to be a property of large masses, how it exerts a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects etc. But aren't these just facts that I also know?
I'm going here on the assumption that rules can be facts too. They can usually be described or encoded that way. Exactly how we remember them may not be as a verbal description (and almost certainly isn't in most cases), but that doesn't stop them being facts.
I don't seriously hold to this point of view myself, since I'm undecided whether we know any facts at all. Maybe we only have opinions, and the facts will be forever uncertain.
Perhaps you missed my point about long division. I never said I didn't learn it. I just said I never mastered it. That seemed to me a real waste of time. I know how it's done, and I can do it slowly. More importantly, I know what it's for. The same may go for general knowledge - putting some preponderance of digitally encoded fact into our naturally analog brains seems like an incredibly laborious process. Perhaps our aim should always be to get the overview, and then look up the details. Even in our areas of specialty.
For instance, there's no way I can remember all the computer code I'm supporting. I only know the outline. But I'm the guy who knows how to look it up the fastest, having written it. That's why I say that Googling may be the general knowledge of the future.
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Ben. I think those are all very good points. You have to take learning in its totality, not try to break it down into bytes, credits, points, etc. That is the worst message NCEA and very detailed syllabuses send.
Russell, we did complain to the school. The teacher insisted it was an exercise in distilling facts and coming to your own conclusion. but my daughter was still very distressed that most of her classmaates had got the wrong message and had even gone so far as to giver her a hard time about it. You have to be very careful implementing theis "newthink" type syllabus at primary, intermediate and even secondary school. A lot of it is just stuff people have dreamed up in coffee bars at uni and it is at uni where a lot of it should stay.
I have another little story about rote learning and strangly it has to do with Minto:
I remember standing outside the Big I in the pouring rain in the middle of winter chanting over and over again "one race, the human race". And I ending up believing it; I still do. What a sucker eh John?
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Is it the role of school education to give mastery? Seems unrealistic to me. Students will find what they want to be a master of, and a good school will let them, give them resources to, guidance from people who may have followed a similar path. If they don't know what they want to master, then being a generalist of a lot of stuff is sensible, just to find that thing which they are really good at.
It's a very hard job to decide how to educate people. In itself it is a skill that requires mastery. And I think that is usually not entirely transferable, it's limited to educating people within the teacher's own subject of mastery. There are no general life teachers. Just people who claim to be, who will appeal to some and not others.
As a group of Technology teachers reviewing the “draft” curriculum document we only looked at the delivery of the Technology section. I think “Silo(ing)” describes this methodology of education. “Essential Learning skills” which generally worked on transference of skills, but to work across Learning Areas is extremely difficult. In the area of Technology (the subject not a bunch of computers) our school tried regularly to break down those edges. Hard media made packaging for the chocolates made in the Foods room kind of stuff.
I don't think the curriculum does necessarily exclude non-profit initiatives like those listed in Minto's statement -- indeed, I think skills in operating such initiatives are not mutually exclusive to a sense of enterprise.
But to take on an entrepreneurial approach that might not frighten John the exercise is much bigger as it is not easily implemented. Say the running of the school canteen as a business. Design of menus, preparation of the food, running the canteen, doing the accounts, maintaining food hygiene standards, eating the profits … and all. The first (practical) problem is timetabling … enabling the group of students to actually do each of these jobs at the appropriate times, ie make the “green salads” before lunch time! … every day …
It’s not the curriculum document (even a word like “entrepreneurial”) so much as the delivery of such a document.I want to take a sledge hammer to the running of schools, less bell ringing, crack open the “silos”, involve the community more … We don’t need general life teachers (scary) but a closer model of general life in school, one based on the place our kids inhabit. When was the last time you had a bell ring to tell you where to go!
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True documentary footage from a UK classroom:
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With regard to the comments in this thread about GREs -- American graduate schools do require you to sit them, but they are not the *primary* factor that determines whether you will admitted. (The letters of recommendation probably carry the most weight, along with your transcript).
My experience is that the GREs mainly serve as a "consistency check" -- if you have great letters and straight As in your classes but lousy GREs, the admissions committee would be reading your packet very carefully. And on the other side of the coin, a really stellar set of scores in the GREs never hurts, especially if you not at a place whose quality is known to the people reading your application.
It is biased towards the sciences, but people contemplating graduate study in the US (and elsewhere, but the advice is certainly American-o-centric) might get a lot from this set of posts to the Cosmic Variance blog:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/09/26/unsolicited-advice-iv-how-to-be-a-good-graduate-student/
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3410,
General knowledge - indeed any knowledge - is not just a big list of facts. It's about building an ever-growing understanding about the world, etc.
That's a highly disputable point. It could just be a word play where you claim 'understanding' a fact is somehow different to 'knowing' a fact
I never claimed that. I talked about "understanding the world", not understanding each fact, ie that each known fact contributes to a body of knowledge, the various elemants of which enhance understanding of each other.
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the idea of investing in NZs future by ensuring our brightest graduates aren't mortgaged up to the eyeballs is abhorrent to the very people who railed against the American type user pays system when it is brought in.
I totally railed. Marched on Parliament. Chanted "Lockwood is a wanker". Etc.
I am not, however, mortgaged to the eyeballs, thanks to my lovely lovely endowment-backed grad experience. I do think NZ has settled on the best bang for its buck in this matter - spend our small country education dollar on a solid education for lots of people, then send those that want it away to get elite further education at elite places on, where possible, someone else's dime.
As for not coming back, it's not as simple as a lot of NZ-based commentators seem to think. For example: if you're off getting edumicated overseas, you have a much higher probability of getting mixed up with someone who is a) from overseas and b) also undergoing edumication. So you have the standard academic two-body problem (which the NZ market isn't big enough to absorb in general), plus two conflicting sets of national ties. No amount of loyalty or economic fiddling is going to fix that.
There are probably as many reasons for not coming back as there are people away, but a lot of them are similarly intractable. We can't move NZ closer to other countries to make collaboration easier. We can't, as richard points out, have US-type resources in NZ-proportioned amounts and still have them be any use.
Maybe some people want to increase the NZ population to US levels and more rigorously stratify opportunities into the elite and the crap. If that happened, though, why would anyone want to come back at all?
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My way out is to develop clean lean green industry to solve our problems in a high tech fashion while still preserving our environment and not overpopulating. I would certainly hope that you and your US partner would consider coming back under those circumstances. The alternative is a low tech solution where we slip off the bottom of the OECD or invite you and your partner back after you have made your fortune, to buy a beach and live happily ever after in your Mexico look alike gated community. We are a democracy - its up to the NZ public to decide which future we want - time is running out.
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I never claimed that. I talked about "understanding the world", not understanding each fact, ie that each known fact contributes to a body of knowledge, the various elemants of which enhance understanding of each other.
Sure, that's why I only suggested it was a word play, rather than insisting. But I think there's still some verbal sleight of hand going on - it seems your idea of "understanding the world" still involves amassing a body of facts. You're just making some stipulations about the facts, that they should interrelate. And I don't clearly see the difference. OK, the fact that the battle of Borodino was fought in 1812 doesn't have much to do with the English translation of the Treaty of Waitangi. But they're still snippets of knowledge that tell you something about some piece of the world at some time. As such isolated snippets amass, you often do get a general picture, and a very, very wide picture at that.
Obviously it is also good to go into greater depth in areas, just to experience what going into greater depth is all about, and to know more about that subject. The snippets of fact become less isolated, the picture more detailed. But there's even more learning of facts going on than before in this scenario. The memory is still being engaged heavily. But try doing it for all of history (something that I think it is well worth having a picture of). You can't, it's too big. That doesn't mean you should ignore it, it just means your knowledge will be sketchy and will boil down to isolated facts.
I admit there is a danger in thinking that knowing a particular fact in isolation means you know a lot about something. There's also the danger that the list of facts chosen can show only one perspective. You could cherry pick only native uprisings for all your knowledge of historical warfare and conclude that natives start all wars. But that's a fault of the choice of facts, not the learning of facts in general. Even with only that body of knowledge, you still know a lot about native uprisings, something quite worthwhile.
The other danger with facts is insidious. The knowledge of them is easily testable. Other kinds of mental powers, like reasoning skill, or originality, or fluency, are nowhere near so simple. The answer to this is simple though. Facts are not everything. But I dispute that being able to amass them is not an important skill, which should be constantly developed. For many subjects, like foreign languages, they are the most basic building blocks, without which absolutely no progress can be made.
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3410,
You've lost me. There's no sleight of hand. I just think you talk a lot more than you listen. Good day, sir.
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Good day, sir.
Yes it is. A good day to cop out. You want to say:
"Look it up when you need to" is an utter cop out. If the education system gets hijacked by that utterly misguided "theory" we're in serious trouble.
in response to a quote from me. Then you want to avoid describing your alternative theory in any depth at all. Yeah, I'm doing all the heavy lifting. Sorry for bothering to engage with your throwaway dismissal, and spoiling your afternoon. If you want a debate, reengage, ask about what you don't understand. If you just want to chuck your 2 cents in, claim to be misinterpreted, and withdraw happily convinced that you're a good listener, fine.
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3410,
Ben, it's just tough when even after clarification, you still misrepresent (I'm not saying deliberately so) what I'm saying. I've got a life outside this page, and can't afford to go back and forth all day. I thought I'd explained the point well enough, at least the second time.
Anyhow, I'm saying that if one thinks of knowledge as merely a list of accumulated facts, and therefore that remembering them is a waste of brain-space, a waste that could be avoided by not remembering them and just looking them up when neccesary, one is making a fundamental error in understanding what knowledge is. The "look it up when you need to" system may well work very well for many technical areas, clearly, but for the liberal arts? Not at all.
The fact is that lessons learned from one thing will almost certainly apply to others, and that for a rounded education general knowledge is essential. I fear for a system that doesn't recognise this.
After all, Googling doesn't help if you end up realising "I needed to know this 10 years ago".
P.S. sorry if I upset you.Good day ;)
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3410, no worries. I take your point about life outside, particularly on this lovely day. I have the leisure to work from home and I comment between other diversions or work, whilst sitting at my laptop in the sun (or lounging in the hammock with a cold drink considering points people have made). I tend to forget that others don't have the same leisure. Not upset, just giving you a stir, in response to a stir.
I do talk at length and put words into people's mouths. That's usually when there was an absence of words causing a lack of clarity. I was 'making suggestions' to help me understand what you were saying. It can be annoying I'm sure, but it's how I think. I tell the story I think you're saying, and you can interrupt and dispute something, clarify etc. I'm not trying to give you the shits or even to win the argument, it really is how I get clarity, through clash. I'm well aware a lot of people hate that way of arguing and can take it personally, but such people should steer clear of arguing with me. And it's something I usually only do on blogs or in formal debates, just as I will only physically fight in a formal context, with rules, refs, and all the martial arts honor blah blah. Shake hands after tap out, great fight mate, that kind of thing.
Apologies done. Back to topic.
Regarding the "look it up when you need to" school of thought, I'm not advocating this to the detriment of all other ways of doing it. I'm not advocating it at all. I'm merely commenting that that is the way the world is going. IS going. Not should be. Maybe adults are not seeing this as clearly as kids, who listen bored to a teacher lecturing, look it up and see the teacher is wrong anyway. Or at least that the question is not so simple. Or that there are millions of other ways of looking at the problem. Or that new solutions have come to light, or new evidence. Or a way better way of explaining it than the teacher did.
That's why I don't envy teachers the job of trying to impart 'general knowledge'. They risk just looking antiquated. Even what general knowledge is is changing every day.
General knowledge has its place, sure. But I'm suggesting that it's place is declining. Back in Aristotle's time one man could almost know almost everything about science that was known. Nowadays I couldn't possibly know everything even about my very narrow field of work, one tiny branch of computer programming. But I'm expected to if I'm to be any use to employers. Where does that leave time for me to go getting generally educated?
This is especially poignant to me because the subject I most wanted to pursue at Uni was Philosophy (in which I majored). But I realized very quickly that it was a totally impractical choice, and minored in Computer Science, a subject I enjoyed, but really saw as vocational. This meant I spent 5 years studying before hitting the workforce. In the same time my best mate, and a man of very similar mindset and talent, had worked his way through on-the-job training had earned heaps of money, slept soundly at night without a million assignments and exams hanging over his head, learned waaaay more about computing than I did from all that training, didn't have a great big student loan, and is now a millionaire.
I don't particularly regret it because he was always a man who knew what he wanted, I wasn't. I also valued general education, and still do. But I'm not actually that convinced I got the better deal. I think the jury is out on that one. Did having a wide general education not just make me into someone who thinks they know a lot more than they really do?
He's of the mind of "if I wanted to know I'd look it up". Which he does all the time. And as a result, he knows a great deal about a lot of stuff. It's not 'General'. He couldn't give a flying fuck about Ancient Rome. But on modern issues which I desperately try to link to knowledge of the classics or other even quite recent history, his opinions are usually no more or less well informed than mine.
Even the 'tools of thought' are changing. Most days now when I'm looking for answers to questions, some forum or blog somewhere has everything I need. Not just the answer, but discussion about why it was the wrong question. This was not the case only 10 years ago. In only a few years Wikipedia has become the #1 result for all searchs on general questions. That from freely given anonymous contributions. And yet the academic system seems deeply hostile to it, because they catch it out on some minor point of fact in some highly specialized area. But I've learned a huge array of general things from pottering around on there, and most kids I know have too. This is not bad, this is bloody brilliant.
I guess what I'm saying is that as time passes the old adage "jack of all trades, master of none" seems to become more and more true. There is nothing at all wrong with becoming a master of a narrow domain. It's probably the best way to organize society, the most efficient at least. The cost is that people become less widely educated. It's a totally inevitable process. There are some things that are lamentable about it, sure, but any particular child is not responsible for that, and doesn't see why they should care.
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Well looky-looky. I've buggered off for a few days traveling about and having fun and I come back to this; a genuine, respectful and intelligent debate. I frick'n love this blog Russell. There's no other space I'm aware of where a debate of this quality and dynamic could occur. Fair play to you sir and to each any every contributor.
Hey, apropos nothing in particular I'm well chuffed my mate Grant Robertson's now odds on to get the chance to represent Welly Central.
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Our daughter attends Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti school
in Christchurch and went to Discovery primary before that.
I'm very much hoping to get my son to go to Unlimited year after next. He wants to go to Riccarton like all his friends, but I look at what Unlimited offers in comparison with a traditional high school and I get all excited.The above is way back on page 2. But I’d like to expand for the record on what can happen in a school where there is a pervasive sense of enterprise and innovation.
I think one of the greatest successes of these two schools is the level of socialisation that is achieved. Some of it is hard to imagine when you think of your own school days.
Both schools are in Christchurch’s CBD. They use the wider community resources such as libraries, swimmimng pools, parks etc. Things may have changed as they are constantly adapting, but while our daughter was at the primary Discovery school the older children were allowed to move around the city in small groups (I think it had to be 3 or more) unsupervised. A student earned a ‘trust licence’ to be part of this scheme. Safety checks and balances are in place, e.g. each group had a cell phone and had to txt in within a certain time period when they had reached their destination. So you would see primary aged children on the central city streets going about their business in the same unruffled way as the adult shoppers and office workers. It’s rather wonderful to behold.
At the secondary level, form classes called ‘home bases’ are vertically integrated by age so all age groups intermingle. Because of the focus on the individual learner’s goals rather than the need’s of the organisation as a whole it breeds independence and self sufficiency. Overall I’d call it maturity, so that especially amongst the students who have been in the system since they were young, there is little evidence of what we think of as negative or typical teenage behaviour.
For example: last year our daughter was in the local Shakespeare competition. The Unlimited School group prepared and presented their piece without any noticeable teacher input (I think it was there, just not visible), then afterwards sat down in the front row and supported the following schools’ presentations.
Other school’s had teachers organising their students through the performances and as soon as they had finished and were out of the limelight they would settle as groups back in the audience, lose interest in proceedings and start txting friends and generally interacting with each other loudly and rather rudely from the point of view of those still to present. This just as an example I observed as a parent, although obviously not an unbiased one.
I haven’t touched on the educational successes of this form of education but happy to do so if anybody’s interested.
But just to say again this experimental education is being driven by entrepreneurs (or any other name you want to give people who innovate and make things happen), who originate from the business community and the ‘system’ appears to tolerate it. Even ERO seems to be able to get it’s head around it although I understand not without difficulty.
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Well looky-looky. I've buggered off for a few days traveling about and having fun and I come back to this; a genuine, respectful and intelligent debate. I frick'n love this blog Russell. There's no other space I'm aware of where a debate of this quality and dynamic could occur. Fair play to you sir and to each any every contributor.
Thanks! I'm struck down with flu today, and thus not much up for debating ...
Hey, apropos nothing in particular I'm well chuffed my mate Grant Robertson's now odds on to get the chance to represent Welly Central.
He's a cert now, surely. I'm really pleased for him. Do his guest blogs here on important matters of cricket and rugby qualify him as the first Public Address candidate for Parliament?
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Hey, apropos nothing in particular I'm well chuffed my mate Grant Robertson's now odds on to get the chance to represent Welly Central.
The ODT mingled a thing on DBP's competition for South Dunedin with a bit about him in Wgtn Central.
Presumably on the basis that anyone who lived in Dunedin over a decade ago, is still front page news. Love the Oddity.
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I don't particularly regret it because he was always a man who knew what he wanted, I wasn't. I also valued general education, and still do. But I'm not actually that convinced I got the better deal. I think the jury is out on that one. Did having a wide general education not just make me into someone who thinks they know a lot more than they really do?
I often think that too. While I loved every minute of my broad based education I don't know how much practical use it has been. I am good at teaching myself things but I still have this gigantic student loan hanging over my head while I play catch up.
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