sotonye.substack.com
SS: I make a case for drastically cutting back on education. I argue that education doesn’t achieve its desired goals. The material is irrelevant and students forget much of the material. Most information taught in schools is quickly accessible with a smartphone. Education might be warranted if it boosted cognitive ability but it appears to be increasing IQ scores rather than actual ability to think.
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They're brilliant resources I won't disagree. But I don't think Wikipedia is good enough to do away with the need to memorise historical facts to the point where someone relying solely on it won't be severely limited.
If someone is misrepresenting history to you, you won't become aware that something is wrong in the first place unless you've got a stock of historical knowledge already built up in your mind (Wikipedia is a decent way to do this, but we're back to memorising information here).
Now you can double check everything you hear on Wikipedia, but even that labour intensive act can't help you find analogous information which won't be considered relevant enough to be included in the same Wikipedia page, but which may be very relevant to the discussion at hand.
This is a false dilemma. You can use Wikipedia to avoid memorizing certain facts, like the year WWII started, and other stuff you happen to remember.
There's many historical fact that I do remember, but I remember because I keep talking about them, and I keep looking them up. I'm not memorizing them, I just happen to remember them.
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