The last time I was heard from here, I dissected the social-kid subculture as if I was an anthropologist narrating a training film. Cold or weird this might have seemed, but I hoped to gain a distance from a kind of teenage lifestyle which has profoundly affected anyone over the age of 30 or so. What today’s young face, I have no direct idea.

Part of the reason for making the familiar strange is to gain an outsider’s perspective on what mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. A more direct answer hit me this morning as I was plowing through some homeschooling chores. I was mis-reading slightly some of the material I had to master and was wondering why, until I bumped into some memory associations that were confusing my intake slightly. Then the answer hit me:

The brain habit which was impeding my intake of that new knowledge was uncannily similar to the memory-association trick recommended by cramming guides. What made this spooky was that such associational mind-tricks were making my chore harder, not easier, to accomplish.

In a way, it was lucky I was using French for this. I have old report cards which show me getting low A’s in the subject in junior high and in the first two grades of high school, but real functional literacy has eluded me until recently. In otherwords: I scribbled mostly right answers onto test sheets and got a good number in return, but I never really learned the subject. Part of what was making the study of it hard now was the un-learning of my previous “good study habits” picked up in those classes.

I’m sure you can see the relevance even if you don’t hail from a land where bilingualism is official and knowledge of two languages is officially pushed. Just substitute knowledge of English for the above.

If you learned English through the use of associational-memorizing techniques, then chances are that you’re clumsy in the language in a way similar to my until-recent clumsiness in French. If so, I have some sad news for you: unlearning those bad habits and replacing them with a correct learning technique is going to be dog- tiring after two or three hours of study. The only way to do it is to treat what you previously thought of as virtue as vice: you have to treat the old associations as a distraction that has to be blocked from your head, not as an aid.

If this gives you a headache just reading this, then you have my empathy. I found out the hard way myself.

I can commiserate with you in two ways, to be honest. Not only does the chore of further learning become more of a hassle because of the need to unlearn the bad habits previously urged upon you, but also you’ll soon make a lot more mistakes than you’re used to because all your good practice is bound up with your bad habits. Once you shuck off the charm, you also shuck off a lot of your technique, too. That makes the re- learning process harder – something akin to the break-and-repair-of-habit process need to go from hunt-and-peck typing to touch typing.

If a normal student pursuing the incentives set forth in front of him or her in a diligent way winds up with a kind of Jell-o mold of memorized facts in their head, but also ends up lacking the ability to think clearly with what the school system left them, there’s obviously something wrong. Which leads to this two-part question:

1. How did the school system get this way?
2. Why was this not caught a long time ago?

The above are two questions with one answer: school turned into charm school in large part because learning was made the secondary priority, and being trained to be a “social winner” became tops.

What’s the primal attribute of a social winner? Never having to back down, right? The born winner never makes a mistake.

Look at how a system which places skull sweat on the back burner reinforces the above. The use of the associational technique means that whatever you had in your head previous to what you’re trying to learn now was right for you; you were perfect as you were. (Otherwise, you’d have to indulge in a little squelching.) Associating a song, movie scene, video, teacher’s cooing, etc. with whatever you have to study now means that the essential perfection of “You” never has to be breached; all you have to do is pile the latest sense experience (the lesson you’re staring at) onto what you enjoyed earlier.

This kind of education does produce a social winner, as they never have any reason to be embarrassed while at school, provided it’s understood that the grading system is somewhat unfair. It also produces an adamantinely self- absorbed rock-head. This very much is a social winner when their charm fails to carry. (I’m sure you remember at least one such winner which you were unimpressed with.)

It’s as if the students of the last several decades were taught to hoard their mistakes.

I’ve already criticized the modern school system from a somewhat different angle, and I wish I could stop here with a happy ending that doesn’t involve turning away from the dead-end sign and going down another street, but my own dabbling in a sort of informal adult retraining have left me with no answer except “hit the grindstone.” The only hope above seems to be reserved for the young ‘uns – once the education system is straightened out for them.