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What is the best way to learn?
Usually by screwing up in a spectacular fashion. Search your memories (Luke) and I bet you can find a lesson painfully learned, but painfully learned well in your past.
Fast forward to school and the increasing focus on tests and testing. Everyone wants to do well on the tests, but how does photocopying facts improve your critical thinking? It doesn’t. Lawrence Davidson in Scientific American comments on the lack of critical thinking skills being taught in school:
“Informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardized tests. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions, about their own medical treatment, say, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust informal learning system that eschews grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends.”
So, you want people to who can think, you need to take them to environments where it is okay to ask questions and more importantly, it is okay to fail, because learning to constructively fail is one of the cornerstones of rational inquiry.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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