Almost none of the students in any major showed a consistent understanding of how to apply methods of evaluating truth they had learned in their own discipline to other areas.

The problem nowadays is that many students are without skills, and after graduation, they will begin to go all around the streets looking for white-collar jobs. They must learn skills so that when they graduate, they will be able to open up their own businesses and become employers of labour.

Mostly, though, students get what economist Bryan Caplan called narrow vocational training for jobs few of them will ever have. Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major — a trend that includes math and science majors — after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline. One good tool is rarely enough in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world. As the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said when he described analyzing the world in an age of technological and social change, “No tool is omnicompetent.” •

Almost never do they realize that they, too, 'know things' they have learned in their relations with the world.

No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know.

Generally speaking, people useless at everything else become academics

We prepare our students for jobs and careers, but we don't teach them to think as individuals about what kind of world they would create.

Education doesn’t prepare you for the real world.

If graduates do not get relevant experience in their field of study after graduation, they will forget what they learned and, in a few years, their knowledge may be completely lost,

In that way, the students had something in common with Luria’s remote villagers — even the science majors were typically unable to generalize research methods from their own field to other fields. Flynn’s conclusion: “There is no sign that any department attempts to develop [anything] other than narrow critical competence.

One of the most critical skills in life—and yet never taught in school—is choosing where to direct your attention.

After graduation, the valedictorian will often get lapped by “average” people who better invest their time.

Success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don't know how to learn.

They know how to take tests and get A’s but they don’t know how to do this — yet. They forget the yet.

Some people have no idea what they're doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.