[dylukes]

I disagree. We associate schooling with authority. Learning may or may not co-occur with schooling depending on circumstances.

There is only a focus on "learning" until maybe 5th grade. What you do in school after that isn't making sure you learn so much as making sure you know a base set of things.

Thereafter there tend to be two types of successful students: the ones that chase A-grades ("good students"), and the ones who settle for somewhere around or just above B-grades but explore the material more freely. The key distinctions between those groups have been, in my experience, respect for authority and self discipline.

Later in life they seem to correlate with two common tropes: the person who is not superficially brilliant but can apply themselves to something for long periods of time and "just get it done", and something akin to the hacker trope: clearly intelligent, capriciously disorganize, but utterly omnivorous for any and all interesting skills and knowledge.

[justanothernoob]

I'm curious- do you mean to say those two tropes are in respective order to the "good students" and the "okay students"?