[Leoluc]

" Study well in advance. Did I mention this already? Maybe I should stress it again. The brain really needs time to absorb material. Things that looked hard become easier with time. You want to alocate ~3 days for midterms, ~6 days for exams. "

Are you kidding? Don't expect to pass the calculus 3 exam I took as a Physics Engineer at Politecnico di Milano with less that one month (keep in mind: bare minimum) of studying ahead of the exam (lectures not included): If you could actually get good grades with what Andrej said, I totally chose the wrong university.

[tim333]

In my physics group in Cambridge there was one student who was way better than the rest of us at physics although only normally bright at stuff outside of physics and the thing that was different about her was her dad was a physics prof and she was probably exposed to the advanced ideas a kid. I think in the same way kids pick up languages more easily than adults they may pick up other intellectual stuff.

[bluGill]

It matters what topics are taught in elementary school, and how they are taught. We as society need to figure out what is going to be important in 40 years (when current kids are 45-50 years old) and ensure those things are started so they slowly have time to get the concepts.

I can be reasonably confident that logical thinking will be important, which you can get from Math (philosophy also has logic - is that useful too? My background is math so I don't know about that side). I'm sure other parts of math will be useful but not what. The BASIC I learned in school was worthless (it would have been useful as an introduction if my teachers didn't teach/test so many "facts" that were wrong - I was too shy to tell them that back then and now I'm mature enough to know I'd get in trouble without changing anything so there was no point)