[arjie]

This writing an essay / writing a paper obsession doesn't make any sense to me. All American kids are always "writing a paper" on something. I never wrote a paper on anything of significance. If this constant writing of papers had a great effect, you'd expect me to perform at the 50th percentile or lower of people. But my income has always been much higher than that, I'd say I write more blog posts than the 50th percentile (the quality of which might suffer from the lack of paper-writing, one might claim), and I'd rate my life at much higher than the 50th percentile.

My parents took a different tack, and insisted that I spend my time reading, playing, or doing something. I spent very little time on homework because my parents negotiated this with the school. My school scored us entirely on exams, which I performed well on - just as I did well on the GRE to come here.

By the pedagogical standards of America, this must mean that I was atrociously educated. Why then am I happy and successful here? I suspect it is because paper-writing is a waste of time. I suspect that almost all education comes from solving the unknown related to the known (exercises), repeating the known (revision), and introduction of model-breaking notions (for which I don't have a short word). Even literary criticism would probably benefit from this structure.

This, along with the religion of note-taking[0], has made me suspect that US pedagogy is not particularly well-informed. The higher-education system is obviously superlative, but the teaching of children seems pretty haphazardly determined.

0: I've always hated note-taking. I'm glad to have found at least some others on HN like me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640454