I came to the US for college from Asia to study physics (and mathematics). I actually came to study astronomy because I found it fascinating but didn't really like physics or math. My first physics encounter in college here transformed my life. There was no memorization. Instead, we had short quizzes in each class (first 5 min), weekly individual assignments, weekly group assignments (two students each), four "midterms" where one could get densely written "cheat-sheets" as well as weekly physics lab that often went on far beyond the time slot.
In high school, physics was mostly based on memorization. There were a few problems but all based on some patterns. None made you think extremely hard.
I also found that many American students (who were extremely good in my experience) seemed to have a much better practical sense.
One of the key steps in the development of a physicist is the transition from solving textbook problems to creating your own problems. In essence, the skill one learns in graduate school is defining/crafting problems that are solvable and interesting. The primordial phase starts in college as one is solving many problems. Initially, the new problems are straightforward extensions of existing ones (e.g. add an air resistance term for parabolic motion). Eventually, one (hopefully) develops good taste and essentially is doing research.
Interestingly, I also find very different attitudes to physics in the west (at least in the US) and other parts of the world. In US universities, physics is still seen in glowing terms. In many other places, physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering. Young people (well, all people) are impressionable and this subtle bias affects what kind of students end up studying the subject.
> physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering
Wdym "couldn't do"? Nobody here is studying Physics for the job opportunities but I'd say everybody who makes it past semester 4 genuinely loves Physics otherwise they'd be studying something easier.
> physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering
This reminded me of something from my alma mater.
At my (Canadian) university, there was a running joke that engineering was what you studied if you couldn't get into computer science. In fact, the Engineering and Computer Science faculties would semi-frequently prank each other because they were next to each other, I guess. Each faculty focuses on different things, of course, but the "running joke" was that engineering courses were just easier, not as rigorous, and therefore getting in engineering was seen as easier (and so they had more time to do such elaborate pranks).
Again, I don't think this had any truth to it, but it was just one part of a fun tradition the university had.
Also, this was a long time ago. I'm not sure what the current state of this is now or if it even still exists.
I was just thinking about this earlier today when washing my hands in the sink.
When you first turn on the hot water tap in most homes, the water that comes out is cold. After some period of time, hotter water starts to come out. My mom used to describe this as "waiting for the water to warm up".
For decades, I didn't consider the mechanism behind this. That is that there is water in the pipes between the home water heater and the tap. That water can't retain its heat without any further heat input, and gradually loses heat and comes into near-equilibrium with the temperature of the rest of the house. The hot water inside the water heater tank, on the other hand, is constantly being reheated as necessary by a heating element.
When you turn on the tap, after not having used it for some time, you're waiting for cold water from the pipes to be flushed out through the tap and be replaced with freshly heated water from the tank. Once this happens, the water coming out of the tap will be hot because it's been heated recently enough.
I probably didn't realize this until I was about 30 years old, and then I thought of Feynman's anecdote of his students not connecting their theoretical knowledge to understand the mechanism of a real physical situation. It seems I wasn't curious enough as a child to apply my own knowledge to the mechanism of the hot water tap!
One of the best ways to learn to think Scientifically i.e. in terms of Physics/Chemistry/Mathematics/Biology is to start with the classic Soviet era books by Yakov Perelman - https://mirtitles.org/?s=yakov+perelman
Specifically; start with the 2-vol Physics for Entertainment (the breadth of coverage is really good) followed by Mathematics can be Fun, Algebra can be Fun etc.
Note: Do not be misled by the words "Entertainment"/"Fun" etc. in the title. As is typical of Soviet era books these are serious works with precise, succinct and focused topics quite unlike most current "pop science" books.
I don't think I have anything in my house (other than an ice cube tray?) that's meant to deliberately make cold water colder than the ambient temperature of the house! Maybe some people do, though, especially in hotter parts of the world.
Weirdly enough, this is not the case in the former Soviet Union. Because there's always a reverse pipe ("obratka") that has hot water constantly circulate and the only part that cools down is the small portion of pipe between "obratka" connection and the faucet, so "heating up" takes a second tops.
It's puzzling why no one in the civilised world adopted this idea :/
Many things are told about emigres being constantly homesick etc., and i believe this is largely bullshit, but this is the only thing i really miss from my Soviet past.
This idea comes for free if you're also using hot water in radiators as a way to heat your home at the same time. Which the Soviets did. And in the Soviet era, they also were generally heating that water at the district level, then circulating it to all of the homes. This can only be workable if you're pumping the water continuously. So the cost of the pumping is just part of the overall system.
Places where this was built up, still generally use it today.
In the USA, nobody ever built the district wide heaters. Nor would they be viable in the suburbs that many of us live in. We generally use central air instead of radiators to heat our houses. And the result is that constantly circulating hot water is significantly more expensive for us.
the places i lived in germany and china did have district wide heaters, but only for the water that circulated the heaters, not the water that came out of the tap. i believe the reason being that tap water needs to be potable (at least in germany, in china you still need to at least boil the tap water), whereas water for heating doesn't. you don't actually want your tap water go through the heating system. fun story: in china i once managed to open the heating pipe. the water that came out of that was black. probably rust and other stuff from the pipes. i wonder how the soviets managed to keep the water clean.
I've seen this in a few places, but it's rare because of all the energy (heat loss and energy required to drive the circulation) that gets used up when the water is recirculating but nobody is using it--which is most of the time.
I was recently in Iceland, and since a lot of heat is geothermal, recirc would probably make sense, but I can't remember having it. Maybe it's the pumping cost? Although natural convection driven by the difference in density between hot and cold water might make up for at least part of that.
It’s a thing in the US too, but not common. I always understood them to be expensive to use, as you always have a pump running and hot water cooling down and needing reheating.
My house originally had a recirculating pump for the hot water but it burned out. Somehow though, it still (mostly) worked and had instant _warm_ water.
I think it was through natural convection/circulation - the hot water expanded in the tank and pushed it through the recirculating loop?
So maybe there's a good-enough solution that doesn't require a pump, just a return loop.
Now I have an on-demand water heater with a built-in recirculating pump, so it's instantly hot :)
Yes, in the Soviet Union, hot water was a byproduct of production of electricity - using combined heat and power, it was a waste heat. And it used lots of electricity to make weapons to advance dictatorship of proletariat, so there was plenty of free heat, too.
Hot water recirculation is a thing I have heard of done in the United States. I don't know how common it is, but a simple Home Depot search brought up a bunch of results for options.
For those interested in a kind of retrospective about 40 years after Feynman's speech, read "Physics in Latin America Comes of Age" (published in 2000) by José Luis Morán‐López:
> At the end of the 20th century, a large “science gap” still exists between Latin America and the developed countries of the North.
> The description is not intended to be a complete analysis, but may give a sense of the significant development that has occurred in the past half century and of what might be needed to make the 21st century a flourishing epoch for science in Latin America .
> The most developed group includes Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, which have, respectively, about 3000, 2200, and 2000 PhDs involved in physics research.
Feynman, of course, always had confidence in the ability of the people of Latin America to do good physics. In fact his mentor Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico and emigrated to the US to study at MIT. Emigration to the US or Europe is typical of successful physicists from Latin America, including Juan Maldacena, a theorist from Argentina who discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence and has been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2001.
Anecdotally, I think Europe has more opportunities these days. My friend Gustavo, a high energy theorist from Brazil, got his PhD in the US but now works at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics (OKC) in Stockholm.
Its crazy he thinks that learning physics is the solution:
I believe that in the improvement of the technical ability, thus the productivity, of the people of Latin America lies the source of real economic advancement.
and not the fact that the US has spent 150+ years destabilizing that part of the world.
Lots of places have been unstable for many years though. China, most of Europe, Russia, India, Korea. Some have shrugged that off others haven't, so it does not seem to have much predictive power.
I'd say the extent and duration of the disruption between Latin America and the counties you mentioned are quite different.
LATAM started from the get go being awfully disrupted from the 1500s and in catastrophic ways. Also, we don't call any of those areas Latin X. It shows how much impact the conquerors had that it even defines how we can the region to this day.
> I'd say the extent and duration of the disruption between Latin America and the counties you mentioned are quite different.
I don't think it is. Europe was full of wars, civil wars, conquest, occupation, and suppression and destabilization of competing nations for all that time, for example.
If you tried to back up your assumption with figures or with specific historical facts, you would see that it is wrong. It's not just about the fact that there was instability somewhere at some point, but about how it is being perpetuated. The countries you list above are very diverse. But what they all have in common, and what distinguishes them from countries in Latin America, is that there is a lot of ocean between them and the US. Admittedly, this also applies to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. But if we examine the question of what distinguishes these countries from the ones you list, it brings us back to the connection that was already pointed out above. I live in Germany and have had access to toothpaste my whole life. People my age in Cuba can still remember very well what it was like to have to do without toothpaste. Now ask your favorite LLM who temporarily prevented toothpaste from being imported into Cuba.
I can find nothing to support the claim that Cuba allegedly has labor camps for children. As far as I can see, this is an unsubstantiated propaganda claim. It is well known that the US is currently having ICE round up people off the streets and imprison them throughout the country. There is evidence that five-year-old children are being detained separately from their parents. The ability of people to apply double standards is always astonishing.
Attacking a country's people because the government is a dictatorship makes no sense. Especially when we were just fine with the brutal dictatorship that preceded the one we hate, because that one was capital-friendly and didn't try to give white man's money to brown people.
China's external turmoil can be boxed within the 1800s and I don't think it included: 80+% of casualties, forced religious conversion, forced language conversion, wholesale destruction of books and culture, etc.
And every place actively destabilized by an empire is definitely unstable.
The amount of coups directly planned and executed or supported by the US military/intelligence/lobbying apparatus in south America and the rest of the world is incredible.
And then the presidents have the audacity to say that it is the right and responsibility of the locals to govern (as said by biden on Afghanistan exit).
It truly has been the most exploitative empire ever. I hope the Chinese do better. We'll find out.
You're replying in good faith to someone who ignored the main point of GP (an empire actively disrupting a region) and just said "every place has been unstable" (without even taking century-level timescales into consideration).
Doesn't sound very scientific or predictive. Is also ignorant of history. Ottoman empire lasted many centuries. So did Roman empire. Which crushed and oppressed and destabilized a lot of Europe. China famously had their "century of humiliation" which was "century-level timescale" of "empire actively disrupting a region".
When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.
But it sure feels nice to blame your enemies instead, doesn't it? Let's all pat each other on the back that we're the victims, and only if... and leave it at that.
> When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.
Way to show you really, really don't understand the politics of Latin America and who funds the various interests that run the show.
How could you possibly think those are the only LATAM countries the US has interfered with? We have been intimately involved in every government and every election in the Caribbean, Central, and South America for generations. Just this year there has been interference in Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina, etc.
It's been many decades since I read it, but there was some mention of this in Feynman's first autobiography (Surely You're Joking). He described learning about the problem and investigating the root cause, which is also described in this speech. (The root cause was a focus on the memorization of scattered facts vs. making students understand the subject matter.)
Why do we expect school or university to teach „understanding”.
It is like teaching snowboarding. You can get the pointers but students have to actually do the snowboarding - there is no shortcut.
The same with knowledge and understanding, you can organize material so they don’t end up in unproductive rabbit holes - but they have to work out their understanding on their own.
Classroom setting is also not really good one unless you have small groups on the same level - larger group and you are just pulling slow ones up and fast ones are getting bored.
As someone teaching in higher education, I’d say that you can certainly incentivize the students to learn "understanding", although I agree that a lot is up to the student.
Some basic examples:
- Don’t give test and exam questions that are too similar to examples and problems in the text book and homework. Then they’ll know that learning to generalize is a better pay-off than memorizing the textbook problems, and may choose to change their strategy when studying for exams.
- Reduce the amount of curriculum. By studying in depth instead of in breadth, you have time to focus on how things really work instead of just rushing through material on a surface level, and in my experience that improves understanding more. (But I know many disagree with me on this one.)
- Focus on problem solving as part of the lectures (student-active learning). I’m not an extremist, like some advocating that we shouldn’t lecture at all, but the pedagogical literature is pretty clear that small doses of lectures interspersed with problem solving enhances understanding.
- Try to teach intuition and conceptual models, not just facts. For example, as a student, I really struggled understanding eigenvalues and eigenvectors because our linear algebra textbook defined it by Αv = λv but made no attempt at explaining what it means intuitively and geometrically. Similarly, integration by parts has a simple and beautiful geometric interpretation that makes it obvious why this is correct, but we were only taught the opaque symbolic version in my calculus classes. When I teach myself, I try to lean on such visualizations and intuitive pictures as much as possible, as I think that really enhances «understanding»; not necessarily being able to cough up a solution to a problem you’ve seen before as fast as possible, but being able to generalize that knowledge to problems you haven’t seen before.
But who knows, maybe I’m just biased by how I myself perceive the world. I know there are some people who for example eschew geometric pictures entirely and still do very well. My experience is that most students seem to appreciate the things listed above though.
Students need to take responsibility for themselves and Teachers need to point them in the right direction and help/steer as needed.
A Chinese Martial Arts saying which i keep in mind goes;
To show one the right direction and the right path, oral instructions from a Master are necessary, but mastery of the subject only comes from one's own incessant self-cultivation.
A good authoritative book can be the stand-in for a Master in which case there is more discipline and effort required of the Student.
These days different types of books/videos focusing on different aspects of the same subject are so easily available/affordable that the Teacher/Student can both work together and focus on understanding. A handful of real-world problems modeled and worked through beats pages of mere symbol manipulation. We need to start stressing quality over quantity i.e. deliberate effort via deliberate practice in the right way.
The Feynman essay here is all about the teachers NOT pointing the students toward understanding.
And it is all about the students being disciplined and putting in effort, but toward rote memorization rather then understanding, because that is what teachers told them to do.
I was agreeing/elaborating on "setopt's" comment (which lists specific approaches) on how to solve the problem detailed in the essay.
I had submitted the original article for discussion since the observations seem to apply to how Physics/Science has been taught/studied in most countries and not just Latin America.
I think you’re right and especially in regards to abstract concepts like linear algebra I don’t know anyone serious about learning who didn’t struggle with what turned out to be relatively simple things when viewed intuitively.
The problem as I see it
1. Professors themselves don’t understand it and are regurgitating pedagogy from books.
2. The material load is so high for your average bachelors degree you’d spend 8 years in school otherwise. I would hazard to say this is necessary and sufficient but schools wouldn’t get funding and our job oriented society would have it so then only the wealthiest could get education (like it was for centuries).
3. Tests are a benchmark and very expensive. You can consider a class’ total value to be loaded on the final exam. I recently wanted to go back to school casually. One of the cheapest universities available wanted 2600 dollars for a partial differential equations course. If I fail the course I lose 2600 dollars since I would need to retake it to proceed to higher mathematics. This alone does not allow a person time to explore - and that’s just one class!
4. Schools are simply a money laundering vehicle that takes money from students and moves it into administrator pockets. Education costs have skyrocketed yet education and pedagogy remains the same. This is money laundering by any other name.
- understanding leads intuition. There’s very little of either, anywhere.
> Why do we expect school or university to teach „understanding”.
Having been taught in different systems that emphasize understanding vs memorization, I'd have to disagree. The teachers and the overall academic system can encourage, test for, and reward rote memorization. Or it can encourage, test for, and reward problem-solving, critical thinking, and understanding.
Everything from the way teachers lecture, to assigned reading, to assignments, to tests will influence how students think and what they optimize for. There will always be exceptions who forge their own path, but most students like most people just go with the flow.
Students study to pass exams, teachers teach to enable students to pass exams. If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for.
> If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for
My favorite college class was compilers.
The whole semester you worked on a compiler for a simplified Pascal. Each homework added a feature.
The final exam was 4 hours. Open textbook, open internet. No chat with classmates. You got a description of 3 features to add to your compiler. Grade is number of tests passed.
~ 40% bookwork. Rote learned facts
~ 30% standard questions. Do in an exam hall standard variants of what was done in class/homework/tutorials.
~ 30% New applications and logical extensions.
I don't know how well they achieved that split, I suspect it was mostly aspirational. Seemed like a reasonable ideal though!
I agree with your both of your observations; And I also think what's missing is the acknowledgement that connects the two. Students come with the expectation of "chew it for me" and schools have the expectation of "I'm going to throw the material at you, you can & will handle it yourself".
But it doesn't need to be that hopeless. Learning is a skill and schools can help each individual find the ways working best for them. Starting by not packing gazillion number of people in a class.
> The same with knowledge and understanding, you can organize material so they don’t end up in unproductive rabbit holes - but they have to work out their understanding on their own.
As a university level educator I am pretty confident most universities worth their salt do in fact teach you by "actually doing the snowboarding" to stay with your analogy.
But it is also true that (1) not all universities (or all departments, or all professors) are worth their salt and (2) snowboarding may not be a skill that is highly sought after in the society you live in.
Gladly most academic skillsets are highly transferable if the student isn't totally dull.
At the same time Universities worth their salt also get students that are most likely going to be more self staring. Likely good professors will fail students that need more hand holding because it will be waste of their time.
So there is no magic trick to scale up. Besides getting more people to understand school/university is not going to do hand holding. You will get tools to learn how to learn and curated resources all the other things depend on you.
This speech by Feynman was based on his experiences teaching Physics in Brazil in the 1950s (details mentioned in the "Surely You're Joking" book). "tomhow" has posted the link to a previous HN discussion specifically w.r.t. the Brazil experience.
However, this speech generalizes and posits that the problem is not specific to Latin America but to most countries (including so-called developed ones) in the teaching of Physics or any other Science.
Hence the opening para;
The problem of teaching physics in Latin America is only part of the wider problem of teaching physics anywhere. In fact, it is part of the problem of teaching anything anywhere – a problem for which there is no known satisfactory solution.
I think this is highly pertinent today given the use of AI/LLM models for extracting "correct answers" to all of settled (mostly) Science. At least with a textbook you had to expend some thought/effort; with AI tools even that is removed and you literally need know/understand even less than before.
So where does that leave Science Education? How do we reform the Education System?
Speaking from Uruguay, this characterization feels outdated. Our public universities emphasize problem-solving, experimentation, and strong theoretical foundations, and they produce graduates who work globally in engineering, physics, and software.
Programs like Plan Ceibal normalized hands-on computing early on, and there’s a healthy connection between academia, industry, and research institutes. Brain drain exists everywhere, but it’s no longer accurate to describe countries like Uruguay as stuck in rote learning or disconnected from real-world application. Latin America isn’t monolithic, and some of these critiques reflect a 1960s snapshot more than today’s reality.
Naturally it feels outdated as it was a speech from 62 years ago. Multiple generations of science education and teaching paradigms have come and gone since then.
One issue he mentioned is still true today in Brazil's universities: while in theory you can ask to transfer from one course to another, in practice you have to drop out of your current school and take the entrance exam for the other one. And then you waste a lot of time trying to get your grades for the courses you have already taken recognized as equivalent so you don't have to start from scratch.
For him to move from math to electrical engineering to physics in Brazil would mean going through this twice. This might make him take some 7 or 8 years to graduate.
I guess this inflexibility makes things easier for the administrators. They know they will have 25 students in the statistics class in 2028 and so know how many teachers to hire to handle that.
This resonated with my own experience: exams rewarded recall, not understanding. I only really “earned physics when I started building things and breaking them. Curious how others here learned to move from memorization to intuition.
Caltech tests were not based on memorization, as they were "open book open note". You had to reason your way to a solution.
But I do agree that real world physics, like designing an actual electronic circuit, have behaviors that are not modeled by the usual mathematical models. For example, resistors vary widely from their marked resistance. And I was told, when building digital circuits, to make sure it worked with chips faster than the spec, as replacement chips are always faster, never slower.
> For example, resistors vary widely from their marked resistance
Resistors are sometimes marked with their variance band (+/-1%, for instance) to account for this.
Engineers take these expected variances into account when designing circuits. If your design is sensitive to a 3% variance in resistor value, you'd better not be specifying gold-banded +/-5% lots.
Yes, I know. I also don't know any engineer who bothered doing it (yes, I'm sure some do in critical circuits).
Capacitors also vary, and degrade over time. Semiconductors also have variances and non-linear hard-to-model behaviors. Behaviors change with heat. Few people worry about it.
Vacuum tubes are known for their wacky behaviors, which are treasured by people who make guitar amplifiers. The Melotron is well known for being highly sensitive to humidity.
Fundamentally, physics teaches one how to hack nature ... Math teaches one how to hack logic ... two useful skills to have an enjoyable life journey :-).
This problem is not limited to Latin America or physics alone - it also affects regions such as Africa. For example, many students at universities in Senegal, do not find employment after graduating. Some drop out earlier once they realize their prospects are slim, while others try their luck in Western countries.
> This, along with the fact that salaries are absurdly low, shows a lack of interest by the Brazilian government, people, and industry, in the development of science in this country.
No, it shows that the country is poor - the desire to pay higher salaries was always there, but it's hard. People in rich countries think money grows on trees because for them, it kind of does.
And this is why development advice from "intellectuals" in rich countries is worthless.
As a Brazilian, I believe the problem is that we have a culture of "gratitude" towards the government. We quietly and silently thank God that we received whatever benefit and pray that they will keep giving us that. But a tiny bit of economical education, and an open eye to the frequent corruption scandals teaches one that there is more than enough money for a decent salary for academic workers.
I read an interesting article once that mentioned, the worst thing that can happen to your country is that it sits on a large supply of rare resources.
You'd think it would make you rich; instead it makes you miners, and ripe for invasion.
The Resource Curse. It’s not a given, but it’s a dangerous pitfall that must be avoided. England had coal. Norway has oil. If you don’t have strong institutions, someone will take control of it, like modern Russia for instance.
The problem of teaching physics in Latin America is only part of the wider problem of teaching physics anywhere. In fact, it is part of the problem of teaching anything anywhere – a problem for which there is no known satisfactory solution.
Even though Feynman wrote this based on his experience in Latin America, i think this is true of many (most?) countries even today.
There is no "True Education" anymore, only the appearance of one with the sole aim of churning out a "Productive Worker"(for a certain definition of the term) for a Economy; no understanding required.
It is interesting to interpret how the above is still applicable in the current technological hoopla of AI/LLMs capabilities.
What do the students know that is not easily and directly available in a book? The things that can be looked up in a book are only a part of knowledge. Who wants such a student to work in a plant when a book requiring no food or maintenance stands day after day always ready to give just as adequate answers? Who wants to be such a student, to have worked so hard, to have missed so much of interest and pleasure, and to be outdone by an inanimate printed list of "laws"?
But these are not productive workers of the knowwledge economy. These are producers of paper spam, of fraud and ilusion. Innovation in such s world would grind to a halt while their output would clog the system that brought them forth.
> There is no "True Education" anymore, only the appearance of one with the sole aim of churning out a "Productive Worker"(for a certain definition of the term) for a Economy; no understanding required.
If I understand correctly, this is not the same problem. The problem Feynman was facing was education where the point was to get a credential, not to become useful. (I agree that neither is the same as to actually learn...)
Yes and the credential is the gateway to getting a Job as a "Productive Worker"(for a certain definition of the term) in the Economy. That is what Education has been reduced to nowadays.
G.I Gurdjieff, in Meetings With Remarkable People references the present civilization, where a "The Conversation of the Two Sparrows" concerns the European's scope of wisdom in mathematical knowledge, whereas the Asiatic understands contemporary knowledge "not by knowing but by being."
'In this anecdote it is said that once upon a time on the cornice of a high horse sat two sparrows, one old, the other young.'
'They were discussing an event which had become the "burning question of the day" among the sparrows, and which had resulted from the mullah's housekeeper having just previously thrown out of a window, on to a place where the sparrows gathered to play, something looking like left-over porridge, but which turned out to be chopped cork; and several of the young and yet inexperienced sparrow sat, almost burst.'
'While talking about the old sparrow, suddenly ruffling himself up, began with a pained grimace to search under his wing for the fleas tormenting him, and which in general breed on underfed sparrows; and having caught one, he said with a deep sigh:
'"Times have changed very much -- there is no longer a living to be had for our fraternity.
'"In the old days we used to sit, just as now, somewhere upon a roof, quietly dozing, when suddenly down in the street there would be heard a noise, a rattling and a rumbling, and soon after an odour would be diffused, at which everything inside us would begin to rejoice; because we felt fully certain that when we flew down and searched the places where all that happened, we would find satisfaction for our essential needs.
'"But nowadays there is plenty and to spare of noise and rattlings, and all sorts of rumblings, and again and again an odour is also diffused, but an odour which it is almost impossible to endure; and when sometimes, by force of old habit, we fly down during a moment's lull to seek something substantial for ourselves, then seach as we may with tense attention, we find nothing at all except some nauseous drops of burned oil."
Okay, so I don't really understand what you're saying, but let me take a stab at it.
Somebody named GI Gurdjieff wrote a book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" in 1923, and in that book there was a kind of story in the introduction. That story attempted to distnguish between two different ways of life: a Western, "knowing" way and an Eastern "being" way.
The story basically involves a young sparrow eating cork which he thought was leftover thrown-out porridge and gets sick. Then an old sparrow says that in the old days, whenever a horse pooped you could always be sure to get undigested oats from it, but now when a car lets anything out, there is nothing to be had.
I guess the symbolism is that Gurdjieff was saying that the modern culture is deceptive in the sense that the "new" cork is not the same as the "old" porridge. So modern (Western) culture is poison, old (Eastern) culture provides sustenance.
And the connection to the posted article is that the "cork" is like the textbook definitions that Feynman described, while the "porridge" is like "true understanding/incorporation" of knowledge.
I have very limited experience with LLMs, and no recent experience teaching. But every time I hear about the problem of students using LLMs, I have two thoughts:
1) When they get out of school, no one can stop them from using LLMs. So preventing them from using them now is not a way to teach them how to cope in the future.
2) LLMs are (duh!) often wrong. So treat what the LLMs say as hypotheses, and teach the students how to test those hypotheses. Or if the LLMs are being used to write essays, have the students edit the output for clarity, form, etc. Exams might be given orally, or at least in a situation where the students don't have access to an LLM.
I guess the whole discussion (in 1963, in 2025), is about 'knowledge acquisition' (or lack thereof). He mentions the Brazilian students memorising 'stuff' without understanding - as a former Brazilian educator, I can tell you that when I was working there in 2010-2020, it hadn't changed, and, to my point, got worse in late years. I think a lot of students care about 'getting a diploma' without actually learning something, but my main concern is about fairness: how could I praise good students from 'devious' students altogether?
The education system is a prime example of Goodhart's Law and I'm so surprised how little it's done to avoid that.
I guess that as long as possessing a piece of paper stating "Mr. White passed all hoops we put in front of them" is a baseline requirement for many jobs nowadays, we will always have this problem.
At least in tech, the piece of paper helps but it's mostly about hobby projects, external contributions, past job experiences and referrals which matter the most.
But in more and more countries even just working at a supermarket requires a high degeee, so the non-academically inclined people will try to keep finding ways to pass with as little effort as possible (and any learning takes effort). So, I can't really blame them.
> why does literally any discussion must have a mention of AI/LLMs?
Your sentiment is right but in this case not applicable.
A Teacher who did not really understand what he was teaching can easily have LLMs generate lectures/notes/etc. and pass it along to students without any thought put into it. A Student on his part can simply have LLMs generate answers for all of his problem sets and pass it along to the teacher.
The above would be a disaster for the overall spread of Science in the Society.
That is one of the points of the essay. You just need the appropriate credentials to qualify as a Teacher (i.e. passing B.Ed/M.Ed etc.) and not necessarily "domain understanding" in the Feynman sense.
Read this from HN in 2011, was interesting. But I take Feynman's conclusions with the grain of salt, and most comments here are near conspiracy theories. Here's why.
Education in the older epoch that his informers mention, was much smaller in scale. Brazil's illiteracy was at ~65% in 1930, at just <50% by 1960, if I remember correctly. So both common schools and secondary education (college/university) were expanding at the time. And that's the reason.
If you expand education, quality inevitably drops. The lower social strata that are reached by education won't get as good teachers as earlier. You may be able to write good schoolbooks, like mathematicians in the USSR did, but there's still last mile problem, the teacher. Most teachers are not bright enthusiasts, often times they're underpaid and burnt out after ages of teaching. The few enthusiasts and visionaries, are exceptions -- at least this is what I read from one recent study -- and their recipies aren't reproducible.
From what I've read, better universities usually have less students per teacher. This way a teacher can engage better and actually care what the student does. This requires more money poured in the system and less corruption.
(For non-Western countries, money shouldn't be a big problem, they're spending smaller share of GDP on education. But modern beliefs tell that everything should be "efficient", and governments don't want to spend more, instead they insist they need to "digitize" education, and then somehow it will make breakthroughs.)
But also, if you want to play god and pour money from the education ministry into schools or colleges/unis, these streams may actually never reach the file and rank teachers.
Last note: elite school/uni material won't work in lower level ones. I taught in the university where some graduation projects were published in journals for young researchers, and teachers were publishing in not top ranking, but high ranking serious ones. Some courses included work on good older papers (in English, a foreign language).
There, you could easily dismiss students who just want a grade and a degree as noise.
But take a city further from the capitals -- even in good college students will struggle and not able to process it. Not because further on the periphery people are dumber -- simply because most brightest students went to the best unis in the capitals.
In the elites, it's easy to argue to shrink education to keep only the bright guys, like in the XIX century. Well, it doesn't work this way -- you need to educate lots of people to find more bright ones.
So, who, what and how will teach those less bright guys? A big open question to me.
There have always existed levels, some better functioning mechanisms than others.
I think it varies a lot from even year to year. For the same course, some teacher might be really optimistic and produces little explanations and tests with very hard problems, while next year there's a teacher who is very good at explaining issues and the tests are a bit less "gotcha" like. Even a single teaching assistant or a friend explaining some key concept in a way it clicks for the student can make a huge difference.
Or maybe you have different formal levels, ie university, technical school, so on, these vary by country and don't have full 1:1 mapping to each other. These also evolve over time.
Or inside one university, you have various levels. Some departments might be small and really hard to get to, either via exams, or proof of previous study ability like high grades. And there then you can expect more from the students.
So one big issue is to get the people sorted into the right places. Also if a person's performance or preference changes over time, they should be able to switch.
I came to the US for college from Asia to study physics (and mathematics). I actually came to study astronomy because I found it fascinating but didn't really like physics or math. My first physics encounter in college here transformed my life. There was no memorization. Instead, we had short quizzes in each class (first 5 min), weekly individual assignments, weekly group assignments (two students each), four "midterms" where one could get densely written "cheat-sheets" as well as weekly physics lab that often went on far beyond the time slot.
In high school, physics was mostly based on memorization. There were a few problems but all based on some patterns. None made you think extremely hard.
I also found that many American students (who were extremely good in my experience) seemed to have a much better practical sense.
One of the key steps in the development of a physicist is the transition from solving textbook problems to creating your own problems. In essence, the skill one learns in graduate school is defining/crafting problems that are solvable and interesting. The primordial phase starts in college as one is solving many problems. Initially, the new problems are straightforward extensions of existing ones (e.g. add an air resistance term for parabolic motion). Eventually, one (hopefully) develops good taste and essentially is doing research.
Interestingly, I also find very different attitudes to physics in the west (at least in the US) and other parts of the world. In US universities, physics is still seen in glowing terms. In many other places, physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering. Young people (well, all people) are impressionable and this subtle bias affects what kind of students end up studying the subject.
> physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering
Wdym "couldn't do"? Nobody here is studying Physics for the job opportunities but I'd say everybody who makes it past semester 4 genuinely loves Physics otherwise they'd be studying something easier.
> In many other places, physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering.
What places are these?
> physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering
This reminded me of something from my alma mater.
At my (Canadian) university, there was a running joke that engineering was what you studied if you couldn't get into computer science. In fact, the Engineering and Computer Science faculties would semi-frequently prank each other because they were next to each other, I guess. Each faculty focuses on different things, of course, but the "running joke" was that engineering courses were just easier, not as rigorous, and therefore getting in engineering was seen as easier (and so they had more time to do such elaborate pranks).
Again, I don't think this had any truth to it, but it was just one part of a fun tradition the university had.
Also, this was a long time ago. I'm not sure what the current state of this is now or if it even still exists.
I was just thinking about this earlier today when washing my hands in the sink.
When you first turn on the hot water tap in most homes, the water that comes out is cold. After some period of time, hotter water starts to come out. My mom used to describe this as "waiting for the water to warm up".
For decades, I didn't consider the mechanism behind this. That is that there is water in the pipes between the home water heater and the tap. That water can't retain its heat without any further heat input, and gradually loses heat and comes into near-equilibrium with the temperature of the rest of the house. The hot water inside the water heater tank, on the other hand, is constantly being reheated as necessary by a heating element.
When you turn on the tap, after not having used it for some time, you're waiting for cold water from the pipes to be flushed out through the tap and be replaced with freshly heated water from the tank. Once this happens, the water coming out of the tap will be hot because it's been heated recently enough.
I probably didn't realize this until I was about 30 years old, and then I thought of Feynman's anecdote of his students not connecting their theoretical knowledge to understand the mechanism of a real physical situation. It seems I wasn't curious enough as a child to apply my own knowledge to the mechanism of the hot water tap!
One of the best ways to learn to think Scientifically i.e. in terms of Physics/Chemistry/Mathematics/Biology is to start with the classic Soviet era books by Yakov Perelman - https://mirtitles.org/?s=yakov+perelman
Specifically; start with the 2-vol Physics for Entertainment (the breadth of coverage is really good) followed by Mathematics can be Fun, Algebra can be Fun etc.
Note: Do not be misled by the words "Entertainment"/"Fun" etc. in the title. As is typical of Soviet era books these are serious works with precise, succinct and focused topics quite unlike most current "pop science" books.
Same with cold water.
I don't think I have anything in my house (other than an ice cube tray?) that's meant to deliberately make cold water colder than the ambient temperature of the house! Maybe some people do, though, especially in hotter parts of the world.
Weirdly enough, this is not the case in the former Soviet Union. Because there's always a reverse pipe ("obratka") that has hot water constantly circulate and the only part that cools down is the small portion of pipe between "obratka" connection and the faucet, so "heating up" takes a second tops.
It's puzzling why no one in the civilised world adopted this idea :/
Many things are told about emigres being constantly homesick etc., and i believe this is largely bullshit, but this is the only thing i really miss from my Soviet past.
This idea comes for free if you're also using hot water in radiators as a way to heat your home at the same time. Which the Soviets did. And in the Soviet era, they also were generally heating that water at the district level, then circulating it to all of the homes. This can only be workable if you're pumping the water continuously. So the cost of the pumping is just part of the overall system.
Places where this was built up, still generally use it today.
In the USA, nobody ever built the district wide heaters. Nor would they be viable in the suburbs that many of us live in. We generally use central air instead of radiators to heat our houses. And the result is that constantly circulating hot water is significantly more expensive for us.
Does that answer your question?
the places i lived in germany and china did have district wide heaters, but only for the water that circulated the heaters, not the water that came out of the tap. i believe the reason being that tap water needs to be potable (at least in germany, in china you still need to at least boil the tap water), whereas water for heating doesn't. you don't actually want your tap water go through the heating system. fun story: in china i once managed to open the heating pipe. the water that came out of that was black. probably rust and other stuff from the pipes. i wonder how the soviets managed to keep the water clean.
I've seen this in a few places, but it's rare because of all the energy (heat loss and energy required to drive the circulation) that gets used up when the water is recirculating but nobody is using it--which is most of the time.
I was recently in Iceland, and since a lot of heat is geothermal, recirc would probably make sense, but I can't remember having it. Maybe it's the pumping cost? Although natural convection driven by the difference in density between hot and cold water might make up for at least part of that.
It’s a thing in the US too, but not common. I always understood them to be expensive to use, as you always have a pump running and hot water cooling down and needing reheating.
Hot water recirculating pump. https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/hot-water-recirculati...
My house originally had a recirculating pump for the hot water but it burned out. Somehow though, it still (mostly) worked and had instant _warm_ water.
I think it was through natural convection/circulation - the hot water expanded in the tank and pushed it through the recirculating loop?
So maybe there's a good-enough solution that doesn't require a pump, just a return loop.
Now I have an on-demand water heater with a built-in recirculating pump, so it's instantly hot :)
This is how rooftop solar water heaters circulate water as well. Though these days you'd be better off with PEV plus a small electric heater.
Yes, in the Soviet Union, hot water was a byproduct of production of electricity - using combined heat and power, it was a waste heat. And it used lots of electricity to make weapons to advance dictatorship of proletariat, so there was plenty of free heat, too.
Hot water recirculation is a thing I have heard of done in the United States. I don't know how common it is, but a simple Home Depot search brought up a bunch of results for options.
https://www.plumbingsupply.com/recirculating-systems-explain...
https://www.homedepot.com/s/hot%20recirculation?NCNI-5
You can install an immediate hot water heater at the sink if you’d like.
For those interested in a kind of retrospective about 40 years after Feynman's speech, read "Physics in Latin America Comes of Age" (published in 2000) by José Luis Morán‐López:
> At the end of the 20th century, a large “science gap” still exists between Latin America and the developed countries of the North.
> The description is not intended to be a complete analysis, but may give a sense of the significant development that has occurred in the past half century and of what might be needed to make the 21st century a flourishing epoch for science in Latin America .
> The most developed group includes Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, which have, respectively, about 3000, 2200, and 2000 PhDs involved in physics research.
https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/physics-in-latin-ameri...
https://aip.brightspotcdn.com/PTO.v53.i10.38_1.online.pdf
Feynman, of course, always had confidence in the ability of the people of Latin America to do good physics. In fact his mentor Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico and emigrated to the US to study at MIT. Emigration to the US or Europe is typical of successful physicists from Latin America, including Juan Maldacena, a theorist from Argentina who discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence and has been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2001.
Anecdotally, I think Europe has more opportunities these days. My friend Gustavo, a high energy theorist from Brazil, got his PhD in the US but now works at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics (OKC) in Stockholm.
Good informative post to address the specific criticisms.
Its crazy he thinks that learning physics is the solution: I believe that in the improvement of the technical ability, thus the productivity, of the people of Latin America lies the source of real economic advancement.
and not the fact that the US has spent 150+ years destabilizing that part of the world.
Lots of places have been unstable for many years though. China, most of Europe, Russia, India, Korea. Some have shrugged that off others haven't, so it does not seem to have much predictive power.
I'd say the extent and duration of the disruption between Latin America and the counties you mentioned are quite different.
LATAM started from the get go being awfully disrupted from the 1500s and in catastrophic ways. Also, we don't call any of those areas Latin X. It shows how much impact the conquerors had that it even defines how we can the region to this day.
> I'd say the extent and duration of the disruption between Latin America and the counties you mentioned are quite different.
I don't think it is. Europe was full of wars, civil wars, conquest, occupation, and suppression and destabilization of competing nations for all that time, for example.
If you tried to back up your assumption with figures or with specific historical facts, you would see that it is wrong. It's not just about the fact that there was instability somewhere at some point, but about how it is being perpetuated. The countries you list above are very diverse. But what they all have in common, and what distinguishes them from countries in Latin America, is that there is a lot of ocean between them and the US. Admittedly, this also applies to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. But if we examine the question of what distinguishes these countries from the ones you list, it brings us back to the connection that was already pointed out above. I live in Germany and have had access to toothpaste my whole life. People my age in Cuba can still remember very well what it was like to have to do without toothpaste. Now ask your favorite LLM who temporarily prevented toothpaste from being imported into Cuba.
Blaming Cubas struggles on the US without acknowledging that Cuba, for example, has labor camps for children, is kinda silly imo.
It's a brutal dictatorship very similar to Iran. Let's all keep that in mind.
I can find nothing to support the claim that Cuba allegedly has labor camps for children. As far as I can see, this is an unsubstantiated propaganda claim. It is well known that the US is currently having ICE round up people off the streets and imprison them throughout the country. There is evidence that five-year-old children are being detained separately from their parents. The ability of people to apply double standards is always astonishing.
https://www.amnesty.de/sites/default/files/2025-03/030_2025_...
And it is simply irrational not to link Cuba's problems with the US embargo.
Attacking a country's people because the government is a dictatorship makes no sense. Especially when we were just fine with the brutal dictatorship that preceded the one we hate, because that one was capital-friendly and didn't try to give white man's money to brown people.
That really downplays the turmoil China has gone through. It’s at least equal.
China's external turmoil can be boxed within the 1800s and I don't think it included: 80+% of casualties, forced religious conversion, forced language conversion, wholesale destruction of books and culture, etc.
>China's external turmoil can be boxed within the 1800s
Yeah except for that time that Japan tried to conquer them while they were in a civil war.
True but do you really think, all summed up, they had it worse than LATAM?
No it really _really_ cannot be. Go read a history book.
Graceful arguing right there.
If you feel like enlightening us how China fared worse than LATAM or you can avoid being all snarky like that.
Every place has been unstable at some point.
And every place actively destabilized by an empire is definitely unstable.
The amount of coups directly planned and executed or supported by the US military/intelligence/lobbying apparatus in south America and the rest of the world is incredible.
And then the presidents have the audacity to say that it is the right and responsibility of the locals to govern (as said by biden on Afghanistan exit).
It truly has been the most exploitative empire ever. I hope the Chinese do better. We'll find out.
I see no evidence at all they will do better. Rather the opposite.
You're replying in good faith to someone who ignored the main point of GP (an empire actively disrupting a region) and just said "every place has been unstable" (without even taking century-level timescales into consideration).
> an empire actively disrupting a region
> century-level timescales
Doesn't sound very scientific or predictive. Is also ignorant of history. Ottoman empire lasted many centuries. So did Roman empire. Which crushed and oppressed and destabilized a lot of Europe. China famously had their "century of humiliation" which was "century-level timescale" of "empire actively disrupting a region".
You are right, but I felt morally compelled.
It could definitely be both.
When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.
But it sure feels nice to blame your enemies instead, doesn't it? Let's all pat each other on the back that we're the victims, and only if... and leave it at that.
> When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.
Way to show you really, really don't understand the politics of Latin America and who funds the various interests that run the show.
[flagged]
> and not the fact that the US has spent 150+ years destabilizing that part of the world.
Latin America is bigger than Cuba and Chile...
How could you possibly think those are the only LATAM countries the US has interfered with? We have been intimately involved in every government and every election in the Caribbean, Central, and South America for generations. Just this year there has been interference in Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina, etc.
It's been many decades since I read it, but there was some mention of this in Feynman's first autobiography (Surely You're Joking). He described learning about the problem and investigating the root cause, which is also described in this speech. (The root cause was a focus on the memorization of scattered facts vs. making students understand the subject matter.)
Why do we expect school or university to teach „understanding”.
It is like teaching snowboarding. You can get the pointers but students have to actually do the snowboarding - there is no shortcut.
The same with knowledge and understanding, you can organize material so they don’t end up in unproductive rabbit holes - but they have to work out their understanding on their own.
Classroom setting is also not really good one unless you have small groups on the same level - larger group and you are just pulling slow ones up and fast ones are getting bored.
As someone teaching in higher education, I’d say that you can certainly incentivize the students to learn "understanding", although I agree that a lot is up to the student.
Some basic examples:
- Don’t give test and exam questions that are too similar to examples and problems in the text book and homework. Then they’ll know that learning to generalize is a better pay-off than memorizing the textbook problems, and may choose to change their strategy when studying for exams.
- Reduce the amount of curriculum. By studying in depth instead of in breadth, you have time to focus on how things really work instead of just rushing through material on a surface level, and in my experience that improves understanding more. (But I know many disagree with me on this one.)
- Focus on problem solving as part of the lectures (student-active learning). I’m not an extremist, like some advocating that we shouldn’t lecture at all, but the pedagogical literature is pretty clear that small doses of lectures interspersed with problem solving enhances understanding.
- Try to teach intuition and conceptual models, not just facts. For example, as a student, I really struggled understanding eigenvalues and eigenvectors because our linear algebra textbook defined it by Αv = λv but made no attempt at explaining what it means intuitively and geometrically. Similarly, integration by parts has a simple and beautiful geometric interpretation that makes it obvious why this is correct, but we were only taught the opaque symbolic version in my calculus classes. When I teach myself, I try to lean on such visualizations and intuitive pictures as much as possible, as I think that really enhances «understanding»; not necessarily being able to cough up a solution to a problem you’ve seen before as fast as possible, but being able to generalize that knowledge to problems you haven’t seen before.
But who knows, maybe I’m just biased by how I myself perceive the world. I know there are some people who for example eschew geometric pictures entirely and still do very well. My experience is that most students seem to appreciate the things listed above though.
You are absolutely right on all points!
Students need to take responsibility for themselves and Teachers need to point them in the right direction and help/steer as needed.
A Chinese Martial Arts saying which i keep in mind goes;
To show one the right direction and the right path, oral instructions from a Master are necessary, but mastery of the subject only comes from one's own incessant self-cultivation.
A good authoritative book can be the stand-in for a Master in which case there is more discipline and effort required of the Student.
These days different types of books/videos focusing on different aspects of the same subject are so easily available/affordable that the Teacher/Student can both work together and focus on understanding. A handful of real-world problems modeled and worked through beats pages of mere symbol manipulation. We need to start stressing quality over quantity i.e. deliberate effort via deliberate practice in the right way.
The Feynman essay here is all about the teachers NOT pointing the students toward understanding.
And it is all about the students being disciplined and putting in effort, but toward rote memorization rather then understanding, because that is what teachers told them to do.
I was agreeing/elaborating on "setopt's" comment (which lists specific approaches) on how to solve the problem detailed in the essay.
I had submitted the original article for discussion since the observations seem to apply to how Physics/Science has been taught/studied in most countries and not just Latin America.
I think you’re right and especially in regards to abstract concepts like linear algebra I don’t know anyone serious about learning who didn’t struggle with what turned out to be relatively simple things when viewed intuitively.
The problem as I see it
1. Professors themselves don’t understand it and are regurgitating pedagogy from books.
2. The material load is so high for your average bachelors degree you’d spend 8 years in school otherwise. I would hazard to say this is necessary and sufficient but schools wouldn’t get funding and our job oriented society would have it so then only the wealthiest could get education (like it was for centuries).
3. Tests are a benchmark and very expensive. You can consider a class’ total value to be loaded on the final exam. I recently wanted to go back to school casually. One of the cheapest universities available wanted 2600 dollars for a partial differential equations course. If I fail the course I lose 2600 dollars since I would need to retake it to proceed to higher mathematics. This alone does not allow a person time to explore - and that’s just one class!
4. Schools are simply a money laundering vehicle that takes money from students and moves it into administrator pockets. Education costs have skyrocketed yet education and pedagogy remains the same. This is money laundering by any other name.
- understanding leads intuition. There’s very little of either, anywhere.
> Why do we expect school or university to teach „understanding”.
Having been taught in different systems that emphasize understanding vs memorization, I'd have to disagree. The teachers and the overall academic system can encourage, test for, and reward rote memorization. Or it can encourage, test for, and reward problem-solving, critical thinking, and understanding.
Everything from the way teachers lecture, to assigned reading, to assignments, to tests will influence how students think and what they optimize for. There will always be exceptions who forge their own path, but most students like most people just go with the flow.
Students study to pass exams, teachers teach to enable students to pass exams. If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for.
> If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for
My favorite college class was compilers.
The whole semester you worked on a compiler for a simplified Pascal. Each homework added a feature.
The final exam was 4 hours. Open textbook, open internet. No chat with classmates. You got a description of 3 features to add to your compiler. Grade is number of tests passed.
Fantastic way to teach understanding.
My uni claimed grading was something like:
~ 40% bookwork. Rote learned facts ~ 30% standard questions. Do in an exam hall standard variants of what was done in class/homework/tutorials. ~ 30% New applications and logical extensions.
I don't know how well they achieved that split, I suspect it was mostly aspirational. Seemed like a reasonable ideal though!
I agree with your both of your observations; And I also think what's missing is the acknowledgement that connects the two. Students come with the expectation of "chew it for me" and schools have the expectation of "I'm going to throw the material at you, you can & will handle it yourself".
But it doesn't need to be that hopeless. Learning is a skill and schools can help each individual find the ways working best for them. Starting by not packing gazillion number of people in a class.
> The same with knowledge and understanding, you can organize material so they don’t end up in unproductive rabbit holes - but they have to work out their understanding on their own.
Problem sets with feedback.
As a university level educator I am pretty confident most universities worth their salt do in fact teach you by "actually doing the snowboarding" to stay with your analogy.
But it is also true that (1) not all universities (or all departments, or all professors) are worth their salt and (2) snowboarding may not be a skill that is highly sought after in the society you live in.
Gladly most academic skillsets are highly transferable if the student isn't totally dull.
I will say you are right.
But ;)
At the same time Universities worth their salt also get students that are most likely going to be more self staring. Likely good professors will fail students that need more hand holding because it will be waste of their time.
So there is no magic trick to scale up. Besides getting more people to understand school/university is not going to do hand holding. You will get tools to learn how to learn and curated resources all the other things depend on you.
This speech by Feynman was based on his experiences teaching Physics in Brazil in the 1950s (details mentioned in the "Surely You're Joking" book). "tomhow" has posted the link to a previous HN discussion specifically w.r.t. the Brazil experience.
However, this speech generalizes and posits that the problem is not specific to Latin America but to most countries (including so-called developed ones) in the teaching of Physics or any other Science.
Hence the opening para;
The problem of teaching physics in Latin America is only part of the wider problem of teaching physics anywhere. In fact, it is part of the problem of teaching anything anywhere – a problem for which there is no known satisfactory solution.
I think this is highly pertinent today given the use of AI/LLM models for extracting "correct answers" to all of settled (mostly) Science. At least with a textbook you had to expend some thought/effort; with AI tools even that is removed and you literally need know/understand even less than before.
So where does that leave Science Education? How do we reform the Education System?
AI will wreck your capitalized "Education System" and that is good. We'll be fine.
Fully agree with your first statement, mush less so with the other two.
Speaking from Uruguay, this characterization feels outdated. Our public universities emphasize problem-solving, experimentation, and strong theoretical foundations, and they produce graduates who work globally in engineering, physics, and software.
Programs like Plan Ceibal normalized hands-on computing early on, and there’s a healthy connection between academia, industry, and research institutes. Brain drain exists everywhere, but it’s no longer accurate to describe countries like Uruguay as stuck in rote learning or disconnected from real-world application. Latin America isn’t monolithic, and some of these critiques reflect a 1960s snapshot more than today’s reality.
Naturally it feels outdated as it was a speech from 62 years ago. Multiple generations of science education and teaching paradigms have come and gone since then.
One issue he mentioned is still true today in Brazil's universities: while in theory you can ask to transfer from one course to another, in practice you have to drop out of your current school and take the entrance exam for the other one. And then you waste a lot of time trying to get your grades for the courses you have already taken recognized as equivalent so you don't have to start from scratch.
For him to move from math to electrical engineering to physics in Brazil would mean going through this twice. This might make him take some 7 or 8 years to graduate.
I guess this inflexibility makes things easier for the administrators. They know they will have 25 students in the statistics class in 2028 and so know how many teachers to hire to handle that.
This resonated with my own experience: exams rewarded recall, not understanding. I only really “earned physics when I started building things and breaking them. Curious how others here learned to move from memorization to intuition.
Caltech tests were not based on memorization, as they were "open book open note". You had to reason your way to a solution.
But I do agree that real world physics, like designing an actual electronic circuit, have behaviors that are not modeled by the usual mathematical models. For example, resistors vary widely from their marked resistance. And I was told, when building digital circuits, to make sure it worked with chips faster than the spec, as replacement chips are always faster, never slower.
> For example, resistors vary widely from their marked resistance
Resistors are sometimes marked with their variance band (+/-1%, for instance) to account for this.
Engineers take these expected variances into account when designing circuits. If your design is sensitive to a 3% variance in resistor value, you'd better not be specifying gold-banded +/-5% lots.
Yes, I know. I also don't know any engineer who bothered doing it (yes, I'm sure some do in critical circuits).
Capacitors also vary, and degrade over time. Semiconductors also have variances and non-linear hard-to-model behaviors. Behaviors change with heat. Few people worry about it.
Vacuum tubes are known for their wacky behaviors, which are treasured by people who make guitar amplifiers. The Melotron is well known for being highly sensitive to humidity.
Resistors without a tolerance marking are speced at +/- 20%.
And they might not be temperature stable either.
I don't think I've ever experienced an exam that rewarded recall in college.
All my engineering exams were open book, open notes, and still >50% failed out by senior year.
Fundamentally, physics teaches one how to hack nature ... Math teaches one how to hack logic ... two useful skills to have an enjoyable life journey :-).
This problem is not limited to Latin America or physics alone - it also affects regions such as Africa. For example, many students at universities in Senegal, do not find employment after graduating. Some drop out earlier once they realize their prospects are slim, while others try their luck in Western countries.
> This, along with the fact that salaries are absurdly low, shows a lack of interest by the Brazilian government, people, and industry, in the development of science in this country.
No, it shows that the country is poor - the desire to pay higher salaries was always there, but it's hard. People in rich countries think money grows on trees because for them, it kind of does.
And this is why development advice from "intellectuals" in rich countries is worthless.
As a Brazilian, I believe the problem is that we have a culture of "gratitude" towards the government. We quietly and silently thank God that we received whatever benefit and pray that they will keep giving us that. But a tiny bit of economical education, and an open eye to the frequent corruption scandals teaches one that there is more than enough money for a decent salary for academic workers.
The real culprit is the International Division of Labour.
Some countries sell primary goods and other countries manufacture them.
But it turns out it's the manufacturing industry the one that trickles wealth the most, raises salaries and improves education overall.
China knew this. And used all its non-democratic powers to make their country a manufacturing superpower.
A country that only extracts natural resources can't hold a numerous population. And if it does, a big % of them is doomed to a life of misery.
I read an interesting article once that mentioned, the worst thing that can happen to your country is that it sits on a large supply of rare resources.
You'd think it would make you rich; instead it makes you miners, and ripe for invasion.
The Resource Curse. It’s not a given, but it’s a dangerous pitfall that must be avoided. England had coal. Norway has oil. If you don’t have strong institutions, someone will take control of it, like modern Russia for instance.
A story told from an old school Russian professor about physics at the university of Moscow under Stalin:
It’s exam. The professor enters the room and tells students there will be 3 exams.
One extremely hard all books allowed, it’s either pass with top grade or fail, nothing in between.
One hard, one book allowed, it’s either pass with moderate grade or fail, nothing in between.
One moderate, no book allowed, but if you know the books you can pass, it’s passing grade or fail.
Students are told to sort according to the exam they want to take. Very hard to the right, hard in the middle, moderate to the left.
Once students are sorted the professor says: „ Right pass. Middle come back next year. Left go home, Russia does not need you.“
Nice!
The problem of teaching physics in Latin America is only part of the wider problem of teaching physics anywhere. In fact, it is part of the problem of teaching anything anywhere – a problem for which there is no known satisfactory solution.
Even though Feynman wrote this based on his experience in Latin America, i think this is true of many (most?) countries even today.
There is no "True Education" anymore, only the appearance of one with the sole aim of churning out a "Productive Worker"(for a certain definition of the term) for a Economy; no understanding required.
It is interesting to interpret how the above is still applicable in the current technological hoopla of AI/LLMs capabilities.
What do the students know that is not easily and directly available in a book? The things that can be looked up in a book are only a part of knowledge. Who wants such a student to work in a plant when a book requiring no food or maintenance stands day after day always ready to give just as adequate answers? Who wants to be such a student, to have worked so hard, to have missed so much of interest and pleasure, and to be outdone by an inanimate printed list of "laws"?
But these are not productive workers of the knowwledge economy. These are producers of paper spam, of fraud and ilusion. Innovation in such s world would grind to a halt while their output would clog the system that brought them forth.
Your comment should start with "And" not "But" since you are amplifying the original comment not disagreeing with it...
> There is no "True Education" anymore, only the appearance of one with the sole aim of churning out a "Productive Worker"(for a certain definition of the term) for a Economy; no understanding required.
If I understand correctly, this is not the same problem. The problem Feynman was facing was education where the point was to get a credential, not to become useful. (I agree that neither is the same as to actually learn...)
Yes and the credential is the gateway to getting a Job as a "Productive Worker"(for a certain definition of the term) in the Economy. That is what Education has been reduced to nowadays.
> It is not economically sound to continuously import technically‑skilled people
Interesting take.
G.I Gurdjieff, in Meetings With Remarkable People references the present civilization, where a "The Conversation of the Two Sparrows" concerns the European's scope of wisdom in mathematical knowledge, whereas the Asiatic understands contemporary knowledge "not by knowing but by being."
'In this anecdote it is said that once upon a time on the cornice of a high horse sat two sparrows, one old, the other young.'
'They were discussing an event which had become the "burning question of the day" among the sparrows, and which had resulted from the mullah's housekeeper having just previously thrown out of a window, on to a place where the sparrows gathered to play, something looking like left-over porridge, but which turned out to be chopped cork; and several of the young and yet inexperienced sparrow sat, almost burst.'
'While talking about the old sparrow, suddenly ruffling himself up, began with a pained grimace to search under his wing for the fleas tormenting him, and which in general breed on underfed sparrows; and having caught one, he said with a deep sigh:
'"Times have changed very much -- there is no longer a living to be had for our fraternity.
'"In the old days we used to sit, just as now, somewhere upon a roof, quietly dozing, when suddenly down in the street there would be heard a noise, a rattling and a rumbling, and soon after an odour would be diffused, at which everything inside us would begin to rejoice; because we felt fully certain that when we flew down and searched the places where all that happened, we would find satisfaction for our essential needs.
'"But nowadays there is plenty and to spare of noise and rattlings, and all sorts of rumblings, and again and again an odour is also diffused, but an odour which it is almost impossible to endure; and when sometimes, by force of old habit, we fly down during a moment's lull to seek something substantial for ourselves, then seach as we may with tense attention, we find nothing at all except some nauseous drops of burned oil."
Okay, so I don't really understand what you're saying, but let me take a stab at it.
Somebody named GI Gurdjieff wrote a book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" in 1923, and in that book there was a kind of story in the introduction. That story attempted to distnguish between two different ways of life: a Western, "knowing" way and an Eastern "being" way.
The story basically involves a young sparrow eating cork which he thought was leftover thrown-out porridge and gets sick. Then an old sparrow says that in the old days, whenever a horse pooped you could always be sure to get undigested oats from it, but now when a car lets anything out, there is nothing to be had.
I guess the symbolism is that Gurdjieff was saying that the modern culture is deceptive in the sense that the "new" cork is not the same as the "old" porridge. So modern (Western) culture is poison, old (Eastern) culture provides sustenance.
And the connection to the posted article is that the "cork" is like the textbook definitions that Feynman described, while the "porridge" is like "true understanding/incorporation" of knowledge.
Is that what you were getting at?
Fast-forward to 2025.
The same problems still exist, exacerbated by the prevalence of LLMs and no detection mechanisms whatsoever.
The recipe for disaster.
I have very limited experience with LLMs, and no recent experience teaching. But every time I hear about the problem of students using LLMs, I have two thoughts:
1) When they get out of school, no one can stop them from using LLMs. So preventing them from using them now is not a way to teach them how to cope in the future.
2) LLMs are (duh!) often wrong. So treat what the LLMs say as hypotheses, and teach the students how to test those hypotheses. Or if the LLMs are being used to write essays, have the students edit the output for clarity, form, etc. Exams might be given orally, or at least in a situation where the students don't have access to an LLM.
Not to disagree with your point but why does literally any discussion must have a mention of AI/LLMs?
Is it possible not to bring them up and still have a deep conversation?
I guess the whole discussion (in 1963, in 2025), is about 'knowledge acquisition' (or lack thereof). He mentions the Brazilian students memorising 'stuff' without understanding - as a former Brazilian educator, I can tell you that when I was working there in 2010-2020, it hadn't changed, and, to my point, got worse in late years. I think a lot of students care about 'getting a diploma' without actually learning something, but my main concern is about fairness: how could I praise good students from 'devious' students altogether?
The education system is a prime example of Goodhart's Law and I'm so surprised how little it's done to avoid that.
I guess that as long as possessing a piece of paper stating "Mr. White passed all hoops we put in front of them" is a baseline requirement for many jobs nowadays, we will always have this problem.
At least in tech, the piece of paper helps but it's mostly about hobby projects, external contributions, past job experiences and referrals which matter the most.
But in more and more countries even just working at a supermarket requires a high degeee, so the non-academically inclined people will try to keep finding ways to pass with as little effort as possible (and any learning takes effort). So, I can't really blame them.
> why does literally any discussion must have a mention of AI/LLMs?
Your sentiment is right but in this case not applicable.
A Teacher who did not really understand what he was teaching can easily have LLMs generate lectures/notes/etc. and pass it along to students without any thought put into it. A Student on his part can simply have LLMs generate answers for all of his problem sets and pass it along to the teacher.
The above would be a disaster for the overall spread of Science in the Society.
A teacher who doesn't understand what they teach. Who put that teacher there in the first place?
That is one of the points of the essay. You just need the appropriate credentials to qualify as a Teacher (i.e. passing B.Ed/M.Ed etc.) and not necessarily "domain understanding" in the Feynman sense.
Read this from HN in 2011, was interesting. But I take Feynman's conclusions with the grain of salt, and most comments here are near conspiracy theories. Here's why.
Education in the older epoch that his informers mention, was much smaller in scale. Brazil's illiteracy was at ~65% in 1930, at just <50% by 1960, if I remember correctly. So both common schools and secondary education (college/university) were expanding at the time. And that's the reason.
If you expand education, quality inevitably drops. The lower social strata that are reached by education won't get as good teachers as earlier. You may be able to write good schoolbooks, like mathematicians in the USSR did, but there's still last mile problem, the teacher. Most teachers are not bright enthusiasts, often times they're underpaid and burnt out after ages of teaching. The few enthusiasts and visionaries, are exceptions -- at least this is what I read from one recent study -- and their recipies aren't reproducible.
From what I've read, better universities usually have less students per teacher. This way a teacher can engage better and actually care what the student does. This requires more money poured in the system and less corruption.
(For non-Western countries, money shouldn't be a big problem, they're spending smaller share of GDP on education. But modern beliefs tell that everything should be "efficient", and governments don't want to spend more, instead they insist they need to "digitize" education, and then somehow it will make breakthroughs.)
But also, if you want to play god and pour money from the education ministry into schools or colleges/unis, these streams may actually never reach the file and rank teachers.
Last note: elite school/uni material won't work in lower level ones. I taught in the university where some graduation projects were published in journals for young researchers, and teachers were publishing in not top ranking, but high ranking serious ones. Some courses included work on good older papers (in English, a foreign language).
There, you could easily dismiss students who just want a grade and a degree as noise.
But take a city further from the capitals -- even in good college students will struggle and not able to process it. Not because further on the periphery people are dumber -- simply because most brightest students went to the best unis in the capitals.
In the elites, it's easy to argue to shrink education to keep only the bright guys, like in the XIX century. Well, it doesn't work this way -- you need to educate lots of people to find more bright ones.
So, who, what and how will teach those less bright guys? A big open question to me.
There have always existed levels, some better functioning mechanisms than others.
I think it varies a lot from even year to year. For the same course, some teacher might be really optimistic and produces little explanations and tests with very hard problems, while next year there's a teacher who is very good at explaining issues and the tests are a bit less "gotcha" like. Even a single teaching assistant or a friend explaining some key concept in a way it clicks for the student can make a huge difference.
Or maybe you have different formal levels, ie university, technical school, so on, these vary by country and don't have full 1:1 mapping to each other. These also evolve over time.
Or inside one university, you have various levels. Some departments might be small and really hard to get to, either via exams, or proof of previous study ability like high grades. And there then you can expect more from the students.
So one big issue is to get the people sorted into the right places. Also if a person's performance or preference changes over time, they should be able to switch.
Previously:
Richard Feynman on education in Brazil - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483976 - April 2011 (73 comments)
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