Leonardo da Vinci on Compulsory Learning

Leonardo da Vinci is considered one of the most intelligent humans to have ever lived. He was an illegitimate son who did an apprenticeship and went on to be a genius painter, scientist, engineer, and inventor.

He has two sentences in his notebooks, that are similar, talking about learning.

"Just as food eaten without caring for it is turned into loathsome nourishment, so study without a taste for it spoils memory, by retaining nothing which it has taken in."

"Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in."

This is something that everyone knows, you can't learn without interest and motivation. Yet, year after year, generation after generation, people send their kids to school to learn little to nothing because of lack of interest.

Almost everyone knows this, because they can't remember the things they were supposed to have learned in school. Yet, what else do you do? Society is set up to send kids to school. Governments heavily incentivize it, and sometimes force it. They don't do that because they want the kids to learn.

I've met people who have graduated college, learning as little as needed to graduate at all levels, only memorizing things for a week to pass the tests, that then vow to never read a book again because of their distaste of having been forced to read and learn for years. Then people wonder why so many people don't seem to know much.

Yet, there is another way. I've had students where I let them pick the subject. Any subject. Notably I had one that chose fashion and dresses. A 12 year old Chinese girl named Angela. She was doing poorly in all subjects and her parents were desperate because they were leaving the country soon. So, Angela and I started learning about fashion with a hub and spoke method. I showed her that to know how to make dresses she should understand Chinese for manufacturing and English for selling. She needs to understand math for how much material she needs and production costs. She needs to understand geography to know where to source materials and where to ship items. She needs to understand the history of the trade routes between Asia and Europe because that's a major part of how fashion trade developed. Essentially, she needs to know everything connected with fashion and dresses. Angela started requesting homework, showing up for class early, studying on her own, and her grades didn't just go up in English (what I was specifically hired to tutor), her grades went up in all subjects.

Any student can use the hub and spoke method of education to learn everything that they need to learn, focused on what they want to learn. It's just not going to happen in a government school. For that you need a private tutor.

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