A couple of recent posts on a discussion list I belong to have made me think. The subject of the discussion was the study of philosophy. One person spoke of how they were given "ludicrous" amounts of material to wade through, and pointed out that the words of various famous philosophers should be mulled over, not raced through. In response, another told of their own fortunate experience, where the lecturer had spent most of a semester going through, line-by-line (with commentary), one particular work by Hume. This, I would imagine, would more nearly approximate the "traditional" method of educating students, and it reminds us that probably one of the most important reasons for the frequent failure of modern (at least Western) education systems to leave its students with lasting, "ground-in" knowledge, is simply that they don't spend enough time on anything. Too much to cover - and consequently, too little properly learned. It's worth remembering that one reason why so many of us think our memory is failing, is simply that we don't appreciate how much time and effort is needed to properly encode memories.

By the way, I've added a few new articles to the site recently: on music and language, the Mozart Effect, the role of working memory in vocabulary acquisition, and on working memory.