"You come to school to learn!"

I recall this mantra being drummed into us at primary school. Teacher after teacher, as if they were part of some cult.

A while later, a maverick teacher tried to correct this: "No, you don't come to school to learn; You come to school to learn HOW to learn" he preached. That perspective influenced me.

IBM, as part of their e-learning research, found that about half the learning by students is done from other students, the questions they ask, and the water cooler conversations they have. Yet the education system seems to resist change as this Wharton article suggests: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/articlepdf/2032.pdf

Decades on, my current view is that an improved purpose is to learn how to think. There is so much raw data out there, generated at an accelerating pace, that learning it becomes impossible. The best we can hope for is to learn generic tool sets and methodologies (themselves open to improvement) in order to develop a robust decision making process, which will allow us to deal with infinite data and changes as the situation requires.