Educational psychologists who specialize in “transfer of learning” have measured the hidden intellectual benefits of education for over a century.33 Their chief discovery: education is narrow. As a rule, students learn only the material you specifically teach them . . . if you’re lucky. In the words of educational psychologists Perkins and Salomon, “Besides just plain forgetting, people commonly fail to marshal what they know effectively in situations outside the classroom or in other classes in different disciplines.
