The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

In summary, as best I can, clearly in low-level conditioned response situations, typically associated with training, I believe computers can greatly aid in the learning process, but at the other end, high-level thinking, education, I am very skeptical. Skeptical mainly because we ourselves do not understand either what we want to do, nor what we are presently doing! We simply do not know what we mean by “the educated person,” let alone what it will mean in the year 2020. Without that knowledge, how am I to judge the success of any proposal which is tried? Between low-level training and high-level education there is a large area to be explored and exploited by organizations outside the universities, as well as inside.