It’s no secret that we, as Americans, are getting dumber. 20% of us apparently think the President is a Muslim. We watch reality television rife with no talent assclowns. Google has realized we’re such a tremendous combination of stupid AND lazy that it has initiated a new search function that essentially makes it so you don’t have to think.

And now, apparently, we’re studying like morons as well.

The gist of this piece (brought to you by the Paper of Record) is that most conventions about learning and studying are based on a pile of nonsense. Three things stood out:

1. You shouldn’t study a single subject intensively, but rather inter-related subjects for briefer periods over a longer stretch of time.

2. You should not find a comfortable place to study and study there exclusively; rather, you should actually divide up your study time between multiple locations because it helps your brain assign details to certain pieces of knowledge, which makes it easier to retain.

3. There are no such things as visual or auditory learners and anyone who says different is a hippie.

It’s all pretty interesting stuff, but what does it mean for the LSAT? We generally recommend the first step already (alternate your sections of studying so you don’t go insane with reading comprehension). As for the second, that should be fairly easy for most students to do (coffee shop one day, library the next, poolside in Vegas after that).

As for 3, this just means that a familiar crutch for a lot of people that they can’t learn something because they’re “visual learners” is just a bunch of crap to explain away the fact that they can’t concentrate for a period of time longer than a few seconds.

Anyway, give that article a read through, and reflect on a school system that continues to fail us long after we have departed from it.