I don't think we are talking about transfer. My mam had the concept of exercising zitsfleish, the ability to sit down and concentrate at a mentally taxing boring task for uncertain reward.

This is a skill I use to this day, especially when debugging, and when I have a hard day, I remind myself that if I was able to solve 100 linear equations over christmass when I was 10, I should be able to find this bug!

> the ability to sit down and concentrate at a mentally taxing boring task for uncertain reward

If anything I'd say school hindered me in this regard! I think I learnt dogged persistence through playing videogames.

How did it hinder? Peergroup? Teachers?

I have to admit, that I did mention my mum on purpose, for first two years she literally sat by my side to help me concentrate.

Videogames either reqiured too good reaction time for me, or were too entertaining to need dogged persistence on my part :)

> The evidence for transfer learning is weak to the point of non-existence.

Citation needed. But transfer learning is a term specific to the ML field anyway, so I'm not sure why you used it.

> teaching nationalism is a much easier sell as to the purpose of school

I don't think most people believe this is the purpose of school, not even nationalists.

Nationalists most certainly believe that, for example every small change to our children’s history books that can be seen as not conforming to our glorious past (or what the nationalists see as our “glorious past”) is seen by our local nationalists (I live in a Eastern Europe) as potentially the end of the world as we know it. Europe can be interesting like that, good thing that we (almost) stopped killing each other after WW2 over stupid things like imaginary lines drawn on soil.

> stupid things like imaginary lines drawn on soil.

So let's erase all borders and see how we get on.

Orwell: 'men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.'

Actually we get on quite well in Europe, thank you very much. I suggest you take a car-ride through Northern France, close to Verdun, if those numberless WW1 cemeteries don’t change your mind I don’t know what else will.

> Actually we get on quite well in Europe, thank you very much. I suggest you take a car-ride through Northern France, close to Verdun, if those numberless WW1 cemeteries don’t change your mind I don’t know what else will.

That'll be the same France that has nuclear weapons?

I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt as per this website’s rules but looking at your recent post history I can see that you’re a Brexit supporter so I’ll leave it at that, there’s no benefit in arguing. But for the life of me I cannot understand why people like you, who are against an open society, choose to spend your time on the Internet, i.e. the number one “result” (so to speak) of the post-WW2 open society. In other words, if you are a provincialist why do people like you choose to spend their time in discussing with foreigners on a borderless thing like the Internet?

You don't have true open borders in Europe. You need an EU passport, which is kind of the hard part. Try letting in anyone from any country with no restrictions and see how you get on. I'm not saying it won't work, just don't pretend like your borders are truly open.

>over stupid things like imaginary lines drawn on soil.

Now consider how many people are hurt every year over enforcing laws that have just as imaginary lines drawn about other issues. Things like not being able to vote because of an imaginary line. Not being able to buy alcohol. Being forced to go to school where you have no rights to protect yourself from being harmed.

> killing each other after WW2 over stupid things like imaginary lines drawn on soil.

Those imaginary lines drawn on soil determine how resources are allocated, for example, enabling cheap energy and customers for the US’s military industrial complex, or cheap spices and labor for the British, and so on and so forth.

Even the most advanced mammals use tribes to maximize chances of survival, and humans are no different.

> Europe can be interesting like that, good thing that we (almost) stopped killing each other after WW2 over stupid things like imaginary lines drawn on soil.

Yes, that happens when ethnic cleansing is completed so that what were previously multi-ethnic empires are now mono-ethnic nation states.

Sorry, meant transfer of learning.

Re: schooling as a means of promoting nationalism

> Education and Military Rivalry

> Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By con- trast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic politi- cal institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commod- ity prices or rivalries in a certain country’s immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence.

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27759015/educati...

That paper is a decent description of how autocratic or militaristic governments invest in education, the purpose of a school is a separate meaning though. The paper itself states that threats to democracy increase enrolment and not funding, showing that parents or kids find value in applying to school even when it is not invested in. The paper goes on to note that expansion into studying economic threats as a motive for investment into schooling could be explored.

The paper is too narrow to be a 'better sell' than transfer of learning, as dubious as that is.

How do you cite lack of evidence? :)

For those who don't know, transfer learning is a term from ML where you train a model on one task, then train it more on other tasks...

Sorry, meant transfer of learning, edited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning

> Today, transfer of learning is usually described as the process and the effective extent to which past experiences (also referred to as the transfer source) affect learning and performance in a new situation (the transfer target).[2] However, there remains controversy as to how transfer of learning should be conceptualized and explained, what its prevalence is, what its relation is to learning in general, and whether it exists at all.[3]

The keyword you’re looking for is “transfer of learning”, especially “far transfer.”