Daniel Bibawy

09.05.13

As I read “The 95 Percent Solution,” I came up with one conclusion on my own. You only really learn anything when you are interested in it. This may seem obvious to you, but to me I did not really understand this until I started college. Even the things that we are taught in school, we do not really embrace and understand unless we care about them and care to learn them ourselves. For example, I would not say I am the type of person who takes an interest in many things, let alone things of a more educational nature, yet I do find myself interested and even fascinated by psychology. One of the few books I read in high school for my own leisure was a psychology book that I was so engrossed in that for a couple of years after I finished reading it, I felt I had a decent grasp on psychology until I started my first semester in college and took an intro to psychology class that furthered my knowledge of psychology and increased my admiration for it. My point is that you will not actually learn anything unless you care to take an interest in it yourself. Otherwise it will be memorization and useless jargon that has no meaning to you. For this reason I think the amateur astrology students in the club had more knowledge than the undergraduate college students who majored in astrology. I also think this is the reason that older Americans performed more highly than international adults in science: because the things they learned in science were of their own interest and volition.