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Lots of people in education disagree with the premise of maximizing learning

But in talent development, the optimization problem is clear: an individual’s performance is to be maximized, so the methods used during practice are those that most efficiently convert effort into performance improvements.

There are plenty of students who would prefer for their education to maximize other things like fun and entertainment while, as a secondary concern, meeting some low bar for shallowly learning some surface-level basic skills. Like sports and music, math is an extremely hierarchical skill domain, so achieving a high level of success requires a dedication to talent development. However, unlike sports and music, most students are expected to achieve a relatively high level of success in math: many years of courses increasing in difficulty, culminating in at least algebra, typically pre-calculus, often calculus, and sometimes even higher than that.

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