First-Principle Approach to Learning

Conventional learning strategies place a lot of emphasis on memorisation and pattern recognition. However, parroting knowledge and doing without truly reflecting dulls the learning process. It may provide short-cuts to getting questions correct, and even make notable improvement in academic grades, but it almost never make any learner outstanding, or distinct from his peers.

This conventional education and trend of learning continue to be championed by the public education system, and by most learning centres. Critical thinking and academic excellence are buzzwords, almost as if examinations are something to be gamed. This is understandable, since public education is partly modelled by society's reward of high performers. It can even be seen as a system to impartially and systematically stratify the population into economic classes.

However, a true and ideal education is a purist and creative one. It questions and dissects the foundation of theories and assumptions bottom-up, and from the ashes of ignorance, build up a solid base of understanding. This transformative process is called the First- Principles Approach, and from my personal experience, this provides the strongest potential for mastery of any subject.

I do not count myself as particularly intelligent. When I was in Sec.1 in Victoria School, my academics was a mess, scoring a miserly 31st position in my class end-of-year. But upon this quantum leap in my approach towards learning and life in general, my grades springboard to the 1st in class within a year. At the end of Victoria School, I was top 10 in cohort and I went on to pursue JC studies in Raffles Junior College. This is the thinking process and attitude that I hope to pass down to students of the Physics Math Laboratory.

"Well, I do think there’s a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.

Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations."

- Elon Musk