The Lesson to Unlearn

Graham argues that the most damaging thing school teaches isn't anything in a specific class — it's learning to get good grades. Because almost every test is hackable, the optimal strategy for grades systematically diverges from the optimal strategy for learning; ambitious students are forced to choose grades, and the habit follows them into the rest of life. He frames the lesson to unlearn as: stop optimising for legible scores set by other people, and start optimising for the actual thing the score was supposed to measure.