I’m not sure how unusual my education was 45…

Page 255 I’m not sure how unusual my education was 45 years ago, but to school and university I rarely had to take a multiple-choice test. Instead, students were expected to demonstrate skills, observation, deduction, and communication. As an example, for one high school exam in my final year of studying zoology, students nervously filled into the laboratory, and we sat at our appointed places. In front of each of us were three sheets of paper a single object, and in some cases a microscope. Each object was different, ranging from bones, fossils and coral to microscope slides of various tissues. The teacher said you have exactly one and 1 1/2 hour we realized we were not getting any further direction we had to do what we thought was best. When the instructor graded our work, there was no question of being right or wrong. He was evaluating our powers of observation, knowledge, logic, any ability to Xpress ourselves. Examination itself affirmed each of us, because it demonstrated that, when faced with an object, we have never seen before, we had none the less developed new abilities to observe, the deuce and communicate.

— from The Mind in the Cockpit · How to Understand Everything, Consilience: A New Way to See the World

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