Stategic Learning Is Best Learning

In What the Best College Students Do, Ken Baine uses the term “strategic learner”(36) to describe someone who learns well but only to succeed in whatever purpose they need the information for. Baine states that strategic learners “primarily intend simply to make good grades, often for the sake of graduate or professional school”, and “focus almost exclusively on how to find out what the professor wants and how to ace the exam”. To Baine, being a strategic learner is a bad thing and, although these types of learners are acing the tests, they aren’t truly engaging with what they are being taught. Personally, I am a strategic learner in many subjects, because I don’t find interest in them and simply want to pass the course, and I don’t think that is a bad way to learn. For me personally, I am not interested in very many subjects that are taught at school. Math and science have always been the only subjects that interest me, so for the rest, I remained a strategic learner. People can’t be completely absorbed in every subject they have to learn about, so sometimes just learning strategically is enough. The only difference Baine presents between learning strategically and learning deeply is motivation, and people can't change what interests them, so I think Baine is wrong to tell people to always learn deeply.