I found several books that are of more practical sense on education written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1900), Charles H. Ham
–a treatise on setting up schools to train both the purely academic as well as the useful arts. Not as vocational training as most think of it but using the useful arts to reinforce the purely academic topics.

How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
–written for teachers, this book offers factors of studying and a good discussion of how these traits are inherent in children but can be polished. Or as most schooling does, inhibited.

Teaching Boys and Girls How to Study’ (1919) by Peter Jeremiah Zimmers, Superintendent of City Schools, Manitowoc, Wisconsin
— Uses the McMurry’s book as the basis of changes in the schools of Manitowoc. The book is a report of what was discovered. Classrooms were conducted more as discussion with the teacher as coach rather than the now predominant ‘sage on the stage’ method.

Here is a student comment included in Zimmers:

“I think this is a good way of teaching because it gives the pupils initiative and self reliance It helped me to like school because now the class is more interesting. If I do not believe a thing I now ask the pupils questions about it.. This method is better than the old because when the teacher went out of the room the class would have to stop but now when she goes out the class goes on just as though she were present.”

The biggest thing that helped me learn was figuring out a form of what you might call “Cowenesque” reading. That is, to just voraciously read and re-read as many sources on a subject (including podcasts and video courses) from as many angles as possible. Needless to say, I figured this out entirely on my own, and the constant barrage of disparate subjects in formal education even militates against it. It would not be far off to say that I have not been exposed to any education. The individual attention I received in school is far less than, say, the guitar lessons I took on my own my freshman year and may even be net negative (I taught my advisor several things, I’m not sure he really taught me anything, and all learning was 90% on my own and 10% transfer between peers). Nearly all individual attention prior to college was definitely not desired. I’m not even referring to direct practical applicability, which is almost definitely zero. This is very easy to see in a technical field. If you use any of the tools you taught yourself in the real world it is likely because you carry that hammer around looking for nails. If you are a liberal arts major it is probably harder to see this because you think you got the education. You might think you are educated because you know the things they taught. You judge yourself smart and educated because your standard is knowing the sum total of all the syllabi better than the other guy knows it. But maybe you are just delineated and are assuming an education is the limited subset of knowledge they presented to you.

I sat on this comment for a while, but the more I think about it the truer it gets. One professor put a photocopy of the research process on a bulletin board- results,, papers, grants, equipment, results, papers, grants, etc. They did this because money is good for them too. The sum total of instruction on the nuts and bolts was “keep a lab notebook, you will forget stuff.” John Wooden, they are not.