Depending on the material it is doable over the course of a few weekends. Consider many college courses meet twice a week for one hour each time, so two hours a week. ~14 weeks leaves only 28 hours of in class instruction time. Devote three of your weekends this month to complete study and you'll easily match the hourly total lecture-wise (you could even do it in one weekend if you're hardcore), what can kill you is the exercises, and the time it takes for actually learning the material.
Despite meeting more frequently I don't think college students learn the material any better than an upfront binge learner, because most of them have no clue how to actually learn something. They read and cram exercises enough to match the patterns and pass by (a sort of compressed periodic binge learning), and then they're done. Course interdependence forces some amount of actual learning that lasts but not that much.
Anyway to pull off the weekend study you wouldn't spend 6 hours on each day of your weekends just "reading". You would be reading (not necessarily in order or even every page), doing exercises, creating mnemonics, finding other resources to clear something up, and possibly making some flash cards to take advantage of spaced repetition later, which has an important characteristic that you don't need to review every day for an hour, only at the moment before you'd naturally forget which could be days, months, or years away. Depending on the subject you may also just be "practicing", for whatever that means for the subject. (Writing programs is a common programmer method to supplement in the learning of something.)
Another benefit to the intense approach is that you create many associations up front, instead of living in confusion until (if you don't give up beforehand) your slow and steady schedule advances to the point where learning something new makes enough older things click together. If you're just casually reading for 6 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, and do no review, and have no intensity of making it an active exercise instead of a passive reading-only one, then yeah, you're not going to learn anything, but I doubt you'd learn much more by converting the same behavior to an hour a day.
Some students might learn how to learn as a side effect of surviving the system, but there are easier ways of surviving the system than actually learning. There are strong incentives against actually learning too -- e.g. when the material to be learned is obsolete or irrelevant in the face of modern technology. In any case I think you're the first I've heard say they thought the point of the system is to learn how to learn, I've never seen that even historically. (And if it were true, the system is an even bigger failure than it already is while addressing its other stated purposes...)
"The aim of the University is a true enlargement of mind... the power of viewing many things at once." [0]
Would very much like to see Cardinal Newman's Ideas around 'liberal' and 'servile' education catch the attention of the HN crowd. We're doing learning and advancement all wrong by focusing on utilitarian outcomes for universities rather than pure development of the mind (whence would flow marvellous creativity).
I cannot find that quote on the site you linked. Do you have an expansion? The closest I found in the text was this paragraph:
"Instances, such as these, confirm, by the contrast, the conclusion I have already drawn from those which preceded them. That only is true enlargement of mind {137} which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence. Thus is that form of Universal Knowledge, of which I have on a former occasion spoken, set up in the individual intellect, and constitutes its perfection. Possessed of this real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended subject-matter of Knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part, or without the associations which spring from this recollection. It makes every thing in some sort lead to every thing else; it would communicate the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that whole becomes in imagination like a spirit, every where pervading and penetrating its component parts, and giving them one definite meaning. Just as our bodily organs, when mentioned, recall their function in the body, as the word "creation" suggests the Creator, and "subjects" a sovereign, so, in the mind of the Philosopher, as we are abstractedly conceiving of him, the elements of the physical and moral world, sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks, offices, events, opinions, individualities, are all viewed as one, with correlative functions, and as gradually by successive combinations converging, one and all, to the true centre."
If the quote comes from this, it is crucially leaving off the continuation: "...as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence." This implies that by learning a lot, you enlarge your mind, and then can connect everything. This has nothing to do with learning how to learn, especially as a primary goal of university. Here is a college that supposedly follows his guidance: http://www.thomasmorecollege.edu/academics/true-enlargement-... Again, from that page, "it is plainly both the knowledge of architectonic principles and the familiarity with the substance of the various arts and sciences of which a liberal education is composed, including such pursuits as history, literature, rhetoric, mathematics, and the study of the natural world." So what you learn matters.
Thanks for the link though, should be interesting reading later. I agree it'd be nice if universities embodied some of the purpose they historically set out to be for, and we resurrected utilitarian trade schools with tight integration into what companies want so that those without the inclination or ability to pursue intellectualism can still learn something useful and create a better life for themselves.
I'm glad you find the Cardinal's thoughts stimulating. Yes, I pulled that quote from a Google result without sourcing it correctly, but perhaps you would agree they convey the spirit of the discourses? I'd love to hear your remarks on Cardinal's distinction between liberal and servile education[0], or, indeed, your impressions of the essay as a whole.
Addressing your point, it seems that these things are not that different (being able to fit knowledge within a universal system and understanding how to learn), or that in achieving the stated end (being able to fit knowledge within a universal system), one would need to 'learn how to learn.'
If you'd like to continue the discussion offthread, I'm available at myusername at geemayl dawt com
Great point about forgetting the material. If you really want to learn something you need to review it more than once, and you need to encounter it in more than one environment / context (unless you're a genius, maybe). It's science, yo.
I learned that from math literature. To really solidify a topic you need to express it in as many ways and "different angles" as possible. It's related to the more ways you've seen a problem solved the better your understanding.
An hour or so every day is much better and realistic.