The focus in universities appears to have shifted from education, to living the good life for four years. Universities these days have five-star dorms that cater to students' every whim (double decaf mocha latte at midnight, anyone?). How about we return to modest buildings and dorms (clean, but very basic accommodations) so the money can actually be spent on education? How about cost containment? Surely professors' salaries are not rising at 2-3 times the rate of inflation that tuition is rising at?
-- Jagadeesh Venugopal, October 15, 2009
I'm not sure about an open office. I could study fine in my dorm room, which didn't have a computer or anything like that but in an office I'd have to deal with other people. Important at work but it wouldn't help me get my Chemistry book read.U tended to like studying on my bed while swishing my legs around. Lying on the floor swishing your legs wouldn't be acceptable in an office.
That's not to say I wouldn't have benefited from more collaborative projects, but I need time alone to.
However, I agree about lectures being mostly useless. I often drew during lectures to stay awake.
-- Elizabeth Porco, November 2, 2009
The first day of Statistics 100 at the University of Michigan, the professor said our final grade was either the average score of our midterm and final, or the score of the final -- whichever was greater. Our labs and homework assignments did not impact our course grade. My roommate, also enrolled in the same course, didn't make the first class. I told him about the grading system. Neither of us attended another class, nor took the midterm.Before the final, we spent two days straight, reading the material and doing problem sets. I got a B+. He got an A-.
I am ashamed to admit that I wasted all those lectures and labs that my family paid for. But what does it say about inadequacy and inefficiency of the lecture system when we arguably learned the practical application of our course material with 24 hours of self-study spread over two days and a $100 textbook?
Compare that with the cost of the lectures and labs -- 64 hours spread over 16 weeks and $3,861-5,791 in tuition (depends on course load, based on current tuition of $17,374).
-- Mike Lin, November 9, 2009
The ideas encapsulated by "eventually most of the English were somehow descended from people with a psychological propensity to save and invest rather than leap at instant gratification" are the weakest part of Clark's argument. Unless there is a large body of genetic and psychological literature I am unaware of, this theory of economic eugenics is almost pure speculation. To the extent that it is used to "explain" the success of one country as compared to another it also carries very unpleasant racial overtones--- that the story of England's rise to power is a story of a genetically superior group of savers and investors vanquishing genetically inferior groups of savages who can think only of the present moment. If we take this seriously, we do not need to worry about educational systems if we want to preserve the standing of the US relative to other countries; we just need to adjust social conditions so that rich people have more surviving children than poor people. (Perhaps the children of rich people could _eat_ the children of poor people?)You make the point that the main weakness of the lecture format is that it requires talented storytellers, and there simply aren't enough of them. For this to be a critique of the lecture _system_, and not just individual lecturers, one has to believe that we can't do anything about the number of good storytellers--- or at least that it is more expensive to change this than it is to introduce something different. Is it? Graduate schools could do much more to increase the lecture-giving ability of the PhDs they produce, at no additional cost. All of the programs I am personally familiar with currently have nothing specifically about giving lectures as a PhD requirement. And I have never heard of anybody being asked to leave a PhD program for not being able to give a decent lecture. What if we just changed that?
My personal feeling is that there is a lot of life left in lectures if we take them seriously, and there is nothing more practical about other models if they are implemented by the same group of people. If somebody makes a long lecture a waste of time, they will also make a short lecture and supervised group work a waste of time. At present, most PhDs are expected to learn teaching (in whatever format) by osmosis--- and it sometimes seems that the more elite the university, the less the hiring and firing depends on teaching ability. This does lead to very bad lectures at "very good" schools, but it is not itself a fault of the lecture-based model of instruction.
-- Joe C., December 6, 2009
The process you describe is not new--Architecture has always been taught this way.
-- mike franklin, December 10, 2009
With hindsight(!) three of the greatest problems with the University education I received was the politicisation of the content of study in the Arts (anthropology/philosophy) faculties; the chasm that existed between the Arts and Science faculties (math); and overall the poor quality of the tenured staff and teaching practice. In math for example, proof theory was not taught systematically at all, the history of math was not presented systematically (which is fatal for understanding in an essentially cumulative science), and to cap it all off, complete proofs were not always presented. No wonder the dropout rate for math was catastrophic (from 300 students in year 1, to 100 in year 2, to 30 "mathematically minded" students in year 3). In both the Arts and in maths there has long grown up a ferocious in-group "professionalism" that is designed to keep outsiders out and insiders smuggly pleased with themselves and their "honest, hardworking, colleagues"; an educated layman cannot today pick up and read the average maths paper, nor understand the incomprehensible gibberish that is "post-modernism". Yet there is nothing at all in maths or philosophy say that is that difficult to understand, our current crop of "great" mathematicians are not Euler's and our "great" philosophers are not Aristotle's, not even close! My point being, that against this background, it doesn't make any difference at all whether information is presented in lecture format, or online, it is still mediocre rubbish on the whole. Listening to an intellectual post-modernist phoney like Derrida speak in person, or reading his "transgressive" effusions online makes no difference.
-- Fred Bishop, March 10, 2010
I completely agree with this article on many levels. I sometimes feel there is no education system in America. Most people I know who are particularly knowledgeable usually were lucky to have good mentors, usually parents. High school teaches very little useful skills - when was I supposed to learn how to file my taxes, write a check, change a tire, etc.? Of course you can learn these things on your own, but then what is our education good for? Most people I know who are good with cars learned from a relative. If you ask them a good resource to learn from, they will usually say 'Well, I don't know, I've just been working on cars since my dad had me in the garage as a kid...' The best programmer I know seems to not understand that his dad being a programmer probably exposed him to many things that the rest of sitting through 'Intro to MS Word' were not, and that probably contributed to where he is today. And if it wasn't for the internet, I don't think I'd be anywhere either.Why do I clearly remember spending time being indoctrinated that marijuana was evil and underage drinking was a horrible crime and that the policies against it make sense but us teenagers are just a bunch of rotten apples? Why do I remember being bored out of my mind when we had to review old material yet against because a small percentage of the class failed the test, because in our 'no child left behind' culture the classroom must move at the rate of its slowest students? I could have been learning something useful any of those times.
And don't even get me started on how useless college is. I remember taking a Signals and Systems class where the professor would FLY through all sorts of Laplace and Fourier transforms as if we were supposed to learn them by osmosis, in the hour and a half lecture of dense math. It was impossible to concentrate for that long just sitting there and listening with no involvement. Adderall abuse was extremely common at my college, and I refuse to believe it's because we are in an ADD generation, but simply because we are asked for superhuman concentration.
Of course the smug professor just prefers to think his students are not gifted enough to follow his brilliance, and maybe I agreed when I dropped the class and temporarily left college. But when I decided to learn some of the material on my own time, grounded in the actual application of image processing, I realized it's not so difficult. It was just extremely poorly taught. There was no student participation, no grounding the theory in application (which is the whole point of engineering), and no time to really sit back and wrap your head around a concept before moving on to the next. Now I have all these things, and I guess I got some appreciation for why so many Americans are 'dumb'. Nobody's teaching them, and anybody who tries will get brow beaten by teacher's unions or university bureaucracy until they give up - and even the best teachers give up.
http://reason.com/archives/2002/07/01/stand-and-deliver-revisited
Fortunately, there is one gigantic beacon of hope and that is the internet, but as you mention, that may keep the world's education afloat, but it won't give Americans any sort of advantage. But at this point, it's clear this country doesn't deserve one anyway.
-- Billy Prin, April 2, 2010
"I once asked a group of professors at Makerere University in Uganda "How come more people fail the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer test than your most advanced computer science course?" It would seem that the answer is that the MCSE, which tests the ability to do basic Windows administration, is graded by an impartial computer system. "For the record, the MCSE does not teach basic Windows administration...it teaches engineering, designing, creating, and development of networks.
Basic Windows administration is defined as resolving desktop and server issues (ie system updates, adding removing objects to an existig infrastructure, NOT the creation of that infrastructure).
Equating an MCSE to basic Windows administration is a poor analogy to say the least.
Having said that, your point of bias in testing is a valid one, albeit made with a very poor example. Just say that there are inherent biases in grading ones own tests.
-- Jason Anderson, July 9, 2011