4 ms·

I was expecting the worst judging from the comments here, but it's actually an excellent essay (or article, or whatever you want to call it). I personally agre

by Mikeb85 11y ago

I was expecting the worst judging from the comments here, but it's actually an excellent essay (or article, or whatever you want to call it). I personally agree. University should be more about learning and becoming better thinkers than simply learning a few facts and getting a piece of paper. Pretty much none of the students I interact with care about 'learning', or any form of critical thinking. They want the profs to teach them a few facts, then base the test on those few facts. They optimize for this so they can get their A, then get the hell out.

Retric 11y ago
IMO, the internet has changed who speaks for the masses. It used to take real effort to speak out. So, you generally only hear from people who do stuff. Now days speaking is easy, it's getting people to pay attention that's hard. And what most speaks to people are simple messages about simple problems. Sadly, this means it's simple messages from whiners that drones out everyone else. There are still plenty of builders, protesters, and politicians, but it's just the drone of first world problems silences them. PS: As to learners, you don't need to speak to your professors if you want to learn something. So, professors are going to hear more from people about there grades than the actual subject.
kaitai 11y ago
A lot of students don't care about critical thinking, but I think that really underestimates these students. What do we offer them, after all? All I had to do was advertise some research opportunities and 10+ students were interested in doing work for no pay and no credit outside of class. Sure, they have no idea what they're doing -- but they know they want to be doing something interesting, and they took the initiative to follow up with me. What is so special about my students? They're pretty career focused, and not in a "learning-for-learning's-sake" kind of field. And yet they want to use what they learn in class to do meaningful analysis on extracurricular topics.
superuser2 11y ago
This is a matter of institutional culture. You'll find it in schools that are country clubs or low-cost mass-appeal credential factories. You won't find it so much in private schools with reputations for nerdiness and difficulty.
- tokenadult 11y ago
  private schools with reputations for nerdiness and difficulty Which schools are those? As a homeschooling parent, who emphasizes to my children that they should THINK, I would definitely encourage my children to apply to schools (public or private) that are genuinely nerdy and difficult. I'd be delighted to hear suggestions of good colleges and universities like that.
  - pbh101 11y ago
    Harvey Mudd, CalTech, Rose Hulman, Carnegie Mellon, from what I've heard and experienced. But I expect you have heard of these institutions, and they are all on the technical side.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    MIT, UChicago, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, WashU, Middlebury, Berkeley, etc. Students who are primarily interested in prestige have better options. What's left at schools like these are the masochists who actually want to be challenged academically and surrounded by peers at or above their intellectual level. I'd say Chicago is the paradigm case, but I'm biased :). One of its best features is an extraordinarily large and rigorous general ed requirement ("the Core") which means even a computer science student gets a substantial liberal arts education. There are paths through the Core with a higher tolerance for bullshit, but they're frowned upon. I took the more philosophy-leaning sequences and loved them. Lots of emphasis on close reading, lucid discussion, critical analysis, and clear argumentative writing. It has also been my experience that students merely looking to check the "college" box with minimal effort are not mainstream and don't tend to succeed.
geofft 11y ago
I think there's a valuable role for such an institution in the world, but I'm not sure why it should be the university. The vast majority of people who attend university don't really care about optimizing for that goal. The vast majority of people who require university attendance as a prerequisite for something else don't really, either. And the vast majority of people who provide outside funding to universities don't: they fund research, not teaching. And as a result, the vast majority of successful employees in this system are those who at best want the university to be a place where faculty and graduate students learn things, and only secondarily where undergraduates learn things. The change to make universities, as a system, be about people who specifically care about being a better thinker would be greatly disruptive to society, and for what benefit? Those who are interested in becoming better thinkers can go to a different sort of institution. Arguably there is such an institution already, namely graduate school. That you have to go through undergrad first is not particularly more onerous than that you have to go through grade school first. Grade school sucks a lot for people who care about learning.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It should be university because it originally was. It evolved towards being a very elaborate vocational school. The actual vocational schools are uncool now, so you get basically the same thing from Ivy League, only less efficiently and for more money. I think both approaches are fine; what messes things up is the dissociative identity disorder the university suffers from. On one hand, it is expected to carry great traditions of scholarship. On the other, economic incentives create strong pressure to do vocational training instead. If we could split it (back) into two separate institutions, things would be much better.
danieltillett 11y ago
When I was a professor I tried an experiment a few times of offering extra classes during the lunch break. These covered interesting and important areas that we just didn't have time to get to in class. The topics covered weren't on the final exam and were totally voluntary. Out of a class of 100 I would get around 10 or so students come to these classes which were more tutorial than lecture. It was great experience teaching students just interested in learning. The most interesting aspect of the exercise was the students were drawn pretty evenly from across the performance spectrum. There were students who got A's in everything, but there were also a number who we're just scraping through the degree. I was quite surprised at which students came.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I'd probably be in the middle of the perfomance spectrum of your group. I learned in my own pace, followed things that interested me, which meant that I could have bad grades (mostly from ignoring assignments) but still have a keen interest in the subject. That is, if anyone would tell me this is a thing. I always thought that office hours are mostly for a) helping people who didn't understand some part of a lecture, and b) dealing with formal stuff - grades, extensions, absences, etc. It was pointed out to me just around the time I was finishing my education that I could have just come to talk about the subject matter, and a lot of the staff would be more than happy to tell me about it. This is one of my two biggest regrets from the university - that I didn't come to professors and asked them, only limiting myself to occasional after-lecture chat. (The other one being that I completely ignored party life and thus didn't take the chance to meet and befriend many smart people studying various sciences and arts.)
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I used to have the occasional student that would "drop in to chat”, but I think most were too scared to do so. In the natural sciences you have labs which are smaller and more informal where students were more comfortable chatting about science. I had lots of interesting conversations in labs and even occasionally about the subject. I had always wished that we could have a more informal learning process where the professor’s job is to guide the student through the subject, but this is not really compatible with the industrial-scale higher education system we have today. In the end you feel you have accomplished something if at least a few students have learned something. On a bit of a rant at no stage in your performance evaluation as a professor are you ever judged on what your students learned. No effort is made by the university to measure how effective your teaching is or if your students have gaining anything from the course. Entertain the students and hand out A’s like confetti and the university is happy.

by Mikeb85 11y ago

Retric 11y ago

IMO, the internet has changed who speaks for the masses. It used to take real effort to speak out. So, you generally only hear from people who do stuff. Now days speaking is easy, it's getting people to pay attention that's hard. And what most speaks to people are simple messages about simple problems. Sadly, this means it's simple messages from whiners that drones out everyone else. There are still plenty of builders, protesters, and politicians, but it's just the drone of first world problems silences them. PS: As to learners, you don't need to speak to your professors if you want to learn something. So, professors are going to hear more from people about there grades than the actual subject.

kaitai 11y ago

A lot of students don't care about critical thinking, but I think that really underestimates these students. What do we offer them, after all? All I had to do was advertise some research opportunities and 10+ students were interested in doing work for no pay and no credit outside of class. Sure, they have no idea what they're doing -- but they know they want to be doing something interesting, and they took the initiative to follow up with me. What is so special about my students? They're pretty career focused, and not in a "learning-for-learning's-sake" kind of field. And yet they want to use what they learn in class to do meaningful analysis on extracurricular topics.

superuser2 11y ago

This is a matter of institutional culture. You'll find it in schools that are country clubs or low-cost mass-appeal credential factories. You won't find it so much in private schools with reputations for nerdiness and difficulty.

tokenadult 11y ago
private schools with reputations for nerdiness and difficulty Which schools are those? As a homeschooling parent, who emphasizes to my children that they should THINK, I would definitely encourage my children to apply to schools (public or private) that are genuinely nerdy and difficult. I'd be delighted to hear suggestions of good colleges and universities like that.
- pbh101 11y ago
  Harvey Mudd, CalTech, Rose Hulman, Carnegie Mellon, from what I've heard and experienced. But I expect you have heard of these institutions, and they are all on the technical side.
- superuser2 11y ago
  MIT, UChicago, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, WashU, Middlebury, Berkeley, etc. Students who are primarily interested in prestige have better options. What's left at schools like these are the masochists who actually want to be challenged academically and surrounded by peers at or above their intellectual level. I'd say Chicago is the paradigm case, but I'm biased :). One of its best features is an extraordinarily large and rigorous general ed requirement ("the Core") which means even a computer science student gets a substantial liberal arts education. There are paths through the Core with a higher tolerance for bullshit, but they're frowned upon. I took the more philosophy-leaning sequences and loved them. Lots of emphasis on close reading, lucid discussion, critical analysis, and clear argumentative writing. It has also been my experience that students merely looking to check the "college" box with minimal effort are not mainstream and don't tend to succeed.

geofft 11y ago

I think there's a valuable role for such an institution in the world, but I'm not sure why it should be the university. The vast majority of people who attend university don't really care about optimizing for that goal. The vast majority of people who require university attendance as a prerequisite for something else don't really, either. And the vast majority of people who provide outside funding to universities don't: they fund research, not teaching. And as a result, the vast majority of successful employees in this system are those who at best want the university to be a place where faculty and graduate students learn things, and only secondarily where undergraduates learn things. The change to make universities, as a system, be about people who specifically care about being a better thinker would be greatly disruptive to society, and for what benefit? Those who are interested in becoming better thinkers can go to a different sort of institution. Arguably there is such an institution already, namely graduate school. That you have to go through undergrad first is not particularly more onerous than that you have to go through grade school first. Grade school sucks a lot for people who care about learning.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
It should be university because it originally was. It evolved towards being a very elaborate vocational school. The actual vocational schools are uncool now, so you get basically the same thing from Ivy League, only less efficiently and for more money. I think both approaches are fine; what messes things up is the dissociative identity disorder the university suffers from. On one hand, it is expected to carry great traditions of scholarship. On the other, economic incentives create strong pressure to do vocational training instead. If we could split it (back) into two separate institutions, things would be much better.

danieltillett 11y ago

When I was a professor I tried an experiment a few times of offering extra classes during the lunch break. These covered interesting and important areas that we just didn't have time to get to in class. The topics covered weren't on the final exam and were totally voluntary. Out of a class of 100 I would get around 10 or so students come to these classes which were more tutorial than lecture. It was great experience teaching students just interested in learning. The most interesting aspect of the exercise was the students were drawn pretty evenly from across the performance spectrum. There were students who got A's in everything, but there were also a number who we're just scraping through the degree. I was quite surprised at which students came.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I'd probably be in the middle of the perfomance spectrum of your group. I learned in my own pace, followed things that interested me, which meant that I could have bad grades (mostly from ignoring assignments) but still have a keen interest in the subject. That is, if anyone would tell me this is a thing. I always thought that office hours are mostly for a) helping people who didn't understand some part of a lecture, and b) dealing with formal stuff - grades, extensions, absences, etc. It was pointed out to me just around the time I was finishing my education that I could have just come to talk about the subject matter, and a lot of the staff would be more than happy to tell me about it. This is one of my two biggest regrets from the university - that I didn't come to professors and asked them, only limiting myself to occasional after-lecture chat. (The other one being that I completely ignored party life and thus didn't take the chance to meet and befriend many smart people studying various sciences and arts.)
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I used to have the occasional student that would "drop in to chat”, but I think most were too scared to do so. In the natural sciences you have labs which are smaller and more informal where students were more comfortable chatting about science. I had lots of interesting conversations in labs and even occasionally about the subject. I had always wished that we could have a more informal learning process where the professor’s job is to guide the student through the subject, but this is not really compatible with the industrial-scale higher education system we have today. In the end you feel you have accomplished something if at least a few students have learned something. On a bit of a rant at no stage in your performance evaluation as a professor are you ever judged on what your students learned. No effort is made by the university to measure how effective your teaching is or if your students have gaining anything from the course. Entertain the students and hand out A’s like confetti and the university is happy.