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School consists of sitting in a lecture hall with 100 other students listening to a middle-aged lecturer talk about his interests for 50min, 3 times a week. Unl
by reader5000 17y ago
School consists of sitting in a lecture hall with 100 other students listening to a middle-aged lecturer talk about his interests for 50min, 3 times a week. Unless you aspire to be a good listener / note-taker, no, there is no actual point to school, unless both common sense and modern psychological learning theory are both horribly wrong.
HOWEVER, when you get a degree what you are getting is a signal to potential employers that you are of roughly the average intelligence of other people with that degree. This signal is of varying importance in the real world.
- boryas 17y agoI don't know what university you went to, but this is about as far from the truth as statements come. If you can't learn anything interesting/useful/mindblowing in a university course, you are either not paying attention, or are taking the wrong course...
- reader5000 17y agoMaybe this is just a generational thing, but when I entered my years of intellectual curiosity I had access to the local university library, bookstore, and the internet. Although I don't disagree there are mindblowing concepts out there, I feel they are much more efficiently delivered in texts written by practitioners with worldwide recognition in their fields rather than from a powerpoint lecture made by average state U professor. It seems rather absurd many students must pay thousands of dollars per semester for the privilege to sit in on these lectures when one could purchase the definitive treatment of the subject for $35 and read it in a month. There are a lot of ways of interpreting the question. But to me, the main interpretation is: is it at all cost-efficient to charge students $60k+ and 4 years of their lives to sit in on lectures in order to "learn" abstract bodies of conceptual knowledge? To me the answer is no. But of course the other aspect is the social signal. Many middle class wage paying jobs will not consider uncredentialed people. For this reason acquiring a degree is probably 'worth it'. And of course if you can go for free and delay the real world for that long, hell yeah do it.
- g1t1t 17y agowell you just missed the point of lectures...its to INTERACT with someone who knows the material. no one is disputing the value of a good text. when i didn't want to interact with the prof, i just skipped class. its college. they don't care if you go or not (nor should they). just show up for the exam.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]