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People tend to forget information that is not useful to them. The age old problem with school curriculum is so much of it doesn't apply to day to day or even pr

People tend to forget information that is not useful to them. The age old problem with school curriculum is so much of it doesn't apply to day to day or even professional know-how. Getting students to retain more information is pointless if there is no value in retaining the information beyond final exams. The better pursuit is for schools to work on constantly realigning their curriculum towards what is necessary for modern life and employment. Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in.

rayiner 9y ago
The fundamental problem with schools is that they’re run by professors and teachers, who have almost a pathological aversion to teaching people anything useful.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
vkou 9y ago
> Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in. I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. I didn't have much of a classics education, but presumably, the value of it is not in learning the classics (Nobody actually gives two rat's asses about the the themes of the Illiad), but in learning how be analytical. The purpose of general education classes is to turn us into better people, and the purpose of specialization classes is to make us employable. I think Silicon Valley could use a lot more of the former.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. Davka to disagree with you, I think that might just mean you had more life experience before going into those classes than most people do. IME, formalized humanities material really needs to build on, well, some basic foundation of personal worldliness.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  That would be a great if school was actually about turning us into better people, but it's not. College nowadays is just a jobs training program separated from the employer so they can lower training costs. Almost all good jobs require degrees nowadays.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    “All good jobs require degrees” does not support that college is job training, only that it is used by employers as a filter. But the fact that it is used as a filter does not mean that it is indicative of needed skills, and even if it was that wouldn't mean it was training for those skills. It could be neutral impact as training but still tend to fail out unsuitable candidates, which would make it a useful skill or aptitude filter without being job training. And, of course, it could be conmonly used as a (cargo cult) filter without actually being a useful skill/aptitude filter at all.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      Yet an IT graduate is unlikely to be hired as a book keeper, right? And I bet a Law graduate would have a hard time getting a job involving direct healthcare. That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth. While I'd certainly agree that there are, in fact, at least some career paths for which that is true, but even a job having a preference for certain degrees doesn't have to imply that training is happening; different degree programs could have different filtering effects without being actual training. And, of course, not all jobs that require degrees are narrowly focussed on specific fields.
      - smsm42 9y ago
        Bookkeepers, lawyers and healthcare professionals require very specific and specialized training and in many cases it is not even legal to be employed as, say, lawyer or doctor without having specific credentials. But many jobs aren't like that - and still require degrees. > That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth. For some jobs - definitely. But there are plenty of others where degree is just a very rough filter and degrees that do not provide any direct training for the specific job are still required (and accepted).
- rayiner 9y ago
  It’s deeply ironic. We accept “teaching the classics teaches people how to be analytical” as a shibboleth to which we apply no scrutiny or analysis. Is there evidence showing that teaching classics helps with analysis more than say teaching math, logical reasoning, statistics? I strongly suspect that we would get better results if we replaced instruction on Greek myths with courses on Bayesian reasoning.
  - DiffEq 9y ago
    Well...the classics include logic and reasoning, or should. It is part of the Trivium (Classical Liberal Arts). The problem is that people only associate old books with a Classical Education when in reality Math and Science is indeed a great part of it. How can one be well rounded without math, science and logic - you can't be.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Teaching math, physics, and logic teaches you how to form and analyze, broadly speaking, chains of logical statements. This is an incredibly useful technical skill. Teaching classics teaches you how to analyze writing. Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own. (This is also why I think that limiting it to Western European classics is bullshit.) We spend a lot of time reading and writing, and very little of what we produce or consume can be distilled down to chains of logical statements. It's not going to help you derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, or figure out how to use the new flavour-of-the-week web framework, and that's fine.
    - trentmb 9y ago
      > Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own. Right, a different set of axioms. Any sort of analysis will, ultimately, be a series of arguments using the text and the set of axioms you mentioned.
  - unit91 9y ago
    Also ironic: "shibboleth" seems to be the new favorite buzzword of the HN shibboleth.
- chatmasta 9y ago
  This seems like confirmation bias. Have you considered that what you learned in CS may have had similar abstract analytical benefits? That is, even if you retained 0% of the practical programming content (like you retained 0% of the Illiad), you still exercised the logical side of your brain and learned to think algorithmically/logically.
lefstathiou 9y ago
I agree in spirit with this though I find internalizing the facts is less important than internalizing the method or theory of knowledge which they aren't getting either in my opinion. Personal anecdote: I believe there is a broad and pervasive culture of extreme procrastination across liberal arts campuses (it's much harder to do this in the sciences because if you don't keep up you completely drop off). Vast majority of my peers were pulling all nighters and needed a looming deadline to finish any assignment. It is very difficult to retain information on no sleep.
mulmen 9y ago
I do not believe a university is a job training program so I don't think we should optimize for employment. Skills necessary for modern life include critical thinking and diverse perspectives on the world. This is the value of "general education". College students don't know what they are interested in, that's a big reason for going to college in the first place. You can't ask them what they need to know because they don't know it yet.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  People with a degree tend to make more money than people without, even after adjusting for ability and conscientiousness. This is why most students are there at most colleges. It's very hard to teach people things they aren't willingly there for, so that they really get it.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    Ok but why do people with college degrees generally make more money?
    - abecedarius 9y ago
      Bryan Caplan argues it's mostly signaling: employers think (reasonably) that degree-holders tend to be more valuable employees than dropouts and people who didn't go to college, even though the education didn't add much to their productivity. They can't easily tell the able/conscientious/conformist dropouts from the others. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html
- yorwba 9y ago
  You may not believe that a university is a job training program, and I agree that it shouldn't be this way, but effectively, most students, educators and employers treat it as a training program. If universities weren't the only places to be trained for some jobs, few students would pay the high fees to receive "general education". If universities didn't provide job training, few employers would care about a degree any more than about the candidate's hobbies. If universities are not supposed to focus on job training, then they need to be replaced in this function by some other kind of institution that does. But so long as there are no established alternatives, universities will need to continue looking out for their student's employment prospects.
MisterBastahrd 9y ago
I remember when I was in 7th grade and we were first introduced to the Saxon math books. We would learn new material, but our homework constantly reinforced information from previous sections so that we never needed to go back to study anything, because we were solving the older problems on a daily basis and could be expected to solve them on tests. Requiring that students not only show that they understand current knowledge but also that they retain past knowledge seems to be a much better way to educate students. It obliterates the slacker cram mentality that many students have.

rayiner 9y ago

The fundamental problem with schools is that they’re run by professors and teachers, who have almost a pathological aversion to teaching people anything useful.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

vkou 9y ago

> Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in. I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. I didn't have much of a classics education, but presumably, the value of it is not in learning the classics (Nobody actually gives two rat's asses about the the themes of the Illiad), but in learning how be analytical. The purpose of general education classes is to turn us into better people, and the purpose of specialization classes is to make us employable. I think Silicon Valley could use a lot more of the former.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. Davka to disagree with you, I think that might just mean you had more life experience before going into those classes than most people do. IME, formalized humanities material really needs to build on, well, some basic foundation of personal worldliness.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
That would be a great if school was actually about turning us into better people, but it's not. College nowadays is just a jobs training program separated from the employer so they can lower training costs. Almost all good jobs require degrees nowadays.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  “All good jobs require degrees” does not support that college is job training, only that it is used by employers as a filter. But the fact that it is used as a filter does not mean that it is indicative of needed skills, and even if it was that wouldn't mean it was training for those skills. It could be neutral impact as training but still tend to fail out unsuitable candidates, which would make it a useful skill or aptitude filter without being job training. And, of course, it could be conmonly used as a (cargo cult) filter without actually being a useful skill/aptitude filter at all.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Yet an IT graduate is unlikely to be hired as a book keeper, right? And I bet a Law graduate would have a hard time getting a job involving direct healthcare. That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth. While I'd certainly agree that there are, in fact, at least some career paths for which that is true, but even a job having a preference for certain degrees doesn't have to imply that training is happening; different degree programs could have different filtering effects without being actual training. And, of course, not all jobs that require degrees are narrowly focussed on specific fields.
    - smsm42 9y ago
      Bookkeepers, lawyers and healthcare professionals require very specific and specialized training and in many cases it is not even legal to be employed as, say, lawyer or doctor without having specific credentials. But many jobs aren't like that - and still require degrees. > That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth. For some jobs - definitely. But there are plenty of others where degree is just a very rough filter and degrees that do not provide any direct training for the specific job are still required (and accepted).
rayiner 9y ago
It’s deeply ironic. We accept “teaching the classics teaches people how to be analytical” as a shibboleth to which we apply no scrutiny or analysis. Is there evidence showing that teaching classics helps with analysis more than say teaching math, logical reasoning, statistics? I strongly suspect that we would get better results if we replaced instruction on Greek myths with courses on Bayesian reasoning.
- DiffEq 9y ago
  Well...the classics include logic and reasoning, or should. It is part of the Trivium (Classical Liberal Arts). The problem is that people only associate old books with a Classical Education when in reality Math and Science is indeed a great part of it. How can one be well rounded without math, science and logic - you can't be.
- vkou 9y ago
  Teaching math, physics, and logic teaches you how to form and analyze, broadly speaking, chains of logical statements. This is an incredibly useful technical skill. Teaching classics teaches you how to analyze writing. Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own. (This is also why I think that limiting it to Western European classics is bullshit.) We spend a lot of time reading and writing, and very little of what we produce or consume can be distilled down to chains of logical statements. It's not going to help you derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, or figure out how to use the new flavour-of-the-week web framework, and that's fine.
  - trentmb 9y ago
    > Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own. Right, a different set of axioms. Any sort of analysis will, ultimately, be a series of arguments using the text and the set of axioms you mentioned.
- unit91 9y ago
  Also ironic: "shibboleth" seems to be the new favorite buzzword of the HN shibboleth.
chatmasta 9y ago
This seems like confirmation bias. Have you considered that what you learned in CS may have had similar abstract analytical benefits? That is, even if you retained 0% of the practical programming content (like you retained 0% of the Illiad), you still exercised the logical side of your brain and learned to think algorithmically/logically.

lefstathiou 9y ago

I agree in spirit with this though I find internalizing the facts is less important than internalizing the method or theory of knowledge which they aren't getting either in my opinion. Personal anecdote: I believe there is a broad and pervasive culture of extreme procrastination across liberal arts campuses (it's much harder to do this in the sciences because if you don't keep up you completely drop off). Vast majority of my peers were pulling all nighters and needed a looming deadline to finish any assignment. It is very difficult to retain information on no sleep.

mulmen 9y ago

I do not believe a university is a job training program so I don't think we should optimize for employment. Skills necessary for modern life include critical thinking and diverse perspectives on the world. This is the value of "general education". College students don't know what they are interested in, that's a big reason for going to college in the first place. You can't ask them what they need to know because they don't know it yet.

abecedarius 9y ago
People with a degree tend to make more money than people without, even after adjusting for ability and conscientiousness. This is why most students are there at most colleges. It's very hard to teach people things they aren't willingly there for, so that they really get it.
- mulmen 9y ago
  Ok but why do people with college degrees generally make more money?
  - abecedarius 9y ago
    Bryan Caplan argues it's mostly signaling: employers think (reasonably) that degree-holders tend to be more valuable employees than dropouts and people who didn't go to college, even though the education didn't add much to their productivity. They can't easily tell the able/conscientious/conformist dropouts from the others. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html
yorwba 9y ago
You may not believe that a university is a job training program, and I agree that it shouldn't be this way, but effectively, most students, educators and employers treat it as a training program. If universities weren't the only places to be trained for some jobs, few students would pay the high fees to receive "general education". If universities didn't provide job training, few employers would care about a degree any more than about the candidate's hobbies. If universities are not supposed to focus on job training, then they need to be replaced in this function by some other kind of institution that does. But so long as there are no established alternatives, universities will need to continue looking out for their student's employment prospects.

MisterBastahrd 9y ago

I remember when I was in 7th grade and we were first introduced to the Saxon math books. We would learn new material, but our homework constantly reinforced information from previous sections so that we never needed to go back to study anything, because we were solving the older problems on a daily basis and could be expected to solve them on tests. Requiring that students not only show that they understand current knowledge but also that they retain past knowledge seems to be a much better way to educate students. It obliterates the slacker cram mentality that many students have.