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Taking things slow is good under certain circumstances. You have to ask yourself whether or not the content of the class is disjointed from the rest of the curr

Taking things slow is good under certain circumstances. You have to ask yourself whether or not the content of the class is disjointed from the rest of the curriculum for most of the students that are taking it. A computer science student will be constantly using basic programming skills, giving it time to crystallize into long-term memory; introductory programming classes can be rushed and still effective, as long as the content is constantly reused. The same goes for many other skillsets. In my anecdotal experience, learning things slowly is most effective when studying content that doesn't have a convenient connection to a current understanding, or even no connection at all. The biggest problem with this approach is that general education requirements in modern education strongly disincentivizes taking things slow. Most universities I know of bog students down in 2 or more semesters of classes entirely irrelevant to their field of study. Although taking another 2+ semesters of relevant study would definitely improve understanding, very few students are going to eat thousands of dollars going out of their way to make up getting shafted by gen-ed classes.

derefr 9y ago
What would be the correct pace for a classical liberal-arts education, do you think? The subjects are weakly related (you can reuse things you learn in studying philosophy or a language like Latin in the study of history) but they don’t really build any of the same skills. Did the classical Universities teach more slowly when trying to imbue such knowledge?
jacobolus 9y ago
Non-major courses are an amazing opportunity for students to learn about a wide variety of scholarship from some of the top experts in those fields. The cognitive strategies / methods of inquiry of various fields vary significantly, and learning to “think like a historian” or “think like an ethnographer” or “think like an economist” or “think like a philosopher” or “think like a mathematician” etc. is incredibly valuable for future work and also for becoming an informed citizen and an inheritor of the richness of human culture. Liberal arts degrees are not supposed to be narrow job training. The problem here is the debt students need to take on to go through college, not the college content per se (at least at the level of which courses students need; some of those courses themselves could use better content and pedagogy).
- seabird 9y ago
  There's a difference between what liberal arts degrees are "supposed" to be and what they are. College has been effectively (but incorrectly) marketed as a requirement for the everyman to stand any chance of success in the future economy. For better or for worse, Joe Average couldn't give a shit less what an ethnographer thinks of the plight of rice farmers in Cambodia or what a philosopher thinks of the absurdity of the human condition. What he does care about is having a viable income in an economy where unskilled gravy jobs have dried up. Informed citizens and "inheritors of the richness of human culture" generally care about such things before they even reach a university. For everyone else, it's a place that takes their money so they can get a degree and stand a fighting chance in the job market. The overall problem isn't that it's too expensive (it is), it's that people are effectively being forced to go to college in the first place, spending four years earning a degree when they would have been better served by four years of work experience.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Joe Average can do a wide variety of vocational training programs, go to a technical/engineering college, join the military, or skip college and go straight into working if he so desires. It’s hardly the colleges’ fault that people show up who don’t really want to be there and “don’t give a shit” about the concept of liberal arts. What kind of future career does your imagined Joe Average aspire to? Semi-skilled manufacturing jobs have mostly dried up because of automation, healthcare costs continue to skyrocket due to the financialization of the medical industry, and wages have been depressed by a range of policy changes that give more and more power and wealth to rentiers and capitalists at the expense of everyone else. I suppose as an alternative all the Joe Averages could get together and vote European-style socialists into office.
- gowld 9y ago
  Paying a top expert in Foo to teach Foo 101 is either a massive waste or a huge lecture hall that may as well be a video.
chatmasta 9y ago
Computer science is probably not the best example. That’s one subject where 99% of learning happens by doing the problem sets. I even had one teacher who told us he never went to class, so he didn’t expect us to, but that showing up would make the problem sets easier. In classes like that, the lectures basically act as a starting point, and establish the scope of the problem sets. If you didn’t attend the lecture, you can still do the problem set, but you’ll probably end up over complicating it because you missed the many hints of how to approach it that were in the lectures.
- seabird 9y ago
  I would argue that computer science is a bad example because blue collar programming, systems administration, etc. largely doesn't require a college education at all, for the reasons you mentioned. Short of research and study concerning the mathematical limits of computers, hardware, and software, much of the computer work that is largely better served by a period of work experience than that same period in university. The point that I was (and doing a poor job of) trying to make is that concepts that will be constantly reviewed anyway probably won't benefit from an inordinate amount of time being dedicated to them, as the "working memory, long-term memory" issue mentioned in the article doesn't fit such situations.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Even “white collar” programming doesn’t require a CS degree. Several of the most innovative, careful, and productive programmers I have ever met were English or Philosophy majors (arguably we should hire more of those in the software industry).
- gowld 9y ago
  99% of learning in math and science is doing the problem sets. 99% of learning in history and literature is doing the reading and writing essays. 99% of the learning in arts is making art.
gowld 9y ago
The "gen-ed", "distribution" concept is very USAmerican. European universities tend to avoid it, and so students complete bachelors/masters 1 or 2 years sooner than USAmericans.

derefr 9y ago

What would be the correct pace for a classical liberal-arts education, do you think? The subjects are weakly related (you can reuse things you learn in studying philosophy or a language like Latin in the study of history) but they don’t really build any of the same skills. Did the classical Universities teach more slowly when trying to imbue such knowledge?

jacobolus 9y ago

Non-major courses are an amazing opportunity for students to learn about a wide variety of scholarship from some of the top experts in those fields. The cognitive strategies / methods of inquiry of various fields vary significantly, and learning to “think like a historian” or “think like an ethnographer” or “think like an economist” or “think like a philosopher” or “think like a mathematician” etc. is incredibly valuable for future work and also for becoming an informed citizen and an inheritor of the richness of human culture. Liberal arts degrees are not supposed to be narrow job training. The problem here is the debt students need to take on to go through college, not the college content per se (at least at the level of which courses students need; some of those courses themselves could use better content and pedagogy).

seabird 9y ago
There's a difference between what liberal arts degrees are "supposed" to be and what they are. College has been effectively (but incorrectly) marketed as a requirement for the everyman to stand any chance of success in the future economy. For better or for worse, Joe Average couldn't give a shit less what an ethnographer thinks of the plight of rice farmers in Cambodia or what a philosopher thinks of the absurdity of the human condition. What he does care about is having a viable income in an economy where unskilled gravy jobs have dried up. Informed citizens and "inheritors of the richness of human culture" generally care about such things before they even reach a university. For everyone else, it's a place that takes their money so they can get a degree and stand a fighting chance in the job market. The overall problem isn't that it's too expensive (it is), it's that people are effectively being forced to go to college in the first place, spending four years earning a degree when they would have been better served by four years of work experience.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Joe Average can do a wide variety of vocational training programs, go to a technical/engineering college, join the military, or skip college and go straight into working if he so desires. It’s hardly the colleges’ fault that people show up who don’t really want to be there and “don’t give a shit” about the concept of liberal arts. What kind of future career does your imagined Joe Average aspire to? Semi-skilled manufacturing jobs have mostly dried up because of automation, healthcare costs continue to skyrocket due to the financialization of the medical industry, and wages have been depressed by a range of policy changes that give more and more power and wealth to rentiers and capitalists at the expense of everyone else. I suppose as an alternative all the Joe Averages could get together and vote European-style socialists into office.
gowld 9y ago
Paying a top expert in Foo to teach Foo 101 is either a massive waste or a huge lecture hall that may as well be a video.

chatmasta 9y ago

Computer science is probably not the best example. That’s one subject where 99% of learning happens by doing the problem sets. I even had one teacher who told us he never went to class, so he didn’t expect us to, but that showing up would make the problem sets easier. In classes like that, the lectures basically act as a starting point, and establish the scope of the problem sets. If you didn’t attend the lecture, you can still do the problem set, but you’ll probably end up over complicating it because you missed the many hints of how to approach it that were in the lectures.

seabird 9y ago
I would argue that computer science is a bad example because blue collar programming, systems administration, etc. largely doesn't require a college education at all, for the reasons you mentioned. Short of research and study concerning the mathematical limits of computers, hardware, and software, much of the computer work that is largely better served by a period of work experience than that same period in university. The point that I was (and doing a poor job of) trying to make is that concepts that will be constantly reviewed anyway probably won't benefit from an inordinate amount of time being dedicated to them, as the "working memory, long-term memory" issue mentioned in the article doesn't fit such situations.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Even “white collar” programming doesn’t require a CS degree. Several of the most innovative, careful, and productive programmers I have ever met were English or Philosophy majors (arguably we should hire more of those in the software industry).
gowld 9y ago
99% of learning in math and science is doing the problem sets. 99% of learning in history and literature is doing the reading and writing essays. 99% of the learning in arts is making art.

gowld 9y ago

The "gen-ed", "distribution" concept is very USAmerican. European universities tend to avoid it, and so students complete bachelors/masters 1 or 2 years sooner than USAmericans.