3 ms·

Curious, haven’t really thought about this before. Seems like your observation is a strong sign that schooling and academia are run by people who’ve only work

• andrewflnr 4y ago
  A lot of it is just that clarity is much, much harder to measure than word count or even vocabulary usage. The system almost can't avoid incentivizing what can be measured, and is almost incapable of incentivizing clarity (consider the task of grading 40 papers over the course of a few days and see if you still think it's reasonable to expect otherwise. And honestly, it's true that students need to prove their ability to write long pieces, and it's, again, hard to measure whether the student is covering enough ground to cover the length you want to see. You get what you measure, and what you can't measure is very hard to get (absent relatively intensive personal attention, hard to scale). I don't know a solution.
  • maegul 4y ago
    All absolute true I think. My only addition is that in my educational experience, a number of times someone would came in to teach with an entirely practical and non-academic background, and it was always a clear and tangible breath of fresh air. Their approach, priorities, clarifications, honesty and insights always had a comparative sense of vitality and importance about them, irrespective of how good a teacher they were in the normal sense. Your point still holds about how to assess, which as you point out, is its own thing. But it also doesn't exclude the possibility of recognising and providing the value of education from those outside of the education/academic system, however hard that value may be to measure.