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It's also not just CS, though CS is the largest culprit because well... software is eating the world. No one cares about getting an education. They just want a

It's also not just CS, though CS is the largest culprit because well... software is eating the world. No one cares about getting an education. They just want a job.

coliveira 14y ago
But there are still areas, lets say for example civil engineering, where you need to know about building materials, some physics and math to do your job. In CS, on the other hand, if you know how to put together a few web pages in Python and solve half a dozen brain teasers you may get a job in a very good company.
- saraid216 14y ago
  You're missing my point, which was about priority order. Most people are going to college hoping to get a job. They're learning because they're told they have to learn, so they do a bad job learning. In a field like civil engineering, you can't graduate unless you pass classes that are simply unpassable without learning some stuff. (I have a friend going through aerodynamics right now and I'm hearing about everything he's learning.) This is kind of a microcosmic version of what we're seeing in general: we see people as workers first and human beings second. The universities and the kids are following suit.
  - derefr 14y ago
    We created elementary schools. The children who attended them surpassed their peers. Employers began to require them as a signal of competence. Eventually, being such a "universal good", elementary education became a public service of the state. Then we created secondary/"grammar" schools. The children who attended them surpassed their peers, who had only attended elementary school. Employers began to require a secondary-school education as a signal of competence. Eventually, being such a "universal good", secondary education became a public service of the state. Then we created universities... --- Although the inductive step is valid, there's a problem in the assumptions: we already had universities for thousands of years before the introduction of elementary or secondary education! The traditional "liberal education" of The University, where the upper-class and the cunning go to cloister themselves with one-another and thus boost their mutual productivity in all sorts of status-signalling arts (sounds sort of like TED, doesn't it?) has come crashing head-first into the rising bar of minimum-expected human competence. Success in secondary school no longer tells you anything about a person's class or cunning, and that's forced employers to look for increasingly-lofty-and-meaningless trust-signals. So "everyone who's anyone" expects to go to university now, from the spoilt valley-girl to the farm bumpkin. Perhaps, in the end, if we want to preserve the "usefulness" of university, we'll chop off the undergraduate portion of it and call that "tertiary school" or something. Everyone gets to go, it occurs at community colleges, probably most of the material comes from Khan Academy and the like. Then the rich and the cunning can go to The University after that.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      > Although the inductive step is valid, there's a problem in the assumptions I'm really not sure who you're addressing. No one is claiming these assumptions.
- pekk 14y ago
  If you know those things... and are fresh out of Stanford, MIT, or Berkeley
kartturi 14y ago
> No one cares about getting an education. They just want a job. Internal vs. external motivation? Maybe some day, when programming is no more needed for anything useful, it can really flourish as an art. Like painting, when its principal real-world reason-to-be was supplanted by photographing. E.g. I don't understand the obsession of quest to invent always _more and more_ optimal algorithms, because often the less optimal ones are more interesting and elegant.

It's also not just CS, though CS is the largest culprit because well... software is eating the world. No one cares about getting an education. They just want a job.

coliveira 14y ago

But there are still areas, lets say for example civil engineering, where you need to know about building materials, some physics and math to do your job. In CS, on the other hand, if you know how to put together a few web pages in Python and solve half a dozen brain teasers you may get a job in a very good company.

saraid216 14y ago
You're missing my point, which was about priority order. Most people are going to college hoping to get a job. They're learning because they're told they have to learn, so they do a bad job learning. In a field like civil engineering, you can't graduate unless you pass classes that are simply unpassable without learning some stuff. (I have a friend going through aerodynamics right now and I'm hearing about everything he's learning.) This is kind of a microcosmic version of what we're seeing in general: we see people as workers first and human beings second. The universities and the kids are following suit.
- derefr 14y ago
  We created elementary schools. The children who attended them surpassed their peers. Employers began to require them as a signal of competence. Eventually, being such a "universal good", elementary education became a public service of the state. Then we created secondary/"grammar" schools. The children who attended them surpassed their peers, who had only attended elementary school. Employers began to require a secondary-school education as a signal of competence. Eventually, being such a "universal good", secondary education became a public service of the state. Then we created universities... --- Although the inductive step is valid, there's a problem in the assumptions: we already had universities for thousands of years before the introduction of elementary or secondary education! The traditional "liberal education" of The University, where the upper-class and the cunning go to cloister themselves with one-another and thus boost their mutual productivity in all sorts of status-signalling arts (sounds sort of like TED, doesn't it?) has come crashing head-first into the rising bar of minimum-expected human competence. Success in secondary school no longer tells you anything about a person's class or cunning, and that's forced employers to look for increasingly-lofty-and-meaningless trust-signals. So "everyone who's anyone" expects to go to university now, from the spoilt valley-girl to the farm bumpkin. Perhaps, in the end, if we want to preserve the "usefulness" of university, we'll chop off the undergraduate portion of it and call that "tertiary school" or something. Everyone gets to go, it occurs at community colleges, probably most of the material comes from Khan Academy and the like. Then the rich and the cunning can go to The University after that.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    > Although the inductive step is valid, there's a problem in the assumptions I'm really not sure who you're addressing. No one is claiming these assumptions.
pekk 14y ago
If you know those things... and are fresh out of Stanford, MIT, or Berkeley

kartturi 14y ago

> No one cares about getting an education. They just want a job. Internal vs. external motivation? Maybe some day, when programming is no more needed for anything useful, it can really flourish as an art. Like painting, when its principal real-world reason-to-be was supplanted by photographing. E.g. I don't understand the obsession of quest to invent always _more and more_ optimal algorithms, because often the less optimal ones are more interesting and elegant.