8 ms·

This University Teaches You No Skills – Just a New Way to Think

69 points by e15ctr0n 12y ago

lazyant 12y ago
"(Minerva) it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate", you can stop reading here. Quality in, quality out, you can bring in brilliant motivated kids and have them do literally almost anything and at after 4 years or whatever they'll (still) be relativity great.
ovi256 12y ago
So, if the classes are online, how long until the material leaks ? I for one would love to look and try my hand at it.
- enoch_r 12y ago
  I was pleasantly surprised to read[0] that Minerva is doing quite a bit more than just taking the MOOC concept and charging for it, e.g.: "He split us into groups to defend opposite propositions—that the cod had disappeared because of overfishing, or that other factors were to blame. No one needed to shuffle seats; Bonabeau just pushed a button, and the students in the other group vanished from my screen, leaving my three fellow debaters and me to plan, using a shared bulletin board on which we could record our ideas. Bonabeau bounced between the two groups to offer advice as we worked." More like that at the link. So despite being online, it sounds like Minerva's trying to increase, not decrease, the amount of educator/student interaction involved. [0] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-future-of-college/375071/ http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-futu...
colbyh 12y ago
I'm a little put off by some of the wording here. In talking with Ben and JK early on they were really against Stanford and Harvard's "no better than chance" acceptance rate and wanted to build a system where anyone smart enough to get in should be able to learn at Minerva. Their idea of online learning was that it should enable higher bandwidth, not less. Then Wired writes this: "...it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate, which is lower than even Harvard or Stanford." It's entirely possible that Wired printed that line without Minerva's blessing and that Minerva's acceptance rate at the moment is simply a consequence of their very small trial class (which is a great idea, not trying to knock their approach). I'd be really bummed to see Minerva changing their vision and trying to be more exclusive than inclusive. I'm just hoping it's a slip of the tongue on an editor's part and not a reflection of where Ben && company want to go with Minerva.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  I'd be really bummed to see Minerva changing their vision and trying to be more exclusive than inclusive. The market value of an elite education is the very fact that it's exclusive. That's why the connections are so valuable and the seal-of-approval means so much on the job market. And that payoff is what justifies the quarter-million-dollar (actually, closer to $140-180k) price tag. This is not a comment in favor of, or against, Minerva. However, the truth is that our society doesn't really value critical thinking, education or culture. It values money and power and social access. That's why colleges can charge such high tuitions, it's why "disrupting" the current model is impossible, and it's why the quality of education you get, even if you go to Harvard, is good only if you're already self-motivated when you enter the place. (You can learn a lot at an elite school, but no one forces you to do so. That's equally true of non-elite schools.) I think ed-tech is doomed to underperform because most of these companies don't understand what's actually behind the problem. It's deep and sociological, and (to use someone else's phrase) the problem has its act together.
  - colbyh 12y ago
    The original goal was to make the "elite education" a factor of the actual education itself. Minerva should be harder to get in to, by merit, than any other university. At the same time, anyone who CAN pass that barrier should be let in. With Stanford/Harvard/etc there are thousands of people every year that qualify to get in, but are rejected because of the relatively small number of spots available. In that way, it should be possible to have an exclusive AND comparatively large program churning out top-tier students. Pessimism aside, you won't know if something like this will work in the market until you actually try it. Don't really feel like tackling the bigger socio-economic issues you brought up, but I think we more or less disagree on "society's" value structure and what to make of it. I think a big change is in order, and I'm really hoping Minerva can be part of that change.
    - michaelochurch 12y ago
      The original goal was to make the "elite education" a factor of the actual education itself. Minerva should be harder to get in to, by merit, than any other university. At the same time, anyone who CAN pass that barrier should be let in. With Stanford/Harvard/etc there are thousands of people every year that qualify to get in, but are rejected because of the relatively small number of spots available. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the clarification, and I hope you succeed with what you're trying to do.
notastartup 12y ago
It taught me a dangerous way to think, to view the world as efficient, logical, rational, infallible.
adam419 12y ago
I found one of the article comments particularly funny and noteworthy: "Question: How do you convince investors that you can teach critical thinking skills? Answer: Screen for students that already have those skills." Put the %2.8 acceptance rate in an interesting light. Anyways I think this is interesting and valuable if for any reason that it's a new, and different idea and some lessons of value may stem from it. What I liked the most was the 2 year "Go do something novel" task. I think the most valuable form of education comes from attempting to do something non-trivial and more focus on that is interesting.
ritchiea 12y ago
This is absurd. The idea that a university should teach you to think rather than teach you job skills isn't a new idea, it's the core principle of a traditional liberal arts education. Visit virtually any liberal arts college in the US and you'll find a place where the professors value teaching critical thinking and communication skills. Typically there are small discussion based classes where participation is a portion of your grade, and lots of writing assignments. That said, according to the article there is one interesting innovation here. While traditional liberal arts schools value critical thinking over tangible skills, students still pick a major and working on a major within an academic department usually means being prepared for graduate school in that discipline. Instead this school tasks its students with creating something novel within their concentration, which is potentially a great way to compromise between the lofty ideals of a liberal arts education and the non-existent job market for academics. Instead of "learning to think" and being prepared for a fictional career in academia, you can learn to think and try to apply those critical thinking skills toward making a tangible impact on the world.
- mc32 12y ago
  There is another alternative college which I find interesting --it's pretty exclusive but seems to have quite a few salient people in its alumni. "Deep Springs is founded on three principles, commonly called the "three pillars": academics, labor, and self-government." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    I know a guy who went there. It's a weird place, and they spend a lot of their time playing cowboy.
    - mc32 12y ago
      I'm curious what he thinks about it? Good place, or it's good but only for some kind of people (right disposition), just different (not good or bad)? Any other tidbits?
Alex3917 12y ago
Of course most research shows that it's not actually possible to teach critical thinking, but when has reality ever gotten in the way of venture capital. http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thinking.pdf http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thi...
innguest 12y ago
FTFA: > Teaching students how to think is a fuzzy, amorphous idea. And so [they] crafted a [...] list of [...] "habits of mind and foundational concepts" that they want every student to learn in their first year. There are 129 of them. I'd pay just to have that list. That list would be a huge source of constructive discussion around how to teach critical thinking skills.
pessimizer 12y ago
I deeply believe in this. Classes on formal logic and formal induction, cause and effect, Mill's methods; that's a path to creating a better world rather than just better consumers and wage laborers. Basic reasoning skills are difficult to come by, whether you're looking to learn them or hire them.
bicknergseng 12y ago
>“Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” He's right. That is insane. But so is spending $27,950/year for 5+ years to "be taught how to think." Coupled with their absurd acceptance rate, I've gotta agree with the other comments that point out that they simply recruited brilliant kids who were already independent thinkers. Reminds me of a Department of Labor(?) study that concludes that ~80% of people can do a job if you tell them what to do, show them how to do it, and manage their progress, ~15% of people are able to do a job if you tell them what to do, and <5% of people are able to figure out what needs to be done and do it. Cool, Minerva, you might have some "success" by finding people who are already capable of doing what you say you do for them.
- crpatino 12y ago
  >“Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” The "learning to code in Python" part qualifies you to earn in the ballpark of $125K USD per year, on average, over a career that will last ~42 years. ROI is 2 years (after graduation), capital will last literally for a lifetime. What's not to like? The "quarter of a million dollars" part will give you the opportunity to know and make friends with people that can pay that kind of money out of pocket (not like you, middle class boy, who had to take a lot of debt for the privilege). Those friends will open doors to you and apply a multiplier factor to the baseline scenario ($125K per year). Best case, they will be your co-founders in a multi-million acquisition event. Worst case, you do not do any friends and coat-tail in the fame of your institution (with multiplier factor between 0.9 and 1.5)
  - codyb 12y ago
    That's a very optimistic view on the situation considering that average pay of a "Computer Programmer" is just under 80,000 [0]. IT Managers are closer towards your ballpark at just under 130,000 according to the same source. Also your ROI assumes you have no expenses at all for those two years? There is a lot not to like about being a quarter million dollars in debt at the age of 22. Especially since the majority of programmers who graduate from these colleges come out and make between 60-80 for years and many never reach 125,000. Especially when you consider trying to pay for rent, food, bills, loans, and living all at once. And while the number of graduates who go on to have a multi-million dollar acquisition event is undoubtably higher than most professions, it is still a statistically insignificant percentage much like kids in college hoping to play football for the rest of their days. Personally I'd take critical thinking skills over any specialized set of skills any day. Because those are the kind of skills that can improve all areas of my life, not just the financial aspect. The fact that, as a society, we can routinely saddle 22 year olds with tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for the chance to get a higher education is deeply troubling to me. [0] - http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programme...
gschiller 12y ago
Ironically, the founder went to Wharton, the institution that is the embodiment of the exact opposite values of the university that he is founding.
- stvswn 12y ago
  Wharton grad here -- I have to reply to your characterization. Wharton still has a strong finance background, but we've also applied the same ideas towards all disciplines where a quantitatively based, structured approach to problem solving is useful. That's why many consider it a "quant school." I specifically learned critical thinking there, and not anything that has helped me in my job specifically (PM at a big tech company).
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
More like leadership training, problem solving. There are many critical skills beside job skills. However ignoring job skills won't get you a job. It'll be a hard sell to get their students hired, especially at any kind of specialty. There's just too long of a runway for many things - art, law, medicine, chemistry, engineering. What does that leave?
RTesla 12y ago
I wasted a lot of time in college.
lumberjack 12y ago
If the rest of the world manages just fine with the current education model, then maybe the solution does not lie in revolutionizing the education model.
- crpatino 12y ago
  Well, it has to be said. The rest of the world is pretty firmly for the idea that advanced education is professionalization (aka. practical skills training). The "critical thinking" idea is given lip service, but rarely taken seriously outside of US/UK.
mesozoic 12y ago
As someone on the job market right now I can say skills is all that companies seem to care about at all.
tokenadult 12y ago
The article reports, "Minerva toys with the notion that in a world where information is never more than a click away, what matters most is not what you know off the top of your head, but how you analyze and interpret everything you learn. And so, the school takes a hard stance against teaching hard skills." And that tells me that the program founders need to learn more hard facts themselves about the failure of efforts to teach thinking skills without also teaching content about the real world. Critical thinking requires deep knowledge of a factual domain.[1] Knowledge is important: it speeds and strengthens reading comprehension, learning, and thinking.[2] There are good books about critical thinking in general,[3] but the best of those books only have a lot of influence on the thinking of readers who are well informed with facts when they read the books. If the Minerva Project doesn't do something on campus to make sure that the learners are gaining knowledge of the world as they participate, the project is doomed to failure. The article also reports, "Its students take all their classes online, and after their first year in California, they spend each semester in a new country of their choosing." This I call burying the lede. That's the really interesting and educational aspect of this program. If the students are funded to study abroad, moving from country to country as they go through the program, the program cannot help but be educational. Living in another country can't help but get a learner unstuck from the learner's earlier prejudices. "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."[4] What I learned from living overseas is that there are a lot of things people think that they just know from observation of the world that people with other cultural backgrounds do not assume to be true, and people from different cultural backgrounds often talk past one another until they examine their hidden "factual" assumptions about how the world works. Getting a group of learners to go all over the world while learning sounds like a very productive idea for a better education. On the whole, it's good that the non-system of higher education in the United States allows experimentation like this. The people who are running the project aren't sure that they will produce graduates who end up getting jobs, but they will try something new and different while they have funding and see what happens. [1] http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thinking.pdf http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thi... [2] http://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/how-knowledge-helps http://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/... [3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0078038367/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0078038367/ http://www.amazon.com/Folly-Fools-Logic-Deceit-Self-Deception/dp/0465085970/ http://www.amazon.com/Folly-Fools-Logic-Deceit-Self-Deceptio... http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology-ebook/dp/B001UE6T46/ http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog... [4] G. K. Chesterton, "The Riddle Of The Ivy" http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20697/ http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20697/
nevergetenglish 12y ago
"in a world where information is never more than a click away" May I wonder which world is this? You can't access information if you don't have the mental framework to process it. For example, where is the one click to get the information about the concept of Monad in Haskell? The only way you could access to information in an structured way is the way in which University teach concepts. As another example there is not royal way to Maths, how are you going to get the one click to the concept of diffeomorphism if don't know about the hierarchical structure necessary to define that concept. Is a very big lie, and a great disservice to students to claim that there is one click to information. The real way to obtain information is to be helped with those that can give you some clues to construct the required mental framework to be able to get information by reading a good book and not by pressing the left button of your mouse.
- yaketysax 12y ago
  "The only way you could access to information in an structured way is the way in which University teach concepts." "The real way to obtain information is to be helped with those that can give you some clues to construct the required mental framework" "how are you going to get the one click to the concept of diffeomorphism if don't know about the hierarchical structure necessary to define that concept." Um, you do further reading online or in a textbook until you understand the things you don't understand. Of course some ideas require context. Why do you believe people can't develop that mental context on their own?
  - nevergetenglish 12y ago
    In many fields of science is so difficult to get to some core concepts that IMHO you will surrender before getting to the essence of it. There can be exceptions with high performing people, but for example Einstein spent seven years with Minkowki trying to develop the concepts necessary to formulate his theory in the language of differential geometry.
cSoze 12y ago
I don't really agree with the proposition that a university degree has anything to do with or should have anything to do with critical thinking skills. A university degree simply implies intimacy with the existing knowledge in a field. This notion that because information is available you don't need to expend effort learning it and you will be just as effective is counter productive as well.

69 points by e15ctr0n 12y ago

"(Minerva) it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate", you can stop reading here. Quality in, quality out, you can bring in brilliant motivated kids and have them do literally almost anything and at after 4 years or whatever they'll (still) be relativity great.

ovi256 12y ago

So, if the classes are online, how long until the material leaks ? I for one would love to look and try my hand at it.

enoch_r 12y ago
I was pleasantly surprised to read[0] that Minerva is doing quite a bit more than just taking the MOOC concept and charging for it, e.g.: "He split us into groups to defend opposite propositions—that the cod had disappeared because of overfishing, or that other factors were to blame. No one needed to shuffle seats; Bonabeau just pushed a button, and the students in the other group vanished from my screen, leaving my three fellow debaters and me to plan, using a shared bulletin board on which we could record our ideas. Bonabeau bounced between the two groups to offer advice as we worked." More like that at the link. So despite being online, it sounds like Minerva's trying to increase, not decrease, the amount of educator/student interaction involved. [0] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-future-of-college/375071/ http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-futu...

colbyh 12y ago

I'm a little put off by some of the wording here. In talking with Ben and JK early on they were really against Stanford and Harvard's "no better than chance" acceptance rate and wanted to build a system where anyone smart enough to get in should be able to learn at Minerva. Their idea of online learning was that it should enable higher bandwidth, not less. Then Wired writes this: "...it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate, which is lower than even Harvard or Stanford." It's entirely possible that Wired printed that line without Minerva's blessing and that Minerva's acceptance rate at the moment is simply a consequence of their very small trial class (which is a great idea, not trying to knock their approach). I'd be really bummed to see Minerva changing their vision and trying to be more exclusive than inclusive. I'm just hoping it's a slip of the tongue on an editor's part and not a reflection of where Ben && company want to go with Minerva.

michaelochurch 12y ago
I'd be really bummed to see Minerva changing their vision and trying to be more exclusive than inclusive. The market value of an elite education is the very fact that it's exclusive. That's why the connections are so valuable and the seal-of-approval means so much on the job market. And that payoff is what justifies the quarter-million-dollar (actually, closer to $140-180k) price tag. This is not a comment in favor of, or against, Minerva. However, the truth is that our society doesn't really value critical thinking, education or culture. It values money and power and social access. That's why colleges can charge such high tuitions, it's why "disrupting" the current model is impossible, and it's why the quality of education you get, even if you go to Harvard, is good only if you're already self-motivated when you enter the place. (You can learn a lot at an elite school, but no one forces you to do so. That's equally true of non-elite schools.) I think ed-tech is doomed to underperform because most of these companies don't understand what's actually behind the problem. It's deep and sociological, and (to use someone else's phrase) the problem has its act together.
- colbyh 12y ago
  The original goal was to make the "elite education" a factor of the actual education itself. Minerva should be harder to get in to, by merit, than any other university. At the same time, anyone who CAN pass that barrier should be let in. With Stanford/Harvard/etc there are thousands of people every year that qualify to get in, but are rejected because of the relatively small number of spots available. In that way, it should be possible to have an exclusive AND comparatively large program churning out top-tier students. Pessimism aside, you won't know if something like this will work in the market until you actually try it. Don't really feel like tackling the bigger socio-economic issues you brought up, but I think we more or less disagree on "society's" value structure and what to make of it. I think a big change is in order, and I'm really hoping Minerva can be part of that change.
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    The original goal was to make the "elite education" a factor of the actual education itself. Minerva should be harder to get in to, by merit, than any other university. At the same time, anyone who CAN pass that barrier should be let in. With Stanford/Harvard/etc there are thousands of people every year that qualify to get in, but are rejected because of the relatively small number of spots available. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the clarification, and I hope you succeed with what you're trying to do.

notastartup 12y ago

It taught me a dangerous way to think, to view the world as efficient, logical, rational, infallible.

adam419 12y ago

I found one of the article comments particularly funny and noteworthy: "Question: How do you convince investors that you can teach critical thinking skills? Answer: Screen for students that already have those skills." Put the %2.8 acceptance rate in an interesting light. Anyways I think this is interesting and valuable if for any reason that it's a new, and different idea and some lessons of value may stem from it. What I liked the most was the 2 year "Go do something novel" task. I think the most valuable form of education comes from attempting to do something non-trivial and more focus on that is interesting.

ritchiea 12y ago

This is absurd. The idea that a university should teach you to think rather than teach you job skills isn't a new idea, it's the core principle of a traditional liberal arts education. Visit virtually any liberal arts college in the US and you'll find a place where the professors value teaching critical thinking and communication skills. Typically there are small discussion based classes where participation is a portion of your grade, and lots of writing assignments. That said, according to the article there is one interesting innovation here. While traditional liberal arts schools value critical thinking over tangible skills, students still pick a major and working on a major within an academic department usually means being prepared for graduate school in that discipline. Instead this school tasks its students with creating something novel within their concentration, which is potentially a great way to compromise between the lofty ideals of a liberal arts education and the non-existent job market for academics. Instead of "learning to think" and being prepared for a fictional career in academia, you can learn to think and try to apply those critical thinking skills toward making a tangible impact on the world.

mc32 12y ago
There is another alternative college which I find interesting --it's pretty exclusive but seems to have quite a few salient people in its alumni. "Deep Springs is founded on three principles, commonly called the "three pillars": academics, labor, and self-government." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  I know a guy who went there. It's a weird place, and they spend a lot of their time playing cowboy.
  - mc32 12y ago
    I'm curious what he thinks about it? Good place, or it's good but only for some kind of people (right disposition), just different (not good or bad)? Any other tidbits?

Alex3917 12y ago

Of course most research shows that it's not actually possible to teach critical thinking, but when has reality ever gotten in the way of venture capital. http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thinking.pdf http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thi...

innguest 12y ago

FTFA: > Teaching students how to think is a fuzzy, amorphous idea. And so [they] crafted a [...] list of [...] "habits of mind and foundational concepts" that they want every student to learn in their first year. There are 129 of them. I'd pay just to have that list. That list would be a huge source of constructive discussion around how to teach critical thinking skills.

pessimizer 12y ago

I deeply believe in this. Classes on formal logic and formal induction, cause and effect, Mill's methods; that's a path to creating a better world rather than just better consumers and wage laborers. Basic reasoning skills are difficult to come by, whether you're looking to learn them or hire them.

bicknergseng 12y ago

>“Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” He's right. That is insane. But so is spending $27,950/year for 5+ years to "be taught how to think." Coupled with their absurd acceptance rate, I've gotta agree with the other comments that point out that they simply recruited brilliant kids who were already independent thinkers. Reminds me of a Department of Labor(?) study that concludes that ~80% of people can do a job if you tell them what to do, show them how to do it, and manage their progress, ~15% of people are able to do a job if you tell them what to do, and <5% of people are able to figure out what needs to be done and do it. Cool, Minerva, you might have some "success" by finding people who are already capable of doing what you say you do for them.

crpatino 12y ago
>“Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” The "learning to code in Python" part qualifies you to earn in the ballpark of $125K USD per year, on average, over a career that will last ~42 years. ROI is 2 years (after graduation), capital will last literally for a lifetime. What's not to like? The "quarter of a million dollars" part will give you the opportunity to know and make friends with people that can pay that kind of money out of pocket (not like you, middle class boy, who had to take a lot of debt for the privilege). Those friends will open doors to you and apply a multiplier factor to the baseline scenario ($125K per year). Best case, they will be your co-founders in a multi-million acquisition event. Worst case, you do not do any friends and coat-tail in the fame of your institution (with multiplier factor between 0.9 and 1.5)
- codyb 12y ago
  That's a very optimistic view on the situation considering that average pay of a "Computer Programmer" is just under 80,000 [0]. IT Managers are closer towards your ballpark at just under 130,000 according to the same source. Also your ROI assumes you have no expenses at all for those two years? There is a lot not to like about being a quarter million dollars in debt at the age of 22. Especially since the majority of programmers who graduate from these colleges come out and make between 60-80 for years and many never reach 125,000. Especially when you consider trying to pay for rent, food, bills, loans, and living all at once. And while the number of graduates who go on to have a multi-million dollar acquisition event is undoubtably higher than most professions, it is still a statistically insignificant percentage much like kids in college hoping to play football for the rest of their days. Personally I'd take critical thinking skills over any specialized set of skills any day. Because those are the kind of skills that can improve all areas of my life, not just the financial aspect. The fact that, as a society, we can routinely saddle 22 year olds with tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for the chance to get a higher education is deeply troubling to me. [0] - http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programme...

gschiller 12y ago

Ironically, the founder went to Wharton, the institution that is the embodiment of the exact opposite values of the university that he is founding.

stvswn 12y ago
Wharton grad here -- I have to reply to your characterization. Wharton still has a strong finance background, but we've also applied the same ideas towards all disciplines where a quantitatively based, structured approach to problem solving is useful. That's why many consider it a "quant school." I specifically learned critical thinking there, and not anything that has helped me in my job specifically (PM at a big tech company).

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

More like leadership training, problem solving. There are many critical skills beside job skills. However ignoring job skills won't get you a job. It'll be a hard sell to get their students hired, especially at any kind of specialty. There's just too long of a runway for many things - art, law, medicine, chemistry, engineering. What does that leave?

RTesla 12y ago

I wasted a lot of time in college.

lumberjack 12y ago

If the rest of the world manages just fine with the current education model, then maybe the solution does not lie in revolutionizing the education model.

crpatino 12y ago
Well, it has to be said. The rest of the world is pretty firmly for the idea that advanced education is professionalization (aka. practical skills training). The "critical thinking" idea is given lip service, but rarely taken seriously outside of US/UK.

mesozoic 12y ago

As someone on the job market right now I can say skills is all that companies seem to care about at all.

tokenadult 12y ago

The article reports, "Minerva toys with the notion that in a world where information is never more than a click away, what matters most is not what you know off the top of your head, but how you analyze and interpret everything you learn. And so, the school takes a hard stance against teaching hard skills." And that tells me that the program founders need to learn more hard facts themselves about the failure of efforts to teach thinking skills without also teaching content about the real world. Critical thinking requires deep knowledge of a factual domain.[1] Knowledge is important: it speeds and strengthens reading comprehension, learning, and thinking.[2] There are good books about critical thinking in general,[3] but the best of those books only have a lot of influence on the thinking of readers who are well informed with facts when they read the books. If the Minerva Project doesn't do something on campus to make sure that the learners are gaining knowledge of the world as they participate, the project is doomed to failure. The article also reports, "Its students take all their classes online, and after their first year in California, they spend each semester in a new country of their choosing." This I call burying the lede. That's the really interesting and educational aspect of this program. If the students are funded to study abroad, moving from country to country as they go through the program, the program cannot help but be educational. Living in another country can't help but get a learner unstuck from the learner's earlier prejudices. "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."[4] What I learned from living overseas is that there are a lot of things people think that they just know from observation of the world that people with other cultural backgrounds do not assume to be true, and people from different cultural backgrounds often talk past one another until they examine their hidden "factual" assumptions about how the world works. Getting a group of learners to go all over the world while learning sounds like a very productive idea for a better education. On the whole, it's good that the non-system of higher education in the United States allows experimentation like this. The people who are running the project aren't sure that they will produce graduates who end up getting jobs, but they will try something new and different while they have funding and see what happens. [1] http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thinking.pdf http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thi... [2] http://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/how-knowledge-helps http://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/... [3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0078038367/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0078038367/ http://www.amazon.com/Folly-Fools-Logic-Deceit-Self-Deception/dp/0465085970/ http://www.amazon.com/Folly-Fools-Logic-Deceit-Self-Deceptio... http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology-ebook/dp/B001UE6T46/ http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog... [4] G. K. Chesterton, "The Riddle Of The Ivy" http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20697/ http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20697/

nevergetenglish 12y ago

"in a world where information is never more than a click away" May I wonder which world is this? You can't access information if you don't have the mental framework to process it. For example, where is the one click to get the information about the concept of Monad in Haskell? The only way you could access to information in an structured way is the way in which University teach concepts. As another example there is not royal way to Maths, how are you going to get the one click to the concept of diffeomorphism if don't know about the hierarchical structure necessary to define that concept. Is a very big lie, and a great disservice to students to claim that there is one click to information. The real way to obtain information is to be helped with those that can give you some clues to construct the required mental framework to be able to get information by reading a good book and not by pressing the left button of your mouse.

yaketysax 12y ago
"The only way you could access to information in an structured way is the way in which University teach concepts." "The real way to obtain information is to be helped with those that can give you some clues to construct the required mental framework" "how are you going to get the one click to the concept of diffeomorphism if don't know about the hierarchical structure necessary to define that concept." Um, you do further reading online or in a textbook until you understand the things you don't understand. Of course some ideas require context. Why do you believe people can't develop that mental context on their own?
- nevergetenglish 12y ago
  In many fields of science is so difficult to get to some core concepts that IMHO you will surrender before getting to the essence of it. There can be exceptions with high performing people, but for example Einstein spent seven years with Minkowki trying to develop the concepts necessary to formulate his theory in the language of differential geometry.

cSoze 12y ago

I don't really agree with the proposition that a university degree has anything to do with or should have anything to do with critical thinking skills. A university degree simply implies intimacy with the existing knowledge in a field. This notion that because information is available you don't need to expend effort learning it and you will be just as effective is counter productive as well.