Earlier quoted context omitted.
There certainly are more opportunities to learn than ever before, but learning requires effort. If you want to learn something that _really_ matters you have to give it full attention. That means total focus, not "continuous partial attention", not facebooking on another tab. Whether you use an ipad, a book, or sit across from a table from a professor, learning really does require undivided attention-- when has this…
But often in university a good 80% of the material doesn't _really_ matter
Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
61–70 of 116 posts
Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#62In all honesty this writer sounds utterly curmudgeonly. He writes passionately about what "real education" is, dispenses some good ol' Hard Facts About Life, and urges us all to put down those dang computer-devices and just learn ! This is classic finger-pointing, angsty whining. I'm sorry, but the conceit here flagrantly disregards modern reality. Learning is easier now than it's ever been. People don't need to give…
If you paid attention to university research, you'd know you're spouting things well-known to be wrong. Multitasking is detrimental to learning and knowledge.
Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#63As an interesting linguistic note: the liberal arts were conceived of as the arts for free men; rather then the techincal things - technicalities - which were to be done by slaves. A careful reading of michaelochurch's polemics should suggest to you that this has not changed in substance in the general case.
No computer science will save you from someone who can out-rhetoric you.
Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I know what you are getting at, but there's an important historical dimension. The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be. Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university…
> IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so. How can it be that there is no use in being "elevated" or in being connected to "the most wonderful human achievement…
Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. 18 out of 230 students bought the text they were studying. That sounds like statistics. 'C' grades for what used to be failing exams - more data. And rising test scores? In what universe is that happening? These are 2nd-tier liberal arts colleges at issue, not Stanford. Tool belt? Its nonsense to imagine googling a subject is as effective as learning it. That's twaddle, and any student who skates over their lack…
18 out of 230 bought bought a book, widely accessible and read by most in the early hs, from the over priced campus book store. FTFY. That's not statistics, that's just a single (unenlightening) data point. A personal anecdote about the fact the OP now feels his standards have dropped (providing no numbers for this nor writing samples so we the readership can appraise the truth of this claim) is also ~not~ statistics…
Oh! They did! SAT was redesigned and rescaled in 2005 to 'reflect today's high school curriculum'. And that whole debacle over the written exam part. So I'm not sure how much we can learn from comparing scores before vs after that watershed year.
But ok accept that scores might be going up. The meat of the OP's rant was, college is no longer a place of learning but instead a place of 'earning'. The degree is what matters, and nobody is expected to actually learn, master, internalize subjects particularly in the liberal arts which are termed 'fluff'.
That is an argument worth examining. Notwithstanding the codgerness of the ranter, and his evident desperation at being ignored and shouted down for a decade.
Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#66Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably another boring humanities elective of dubious merit, being taught by someone whose adult life has been preoccupied with empty navel-gazing.
this, i think, is what he's addressing. if you don't see value in humanities or the arts, i'm afraid you're completely missing the point of being alive. a world run completely by engineers is no place i want to live.
Who said that "humanities or the arts" is, or should be, the exclusive province of academics in the humanities and arts who've never thought about anything else? Self-referential meta-study always seemed a bit... depressingly pointless to me.
Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#68In all honesty this writer sounds utterly curmudgeonly. He writes passionately about what "real education" is, dispenses some good ol' Hard Facts About Life, and urges us all to put down those dang computer-devices and just learn ! This is classic finger-pointing, angsty whining. I'm sorry, but the conceit here flagrantly disregards modern reality. Learning is easier now than it's ever been. People don't need to give…
There are a lot of things students might expect to get out of college, but ideally one of them is the experience of having mastered something genuinely hard (doesn't really matter what—might be physics, might be Latin) and with that, the ability to bootstrap and improve their learning later in life. If all you come out with are "skills", you'll be toast when those skills become obsolete. I think the modern university makes it a bit too easy to get out without having done this, or at least trying to.
Paradoxically, I think this is one of the real values of humanities education: it's mostly not obviously and immediately applicable to the working world, but it's engaging, and if you've really engaged with it, you'll have the tools you need to understand what you need to learn in a future situation. "Learning how to learn" is a bit of a cliche, but it's the key to real success. It doesn't always happen in a classroom, mind you, but it can happen in a good one.
Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that the humanities and arts are of profound importance. I've found that the problem with these subjects is often simply how they are taught. Philosophy is a great example. I was one credit shy of a philosophy minor in undergrad. The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life, yet none of my classes actually provided students with this information. Instead, a lecture…
>The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life ...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it? The whole idea of natural science of the important child of Western philosophy. History of philoso…
Why do people think they can even formulate these sorts of question with rigor and precision if they lack life experience and knowledge of how nature works?
Why should we expect that the world is comprehensible from an armchair in a liberal-arts college?
Re: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t
#70I personally agree. University should be more about learning and becoming better thinkers than simply learning a few facts and getting a piece of paper.
Pretty much none of the students I interact with care about 'learning', or any form of critical thinking. They want the profs to teach them a few facts, then base the test on those few facts. They optimize for this so they can get their A, then get the hell out.