Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

It's true, you make almost no money, the work is hard, and you are at the bottom of the food chain but if you get a good placement you will never learn faster in your live. Trying to finish programming projects while also keeping everyone coordinated and cleaning the kitchens also does a great job of stuffing out the entitlement that so many people join the workforce with.

If you have any doubt about the merit of this style of education simply look at Germany. It's vastly superior and I'm raking my brain on how to reproduce this system in North America successfully.

I'll do that. I haven't read any of Ravitch's work directly yet, and enough time has passed since I heard her speak that I don't remember her position reliably anymore.

> Start with John Dewey and William Torrey Harris (for a counterpoint to Dewey).

I'm a fairly huge fan of John Dewey. I only barely hold back from calling myself a philosophical pragmatist in Dewey's tradition. On the other hand, I kinda recognize Harris' notion as a tradition I'd reject; Wikipedia's characterization of his supporters' arguments suggests that there isn't anything really useful in his ideas that doesn't require stripping it bare first. :P

> Literally every point everyone has been making in this thread -- myself included -- was also being made by educational thinkers 100-150 years ago.

But this is not experimentation. There is a difference between a thought experiment and an actual experiment. Schrodinger did not actually put a cat in a box and mysteriously wave his hands to express the quantum uncertainty of its aliveness.

Yes, we have some tiny movements like Montessori schools or project-based learning or Quest to Learn or KIPP's character training or charter schools and so on and so on, but they make such an infinitesimal impact and are often so incomparable that it doesn't make sense to call it "experimentation". The fact that Will Wright, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos are all Montessori graduates, for instance, gets noticed sometimes but also gets mocked a portion of that. (That is, the term "Montessori graduate" is sometimes used derogatorily.)

> I meant to draw attention to exactly your point, that we've set up a situation where universities are directionless because we've asked them to be everything to everyone.

I don't think that the answer is to unbundle it, though. That's an easy, dare I say Silicon-Valley-esque response to a difficult and multifarious beast, but it's not necessarily the right one. I think that it'd be worthwhile to shed some of those things, yes, but for their invalidity or overgeneralizations on their own merits, rather than because they detract from a university's capacity to be itself.

I am working on an answer myself, naturally... but I've so far declined to try to untangle the nature of a university on my own. It feels like putting the cart before the horse to do so. I've mostly held to a single, simple principle: a university experience should be optional. If people feel compelled to go to a university after some particular amount of basic education, such as high school, then the problems of a university are symptoms, not causes.

As an undergraduate in our college of arts the average student, regardless of major, was required to write scores of pages per semester, all to be read and responded to by someone more than qualified to critique even the especially precocious 19 year old. Most classes were of less than 20 students and involved lively discussion with a professor who, more often than not, was well published and read in his or her field. Setting aside employment for the moment, I just can't imagine a much better way to grow a person.

There are certainly problems with higher education--too many to list really. But the core of what universities do, as it relates to undergraduate education, they do pretty well by and large. It is true, due largely to economic distortions and poor alternatives, too many who would be better suited by something more vocational go to four year universities looking for something the university is not designed to provide. Hence the present discussion I suppose. But for those who are looking for education in the broader sense, I find universities to be serving as advertised.