121–130 of 188 posts
College is not just about getting an education. An equally important part of a traditional college education is finding out who you are as a human being. Living with others full time, perhaps for the first time. The growth I experienced in those 4 years of college was unlike anything else in my lifetime.
How presumptuous to assume that education needs disruption, I think the disaster that is forced e-learning and all the extra bullshit associated with MOOCs and anti-cheat would be enough of a signal to stop breaking things
I hoped that by "disrupted higher education" the author meant something at least as radical as what this decades-old essay proposes. https://citejournal.org/volume-2/issue-3-02/seminal-articles... Alas, I came away disappointed. Instead of aiming for a quantum leap, the author only intends to automate the existing processes.
IMHO, the only thing that is going to disrupt higher education in the US is a change in the federal student loan system. Otherwise, the money is going to keep flowing and those institutions will have little motivation to adapt to survive
edit:
Good article! Thanks for sharing
My wife and I started a microschool (in Mumbai) because we couldn’t find any for our kids that were both good and did not require a multi-hour trek to get to daily. Taking up the responsibility of educating others’ kids meant we needed to articulate and clarify very foundational concepts. What exactly is a good school? What makes it so? As parents, we began our search with the “how”. We knew that traditional standardized age-segmented, test-driven schooling isn’t great. There is tons of literature on that. I also happen to have a PhD in neuroscience and have written a book about the mind, so I also know how little we know about how we learn. From whatever little we do, though, we know this current industrialized form of schooling is bad. And yet it’s been bureaucratized and dispensed with dogmatic confidence. It speaks to our resilience that we turn out okay despite its inanity. There are alternative methods that have been around for quite some time (Waldorf/Steiner schools celebrated their centenary recently). We’ve adopted one of the alternative methods.
However, the practice of actually engaging with twenty kids for hours everyday quickly made us realize that it is not enough to change or ask the how. A set of telescoping questions quickly reveal themselves: How? What? Why? To ask how we must educate, we must ask what is education, and why is it required?
Education is learning to play the game of life well. We must learn it because the game changes and we are not born with the tools and wisdom it takes to play it. We acquire them over our lifetime, learning about the game, about ourselves. We are learning even into our middle and late ages. It’s not just numeracy, literacy, or computational skills. It is mental wellbeing. It is understanding how we fit into the fabric of society and how we can navigate it successfully and profitably, and hopefully sustainably. Do you need school or college for that? No, but it helps to have a place where you can share notes and have experienced guides who are not merely transmitting information, but actively learning and exploring. That isn’t happening in most schools or colleges though. We are stuck with the unconscious definition of learning as information transmission and education as the institutional process within which this transmission happens in a measurable, testable, certifiable manner. Systems have been built around this idea and like all systems, these are tough to dismantle.
I think Generative AI’s greatest potential lies in making the transmission of information so effortlessly easy and effective (by personalizing this transmission to suit each individual’s needs) that we’ll come to realize there is more to education, learning, and the game of life than devoting over twenty years of our lives to getting graded and branded within these transmission of information tests and systems that empower them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they…
In social science and humanities, I agree with you that self studying is an uphill battle. You'll just sound naive unless (1) you've made a herculean effort in studying, and (2) you've thought very critically on your own about how you will assimilate and where you will fit into the existing space of thought. There are no definitively correct opinions in these fields but plenty of influential people have theories. My…
a(b + c) = ab + ac
It’s easy for me to convince someone that because of this property we get the following:
3(x + 2) = 3x + 6
It’s much harder to convince someone that
3x + 6 = 3(x + 2)
It’s hard to convince someone that factoring is just using the distributive property reading right to left instead of left to right. It’s much harder to convince them of this just from reading it in a book. The nuance will be lost. They need examples that one goes over in a classroom to see this and a book can’t contain enough examples without being too many pages or without boring the reader with what appears to them to be minutia. They can’t grasp the nuance from reading. They grasp it from doing problems and being guided on the problems at the time they do them.
Books and videos can not replace a teacher. Your experience is not the norm and you should not use it as a guide for what is realistically possible for most people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are both right, honestly. Much of the value of higher education as it is structured is the credentialing and the networking. Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something. However you are also right that education works in person for a lot of people and there are a lot of values there. Community colleges are an under utilized resource to learn. Making mon…
> Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something. A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree. A doctorate is more like a title rather than a degree, and if you do it full-time early in your career, it signifies that you can advance from junior to intermediate positions. Or they could mean something else, depending on which t…
A bachelor's is an extension of high school. You show you can assimilate knowledge at a professional level.
A masters shows you can do extensive research of existing knowledge in a narrow field.
A doctorate shows you can perform novel research and add knowledge to a field.
...but perhaps that is not really applicable to all fields of study. In any case, "glorified dropout" is imho too harsh, as it implies a failure. For most people, the economic tradeoff in getting a masters degree or higher (both in terms of tuition and time lost not working) simply makes it a bad choice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they…
> With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth I don't disagree, but didn't feel the nuance added meaningful information to my post. Most of these people also are unlikely to complete an online course - ed tech has a hard time reproducing the "social pressure" aspect of education. It's worth noting tha…
I misread what you wrote here. I thought your point was that the value of education was merely as a signal for knowledge rather than in the acquisition of knowledge. Rereading your post I see what you were getting at is the capturable value from an ed tech/ed business perspective. Sorry about the misreading.
Universities have been around for thousands of years. Good universities offer a unique combination of factors - people of the same age group, professors and a distinct atmosphere that encourages learning. How are you going to teach science and engineering courses where you need access to labs? And, university is where you get a chance to meet people from diverse fields and backgrounds, get exposure to challenging poi…
Actually, most historians tend to trace the oldest university back to the late 1100s (or maybe up to a hundred years older), with the University of Bologna being considered the first university. This is especially true if you consider university to be less "place of learning" and more an intentional community of students and their instructors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something. A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree. A doctorate is more like a title rather than a degree, and if you do it full-time early in your career, it signifies that you can advance from junior to intermediate positions. Or they could mean something else, depending on which t…
I've always understood it as: A bachelor's is an extension of high school. You show you can assimilate knowledge at a professional level. A masters shows you can do extensive research of existing knowledge in a narrow field. A doctorate shows you can perform novel research and add knowledge to a field. ...but perhaps that is not really applicable to all fields of study. In any case, "glorified dropout" is imho too ha…
Master's degree was the primary undergraduate degree. Bachelor's degree existed on paper, but it wasn't recognized in the society. People often got their bachelor's and master's on the same day.
At some point, politicians started promoting bachelor's degrees to get people graduate faster. The academia accepted that, but the job market didn't, at least not initially. Because people were not familiar with bachelor's degrees, they often didn't consider them serious degrees. Some people knew them but took them as a negative sign. The idea was that if a university degree is a sign that you can achieve something, leaving the university after bachelor's is sign that you failed at that.
I left Finland a long time ago, and I'm not familiar with the job market relevance of a bachelor's degree today.
I think this significantly misses the point of higher education. By far the most valuable parts are 1) peer interaction, and 2) lecturer-audience interaction. I learned way more from discussing the topic with my classmate during breaks than I ever did from the course material itself. Learning a fact is easy, deeply understanding it is not - and discussing it with your peers is the best way to discover each others' fl…
This is why online teaching didn't take over college education the way administrators hoped it would 25 years ago. People like Hubert Dreyfus early on explained why it wasn't going to work ( On the Internet , 2001).
Guess how well that turned out?