What happened to studying? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happened to studying?

#41

Post by reader5000 » Sun, Jul 04, 2010, 11:18 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #39

College is losing its romantic lustre. Students used to believe in education for itself, but now ambitious students just cram in more classes and activities to graduate faster or pad their grad school applications. Before, a student studying the American Revolution in class might go to the library and flip through the books in the professor's "suggested reading" section on the syllabus looking for a particularly inte…

Nah, students never "cared" about learning. College started in the U.S. as a way for the upper classes to cavort under the ostentation of "learning about the world". It has always been a status signal. This is why the middle classes are willing to pay their left nut for a suitably prestigious degree - status signals to the middle classes are like honey to a bee (or something).

There are perhaps .5% of the population for whom college makes actual productive sense - those intelligent and driven enough to devote their life to producing original research. Colleges now fulfill sort of an odd intermesh in society: stamping the middle classes with seals of 'approval', and housing people who produce actual scholarship. There is really no logical connection between the two, and indeed most professors dislike 'teaching'.

College isn't necessarily 'bad', but is when it saddles people who will be earning 40-60k the rest of their lives with 200k loan debts.

Re: What happened to studying?

#42

Post by reader5000 » Sun, Jul 04, 2010, 11:21 PM UTC

cjy wrote: post #31

reader5000 wrote: post #5

College is simply another hoop to jump through for (an increasingly unlikely) shot at the middle class. The act of studying is useful for when you actually want to know something, but the commoditized studying colleges encourage of plowing hours into courses one cares very little about has very little purpose, and students know this. Just another notch on the "American education is an absurdity and a farce" stick.

I don't think you should throw out "increasingly unlikely" without some evidence. I do worry about our education system. But the idea that it's harder to attain a middle class standard of living then it was in the past is very dubious. And, it's a claim that's used to support a lot of bad policies.

For example: http://www.mybudget360.com/does-a-college-degree-protect-you...

Re: What happened to studying?

#43

Post by dkarl » Sun, Jul 04, 2010, 11:28 PM UTC

reader5000 wrote: post #41

dkarl wrote: post #39

College is losing its romantic lustre. Students used to believe in education for itself, but now ambitious students just cram in more classes and activities to graduate faster or pad their grad school applications. Before, a student studying the American Revolution in class might go to the library and flip through the books in the professor's "suggested reading" section on the syllabus looking for a particularly inte…

Nah, students never "cared" about learning. College started in the U.S. as a way for the upper classes to cavort under the ostentation of "learning about the world". It has always been a status signal. This is why the middle classes are willing to pay their left nut for a suitably prestigious degree - status signals to the middle classes are like honey to a bee (or something). There are perhaps .5% of the population…

Nah, students never "cared" about learning.

The ones who brought up the averages did. College may have been about prestige, but the system is rarely that honest about itself. Most of the people involved in maintaining the system -- teachers, professors, and students, certainly, and also many parents -- believed in the romantic image of college, and the ones who didn't believe, pretended. William James said that whatever you attend to becomes your reality, and thanks to everybody attending so closely to the myth of college as an educational experience, that's what it turned out to be in reality as well.

Re: What happened to studying?

#44

Post by rick888 » Sun, Jul 04, 2010, 11:32 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #34

rick888 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if you want students to study then you should eliminate grades. grades simply encourage them to game the system. of course, gaming the system is a very valuable real world skill." Grades many times give you the push you need to succeed. Without them, many people wouldn't bother studying. A similar thing that happened recently in many public schools is the elimination of winners and losers in sports games (every game…

> Without them, many people wouldn't bother studying. With them, many people don't bother studying.

"With them, many people don't bother studying."

Why? Because they are afraid of failing?

Re: What happened to studying?

#45

Post by _delirium » Sun, Jul 04, 2010, 11:34 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #37

_delirium wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having enough command of background facts to quickly figure things out is useful, but beyond that, knowing where to look up the facts seems like a perfectly fine substitute for memorizing them. The real problem is if you know so little that you don't even know how to figure out what you need.

I used to think that too - and to some extend, it is certainly true - but the problem is that you can't really derive new things without knowing old things, and you simply can't make mental connections between things unless you know them.

I agree there are large classes of things like that, but I think there are also large classes of things where looking them up is fine--- and my guess, though I could be wrong, is that the things traditionally memorized in schools lean more towards the second. If you think of the kinds of information that comes in tables, I think it's important to know that the table exists, and what kind of information is in it, when you would want to consult it, and ideally even how you would recreate it if you needed to. But actually memorizing the table? Doesn't seem that useful, and I think that's the kind of thing traditional tests have focused on (say, memorizing a bunch of different combinatorial identities, or memorizing a bunch of properties of chemical elements).

That's especially the case when nobody in the real world would be in some bizarre situation where they're stuck on a desert island having to do things entirely from memory. For example, if you're doing big-O analysis of an algorithm, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that you'll have Maple or Mathematica, or at least a list of common identities, available to use when simplifying your result or solving recurrences.

Re: What happened to studying?

#46

Post by jodrellblank » Sun, Jul 04, 2010, 11:47 PM UTC

prodigal_erik wrote: post #3

They just barely touch on the important part, which is whether or not students are achieving the same mastery of the subject matter. If professors are making courses too easy, that's the thing to fix. Butt-in-seat hours are only a symptom, and focusing on this (especially after acknowledging it's not the end goal!) is oddly Puritan.

Has the subject matter stayed the same over the past 3-5 decades that you can usefully compare "the same mastery of the subject matter"?

Re: What happened to studying?

#47

Post by Qz » Sun, Jul 04, 2010, 11:49 PM UTC

DannoHung wrote: post #40

10 hour reduction in studying effort sounds about right given the incredible leaps in personal IT. Lots of time spent studying is just finding the right damn information.

If you read the article it points out that the drop in time spent studying started before the major IT effects on colleges.

Re: What happened to studying?

#48

Post by cj » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 12:15 AM UTC

reader5000 wrote: post #41

dkarl wrote: post #39

College is losing its romantic lustre. Students used to believe in education for itself, but now ambitious students just cram in more classes and activities to graduate faster or pad their grad school applications. Before, a student studying the American Revolution in class might go to the library and flip through the books in the professor's "suggested reading" section on the syllabus looking for a particularly inte…

Nah, students never "cared" about learning. College started in the U.S. as a way for the upper classes to cavort under the ostentation of "learning about the world". It has always been a status signal. This is why the middle classes are willing to pay their left nut for a suitably prestigious degree - status signals to the middle classes are like honey to a bee (or something). There are perhaps .5% of the population…

You're saying 199 in 200 people should not go to college? I disagree.

A lot of people are going to state and community colleges and are not spending very much money to do so. There are very few people who graduate with over $100k in debt. Most have much less, if any.

Re: What happened to studying?

#49

Post by cj » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 12:17 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #46

prodigal_erik wrote: post #3

They just barely touch on the important part, which is whether or not students are achieving the same mastery of the subject matter. If professors are making courses too easy, that's the thing to fix. Butt-in-seat hours are only a symptom, and focusing on this (especially after acknowledging it's not the end goal!) is oddly Puritan.

Has the subject matter stayed the same over the past 3-5 decades that you can usefully compare "the same mastery of the subject matter"?

If your taking classes to learn latin or greek, it probably has not. That might be an example of a good subject matter to use as a benchmark.

Re: What happened to studying?

#50

Post by psyklic » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 12:23 AM UTC

prodigal_erik wrote: post #3

They just barely touch on the important part, which is whether or not students are achieving the same mastery of the subject matter. If professors are making courses too easy, that's the thing to fix. Butt-in-seat hours are only a symptom, and focusing on this (especially after acknowledging it's not the end goal!) is oddly Puritan.

Even more important is whether students graduate knowing what they need to know for today's world. I don't think that past study habits are even applicable, since what students need to know nowadays may be completely different from before.