The Education System Puzzle - Part 1


Stephen Levy, in his book titled Hackers writes about college kids:
“You begin working conscientiously as a student… and then you discover something that puts classes into their proper perspective: they are totally irrelevant to the matter at hand.”
He cites this case where a professor drops a robot arm in the computer lab at MIT, and leaves. Here’s how the student feels:
“Nothing in the world is as essential as making the proper interface between the machine (computer) and the robot arm, and putting the robot arm under your control… Then you can see your offspring come to life. How can anything as contrived as an engineering class compare to that?”

Of course, this is a universal criticism of education world over. In The Elephant in the Brain, the authors point out the usual reasons we cite as to why students go to school (to learn, which in turn is a means to a higher paying job) isn’t the entire truth. After all, they say, many top American universities allow anyone to sit in their classes, “join the discussions, and maybe turn in assignments” and yet very few take up such a chance. In fact, most registered students celebrate when a class is cancelled, and pick the “easy A” classes. And “as a rule, students only learn the material you specifically teach them.”

At school, most subjects have “little relevance in real jobs”. Even maths, the one subject that has real application in life, teaches stuff like geometry and calculus, which very few people apply later in life. The schooling system responds to these charges with phrases like “well-rounded”, “broaden their horizons”, teaching students “how to learn” or “how to think critically”, answers the authors refuse to buy. After all:
“Most students can figure out how the homework is like the lecture. But decades later, almost no one can reliably recognize a complex real-world problem as similar enough to a school problem…”

Even more weirdly, despite knowing all of the above, why do “employers value the degree”, ask the authors?! Even in jobs where a degree has no relevance, like bar tending, graduates earn more than their school dropout peers.

So what the hell is going on?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarMarch 8, 2019 at 8:24 PM

    Well, well. Education System puzzle is certainly a very intricate one. The amount of discussions, criticisms and laments, and all that going on and on, certainly are pointers to that effect!

    Like the Zen saying, "The only thing constant is the change!", it is possible to imagine something like this in the context of education too:
    "Education system puzzle forever remains a puzzle! No matter what people do actually to solve it, or, no matter how people imagine that by doing it in some way they imagine the puzzle would get solved, it would still remain an unsolved puzzle!"

    The root of the problem lies in understanding or defining what is education. No two people will agree to any definition that would be "crisp and clear" like in mathematics and physics and such other sciences! The core truth (i.e. what is education/what is the process of teaching-learning) being pretty complicated, the puzzle emerging from it (i.e. putting forth a real good education system) is bound to be a mind-boggling one.

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