Cananito

by Rogelio Gudino

Tech Education Tea Movies Other

The traditional college degree monopoly has long been sustained by three mutually-reinforcing factors. First, colleges are highly subsidized through some combination of direct government funding, non-profit status, and student financial aid. Second, only accredited colleges can receive government subsidies and offer credits and credentials that are recognized by employers and other colleges. The accreditation system, meanwhile, is controlled by existing colleges themselves. Third, our society has made an enormous psychic investment in the idea of traditional colleges. Most people don’t know how to think about credentials any other way.

And I think the third is going to be the hardest to change.

But just as people are ultimately interested in buying holes, not drills, higher education consumers aren’t buying courses or degree programs. They’re buying credentials.

This is so true. If I were buying courses or degree programs all along instead of credentials, I would be asking for so many refunds.

Traditional degrees have the great advantage of being simple and universally understood. The problem is that they provide little information about what students actually know and are becoming more expensive all the time.

“The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called school, equipped with tortures called education.” - John Updike

Oh boy, so much truth.

And the way we’re taught to learn is as receivers of information, non-thinkers. Follow the rules. Read pages 100-132. Do the exercises. Memorize the information. Spit it out in a test. Do this project, because we tell you to, not because it’s fun or interesting.

The way we need to be taught to learn is completely different. It’s this: learn about what interests you, gets you curious, gets you excited. Figure out where to get the information you need. Read about it, talk to someone about it, find out about it. Try it. Do it, make mistakes. Figure out how to correct the mistakes. Figure out how to solve the problems you encounter. Repeat.

I really believe that “basic education” is not about the content. I say this because I’m pretty sure that the number one argument against this would be “they need to learn x”. No, they don’t, if they do, they’ll be interested in it first due to a given event in their lives.

And that’s the problem with schools. They can’t motivate kids to learn, because they’re forcing it. They’re trying to impart on them a rigid system of authority that kids naturally rebel against. In fact, this is the main problem kids face, and they come up with all kinds of incredibly creative ways to solve it, from skipping school and smoking pot to drawing incredible doodles in notebooks instead of listening to a history lecture to finding ingenious ways to communicate with peers, through technologies like texting and iPhones and through old technologies like passing notes and so on.

For a long while, I’ve always asked myself why do people whine about school all the time (including myself), specially professional education in which you’re supposed to choose what to study. But the answer is so obvious: you don’t have the complete freedom to choose what and how to learn.

The whole education system assumes everyone learns the same way, at the same speed, and is interested in the same things. Horrible assumption.

I still believe we need institutions in which people gather to share knowledge or discuss topics. A great example of this are GYMs (in theory, because nowadays it’s filled with marketing crap): people go at any given time, workout, and share knowledge (in this case fitness knowledge). They don’t impose a routine on you, they don’t tell you at what time you should be there. Trainers or experts only give you tips and advice, they guide you. And sometimes you can swap a trainer or expert for the great internet. And sometimes you can choose to stay home.

In general terms, that’s how schools should work in my opinion.

We need to get out of their damn way.

We’re halting kids’s progress if we don’t get out of their damn way.

Best part:

I would say that the main reason that we grade is since we really are not in the business of providing an education but rather in the business of providing degrees. To award a meaningful degree you need to grade. To deliver a meaningful education you do not.

I mostly agree, I think the whole education system is broken because of degrees (with a few exceptions like medicine and related careers), but giving degrees is actually possible without grading, a clear example: martial arts.

The reason martial arts get away with giving degrees without grading is that there are no time lapses defined, you get a new belt whenever the sensei thinks you deserve it. I think this can be applied to some parts of the education system as well.

Not only is he smart and bright, but he’s also an entrepreneur.

No one is entitled to a job. You have to earn it. Earn it by being smart, by being a team player, by knowing what the hell you’re doing, by doing it right.

At this point I see school as a place to network and learn about things that interest you.

Great read from the New York Times, although college itself is a good way to do networking. Here’s an interesting statistic:

[..] there is not one job market in America, but two. The formal market we always hear about — jobs that get filled through cold résumé submissions in reply to posted ads — accounts for only about 20 percent of jobs.

The other 80 percent get filled in the informal job market. Any employer knows how the informal job market works: you need a position filled, so you ask your friends, colleagues and current employees if they know anyone who would do a good job.

And I like this next point:

If I were betting on the engines of future job creation, I wouldn’t put my money on college students cramming for tests and writing papers with properly formatted M.L.A.-style citations in order to bolster their résumés for careers in traditional professions and middle-management jobs in large corporate and government bureaucracies.

I would be happy if schools just changed their current system and forget about tests, forget of those stupid properly formatted documents, and get down to the good stuff.

Jon Morrow sums it up to:

1. No one has ever asked about my GPA.
2. I didn’t sleep.
3. I’ve forgotten 95% of it.
4. I didn’t have time for people.
5. Work experience is more valuable.

There is one exception:

If you’re getting your masters, going to law school, or becoming a doctor, then you’ll need all 37 of those A’s to get into the best school possible, and you can safely disregard this entire post.

Otherwise:

On the other hand, if you want to get a job and make as much money as possible, then good grades aren’t going to help you as your teachers and parents might have you believe. You’re better making powerful friends, building a killer résumé, and generally having the time of your life on your parent’s dime.

Reading through the comments, I noticed everyone (mostly people above their 30’s I’d guess who studied CS ages ago) is opposed to refreshing things up by getting rid of old boring topics like Automata Theory for instance.

But I noticed that wether to change or not CS is not what people should be thinking of, but promoting Software Engineering instead, here’s my comment on the linked blog post:

Most of the people commenting here seem to people above their 30’s, so here’s the take of a young (21 years old) CS student, computer nerd since I was 7 years old.

Whats wrong here is that people interested in CS nowadays are not really interested in CS, but Software Engineering. CS is only for hardcore nerds who want to get all the history and theory of computers.

If I knew this 3 years ago, I would’ve enrolled on a SE program, not CS, in the end, I’m going to spend the rest of my life in software development, and 80% of CS students probably will do the same, so why bother going through the boring old stuff?

So to put it short, rather than changing CS, let people interested in CS know about SE, which is probably what they’re looking for in the first place.

“The old-fashioned way of computer science is, ‘We’re going to teach you a bunch of stuff that is fundamental and will be long-lasting but we won’t tell you how it’s applied’ ”

That’s still true for many careers, and it needs to be changed so that people have an easier time figuring out what they really should study according to their interests.

And the movie [The Social Network] can’t hurt, he [Ed Lazowska] said, because at least it has transformed the image of a programmer. Computer scientists are finally getting the treatment that doctors got with “Grey’s Anatomy” and reporters with “All the President’s Men.”

But, in short, there are benefits beyond the academic that can come from higher education.

I’ve changed my mind a bit since I gave my opinion on higher education, and agree. I still hate that my school is so .NET biased.