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jogill
climber
Colorado
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From Academically Adrift: In 1961 students spent about 25 hours a week studying. Now, it's 12 to 13 hours. In a U. of California (that beacon of intellectual achievement) survey, students spent 13 hours a week on schoolwork, and 43 hours in entertainment and socializing.
At Georgia Tech in the early/mid 1950s, (Randolph Scott was there a few years ahead of me), taking 21 hours, I spent at least 18 hours a week on the books, and, more importantly, thought about the material we were studying at various times out of class, scribbling on napkins as I ate, etc., so I suppose that would substantially increase the time spent "studying." These days students twitter and Facebook and text.
In the student poll cited in Academically Adrift approximately one third reported studying less than five hours per week.
As a graduate student and then professor some time later, I witnessed the deleterious effects of the Vietnam War and the culture it spawned on education, and observed unhappily the increasing lack of preparedness and problem-solving skills of incoming students, as greater numbers of high school graduates were encouraged to attend college.
Toward the end of my career, I volunteered to teach lower-level classes rather than deal with the declining performances of juniors, seniors, and graduate students in my subject area. I became disheartened when I had for example a class of 12 in advanced calculus (a senior-level course required for the math major) who were all C level (at best) students. Most were math majors in our teaching option, which is a sad commentary on secondary education. If I had been a better teacher I would have perceived that as a worthy challenge, but, frankly, it simply took the wind out of my sails. I was happy to retire.
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happiegrrrl
Trad climber
www.climbaddictdesigns.com
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I have a friend who graduated recently. She and here boyfriend both have ginormous school loan debt, as do most of their recent college attending friends. Amounts which will take her into her 30;s to pay off, if all goes okay.
She is an art teacher, and I cannot believe that I was actually instrumental in her getting her first teaching job(me, who never went to college, happened to have the network connection). I do trail work with a guy who taught art, and asked if she might talk to him for advise on getting work. He said "I doubt I can help her, but sure - have her call. He gave her some tips, but mostly it reiterated what she already new. Then the miracle happened - The next week at trailwork he said "Have her call me NOW; a job just opened up in our school."
Wow!
Anyway, that job got her in the door, but she was not asked to return the next year(not unusual, from what I understand). Lucky for HER she was able to find another job locally, and in her field. It happened because someone went on maternity leave, and at the last minute. She was *this* close to accepting an offer teaching at a Catholic School where it would be a requirement she lead the class in a prayer to start out the day. This was an extremely discomforting idea for her, but - the debt pay-off time bomb was ticking away. She would have - would have HAD to have - accepted that job.
She told me last year that the school district had an opening for a kindergarten teacher. They got five THOUSAND applications.....
I've heard over and over from people that there are just SO many apps for every decent job that our land of abundance seems to teach us is our right, if we follow the rules.... I'm told that without the degree, the app wouldn't be considered. There's something wrong - if you ask me - when having simply paid the fee(or put it on credit) is a requirement to be considered worthy of being considered.
I do wish I had gone to college, mainly for the expansive world view I would HOPE it would have provided me. But I see some real duffus' types walking down the streets of this college town. Some of these people are not *thinkers* by a long stretch. They're simply toeing the line. I don't see how this is helpful to this country's development in the long run.
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RatDick
Trad climber
Grand Junction, CO
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Have lurked for some years but feel this subject is worth putting in my two cents.
The slow dismantling of public education in this country is one of the worst things I have seen the professional politicos do in my half century. Historians in the future will speak poorly of it IMO.
An ignorant society will however be easier to control.
And yes there are way too many humans but finding volunteers to leave is difficult.
For those who post the trip reports thanks.
Steve
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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From Louis Menand's article in The New Yorker:
"Professor X thinks that most of the students he teaches are not qualified to attend college. He also thinks that, as far as writing and literature are concerned, they are unteachable. But the system keeps pushing them through the human capital processor. They attend either because the degree is a job requirement or because they have been seduced by the siren song "college for everyone." [Professor] X considers the situation analolgous to the real-estate bubble; Americans are being urged to invest in something they can't afford and don't need. Why should you pass a college-level literature class if you want to be a state trooper? To show you can tough it out with Henry James? . . ."
Professor X is the author of "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower."
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Mimi
climber
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Very interesting, John.
Wasn't going to join this fray...I initially thought this idea was assinine because I support the importance of a college degree for employment purposes unless you are skilled enough in a trade to adequately support yourself.
I know the education system is being damaged by politics but I still place the burden on parents. Parents have stopped being responsible and we have a tendency to blame the schools.
Also, college isn't for everyone. If a kid isn't qualified or isn't interested at the time to go to college, make it possible for them to acquire skills in a trade. We certainly need skilled tradespersons. Out of highschool, go to work and learn a trade. Then, you'll have a better, more mature outlook on life and can make a better decision about attending college or not.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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College is a waste of time?
Unemployment rate amoung college graduates ages 19-34: 5.5%
Unemployment rate among non college graduates ages 19=34: 18%
Yep, just a waste of time.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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John, the two works you cite, Academically Adrift and In the Basement of the Ivory tower, are actually at odds with one another.
Honestly, I can't take Basement seriously. It is written under a pseudonym about what are purported to be "real" places but with fictional names. There is no way to verify that any of it is actually even true. The conceit of the book is that the author is a failed novelist who is now a failed academic only because his day job as a civil service employee won't cover the cost of the house he and his wife wish to purchase. That's not a promising start, even if I were to believe it. Moreover, his point is that the sort of thing he is teaching-- basic college composition courses --are wasted on his working-class students because their prose is bad, they don't think deep literary thoughts, and some of them want to be cops. The secondary point, that students ought to have achieved better literacy in high school, is unremarkable, but the ways in which we could improve reading and writing in k-12 students are massively expensive, since those skills require intensive, small-group training of the sort that costs a lot of labor and that doesn't measure well on the standardized tests that are now the new gods of the 21st century.
Academically Adrift, on the other hand, uses exactly those sorts of tests (and marginal ones at that) to "measure" improvements among college students in a variety of generic areas unrelated to actual disciplinary skills. As you know, I am immensely skeptical of that sort of thing for k-12, and I'm even more skeptical of it at the college level. Nonetheless, what the authors believe they have found is what most of us in real disciplines would've predicted: That the greatest improvements occur in disciplined, small class settings involving hands-on student work of the sort you do in labs or writing classes. In other words, the most effective classes are precisely the ones run by folks like "Professor X." Since the instrument the authors use for their measurements, the CLA is (to put it mildly) depressingly blunt, their positive findings are likely dramatically under estimated.
So one of the ironies is that in fact small seminars in which folks have to sit and read (and write about) Henry James or Sylvia Plath or whatever, are among the most effective, along with the seminars/labs in other disciplines. Of course, most of the media reporting and even many of the reviews in the weeklies and newspapers have lumped these books into a generic "college sucks" storyline.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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What do we as Americans desire for our society?
If what we want is a thriving economic engine shouldn't we follow the libertarian, utilitarian calculus that worships efficiency for the sake of return?
Shouldn't we end all education except that which leads to higher income in an evermore practical social structure emphasizing technological and scientific advancement purely as tools for the development of productivity and wealth?
What strikes me is that most civilizations are admired not for their productive economic systems, not for the efficiency of their schools, but for their most impractical commodities: the art, literature and philosophy, even theology they produce.
When I think of ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy or 19th century France, I think of absolutely impractical gifts that resonate even today as civilizing forces.
Can art and literature be taught? Maybe not so much taught as introduced, nobody can be taught to be a great writer or painter, but insights into writing and painting that enable an enhanced experience of those disciplines can certainly be taught. And that teaching often mediates the harshness of our lives and opens up or gives understanding to those elements that are worth dying for and more importantly are worth living for in a society.
The arts are useless but more necessary than you might imagine.
To imagine an education as simply a path to economic success is to not understand what an education is.
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Mimi
climber
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About says it all, Paul.
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Moof
Big Wall climber
Orygun
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"Moof, did you have to get, present a GED to get into college later? "
Yep. I took two college classes over the summer in an attempt to lop a year off high school, and found it to be so much better for me that my parents helped me drop out even earlier and enroll for the Fall semester. I got in on a semester by semester basis till I had the GED in hand (had to take it 1 section at a time thanks to class schedules mostly overlapping the GED schedule). Found the GED to be pretty straight forward, and had no real trouble passing it with just a 9th grade education.
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Mimi
climber
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Good for you, Moof. I always said if my kids wanted to skip HS, they could take the GED and move on to whatever else.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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^^^^moof, i did something similar.
dropped out of high school and did other things for a few years.
took the ged so i could get into jc.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning...
This comes without a single example that one could confirm or disconfirm.
Unfortunately, the author did not stay in school long enough to learn anything about argumentation.
...and theory rather than application.
As if application is something independent from theory.
Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.
Considering, for example, the astronomical number of patents granted to people with schooling, this claim is going to be tough to defend.
But if this sentence is true then it would already be too late for the author.
Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity.
Meaning that failure is labeled as failure?
We think of college as a stepping-stone to success rather than a means to gain knowledge.
Whose fault is that?
College fails to empower us with the skills necessary to become productive members of today's global entrepreneurial economy.
We're going to need a list of those skills and, for each one, an explanation of how college fails to empower.
Meanwhile, returning to college might help to drain bloated pontifications such as "fails to empower us with the skills necessary..." from the author's writing.
College is expensive.
The first undeniable point made.
In the book "Academically Adrift," sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college.
The trick, then, is to be part of the other 64%. Apparently the opportunity is there.
The success of people who never completed or attended college makes us question whether what we need to learn is taught in school.
Exactly which "successes" are exemplars here, and is there a corresponding count of "failures" for those not in school?
Learning by doing -- in life, not classrooms -- is the best way to turn constant iteration into true innovation.
Why exactly is the alchemy involved in turning "constant iteration" (whatever that means) into "true innovation" the standard by which one measures education?
Can someone with little or no research skills and little knowledge of a field actually distinguish between "true innovation" and, say, bursting through doors already open?
If you want, say, to build the next generation supercomputer, should you skip school and learn by doing?
We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions.
True enough.
We are the disruptive generation creating the "free agent economy" built by entrepreneurs, creatives, consultants and small businesses envisioned by Daniel Pink in his book, "A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future."
Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Here's a notion from the recently abandoned college experience: best to read more than one book.
We must encourage young people to consider paths outside college. That's why I'm leading UnCollege: a social movement empowering individuals to take their education beyond the classroom. Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim started problem-solving in the real world.
With a skill-set that would have been weak 300 years ago?
Imagine if we started our own companies, our own projects and our own organizations.
Imagining is easy.
Imagine if we went back to learning as practiced in French salons, gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other in improving the human condition.
Oh great---let's return education to a tiny elite.
A major function of college is to signal to potential employers that one is qualified to work.
Get ready: here comes an argument based on a debatable premise.
...the argument...
Of course, some people want a formal education. I do not think everyone should leave college, but I challenge my peers to consider the opportunity cost of going to class. If you want to be a doctor, going to medical school is a wise choice. I do not recommend keeping cadavers in your garage.
And why not, given the transcendent value of learning by doing?
On the other hand, what else could you do during your next 50-minute class? How many e-mails could you answer?
A critical developmental activity for the advancement of true innovation.
How many lines of code could you write?
Especially, how many lines of code could you write if that next 50-minute class you are skipping is your computer science class? And will you write several hundred lines of code for a job that can be done with ten lines? And will you document all those lines of code in a way that will make them maintainable, or will you just produce a convoluted buggy nightmare that has to be completely redone by someone with a college education?
Some might argue that college dropouts will sit in their parents' basements playing Halo 2, doing Jell-O shots and smoking pot.
Uh-oh, straw man argument coming...
...straw man argument...
It's not a question of authorities; it's a question of priorities.
Catchy. Does it mean anything?
We who take our education outside and beyond the classroom understand how actions build a better world. We will change the world regardless of the letters after our names.
I guess we'll see. There's a nasty strain of e. coli. in Europe awaiting your efforts.
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Mimi
climber
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I was going to write that. Wow.
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WBraun
climber
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I went to college.
It wasn't a waste of time.
I took all the classes I needed, electronics and manufacturing technology.
Good stuff.
I should have took typing and more English.
I can't type worth sh'it and my English is all cuss words ......
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Heh.
Im sure richard could have developed the reading and writing skills to do that even better, had he not wasted his time going to class in college.
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Kerwin, I owe everything I've accomplished (which isn't a whole lot) to my high school, college, and grad school teachers.
And although I'm fond of proclaiming that I'm a self-taught climber, there too, critical interventions by those with more skill and more wisdom have determined both my progress and my longevity.
The fact that Stephens is passionate but unsophisticated doesn't mean that he is entirely wrong either. Education is a large, messy, inefficient, imperfect enterprise. It is never going to work for everyone, and it cannot be expected to be uniformly successful for those it does work for. It isn't a product you purchase. It is an opportunity you pay for dearly, and it may or may not work for any one individual. In some ways it is a huge gamble.
We are now in the grips of national trends to turn it into a consumer product---a combination liposuction and breast implantation comes to mind. Having distorted it beyond recognition, we then impose on it grotesquely oversimplified evaluations whose net effect, it seems to me, will be to further drain content from the experience. We may yet end up with the picture Stephens paints.
In the face of these changes, many educators have, I think, lost faith both in the value of their own knowledge and in their student's abilities to master that knowledge. I was expected to know considerably more in high school than most of my students now know, at least partially because my teachers were absolutely certain we ought to know these things and their conviction convinced us.
Education has become more and more the private passion of its practitioners, who, as always, love what they do but, battered by the incessant din of the false prophets of utility and the skewed perspectives of the corporate environment, have increasingly abandoned any claims of personal or societal value and have undermined their own credibility by making up strictly utilitarian justifications for the pursuit of knowledge, the development of an ethical character, the appreciation of culture, and the participation in the civic life of the state.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Honestly, I can't take Basement seriously.
Yeah, Professor X is a hoot! Thought that quote would wake up a few folks.
the CLA is (to put it mildly) depressingly blunt, their positive findings are likely dramatically under estimated.
Actually, I thought the concept quite interesting, as well as revealing. Might be entertaining to examine it in greater detail. To those who haven't read the article, it involves requiring a student research information and data relating to an aircraft, one of which has recently crashed, and write an argument for his company purchasing (or, perhaps, not purchasing) such a plane. I haven't read the book, so I'm sure there is a lot more to it I'm not aware of, but it does seem to require critical thought. True, more in-depth knowledge relating to the situation - various engineering disciplines, physics, etc. - would make it a more substantial exercise.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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i recently got together with ken m, who posts on here, for a public colloquium at ucla. ken is a medical school professor, and he brought a colleague, another doctor, whom he had talked into attending the colloquium on u.s. foreign policy. each of us, now approaching retirement, admitted he'd love to go back to school and study an entirely different field--for ken, political science, for his friend, music, and for myself, with an education in various "humanities", hard science.
there's nothing wrong with college except for the control-freak attitude inherited from europe, where you get pegged pretty early in life as to your opportunities. my experience is that the job market undergoes a sea change about every 10 years. whatever you've gotten into, whatever you've studied for, it'll become obsolete in that time and you'd better have the personal resources, whether from your education or not, to change horses in midstream. not so much the case for doctors, but it's remarkable how those with a specialized education can get so interested in other things later in life.
education must become more liberalized. the pressure to specialize is insane. and unlike mr. dicey, i think people are a lot smarter than they're given credit for. but school should be there for those interested in the education. the babysitting function needs to be separated from it after kindergarten.
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tomtom
Social climber
Seattle, Wa
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Supertopo is a waste of time.
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