A hundred+ years ago when "almost nobody" went to college, college was a place for those hungry and willing to sacrifice for intellectual growth. Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost everyone" is expected to consume, and having the desire for intellectual growth as a prerequisite just wouldn't scale.
I also think that some of the classes I took (20 years ago, at a state school) would not be taught this way today. Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. Ditto even on a class that focused on Soviet dystopian literature taught by an emrigre.
The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet.
I say this as a person with 3 degrees. Higher education worked for me because I made sure it did and colleges were more old school then than now.
> If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet.
I’m not sure what one would be hungry for that couldn’t be met in college. Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.
200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated.
So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people.
Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.
Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. This can be very valuable to limit unnecessary exploration of blind avenues (there is of course such a thing as necessary exploration of blind avenues)
For those who progress through the academy, the risk is that they become narrow thinkers
For those without access to the structure, the risk is that they become cranks
These aren't absolutes, but they are observable trends
[Edit: are —> aren't]
I used to have a particularly brilliant (not sarcasm; he really was brilliant) colleague who “invented“ lots of things that had already been invented and would have saved a lot of time by just bouncing things off others who would say stuff like “oh, so it’s RPC” or “oh, so like a distributed queue” and stop him from reinventing the wheel.
Your colleague can dump their thoughts into such a system and quickly get back the shibboleths and the foundational papers. Now is the best time to be a self-taught genius.
University should not be separate from earlier forms of education, things that are university like should also filter back into to high school and middle school.
As a borderline-crank myself, I think we need more folks with crank tendencies and more folks with a solid scientific approach. We have the most minds right now, amazing capabilities but at the same time, a narrowing Chesterton's Window (I know, Overton Window, :)
We should push kids harder in the ways that matter and less in the ways that is too soon. Grinding arithmetic and non-contextualized history is a multilayered waste of time. I am very pro both of those subjects, just the way we teach them an the timing is way off.
The issue isn't some failure of education, but the fact that people are different and have different skill sets. And as education came to be expected to be something everybody goes through and in a roughly similar fashion, the inevitable decline to the lowest common denominator was inevitable.
[1] - https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...
It's like basic math....
Did you continue to read it? Because it covers other topics. Without using the internet, can you name the eligibility requirements of the Gov. of Kentucky? How about five county officers and their principle duties?
I think your initial response belies a deeper problem we struggle with. Our attention span has shortened and social media has biased us towards more course interactions.
The useful skill is being able to find the information on the Internet if you want to run for governor of Kentucky. If you grow up in Kentucky learning it once in seventh grade is sufficient so you know it's a possibility, but will most likely never matter again after that class.
Without an understanding of math you can only cargo cult problems. You can get away with being lazy with computation with no real issur but only if you understand the underlying theory.
Not that it really proves anything in the larger scope they seemed to imply. At least, not anymore than losing on the old show “are you smarter than a fifth grader?”
Most people know that college education has become dramatically "simplified", but fewer seem aware that this is also true of nearly all of our education systems. And it's all for the same reason. When education was not required nor expected, what education that did exist was able to excel and push a group of people who genuinely wanted to learn in ways that are not really possible today, outside of things like elite preparatory academies.
And I think this lesson is extremely important when beginning to think about how education might be reformed. It's easy to say that secondary (or even primary) education should be more sophisticated, without considering the implications of that on the student body. You can't really have widespread exceptional education standards and the expectation that most people should be able to achieve those standards. This is why reforming education is a far bigger task than the current idea of 'throw more money at it' could ever solve.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
Grammar I could probably have done in eighth grade but I forget some of the terminology.
Areas like history, I'd know a fair bit (as an American) but there's a lot of historical essentially trivia that I wouldn't know though may have known at one time.
Some of the double letters and other things in the spelling I'd probably get wrong. That's what red squiggly underlines when typing are for.
You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently.
One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.
One word. Derrida.
ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.
Yet I loathe the words "synergy" and "optics". Gag me with a spoon.
And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days.
What have you read recently?
"Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)
Gleeson seems to be into the suffering for its own sake.
I don't think that jargon is created to confuse or obfuscate, most likely the opposite. My favorite example is in sailing. Every functional part of a sailboat has a name, because precise communication between crew can be critical and saying "pull the rope, no the other one, no the other other one" doesn't help. But telling a non sailer to tighten a jib sheet seems unnecessarily persnickety.
Not to me. I enjoy learning things like that.
I enjoyed watching the "Power" TV series not just for the plot, but for the colorful street jargon. For example: "I'll dime you" means I'll call you on the phone.
What have you read recently from academia?
> You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently.
Sometimes things aren't simple.
That's a trope of critics, but not what happens. Have you studied in college? They (almost always) cover a very wide range - much wider than you will discover on your own - and the focus is to teach you to think critically and be able to examine them yourself. They are not there to teach you information, or that is secondary (at least in social sciences and humanities).
Also, you omit other enormous benefits, including personal tutorial - including guidance, feedback, etc. - from leading experts and PhD students, not to mention a room full of peers studying the same things.
I did not exclude other benefits of a university education in my statement, I simply highlighted one of the things that sets it apart from learning in isolation.
How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader (although of course not precluded by an academic education either)
I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too.
There are many other factors at play, and where and how you are educated is only one of them.
The original claim was about concepts beyond an orthodoxy, but whether concepts or subjects, it's very unlikely you will discover on your own more than a university full of domain experts who spend lifetimes discovering and studying these things. It's not remotely plausible.
> I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too.
Good for you. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have been better off learning CS from experts - especially with all your talent - nor is it a representative sample of education. Most people who don't go to college have no hope of matching its benefits on their own.
Also, your field of study was CS. I don't know about orthodoxy taught in CS, but again, in humanities and social sciences, what's taught is how to develop your own thinking. For example, parroting this orthodoxy (and rhetoric) of the anti-intellectual reactionaries is not a sign of well-developed critical thinking.
College isn't only learning from experts though.
Instruction from experts is a good thing, and that part of college is therefore a good thing. But there are many aspects of college that is directly or indirectly not exactly the same thing as sitting there in front of an instructor.
Things such as paying tuition, socializing, walking around campus, getting classes on being more woke. These aspects add and detract from the central idea of college, which is instruction by experts.
Therefore students have to weigh the total experience and see if it is worth it. The article is saying many of them reckon it is not worth it anymore.
The idea that they represent a single orthodox is a little flawed.
To generalize even further, perhaps to the point of uselessness, is to find balance between tradition and your own spirit–patiently learning how things are, while always critically considering how they could be different.
As long as you maintain perspective like this, and you’re aware of the biases and pitfalls of the avenue you’re pursuing, you can do great in either, or why not spend time in several?
This is true, but in practice few people do it. Most people will not have much time left for study alongside a job. And without the "friction"/motivation college brings, most people will not learn anywhere near as much.
Genuine question: how do you get those people to talk to you? (I am assuming you are not famous or wealthy enough to pay them to talk to you; I am neither.)
Intellectuals in general have espoused a lot of inhuman political ideologies.
I don't see education as the solution to despotism. That requires a fair mind and rationality — neither of which has roots in book learning.
I don't necessarily see communism working over a long period even at that scale though. I think attrition would be too high. The chance of some whacko gaining too much power would be too high. Moral would degrade over time when people were able to compare their own situation with that of their neighbours under other systems.
Honestly, I think we'd be better off making room for small communes and giving them legal protections similar to corporations. Establish some decent laws that allow people to organize and live that way for as long as they want to but also ensure that such systems aren't abused and are held to account when they do wrong. There's a time and place for them in many people's lives but it isn't something we should try to impose on a broad, unwilling populace.
Note that Deng changed PRC from personalist dictatorship to an autocracy that had much more decentralization. He wanted one party rule but not all power in the hands of one person. His liberalization of the Chinese economy lifted millions out of poverty. China ignored Western economist advice and did much better than former Soviet republics as a result.
The mass killings and terror stopped with Deng. They are back with Xi who has re-established a personalist dictatorship. Instead of a blanket knee-jerk reaction to the word “communism” one should analyze each situation on its merits. There is nuance at play. Tito was no Stalin, for instance.
The majority of our history classes also frequently got bogged down before we could get to the civil rights movement and really have to go into the dirty little details of what the post-Civil-War US looked like.
Are you in college?
> can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for
Wow. That's pretty wild! Can you back that up somehow? On the Internet, extreme statements somehow have more credibility. In college, more extreme statements require more extreme support for them.
> Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.
What is more important than looking at ourselves in the mirror, and learning everything we can from others? It's not like we are doing so well right now.
It's not an extreme statement, just a brief description of well-known events.
There goal was to build a self-sustaining agrarian society and everyone who even looked like an intellectual, had a university education, had glasses, or some other trappings of Western life was eliminated or sent to concentration camps where they mostly died.
Why? Because the didn't fit the mold of "suffering farmers oppressed under capitalism & imperialism, waiting to be rescued."
Please, this is widely documented and trying to suggest otherwise seems quite disingenuous.
> I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for.
And then you took issue with the description of the Cambodian genocide. Despite the fact that he was agreeing with you. Now you start a whole new argument. I'm not even sure what are you trying to argue about.
I agree.
I had my best critical thinking class in community college. If I was innately smart, I probably would not have needed it as badly, but that one class gave me a lot of foundation and some credence to 'education' being useful. In other words, I am not smart, but I am educated. Overall, I think society benefits from that.
But that was 2 year community college after which I transferred ( and later got an MBA ).
At least personally, it's concerning to find out how many people think they are thinking critically all the time, but are not able to think critically about the definition of critical thinking.
It seems to me that there are several common ways people define the term:
1. To mean any innate interest or drive whatsoever for knowledge in any topic that is remotely academic or related to something academic. Typically in the context of something free-form and not guided by an instructor.
2. To mean the ability to re-evaluate beliefs shaped by the knowledge you have previously absorbed. This is the most common definition but also the most problematic since it rarely involves questioning your beliefs about critical thinking itself in the future. In essence you are replacing one source of truth with another source of truth making claims based on authority. This often leads to the typical "I learned about critical thinking, now I will reject anything my parents say as false and things my school says as true". I don't believe that is what is meant by this definition, but it is unfortunately very common for people to leave their "critical thinking class" with that kind of takeaway. They also might leave their critical thinking class with the tendency to come up with meta questions and meta narratives and then put them on the internet a bit like what I'm doing. I hate that as well since it's incredibly annoying.
3. To mean the ability to come up with solutions to a novel problem; to synthesize information from a variety of sources and come to a conclusion substantially different from each source individually.
In other words, neither of three options listed.
I suppose that is why I'm confused when the term is used, since I don't think I would use the term critical thinking for avoiding logical fallacies. A better term might be "not wrong thinking". Of course this also should take into account that some things we call logical fallacies probably shouldn't be considered logical fallacies at all, like "slippery slope" arguments and so forth, which are considered to be a fallacy since there is no mathematical implication, despite the obviously correct nature of many slippery slope arguments.
The word critical implies some sort of criticism, I'm not sure if identifying a logical fallacy is really what we typically mean by criticism. At the end of the day I guess the word itself isn't important.
Seems to me like it's a self-defeating argument. If they were really teaching critical thinking as a skill, degree holders would immediately start arguing with them about this vague and poorly thought out claim, but in practice people just nod along.
Common sense is something you can only learn through personal struggle. But if you already have some common sense, going to university and learning about the 15 or so different subtopics of your field is enriching, imo.
There was probably a technical definition of the "critical" at one point, but now basically something like the above is meant by "critical thinking". I don't have a problem with it.
"At the beginning of 2002, the courses were as following: during the first week, an introduction to intelligence topics included the history, mission and values of the CIA, as well as a unit on the history of intelligence an literature taught by the Center for The Study of Intelligence’s (CSI’s). Next, during the following five weeks, analysts are introduced to a variety of skills including analytic thinking, writing and self-editing, briefing, data analysis techniques and teamwork exercises, these representing the basic skills for a CIA analyst. After these five weeks in the classroom, the students go on a four-week interim assignment meant to help them understand how the DI relates to other CIA components, making them better understand their future role. Then, they return to the classroom for another four weeks of training in more advanced topics: writing and editing longer papers and topical modules addressing issues like denial, deceptions, indicators and warnings. These special kinds of analysis require advanced and sophisticated tradecraft skills. Afterwards, they go away again, for a second four-week interim assignment and when they return, after another four weeks in the classroom (when they deal with even more advanced topics), a task force exercise awaits them: a two days terrorist crisis simulation outside the classroom. This is an opportunity to show what they’ve learned and to see how they react in a situation that they might come across in real life."
That's a real "critical thinking" course. What they're trying to do is teach people how to extracts facts from contradictory, incomplete, and deliberately false information.
Some of the concepts are generally useful. Here's an overview of the subject, from the U.S. Army.[2] "The critical thinking material has been used with permission from The Foundation for Critical Thinking, www.criticalthinking.org, The Thinker’s Guide to Analytic Thinking, 2012 and The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools, 2009, by Dr. Linda Elder and Dr. Richard Paul." See especially section 2-13, "AVOIDING ANALYTICAL PITFALLS".
[1] https://www.performancemagazine.org/how-the-cia-analysts-are...
[2] https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf
For instance (and this wasn't an example from the course - that would be brutal to read the whole thing over a semester - I can barely remember the works we discussed directly) - Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He has a discussion around Christianity and the Catholic Church being one of the reason's for Rome's fall. It's interesting to place this idea in the context of HIS time - he was writing during the late 18th century and we see his contemporary modes of thoughts in events like the French Revolution, when there was a deliberate effort to remove the Catholic Church's power. The contemporary thought and his arguments mirrored each other. It was as much studying the work in its historical context as studying what the work was saying. This is what I think of when I think of critically thinking - considering all the layers of both the argument and why it's being made.
These are probably details around your point 2 in that they are meta questions, and while annoying, are vital to engage with a historical text outside of anything but as a collection of facts and an entertaining narrative.
Do more in college. Write a rock opera, spend a week curled up in the union learning about black holes, be good enough to tutor.
Don't just graduate with nothing but a taste for bad jazz and cheap beer.
(Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. Not sure how internationally read it is, but a worthwhile classic. British degrees are classified from firsts to thirds (via upper and lower second class honours) - but the story is (initially) set at Oxford, which at the time awarded fourths.)
Free link to the book here:
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945/w...
I was ready to withdraw and reconsider engineering as a major.
Later still they posted the cut offs. 40 was the cutoff for an A. Avg was 36 and the cutoff for a B. My 48 was the 4th highest score.
I would have preferred the British system
Here in the US we have a saying of " C equals Degree", so kinda the exact opposite of the UK saying. Strange!
"C's get degrees": The bare minimum to get the credential is the optimal use of resources.
"You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything between.": Either excel at school to maximize your achievement or don't worry about your grades and simply pursue whatever comes your way from the opportunity to be there to enrich your life.
In retrospect? Yeah, I probably should have taken a B and finished relevant things faster. I have almost zero use for my understanding of the mathematic accounting of the particle-in-a-box.
Of course in grad school a C is a failure, so the wiggle room is slightly less generous.
Back in my day it was “Ds get degrees”.
Yes, the standard for graduate admission around the world (and also other things, like undergraduate research awards in Canada) is upper second.
This is not true of other places which award Firsts.
I'm only kidding, but more seriously it's certainly not all equal, and few are really in a position to compare any two, nevermind several - it's a bit of a joke that we then make 'a 2:1 in an engineering or related subject' or 'at least 3.5 GPA' or whatever a requirement as though the institution and cohort doesn't make a difference at all.
If you look at the top 1/3 of Harvard students who deserve to be admitted on academic grounds, you end up with a much smaller pool than "top 1/3 of Harvard students".
Even if you were right, though, it’d be an odd take — even if 25% (or 50%!) of Harvard students were admitted noncompetitively, they would simply not be part of the top 5% of Harvard students? Like they’re not diluting the top 5%, they’re just not in it.
I stand by “top 5% of Harvard” is a higher bar than “top 1/3 of Oxford”. But I will grant you that these are all based on GPA anyway, a rather noisy measure of even academic ability, let alone anything else we might care about.
Universities in the UK treat a degree from the US with a 3.7 or 3.8 or higher GPA as equivalent to a first according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_c...
Probably more are familiar with the British Granada Television adaptation, which was shown here on the Great Performances series on PBS. I don't know how well that conformed with the book.
'[Puts book down, objecting to Charles also occupying himself] I do think you might talk to me - I've had a very exhausting day. Entertain me. Take me out of myself.'
My father went to a small, rural school whose local police force generally took the approach that as long as it didn't hurt anyone "At worst, a night in jail and no record of the arrest." Even for what would be considered distribution of hard drugs now.
When I went to school, students got a slap on the wrist for burning a hole in their dorm floor with thermite.
10 years after I went to school, a student was charged with a terrorism offense for making a dry ice pressure bottle and tossing it out of their dorm window as a joke.
And as near as I can tell, it's gotten stricter since. See: bitching about Harvard's dismantling of independent fun.
"Make lots of mistakes" isn't feasible if it ends up on a permanent record.
Dumb example I’ll share for a laugh is when I went to university (graduated 2013) they would put you on the sex offender registry for peeing outside and even for going in the wrong gendered restroom. One time I got obliterated and desperately needed to puke. But I was in a dorm where every other floor had your gender’s bathroom. Given my luck I was on the wrong floor. So my choice was potentially end up a sex offender for puking in a girl’s restroom stall or puke in the stairwell thus stinking it up for weeks. Guess which choice fear motivated me to make. Sorry about the stairwell, guys.
I think this depends quite a bit on your socioeconomic class. Overall in the US, only about 1/3 finish a college degree
This thread was about "college" generically, not about MIT.
There has been a lot of progress in exposing students to broad and multifaceted view of human endeavours. Aboriginal cultures are portrayed in full and with their negative and positive aspects in courses about them. I literally had a course on pre-colonial American cultures... that included all aspects of culture.
What would be racist - is having presenting a very lopsided view on what happened before colonial era replaced those cultures in the "new world"
This is bullshit. The difference is that today, your own culture e.g. (non-native) American society till the modern day is considered fair game for analysis, whereas 20 years ago there was probably a fair bit of "they are savages to be studied, whereas we are civilized" complex going on.
Guess what, that tends to temper critical analysis of other cultures as well, and focuses on understanding without judgement. It is dishonest to cast this as "a priori admiration".
> The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet.
An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college, you can continue to study outside things while you are at college. The problem for most people seems to be that at a college, these ideas will be subjected to rigorous intellectual analysis, whereas on the Internet it's easier to hide in echo chambers where everyone agrees with you.
> I say this as a person with 3 degrees...colleges were more old school then than now.
I think this is little more than viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better off. I highly recommend against the Internet as a substitute for actual college education because it's not "old school" any more.
These was definitely no shortage of ability to analyze and criticize western civilization in a college 20 years ago.
// An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college
You are replying to a comment about what is accessible. College goes not preclude internet. College however is an extremely large resource and time commitment. Therefore ability to learn outside of that is a great addition.
// Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better off.
Agreed. Hence the article we are all talking about - people wisely chosing to forego college as a default.
Not to mention that the whole 18th century is famous for its criticism of (that time's) western civilization...
I'm trying to engage reasonably by assuming some things here, specifically that the OP has peripheral knowledge of some courses (since they haven't actually attended college recently) and they are categorizing the relatively detached nature of those courses as "a priori admiration".
I guess I could also respond by simply asking for specific examples of "a priori admiration" that the OP has seen in college courses recently. I doubt I will get any, but am open to changing my mind if I do.
Your first post had none of the things you are talking about in your 2nd post... It simply said "that's bullshit" and suggested that what changed is the openness of western culture to criticism.
Your second post (one I am replying to) is more reasonable but if this is somehow what you originally meant that's not what came out..
I would probably say blunt, but I think you got the general tone correct.
> Your second post (one I am replying to) is more reasonable but if this is somehow what you originally meant that's not what came out..
Well, the original post had no proof and was making wild statements. It's fair game to meet it with a blunt assessment.
Do you spend time arguing with the wild-eyed guy on the street who is holding a sign that secret agencies are spying on you? Probably not. On the other hand, see that in a national paper with some references and statistics, and hey, you're actually sitting up and taking notice.
Your first comment was much more on the wild-eyed guy side of the scale, hence the (probably overly so, sorry!) blunt engagement.
Emotional temper tantrum - check.
Whataboutism referring to other cultures - check.
> Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better
Unchecked assumption that “new” = “better” - check.
Definitely the product of modern academia lacking any critical thinking skills with a knee jerk reaction to any criticism.
"Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis."
...that makes rather extreme ad-hoc statements about modern academia without citing even a shred of their own or someone else's experience is chock-full of critical thinking skills and a great way to conduct debate?
Definitely the product of an education via Internet Corner Bubble Forum where you can randomly make up controversial statements that get upvoted by like-minded people and expect to not be called out on them.
Read the replies. There was a debate. You just weren’t a part of it because you just had a shit fit and didn’t contribute.
If we are going to be collegiate, let's critically examine our own posts. What is that based on? It doesn't match what I know.
> When Professor Stuart Reges challenged the University of Washington’s position on land acknowledgements, administrators punished him, undermining his academic freedom
But don't worry, you don't have to go so far as critically teaching about all the aspects of different cultures to risk being accused as a racist on college campuses. I also remember the racist rock from a couple years ago[1]:
> The University of Wisconsin removed a 42-ton boulder from its Madison campus Friday after complaints from students of color who called the rock a symbol of racism.
[0]: https://www.thefire.org/news/lawsuit-professor-sues-universi...
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/us/chamberlin-rock-removed-un...
Given this background, I think it is a mark of academic freedom that literally all the university did was offer a separate course section for people who wanted it. I fail to see how he is being retaliated against in any way -- if the university is offering an alternative to his course for people who want to exercise their academic freedom, why is he against that?
Sounds like it should be useful to promote free thought -- you can either take the course where the whackjob professor argues against acknowledging Native American tribes in a computer science course, or you can take the course that, you know, focuses on computer science. And hey, maybe the whackjob professor is a good enough teacher that his content outweighs the land theory nonsense, and people actually take his course? I certainly know a lot of good professors I learned from at college were eccentric.
I admit the second one is far-fetched and weird; but almost entirely removed from academia. Sounds to me like a bunch of administrators making work to justify their own inflated salaries.
----------------------------------------
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/why-dont...
* The Fire appears to be an advocacy organization for one side o that debate, not a credible source of news.
* What is wrong with removing the rock? What do you know about it? I read a couple articles, including the CNN article, and nobody seems to dispute its racist symbolism. The campus administration supported its removal and the students who raised the issue. What do you know better? And who was censored or otherwise harmed by its removal?
As is common IME for these sorts of claims, smoke machines but rarely a fire.
It's amazing that now we're getting hit from both directions in this regard. The left would like minorities treated with kid gloves, and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical of white people or positive about minorities.
I don't know how we got to this place, but damn, it sucks. The 90s seem so quaint by comparison. I'm already looking back and thinking that 80s/90s were a really special era. After a bunch of crazy shit, and before the next wave. Not perfect, there were some incidents, but it just pales in comparison to what happens every year now.
By the end of the 80s, the canon wars had been fought and lost, so any topic was fair game for study. In loco parentis had been gone for a while. Ethnic boundaries were all but gone, and class boundaries were disappearing as well as more people went to college.
By the time the 90s rolled around university life seemed to be the free-wheeling intellectual pursuit with a healthy dose of libertinism that I considered the college experience. I grew up in that era, so maybe I am just a product of it. But there seems to be something pure in that model of university life.
In later years after the 90s, taboo subjects became more common, in loco parentis returned under the guise of limiting legal liability, tuition costs made class differences more stark, and most sadly of all I think we've lost a bit of the universality of the human experience thing, and focus too much on identity and how that divides people.
I suspect that is the driver behind a lot of the points you make - it isn't possible for universities to maintain a little culture of intellectual curiosity off on the side when double-digit percentages of the population are moving through them.
Contention creates a magnet for nonelastic investment in things monetary as well as social will. A surveillance economony that creates opportunity like today's commercialized internet would have been a wet dream for Sylvester McMonkey McBean.
And denying the primacy of objective truth (as best we know it, subject to intellectual inquiry and criticism) over subjective experience.
Did you mean "political cudgel"?
I agree people in power always have a collection of "facts" they pull out to "prove" things. Public arbiters of conversation (op-ed columnists, bloggers, etc.) ought to call those into question as a matter of routine.
We're in the midst of epistemological de/re-territorialization between objective and subjective and frankly, when I hear or read people frame their opinions as fact/truth/reality/nature/science I instantly shutoff and encourage others to do the same. Specifically, I'm an anti-reificationist and if I catch a wiff of people reifying their symbolic universe, they instantly lose my respect.
I found it! We are both absolutely rigid when it comes to reificationism. We happened to move to different sides of the political spectrum is all. It’s fascinating to me. I was a normal person not knowing politics 1.5 years ago. I got radicalized mostly in 2022 to the left.
Thanks for teaching me that word and amazingly I not only whole heartedly agree with everything you’re saying. I’m interested in your insights. Sorry if I behaved rudely to you in other comments. Im autistic and I forget to be an empathic person sometimes.
This lie that you are telling to justify banning transgender people is going to get the love of my life killed, if you're not careful.
I repudiate the narrative that supporting diversity of gender expression is sexualizing children, and will do everything I can to see you and your people lose in the court and at the ballot box.
Do you think there is absolutely no "tribalism" right now, in the public debate?
I don’t think this really true. It’s the sort of thing you’ll read on Reddit comment threads and breathless NPR article titles but when you actually dig into the story it ends up being a boring story about, sticking to facts and not some alt-history histrionics.
It is amazing how many people here are accepting with and agreeing with this statement with no citations at all.
No links to syllabuses of syncophant-led culturally-censored classes.
No links to anything about old courses getting cancelled or changed.
Just a "everybody knows" claim that is either believed or not depending on previous biases.
I think people wax poetically about their own experiences without really considering the experiences of others. We've had free public libraries for centuries now. We've had a pretty open Internet for decades. There is literally nothing stopping a 20 year old human who lives in Western society from growing their intellectual soul through learning.
For a lot of young kids, school is more like a prison than an intellectual garden. Yet a certain kind of thinking keeps these institutions mandated with the good intention of growing souls.
My own opinion is that the current means is utterly failing at generating the desired ends. As the antiquated expression goes: You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
That can be really useful, especially when professors have enough free time to spend with individual students.
It can also be really detrimental: every person has a unique education history that determines what order and perspectives are most optimal to their learning.
The problem I see is that university is structure. The entire design is intended to be predetermined and inflexible. Edge cases are handled by bringing a student "back on track", assuming that track to be the best learning approach for every student.
Most of the substance of "liberal arts" is exactly what a person needs to learn to progress out of this system. The irony of a successful university experience is that the more successful it is at teaching you, the sooner you can walk away and continue learning on your own.
Also just touching on "these things exist", converting unknown unknowns into known unknowns. That's the single biggest thing I got from my degree (having already been programming for years before), that nowadays I'm occasionally reminded of in a relevant context and can now dig deeper into.
Not even a century and a half, really. The first Carnegie library was opened in 1883, for example.
According to that link: The Darby Free Library in Darby, Pennsylvania, is “America’s oldest public library, in continuous service since 1743.”
But really, without going too off topic, why would you even bother to try to correct a statement that is used for effect? Are you trying to suggest that 150 years vs "centuries" is a relevant distinction for a point made about college-aged knowledge seekers? Are you interested in showing you have the trivial fact on hand for when the first Carnegie library was formed?
I'm open to being corrected but sometimes I just have to shake my head. Not only was your attempt to correct irrelevant, it is factually off base.
So, no, not pedantry - just asking that you genuinely consider the experiences of others before waxing poetic about some irrelevant historicism. Perhaps unguided education is today not as accessible for everyone as it was for you, for many reasons.
That is fair, I am too liberal with my hyperbole and so I'll try to be a bit more clear. It seems unlikely to me that an individual that has access to a guided university education does not also have access to freely available educational resources either online or in public libraries. That is, I do not believe that a youth today that desires to "grow an intellectual soul" has the single recourse to enroll in the structured environments of universities.
I have no idea how you clarifying or arguing over the precise duration of the availability of public libraries contributes to that discussion.
There is literally nothing stopping a 20 year old human who lives in Western society from growing their intellectual soul through learning.
Is wildly different than:
I do not believe that a youth today that desires to "grow an intellectual soul" has the single recourse to enroll in the structured environments of universities.
> I have no idea how you clarifying or arguing over the precise duration of the availability of public libraries contributes to that discussion.
Sure, when you totally change what you're saying, it's not relevant anymore.
Except for humans in general being utterly shite at pursuing learning without guidance or an immediate goal, both in regards to the learning effectiveness (i.e. how much you learn per amount of time or effort), and having the discipline to keep the grind
Most people are not, in fact, capable of just going to a library (or using the internet) every day and deeply learning a subject. They need an external force to actually keep grinding, even if they do want to do it by themselves
It's called their own lack of understanding. Take virtually any topic about anything and do a search for it on the internet. If it's even remotely controversial, there will be thousands of pages screaming at each other in opposition to each other. Meanwhile, the academics who are doing actual research are sitting over there in the quiet corner, making an attempt to cut through the bullshit.
It definitely gets easier to cut through the bullshit on your own once you've been around the block a few times, but that's as an actual adult with an actual education, not a child who doesn't know much about anything or a man-child who can be convinced to believe the truthiness of a topic.
The internet is a problem because actual knowledge is often boring. There's no controversy in many fields amongst scholars because they've either exhausted the research on a topic or there's so much data supporting the general consensus that it's not likely to budge. People don't get excited about knowing the things that everyone should know. They get excited about knowing the hot, new thing regardless of whether it's even verifiable or valid.
I think this is one of the more valuable components of attending university - in part just because it exposes one to more people, from more diverse backgrounds. It encourages you to see the world from more than one perspective, and to (I hope) be able to understand and be more compassionate about others.
There is a segment of people (in the US at least) that don't want kids to go to college for exactly this reason - they don't want their kids, or other young people to be exposed to or trained in critical thinking and broad perspectives.
Few universities teach how to think. Most teach what to think. Critical thinking, reasoning through ideas and concepts, and research are often lacking.
> I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do
I don't buy that. You can't by a psychiatrist. You can't be a medical doctor or nutritionist. There are a lot of useful things in this word, that we collectively need, you can't do with those.
But, I do think teaching philosophy would be useful. That involves learning how to think things through which isn't, for the most part, taught.
> If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good.
There is an error in reasoning right here. The implication from the context is that you need to go to a college or university to be more educated. That's not true. It's also a complex question to ask, what level of education on what does who need?
You can self-educate but very, very few have the capacity to get anywhere near what you’d get from a dedicated professional walking you through a curriculum in a context where you’re dedicating 4 years to the endeavor.
Of course not everyone “needs” to be more educated to have a functional life, but society is much better off when more of the public is educated. You can look around the world at the varying results of that, and it’s consequences.
To what extent of educated? What do you mean by educated? A lot of what the general public gets isn't deep thought. It's being told what to think. A lot of the what to think is ideas based on assumptions and beliefs. Are people better off for learning them?
For those who want to think deeply, are modern colleges a place that allow for that? I know PhDs who no longer teach because there is a lack of intellectualism and too much indoctrination.
A dedicated professor telling me what to think (their ideas) rather than teaching me how to think and navigate the space well... for general things... may not be so useful to society.
Yes because what it would be replaced with is even worse and likely instantly falls apart under a modicum of critical thinking.
People wouldn't learn anything if they had to deeply understand and verify every part by themselves before moving on
Great I guess if you're happy with most of society never moving too far past what's covered in the first stretch of middle school
Perhaps if you subscribe to the "chinese master" mentality. I never had much regard for this.
> For mysterious reasons we only care about not being indoctrination when it comes to adults or almost adults
Uh. I sure gave a damn for all of my memorable life --- literally since at least 4 years of age. I don't know about you.
> People wouldn't learn anything if they had to deeply understand and verify every part by themselves before moving on
This is true to some extent of everyone, but I always tried to think for myself as much as possible. Actually, it earned me a lot of scorn and ire, for not just following the herd...
> Great I guess if you're happy with most of society never moving too far past what's covered in the first stretch of middle school
If by middle school you mean social pressure to conform... well, I'd say we want the opposite of that.
If you mean that without indoctrination, people won't move past middle school in terms of knowledge... well, I would argue that most people don't seem to retain most of what they learned in middle school and high school to begin with... hell, that's basically the first half of college right there, just re-hashing those same topics...
You could easily argue that education involves learning to construct solid arguments that do not fall apart.
> > A lot of what the general public gets isn't deep thought. It's being told what to think. A lot of the what to think is ideas based on assumptions and beliefs. Are people better off for learning them?
The issue is that azinman2 says this is fine (due to a claimed worse alternative). This is not critical thought at all. "Being told what to think", "based on assumptions and beliefs", is simply indoctrination. I cannot and will not support such.
At face value, this is obvious nonsense; if the entire populous was naught but simpletons, who would even introduce new concepts to them?
> challenged and evolved by critical thought
This is literally the opposite of what you are advocating for by "being told what to think". Or is it only the elite and privilege few that are allowed to think for themselves (presumably after having been groomed to produce very specific thoughts to begin with)?
Additionally, as noted by Max Planck:
> The German physicist Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. Or more precisely: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Science basically evolves because the the people carrying the old school of thought literally die out, leaving the ideas that are more popular with the new generation. This could lead to genuine advancement, but the obvious flipside is that you could "advance" in an untrue direction. It's not just science that is like this, you see it for example in IT as well.
My entire point is that by telling people what to think, you create this
> simpletons
..whereby in teaching them how to think, you create this
> critical thought
They are more or less mutually exclusive.
If you're not there to network and find a job, you're the odd one out. This idea of treating these institutions as places for continual higher learning is just not the norm.
It's an interesting predicament, more education for everyone is better, yet our designation of colleges/universities as the "last" required tier has stunted many people in many ways.
That might depend on what you define as 'proper'. These environments are typically tailored toward a certain median individual and if you don't fit that median (above or below), you aren't going to have a good time. In my own experience, I can generally self-educate far better than what I've found in any traditional educational environment available* to me. I just can't deal with the snail's pace of concept introduction, the shallowness of concept exploration, etc. Everything moves so slow and I just tune it out.
* What I've seen of MIT's open courseware appeared interesting and well-paced to me, but that's not a route that was ever available to me.
Disagree. I think it's the complete opposite. Higher education is way to structured and inflexible.
Sounds nice. What I've actually seen is dedicated professionals walking entire classes en masse through curriculum --- a very different situation.
Is this compensation? Is this satisfaction with what you do? Is this ability to pay your bills and save enough? How much does one need (what's enough)?
This is all complicated and we tend to focus on compensation. That's why so many people stay in jobs for the pay while they hate the work.
There are lots of good quality jobs out there if you expand your definition beyond "highest compensation". I know people who switched and were much happier in trades. They felt far more satisfied, could daily see their accomplishment, and meet their bills (and then some).
Where did you get your view on good quality careers from?
In the context of this thread it is (almost) all about compensation. "Good quality" is in the sense that one can earn enough to "meet their bills (and then some)" and also weather a major event (such as a medical event). Satisfaction may or may not apply.
Have you even seen a college classroom in the last decade? The STEM classes absolutely have dedicated learners, but most of the people in those other classes can barely write their name on the corner of the page and the classes are designed to cater to their abilities because if they flunk out, they don’t pay next years tuition.
There is no guarantee that attending a college or university will help you develop more than you would outside that setting. There is, however, a guaranteed cost; and that cost can be debilitating.
Not everyone is capable of getting it in either scenario - as such as I said I’m glad more vocational opportunities are becoming in vogue again. Let’s just hope these vocations last another 20-30 years.
Two things - that guaranteed cost CAN be debilitating. It also might not be. There are plenty of cheaper options available for higher education. And, in general, people with higher education make more money overall.
many (most) Colleges is more of a social guild than it is an educational ventures
Keep in mind college is 4 years of education on a daily basis.
Is it? Really??? For all degrees and all programs..
that is the claim... but I just do not see that manifest in reality.
Seem you have a very inflated view of the programs... just how much debt are you attempting to justify?
How do you not see that manifest in reality? What school doesn’t have classes 5 days a week that people are taking, or otherwise expected to be somehow participating in an activity related to education? Sounds like a school that should lose its accreditation.
I know more than a few students attending top rated public universities.
According to one survey conducted by the National Survey of Student Engagement, most college students spend an average of 10–13 hours/week studying, or less than 2 hours/day and less than half of what is expected. Only about 11% of students spend more than 25 hours/week on schoolwork. [1]
a "Full time" course load is 15 credit hours, which is about 5 classes.. a student taking five 3-credit classes spends 15 hours each week in class..
In the past I have run college level internship programs, both for credit, and critically for this discussion not for credit (meaning no affiliation with the schools). I have had no problems scheduling students work around their course schedule, for which they normally have 2 or 3 open days for work.
[1] https://www.collegiateparent.com/academics/student-study-tim...
That school definitely is not in danger of losing its accreditation any time soon. It also didn't have any frats/sororities, and there weren't any bars within a 15 minute drive.
I agree with them and I had 0 debt. Making higher education free was one of the few things I think the government back home actually didn't drop the ball on
Apparently it's done wonders for a bunch of industries
There are also aspects and some intuitions in the US worth it. But they are few and far between, and becoming more rare as the institutions in the US move away from actual education, and more towards political based goals
That said, college students are adults and can be exposed to different viewpoints without worry. IMO students are influenced politically vastly more by fellow students than professors.
For some, but for most, I bet it is a lot less. There are entire degrees (and schools) designed to require little more than for people to show up somewhere a few times per week.
I had multiple semesters while attending a California State University campus where my classes stacked up on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and depending on lab schedules I'd wind up having Tuesdays and/or Thursdays "off", usually taken up by part-time work or projects. Most of my classmates in the ECE department spent their spare days in a similar fashion.
So, no, I was not attending class on a "daily basis". And personally, I've learned far more from professional development, personal projects and self-teaching than I ever did in the coursework for my engineering degree.
For schools, any smaller private school charging $70k per year that is not in the top 10 or 20 probably fits the bill. They have a license to give rich foreigners a way to buy into the US, and I doubt rigorous education is their priority.
"A recent study showed that college students spend between 8 to 10 hours a day using a cell phone. Every day."
I agree with the parent comment. You have conflated college with education.
I am skeptical of this claim. In my experience, it just enshrines a different set of beliefs into students rather than new paradigms of critical thinking.
"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" - Good will Hunting
> It also builds professional networks.
Wait so is college about making money or about growing the soul, because you just said it was about growing the soul but now it's about hobnobbing with people's whose only qualification was the ability to pay money to go to college sounds shallow.
> If a person is smart enough to receive it, more education is almost always good.
If colleges were still about educating I might agree with you but we are a long way from colleges being about educating people. At this points it's simply a social signal.
> Wait so is college about making money or about growing the soul, because you just said it was about growing the soul but now it's about hobnobbing with people's whose only qualification was the ability to pay money to go to college sounds shallow.
There can be multiple benefits simultaneously at different levels.
If whatever college you’re attending is only creating a social signal and not meaningfully educating, then that school lose its accreditation.
And this can't be the case, at least not in the sense that colleges can offer education at the caliber they once were when only educating 25-30% of the population 70+ years ago. Academic ability, like most other traits, exists on something close to a normal distribution. Not to mention the failings of the secondary education system feeding into it.
That's the "finishing school for the elite" function. If you have to ask if you can afford that, you cannot.
Are you speaking narrowly of credential-granting schools or do you actually mean education here?
oh are we talking about youtube? i love youtube
This is a thing that happens to folks who attend school, but I don't think it is the school that causes this to happen. I think this effect is bound to happen to any young person who moves away from their home to live independently for the first time with a thousand other folks who are doing the same thing.
Just moving to a large city and working when you are young is enough to "grow the intellectual soul". Taking out loans and paying for lessons I don't think is a critical part of that development.
> Just moving to a large city and working when you are young is enough to "grow the intellectual soul". Taking out loans and paying for lessons I don't think is a critical part of that development.
Eh. Plenty of people migrate. That doesn't make them educated, necessarily.
Maybe, at one time they did, and maybe some schools still do, but it doesn't seem like most modern colleges are really doing this very well.
maybe only a byproduct, it's more of a means to an end system. people are at the universities they are in because going to college still means something to the job market as opposed to learning everything else where. The people who really grow there 'intellectual souls' are those who would grow it regardless of environment/circumstance.
while I do believe it is a great thing for people to desire to advance themselves intellectually I don't believe it should cost as much as it does. It's ridiculous.
> If a person is smart enough to receive it + many aren’t smart enough for it
the benefits of becoming educated in its most fundamental sense don't vary with intellectual ability.
the way educational institutions are currently structured is one of many ways of educating people, so the question becomes whether that way of educating is optimal for an individual.
---- (opinion)
universities should be purely for the pursuit of knowledge and shouldn't be there to provide relevancy to the job market. That should be the job of systems specializing in providing pathways to certain job market sectors.
currently universities conflate the two which has lead to most of the problems they have been ascribed with today
Yes, but we also need to be cognizant of the opportunity costs: 4 years of gainful, productive employment minus educational debt.
I don’t think university has a monopoly on education any longer. But they still maintain one on accreditation. As a society we need to take a hard look at what credentials certain degrees really need.
It doesn’t uniquely do this. You don’t need college to have intellectual conversations or be exposed to new ideas.
As a (not so) recent grad from a top public university in the US - for STEM fields, absolutely. But from my exposure to the humanities and liberal arts side of the campus, be it gen ed classes or just day-to-day interactions with those students, it was far more like a brainwashing factory designed to churn out professional activists. Those classes were far more about rote memorization and regurgitation of the professor's political opinions than any sort of critical thinking; diverge from that "Overton window" and your grades will suffer.
This is a thing that people say, but I've never seen it happen. To the extent that people are exposed to depth of thought or new ideas, the people interested would have found those things faster, cheaper, and more frequently if they avoided the rat race parts of university programs.
It's similar to the thought that university degrees help people economically, but that is rarely the case. We've spent many human generations trying to figure out how to move the needle and it's mostly IQ + big 5 personality + luck. The people that COULD have gotten into Harvard but chose to go elsewhere wind up with the same outcomes as the people who DO go to Harvard.
There is a lot of nonsense credentialing in America. My most rewarding liberal arts classes in college were electives. Scratch that: the only liberal arts classes I took that had merit were electives. The reading lists were fun. But the discussion, assignments and evaluation stupid to the point that I spent years thinking up clever quips to the absurdity of it all.
It’s honestly cringe when people talk about colleges as if they have some sort of monopoly on thinking. If you want to be intellect stimulated, then do intellectually stimulating things, like reading lots of books. Will Hunting was basically correct about library cards (though it’s not like you really even need libraries any more).
Does anyone have any recommended resources for learning about philosophy? I’ve read some Aristotle and Plato but I think I’d benefit from something more structured.
If the degree nominally takes 4 years to complete, you have enough time to learn approximately 8 things. Use one slot for a subject, and most universities will give you an introduction to the topics covered by the subject. Use another, and then you may start understanding the arguments and issues in one subfield.
This presupposes that college provides a good enough education. Arguably, the more you pay for school, the better the quality of education. A community college CS education is probably not as good as getting your CS degree at MIT.
I made the mistake of going to a college for my first two years with only two CS professors. I'd taken all of the first professor's classes, and the second professor grilled us on binary => decimal, no calculator allowed, on each of her finals (even for Cyber Security and Java!). Not every education is worth the ink the diploma is printed with.
> Of course money is a factor,
Money is THE factor. The cheapest educations that aren't useless are still too expensive for most Americans to afford. Almost nobody can pay for college up front, and the financing is extremely predatory. That's literally the crisis.
No matter how good "learning to think" is, college simply isn't the right place to do it for millions of people. It ruins futures, and knowing how to think doesn't dig you out of crippling debt that only gets discharged if you die.
The problem is, of course, the expense. Unless you have an independent source of income (a family-taught trade, or inherited wealth), you end up with all this more advanced knowledge at a position where you have little opportunity to apply it, and a crippling debt.
To my mind, the right way to proceed is not to eliminate this kind of study, but to transform it so that it does not cost an arm and a leg. Which, I think, is completely doable.
Is there any evidence of this?
Eh, you can get all that without college. And you can go to college without getting any of that.
You know what else builds professional networks? Working and interacting with the real world.
Of course money is a factor, and schools have gotten insanely expensive. I’m glad to hear that more people are finding alternative routes - it shouldn’t be that everyone needs college because quite frankly many career paths don’t require it and many aren’t smart enough for it (and thus the debt will be crushing).
But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. I wish there was a bigger focus in physics, math, and philosophy for those who didn’t know what to do - learn one of those and you can do just about anything.