I got through college, a very well-regarded engineering program, putting in the bare minimum effort to graduate.
I make a lot of money now, 20 years later. I attribute none of my success to public education or college, I didn’t learn anything besides our education system (in the US) is not what they tell kids it is growing up.
We beat the drum of education because it seems like a nice simple solution to fix a lot of perceived problems. “Oh you mean if we just throw money at this problem it’ll fix it?!”
Baltimore city gets some of the highest per-student federal funding in the country. My daughter is in a public middle school there, living with her mom. I’m in the burbs with my wife and kids.
She told me just yesterday she wants to go to high school in my district because “well it just seems more normal than city schools”
She also thought California was a country up until yesterday. Straight A student.
At some point, probably too late, we’ll realize we did it a wrong. Floating kids through high school, dropping an anvil of debt around their neck for a college degree they won’t use. Met a fellow the other day, he has his masters in social work. Making very, very good money, as a regional manager of a car sales group, I forget the specifics. Said he never used his degree and he is very grateful he has a clear path to pay the debt off.
I don’t know what the fix is, but I’ve seen enough to know what we do now, ain’t it.
Just being upfront with people can break low performance patterns of behavior.
New stuff gets explained in class by the teacher - the details are for self study. This is how it was communicated to me in school, so I would call it part of the "contract".
But giving a homework on a fundamental new subject without explicitely telling that this is what it is about, will rightfully confuse, as the normal mode is different.
And when it happened to me, it always happened because the teacher messed up and got confused themself what they had and have not teached before.
Teaching to self study is a valuable skill in itself that should not be taught by accident, but with a clear pedagogic concept.
As someone who graduated high school, I'd hope my more accomplished peers would know the difference between hypothesis, theory and proof. It is entirely possible, and useful, to test someone's ability to form a cogent hypothesis. If you were faced with a question beyond the scope of the ideas you were taught, and could not rely on any assistance, the only useful thing to know about you is how well you would handle it yourself.
If you would synthesize knowledge out of thin air, that would be a failing grade.
A time limited exam is probably the wrong place for that, though, due to the stress interfering with that kind of thinking. It would be better for a homework assignment.
If ChatGPT didn't exist.
Okay, maybe in class, on paper is the right place for that.
Stress testing the student's academic prowess, if you will.
It's a false dichotomy between the "thinkism" bogeyman (actually reading books and papers and putting work into theoretical design is just bad now? Have they tried building anything in the physical world? Checked in with nuclear physics, ever?) and hands-on experience. Both are important. It should be about balance, not trashing an incredibly valuable set of tools because others exist...
Not everything I did I learned at school, such as navigating codebases with more than a million lines of code. But most things? Yea.
With that said, I am curious how people say that they learned much more through experience, what did you specifically learn?
Some I ended up using more during my career than others, but knowing more definitely reduced my tendency to think "ah, that should be easy".
That's a fair question and I'll do my best to answer this. It'll come in an edit. I think it's fair to say: not all courses were created equal in this regard but I'll do it course by course. I studied a bachelor information science but I tweaked my program so close to computer science that I almost daresay it's computer science (if I had 3 courses different, it was). I studied a bachelor in psychology. A two year master in computer science and a one year master called game studies (officially a specialization of information studies, but in practice it wasn't and it really was game studies as a whole field that we studied).
I'll try to do it in order per study program too.
AI-kaleidoscope: general overview of AI algo's. It's a shame we didn't know how to program or that we knew the usefulness of BFS or DFS but we learned it here. Not a useful course due to scaffolding issues (teach programming first).
Business mathematics: partial derivatives, etc.
Problem solving: useless course (teach programming first).
Privacy and security: we didn't learn much about security. We learned a thing or two about privacy. Should've been a TED talk, not a course.
Graph theory: graph visualization (and when not to do it, helped me out as a data analyst later), mathematical proofs, social networks (helped me to actually network a bit), graph algo's (made leetcode easier), not being scared of math notation. This was a really math heavy course as it was taught by someone that studied math in undergrad and grad and then switched to CS as his PhD (and by the time he taught it he was a full professor). He did not skip on the math which was wild since I was under the impression that I did a "business informatics" bachelor so I didn't need to have advanced math as a high school prerequisite. But I definitely needed that here so this course was hard.
Web technology: this was a bit too early but it was a good overview of web programming at the time. I remember being explained what the DOM was and I remember thinking "wtf is the point?" That was because they explained it way too theoretically and simply should've opened firebug or something to really show it.
Language of Logic and Methods of Reasoning: propositional logic and predicate logic. Practically speaking: after this course if statements are not a problem. This was true for me at least.
Pervasive computing: fun course but could've been a TED talk about how tech is used in interesting ways.
Introduction to programming: basic programming stuff in Java. I learned that Java is a terrible language to start programming in. I recommend JavaScript for app/web-oriented people and Python for "just pick a language" people. Nevertheless, while it was a terrible start, it did teach what it needed to teach which was a basic understanding, and skill, in programming.
Empirical methods: the better name is statistics 1. We learned about statistics and we had to program in R. Since our actual programming ability was quite weak it was a double course. It was the second language ever that I had to take seriously and it taught me a lot of programming stuff and statistics stuff at the same time. It helped that I had friends studying psychology at the time as that degree has a lot of stats in it, so I knew the lingo. Almost everyone else was hopelessly lost.
Programming project: no lectures, just one big programming assignment. After this it was expected that the student could write readable code. I failed this course the first time by a hair. And when I came back to it the second year I realized that I failed because my code was unreadable. So I refactored the whole thing and learned how to write much more readable code. We created the game engine for an Othello game. The graphics library was provided by the TA's. So we also learned to program with a library that was way beyond our heads at the time. And that also implicitly teaches you to trust certain abstractions.
Interactive multimedia project: we learned XIMPEL a hypermedia framework, kind of useless. But through XIMPEL we also learned about storyboarding, creating scenes and general video editing. This teacher was super hands off and allowed students to be creative. So I also learned to create simple PHP websites and learned my way around bash a bit. Then I decided to create an upload script where I used PHP to call the ftp command on bash. I thought it was impossible but it wasn't and had to rethink about what web applications could really do. None of these things were formal course requirements but this teacher encouraged this type of explorations so I do credit it to him that "I learned it in school". It's part of these efforts that he also gave me an amazingly high grade as my XIMPEL story graph was a bit meh but my creativity and extra explorations where a 10 out of 10 effort. So he gave me a 9 out of 10 in total. Also deepened my HTML/CSS knowledge.
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I'll write the rest later in another comment this is about the first year and I studied 9 of them. As you can see, I was just learning the basics here. But there are a few patterns:
* Some teachers allowed us to work on real stuff if the student chose to (e.g. Interactive Multimedia) and that got way more serious later on as I created an iPhone app for a client when the teacher taught Multimedia Authoring in the master.
* Some courses were quite useless or could've been condensed to a TED talk.
* Some courses taught something useful or semi-useful but it's not up to industry standard. But as you'll see, this will lead up to a level where - while not quite industry standard - makes the gap between industry standard and whatever I did small enough to just make the jump easily by simply applying what I thought was common sense.
In France at "prepa" (2 year intensive courses to prepare for exams for big eng uni) I learned the theory behind computer science (for example how to modelize a regex machine with graph / automata / matrices). That was useful theory to me, but that's just a drop in the ocean of uselessness
I failed some, did well on others, felt a bit of unfairness emotions completely understandable for that young mind which just wanted to do the test and move on. But when looking back, they were good questions, testing my actual skills in topic I was studying.
Here's an example, consulting at a large Danish company, every Friday morning all departments in this big building would share breakfast and the bosses would say some things.
So this one morning they explained that in the coming months people should register time in a particular way because of accounting and how it related to a particular government grant and money that needed to be used up by a particular time in order to get to the next step of blah blah blah.
I realized as my eyes glazed over, damn this is just the same reaction people who don't understand browser rendering engines get when I start telling them about different events.
I also noticed other clueless people gamely trying to question these finance nerds on how things worked, and the patient finance nerds explaining some detailed bit and the clueless person clearly out of their depth with that "uuuuhhhh, hope they don't ask me if I understand" look on their face.
Now, if it hadn't been for them explaining this stuff I would have gone around thinking the boss is a complete moron. I once saw him mistake a nail gun for a drill! He doesn't understand how search engines work and why stemming and decompounding might be important, I know because I tried to explain to the idiot one time!! But since he actually talked about his work for a bit I realized he just happens to know stuff I don't.
I'm betting most of the morons you know are maybe not quite so stupid, although probably not as forthcoming as why things need to be done in a certain way to those who work under them.
someone, somewhere, at some point, will think i’m a clueless idiot.
we’re all clueless idiots at the end of the day.