Dumbing Down University

[Apech]

Made me laugh ...

 

 

... think about people who say things you don't like on DaoBums and apply ...

[Kar3n]

oh snap! this guy does not discriminate, he's taking shots at 'em all 

[Karl]

 

 

And if you want to know exactly what, where, when, how and why ? We have come to this.

[Karl]

Please, please, won't somebody think of the dumb ?

 

[shanlung]

Made me laugh ...

 

 

... think about people who say things you don't like on DaoBums and apply ...

 

Ha ha ha ha!

 

ROFFLMFAO!

 

He didn't talk directly about books burning did he?

 

 

Idiotic Taoist all ready to step in where angels fear to tread and kumbayahing going on in maximum volume in orgy of wankfest

[redcairo]

John Taylor Gatto has a book online called the secret history of education in america that is really interesting -- it was free when I read it. The first eight chapters get you to the point of total paranoia -- it's a bigger picture than anything today. I found it interesting because in every chapter I felt like, what the heck does this have to do with the topic, and then by the end of the chapter I felt like WOW... I didn't know. 

 

It's not a pretty picture.

 

I work in the edu publishing industry. Talk about everything politically correct. Nutrition has not only been killing the west since the late 70s and that Bright Idea of the government, but it will continue doing so for a century at this rate because the stuff that was actually BS in 1981 is still in textbooks teaching the people who will be doctors, nurses, and nutritionists (what the stupid people in high school do for careers: nutrition and HR) in another 5 or even 10 years.

 

Some topics don't have a lot of room for either PC or idiocy though. Chemistry is still pretty difficult up close. 

[Brian]

Made me laugh ...

 

 

... think about people who say things you don't like on DaoBums and apply ...

The truth he speaks makes it a bit hard to laugh but it does make me glad I stuck it out for that dual-major in puppetry & basket-weaving.

 

My question would be did we import this cultural inanity from you or did you import it from us?

[Apech]

The truth he speaks makes it a bit hard to laugh but it does make me glad I stuck it out for that dual-major in puppetry & basket-weaving.

 

My question would be did we import this cultural inanity from you or did you import it from us?

 

Good question.  I don't know the respective timelines but the weakening of education has been going on for years here.  I'll give you two examples.  My dad who is a maths professor said that maybe ten or fifteen years ago they noticed that the new intake needed special lectures in the first year just to get them up to speed so they could start their degree course.  This was at Imperial College London which was/is quite a prestigious university here.

 

About six years ago I was learning some Tai Chi at a University near where I lived and some of class were physics students.  I told them I had a physics degree from the 1970's and they said oh you probably did proper physics - because they now leave the math out because it is too difficult.  Physics without math!  Purely descriptive ... jesus I ask you ... he was doing a PhD by the way!!!!!

 

Anyway as you know I'm somewhat left leaning liberal type but the list of policy areas where I am becoming entrenched in traditionalist values is growing:

 

- Education

- Law and order

- Foreign policy

 

... I'm sure it'll get longer as I descend into old age ... but hey ... 

 

So I guess we led the way on the dumbing down somewhat - but now I think you have taken the lead with the gender studies bollocks.

Edited January 28, 2016 by Apech

[liminal_luke]

It pains me to exit my intellectually fuzzy safe-space of liberal matyrdom long enough to take issue with you hard-headed engineering types, but somebodies got to stick up for gender studies. Gender studies is simply the study of men and women, how we´re different or not so different, and what various cultures make of that difference. Judging from the popularity of past gender related threads, that´s a subject that lots of folks around here -- of all different political stripes -- take an interest in.

Edited January 28, 2016 by liminal_luke

[Apech]

It pains me to exit my intellectually fuzzy safe-space of liberal matyrdom long enough to take issue with you hard-headed engineering types, but somebodies got to stick up for gender studies. Gender studies is simply the study of men and women, how we´re different or not so different, and what various cultures make of that difference. Judging from the popularity of past gender related threads, that´s a subject that lots of folks around here -- of all different political stripes -- take an interest in.

 

 

Sure. You're right.  But I just love listening to that grumpy old fart going on about this stuff.  The only thing I really agree with is we should preserve free speech and listen to people with opposing ideas and not ban them.

[Brian]

It pains me to exit my intellectually fuzzy safe-space of liberal matyrdom long enough to take issue with you hard-headed engineering types, but somebodies got to stick up for gender studies. Gender studies is simply the study of men and women, how we´re different or not so different, and what various cultures make of that difference. Judging from the popularity of past gender related threads, that´s a subject that lots of folks around here -- of all different political stripes -- take an interest in.

In principle, that's what "Gender Studies" is supposed to teach, yes. Unfortunately, this is one of those situations in which reality is markedly different.

 

Tomorrow, I will take a few minutes (when I'm not using a smartphone) to tell you about my first encounter with someone in one of these programs.

[Karl]

It pains me to exit my intellectually fuzzy safe-space of liberal matyrdom long enough to take issue with you hard-headed engineering types, but somebodies got to stick up for gender studies. Gender studies is simply the study of men and women, how we´re different or not so different, and what various cultures make of that difference. Judging from the popularity of past gender related threads, that´s a subject that lots of folks around here -- of all different political stripes -- take an interest in.

 

I'm sure its very interesting, but you don't need a university to go and study a subject like that. The tough subjects such as engineering, law and medical need a great deal of input from lecturers and graft from students. They are skills which have immediate value in the commercial world.

 

I think what is worse, is that school children are encouraged to get one of these paper degrees in the belief that they will be jobs for them in the real world. The kids apply for loans-in the UK the average course is between £27K and £40k. This money will never likely be paid back, the tax payer will pick up the tab, the student will end up in a dead end job if they are lucky.

 

The way to do this as I've said several times, is to get the state out of education-particularly higher education. They have created horrendous moral hazard and a virtual cartel amongst universities. The state loan should be abandoned and the form and function of a university allowed to change. Perhaps the loan is only available for the tough subjects and entrance qualifications toughened up. Let students pay for their own higher education with special grants for for talented pupils from poorer backgrounds. We need greater competition to drive down costs and modernise the current higher education system.

 

I have a friend who works for the estates department of a local university-the money they spend on buildings, sports/leisure facilities is unbelievable in a time of austerity. The idea appears to be to create a kind of health spar, entertainment, leisure facility where a bit of teaching gets carried out. It's more like a Disney land theme park where the driver is inclusivity and fun. It's not just the tax payer that's getting fleeced, it's the kids students and their parents. They waste 3 to 4 years of vital earning/experience time to leave with a worthless bit of paper and a massive debt. My wife is currently studying for her masters-another waste of money as it's something forced on her by the NHS and also paid by the tax payer, she doesn't need the qualification and will be retiring in a few years time. She tells me the tuition is poor. Often, the lecturers turn up late, or sometimes not at all.

 

Subjects such as gender studies could be taken over the Internet. I did an introductory logic course for $11 and have recently taken the history of philosophy and ethics completely free. They even have an online assessment-although at present, the monopoly on test standards prevents private companies from being able to issue a meaningful certificate.

[redcairo]

 

The truth he speaks makes it a bit hard to laugh but it does make me glad I stuck it out for that dual-major in puppetry & basket-weaving.

Once edu became a corporate construct, so it became vastly more difficult to get a job without having a degree, even puppetry (and its tens of thousands of loan debt) became preferable to nothing.

 

My dad who is a maths professor said that maybe ten or fifteen years ago they noticed that the new intake needed special lectures in the first year just to get them up to speed so they could start their degree course.

That's a given here in the US that the hard sciences need first year (sometimes two) edu that will compensate for what they didn't get prior.

 

Physics without math!  Purely descriptive

Oh, I always called that metaphysics. LOL.

 

Statistics is another example of this by the way. But there is kind of a big schism in stats in terms of how people think it should be taught. This rather opened my eyes to something I'd never considered before. For any given topic -- well the ones that aren't merely theoretical anyway -- there is the tools side of it (e.g. the math) and there is the application side of it (the logic). Now, the logic may determine the math approach. But they can still be separate.

 

In the case of stats, if you teach it conceptually, it is like teaching people "How to think" or "how to measure in context." For example, you can ask a question for stats: what do people have for lunch? If you know math, you can hand out a questionnaire and do all kinds of fun math things with the results. But if you know the concept-in-context, you know that the detail of that questionnaire is an entire topic all its own, and where you hand it out, to whom, and when, and more, is also an entire topic all its own, and all the confounding factors and so on are huge issues, and in the end, the math you finally apply is frankly trivial as heck -- and there is software to do the harder parts of it. It's vastly more important for anybody "designing and applying" statistics to understand the concepts and context, than to be a math expert. Math is merely the tools. You don't have to know how to build an electric lathe to be a carpenter.

 

But because our culture did not have tools for math like this until recently, math always had to be the primary edu for stats -- there was no choice -- because someone had to do it, and someone had to decide what was to be done, so that was the statistician.  But mathematicians are not, actually, always the ideal personalities to do all the other critical roles of statistician, much of which, in order to absorb that context, are actually closer to "almost" social skills -- let's just say "awareness" of a lot of subtleties in culture, human interaction, sociology and psychology and so on. So when the rubber hits the road on stats, unless the question is merely in a lab or on rats, I'd rather have someone educated conceptually than someone educated primarily as a mathematician.

 

To me the interesting part of this is that it's cultural progress -- the availability of more tools in an iPhone app than an advanced government scientist could have fit into a giant room in 1950 -- that has even made it possible to shift this focus (from math to context in stats) -- to put tools as "support resources in the background" instead of making the tools the primary study.

 

somebodies got to stick up for gender studies

I think it's an interesting study but should be avocational.

 

Much like studies that are all about how to plan weddings, vacations, etc.: these are trade-school stuff, not university stuff, or should be.

 

Lovely timing: yesterday I got an email from corp HR announcing a women's focus group and then announcing that now that it existed, we could all meet and form groups and projects and -- and I wrote my boss (a man) and said, please tell me this is not required professionally or personally. He said no it wasn't, but he'd heard good things about it and I should try it. I told him I'd been over-exposed to women's groups my whole life and would rather clean the cat box than sit through one more. This was probably an over-share.  (Gods spare me the only thing worse than women running colleges: women running HR.) I adore women, but in group they have that "emergent property" rather like children do, where more than three of them become exponential, not additional.

 

(Yes, I know I am a woman. I wouldn't change it (especially since it supports my carnal appreciation for manly-men. And I'm kind of a hippy.)  It doesn't make me required to think any certain way about any certain thing though!)

 

The only thing I really agree with is we should preserve free speech and listen to people with opposing ideas and not ban them.

If there is a course of study DESPERATELY NEEDED and that should be absolutely first-year required for EVERY degree -- and expected to be modeled throughout the college experience -- it is the ability to respect and hold "civil debate."

 

Seriously the people in colleges starting with professors often behave like 12 year olds. Emotionally disturbed obviously under-parented 12 year olds. When I was in school people would not even have held a conversation with anybody behaving like that and they would be considered too irrational to take seriously. Yet today they are professors, and editors.

[shanlung]

 

 Yet today they are professors, and editors.

 

Concierges too.

Edited January 29, 2016 by shanlung

[haedon]

 

Made me laugh ...

 

 

... think about people who say things you don't like on DaoBums and apply ...

This guy was not just stating his opinion but also stating the fact. The problem is not on professors and students. It was more on the standards implementations of universities boards and trustees.

[Chang]

If anyone had any doubts regarding the dumbing down of education one only has to study the GCSE exam results in the U.K.

 

The improvement in performance by students has increased year by year in a truly staggering manner. This has been put down to improvement in teaching methods and hard work by both students and teachers. Alas this is not the case.

 

It is in no one’s interests to buck this trend. Education has been highly politicised and governments wish to boast of improved results to improve their credibility. It is really something of a farce and the incremental improvements in results have been brought about not only by dumbing down the examinations but by dumbing down education itself. Our young people are now taught to pass examinations whilst the ability to think and reason for themselves is actively discouraged.

 

The video highlights an even more sinister aspect of modern life in the western world.

 

In theory one can think for oneself but when it comes to voicing ones thoughts it is matter of saying acceptable things or being shot down in flames.

[dust]

I read in The Times the other day (yes, The Times.. though I get it mostly for the puzzle section) that young English have among the lowest literacy and numeracy skills in the "developed world". A similar article here. Of course, this doesn't mean that we're all illiterate, but the numbers are a little worrying.

 

"7% of 20 to 34-year-old graduates in England have numeracy skills below level two, while 3.4% have literacy skills below this level. This means that they struggle to estimate how much petrol is left in a tank from looking at the gauge, or have difficulty understanding instructions on an aspirin bottle."

[dust]

On the video... Whilst agreeing with the main thrust of it (the SJW part), I do want to mention:

 

University is not, and has never been, about 'employability'.

 

It is, and has always been, about education for education's sake; about academic freedom, in the interest of learning more about things. One might learn engineering or medicine, but one might -- with equal support -- study ancient Chinese literature, or the history of the role of women in society. It (almost) all contributes to the wider pool of knowledge.

 

What we should be doing is not limiting the range of subjects students can study, or laughing at the idea of 'Gender studies', but limiting the number of people who go to university. A lot of it comes down to Blair's silly idea. The problem is not that some people read 'Gender studies', but that so many do; that so many people go to university in the first place, with the expectation that it is supposed to set them up for a career in something. It is not, necessarily.

[Karl]

On the video... Whilst agreeing with the main thrust of it (the SJW part), I do want to mention:

 

University is not, and has never been, about 'employability'.

 

It is, and has always been, about education for education's sake; about academic freedom, in the interest of learning more about things. One might learn engineering or medicine, but one might -- with equal support -- study ancient Chinese literature, or the history of the role of women in society. It (almost) all contributes to the wider pool of knowledge.

 

What we should be doing is not limiting the range of subjects students can study, or laughing at the idea of 'Gender studies', but limiting the number of people who go to university. A lot of it comes down to Blair's silly idea. The problem is not that some people read 'Gender studies', but that so many do; that so many people go to university in the first place, with the expectation that it is supposed to set them up for a career in something. It is not, necessarily.

 

Absolutely. Education for educations sake. This isn't what we have. The universities themselves are running as businesses and not seats of learning. People are borrowing upwards of 40K and 4 years of their lives to buy a gilt edged lottery ticket which is supposed to give them a leg up in living standards.

 

If the state is taken out of education, then university takes on a very different role. We certainly do need places that can skill people, but that can be done in a myriad of different ways and over a much shorter period in many cases. We need to go back to the days when teaching was a vocation and not a career. Where parents choose schools and pay for them. There is no need for a person to endure 6 plus hours a day, 5 days a week, 300 days a year for 12 years of their life. After all of that there is still a percentage that can't read, write or do basic maths after all of that time, then it's a failure. A child can be taught the 3r s in a few months. No need for computers, sprawling school premises, play fields and uniforms. Most parents are capable of doing this.

[dust]

Most parents are capable of doing this.

 

Not sure about that...

[Karl]

Not sure about that...

Ok 'some' might be a more accurate statement. I didn't learn to read or write at school. My parents read me books and I followed along where they pointed to on the page. It isn't like adults. Children have super powered brains that thrive on novelty and repetition. Where adults must work hard to develop a habit of consistent practice, children are like ducks to water. They will go off and practice over and over without a sign of boredom. The learning itself is enough, so added to the incentive of copying adult skills, it's one big adventurous game.

 

It's bloody amazing that a school can kill that desire in a child. That, instead of it being fun, they discover that the key reason for reading is to be allocated a place in a hierarchy, to be laughed at by their peers if they struggle with a word, or to be given homework which eats into their leisure time. Eventually you can see why many decide that reading is actually a punishment. I have come across many people of my own age and younger who declare themselves proud because they haven't read a book since finishing school.

Edited February 2, 2016 by Karl

[shanlung]

I have come across many people of my own age and younger who declare themselves proud because they haven't read a book since finishing school.

 

I seen the same in my neck of the woods.

 

Even many of those who finished University are so proud that they never read a book outside of what they were assigned to read.  And wondering why I wasted so much of my time reading and reading all kinds of books outside my course of studies.

 

I decided telling them I read Tao Te Ching since I was 13 years old would have been a waste of my time.

[Karl]

I seen the same in my neck of the woods.

 

Even many of those who finished University are so proud that they never read a book outside of what they were assigned to read.  And wondering why I wasted so much of my time reading and reading all kinds of books outside my course of studies.

 

I decided telling them I read Tao Te Ching since I was 13 years old would have been a waste of my time.

 

I was astonished the first time someone told me that they hadn't read a book since leaving school. It's only now that I realise this was the intention of schooling all along, to accept information. I have a friend who 'skims' books. He doesn't read critically, or deeply. Instead, the mass of multi choice testing he endured has turned in into a seeker of phrases that support his current beliefs. He could read a book venerating libertarianism and come away with a series of excerpts which prove to him that socialism is the best option.

 

In many schools and peer groups, those who read are referred to as geeks, swots, girlies. For men it's worse. It appears to be regarded as unmanly, not macho, effeminate and weak. Of course book burning is something every tyranny loves to do.

[shanlung]

In many schools and peer groups, those who read are referred to as geeks, swots, girlies. For men it's worse. It appears to be regarded as unmanly, not macho, effeminate and weak. Of course book burning is something every tyranny loves to do.

 

 

That was one thing none of them would dare to say of me.  Anyone from High School to University will be considered as having won me in arm wrestling if I had to take more than a second to bring their hand down.

 

They seen me  broke off bricks hold upright on palm of hand with reversed punch.  My more stupid days in hard Martial Arts before I was woken up much later by Masters in Taiwan.

[Apech]

More on the same theme - a real eye opener: