I saw this statement from Governor Wise, who is the head of the Alliance for Education. He is a nice guy who I like, but he is very much in favor of national standards:
Gov Wise: “Zip codes are no way to educate America’s future workforce.”
I found this statement so odd that I wrote to the man who sent it out who responded with:
wouldn’t you agree that current standards in far too many states are too low to prepare students to succeed after high school?
What a weird take on the problem. The standards are absurd and students know that. States differ on how effectively they force kids to attend schools that they hate. And, while we are at it, zip codes are indeed a way to manage education.
How do we find out what there is to be in life? School should tell us but it does not. I have come to realize that this is a serious issue in our society. We teach people literature and mathematics and then throw them out into the world figuring they will know what to do when they get there independent of that fact that knowledge of literature and mathematics is almost certainly not going it be helpful. We also fail to ask what we want of our students.
I realized this in a deep way one day when I went to the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. I was trying to get the legislature to give me money for building an on line school which is part of my larger effort to build many new kinds of curricula for high school students.
I went to the Indian School as part of the kind of politicking one does when one wants a bill to be passed. But once there I had a realization. Telling these people that we could build a technology oriented curriculum was not going to be all that exciting for them. I imagined myself to be an Indian in Santa Fe and I figured that I wouldn’t want my kid on going off to MIT never to return.
Of course, that is exactly what happens in the segment of society I live in. My children were sent to college and were not expected to return. I am not sure where they would have retuned to since I was always moving around myself. But, in hindsight, I am not thrilled that my kids do not live near me and I imagine, if I were an Indian I would be very concerned that they stay around so that my culture does not die.
So I asked them questions about curricula that were meant to get them to think about what their kids could learn that would help their culture survive.
Their answer was: Casino Management. This both surprised me, and then, in retrospect, didn’t surprise me at all. Of course that is what they need their children to learn to be good at doing.
We never got to build that curriculum courtesy of Governor Richardson who simply had lied to me about his forthcoming approval of the bill. But it did make me understand something about what is wrong with the national standards movement (apart from its canonization of the 1892 curriculum.)
People really are different in different places and have different educational needs. In Wichita they have an airplane manufacturing industry and no one to teach students how to work in it. In parts of the country there are hotels in the middle of nowhere that can't find anyone nearby who might know how to manage one.
Education needs to be local at just the time when the country is trying to make it into one size fits all.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
What should I major in?
A column in the Columbia University newspaper caught my eye. A woman was try to explain to her father why she had chosen the major she chose.
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/03/04/i-m-majoring-x-don-t-ask-me-why
She, like most college students, thinks she is making an important life choice here. She is, but she is confused about which choice she is making.
Why do college have majors? If you understand that, then the decision will become clear. All universities in the United States, even those that don’t claim to be, are modeled after the concept of the research university. This means that the professors at the school are primarily interested in research. Not only that, research dominates their lives so much that teaching is very low on their priority list. More importantly, when they teach, they are teaching what are basically research subjects.
So, when a psychology major wants to learn about people’s minds he or she winds up learning how to run experiments and how to do statistics because that is what researchers in psychology do.. When a computer science major wants to learn to become a proficient programmer they wind up learning mathematical theories connected with programming because that is what their professors research.
The major exists as a way of routing students on one track of becoming researchers. There are, of course, a few problems with this model. For one, most students do not want to become researchers. For another, those that do want to pursue PhDs soon realize that they could have majored in most anything and been accepted into a PhD program of their choice if they did well enough in college.
Students major in biology or chemistry because they want to became doctors (a field that actually requires next to none of the biology or chemistry that one learns in college.) They major in economies when they want to became business people because, at schools like Colombia, there is no business major but there are plenty of economists who do research.
In fact the concept of major is meant to move students into advanced courses in a department, namely the research seminars, which are really all the faculty actually want to teach anyhow.
When my son asked me what he should major in (he was also at Columbia) I told him “subways.” I did that because he loved subways. Now of course there is no subway major at Columbia, or anywhere else. I told him to pick and choose courses that related to his main interest and that the major he wound up in would not matter at all to anyone.
And this is my advice to students in all colleges. The major requirement is not there to serve your needs, so serve your own. Pick any courses that interests you as you attempt to determine a plan for your life. It really doesn’t matter. If your college offers real training in areas that lead to jobs and you think you might want one of those jobs, by all means major in that. But most people change their plans in life many times, so the answer to “what should I major in?” is simple enough.
It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. What matter are the choices that you make later. If you pick a major that narrows your choices then you made a bad selection.
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/03/04/i-m-majoring-x-don-t-ask-me-why
She, like most college students, thinks she is making an important life choice here. She is, but she is confused about which choice she is making.
Why do college have majors? If you understand that, then the decision will become clear. All universities in the United States, even those that don’t claim to be, are modeled after the concept of the research university. This means that the professors at the school are primarily interested in research. Not only that, research dominates their lives so much that teaching is very low on their priority list. More importantly, when they teach, they are teaching what are basically research subjects.
So, when a psychology major wants to learn about people’s minds he or she winds up learning how to run experiments and how to do statistics because that is what researchers in psychology do.. When a computer science major wants to learn to become a proficient programmer they wind up learning mathematical theories connected with programming because that is what their professors research.
The major exists as a way of routing students on one track of becoming researchers. There are, of course, a few problems with this model. For one, most students do not want to become researchers. For another, those that do want to pursue PhDs soon realize that they could have majored in most anything and been accepted into a PhD program of their choice if they did well enough in college.
Students major in biology or chemistry because they want to became doctors (a field that actually requires next to none of the biology or chemistry that one learns in college.) They major in economies when they want to became business people because, at schools like Colombia, there is no business major but there are plenty of economists who do research.
In fact the concept of major is meant to move students into advanced courses in a department, namely the research seminars, which are really all the faculty actually want to teach anyhow.
When my son asked me what he should major in (he was also at Columbia) I told him “subways.” I did that because he loved subways. Now of course there is no subway major at Columbia, or anywhere else. I told him to pick and choose courses that related to his main interest and that the major he wound up in would not matter at all to anyone.
And this is my advice to students in all colleges. The major requirement is not there to serve your needs, so serve your own. Pick any courses that interests you as you attempt to determine a plan for your life. It really doesn’t matter. If your college offers real training in areas that lead to jobs and you think you might want one of those jobs, by all means major in that. But most people change their plans in life many times, so the answer to “what should I major in?” is simple enough.
It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. What matter are the choices that you make later. If you pick a major that narrows your choices then you made a bad selection.
Friday, March 12, 2010
National Standards: how crazy is our government?
I have been mulling about writing a scathing commentary on the new idiotic national standards for education that have just been proposed. They are, more or less, the same standards that were rammed down the throats of Americans in 1892 by the President of Harvard. The government just seems to be want to make sure that no innovation or real change ever takes place in education in this century. They think our failed schools can be fixed by firing teachers and by having more tests. The idea that we might want to re-think a seriously broken system doesn't enter their minds.
I was going to say that, but why bother? I have said it many times before.
Instead, I want to point readers to an article recently posted in a congressional on line magazine that was written by my son. He is writing about transportation policy but really it is all the same. A dysfunctional government that can't get its head out of its lower regions.
http://thehill.com/special-reports/transportation-a-infrastructure-march-2010/86313-no-unified-visio-leaves-lawmakers-with-a-grab-what-you-can-approach
And I might add, after you read it: that's my boy!
I was going to say that, but why bother? I have said it many times before.
Instead, I want to point readers to an article recently posted in a congressional on line magazine that was written by my son. He is writing about transportation policy but really it is all the same. A dysfunctional government that can't get its head out of its lower regions.
http://thehill.com/special-reports/transportation-a-infrastructure-march-2010/86313-no-unified-visio-leaves-lawmakers-with-a-grab-what-you-can-approach
And I might add, after you read it: that's my boy!
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
What Really Goes on at College: the humanities are overrated
Here is a part of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that came out today:
“The results of an important new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments make it clear that the humanities remain popular with students and central to the core mission of many institutions . The bad news: The survey found less-than-rosy job prospects for the rising generation of scholars. The good news: the great majority of the humanities departments surveyed—87 percent—said that their discipline was included in the core requirements at their college or university.”
I would find this article hilarious if it weren’t so sad. But it is a very good example of what is wrong with our university system. There are no jobs for English and History majors and no faculty openings for PhDs in those fields, but nevertheless the humanities survive at universities. How do they survive? By making the humanities offer required courses that every student must take.
There is nothing wrong with the humanities in principle. We imagine that people might learn more about life, to be better people, to understand issues that have plagued mankind, and be able to think well what it means to be human. So the humanities must be good stuff right? Here are some courses picked at random from the Yale catalogue:
ENGL 265b, The Victorian Novel
ENGL 158b, Readings in Middle English: Language and Symbolic Power
ENGL 305b, Austen & Brontë in the World
ENGL 336b, The Opera Libretto
HIST 166Ja, Asian American Women and Gender, 1830 to the Present.
HIST 168Ja, Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present.
HIST 201Ja, The Spartan Hegemony, 404-362 B.C.
HIST 202Ja, Numismatics.
I am sure that these are fine courses taught by serious scholars. But that is exactly my point. When people glorify the study of the humanities they fail to mention that these are scholarly subjects of very little use to the average college student. Universities require that students take them because universities don’t want to fire the professors they already have and they need to teach something. But, with a few exceptions, they are not teaching students to think better about life, they are teaching students about a narrow part of the scholarly domain in which they do research.
Here again we have the clash between the research university and what students expect to learn when they go to college.
The Chronicle of Higher Education represents professors and they think its great news that students are being required to take the courses that professors want to teach. I think this is awful news. Students need to learn to live in the real world. There are very few scholarly jobs so there is no practical reason to teach such courses. If these course teach human skills, as we all assume, that would be great, but they don’t.
Scholars need to stop running universities.
As I have said many times I don’t think Yale has to change. We need to produce some scholars after all. But there are 3000 colleges in the United States all copying Yale’s model.
“The results of an important new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments make it clear that the humanities remain popular with students and central to the core mission of many institutions . The bad news: The survey found less-than-rosy job prospects for the rising generation of scholars. The good news: the great majority of the humanities departments surveyed—87 percent—said that their discipline was included in the core requirements at their college or university.”
I would find this article hilarious if it weren’t so sad. But it is a very good example of what is wrong with our university system. There are no jobs for English and History majors and no faculty openings for PhDs in those fields, but nevertheless the humanities survive at universities. How do they survive? By making the humanities offer required courses that every student must take.
There is nothing wrong with the humanities in principle. We imagine that people might learn more about life, to be better people, to understand issues that have plagued mankind, and be able to think well what it means to be human. So the humanities must be good stuff right? Here are some courses picked at random from the Yale catalogue:
ENGL 265b, The Victorian Novel
ENGL 158b, Readings in Middle English: Language and Symbolic Power
ENGL 305b, Austen & Brontë in the World
ENGL 336b, The Opera Libretto
HIST 166Ja, Asian American Women and Gender, 1830 to the Present.
HIST 168Ja, Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present.
HIST 201Ja, The Spartan Hegemony, 404-362 B.C.
HIST 202Ja, Numismatics.
I am sure that these are fine courses taught by serious scholars. But that is exactly my point. When people glorify the study of the humanities they fail to mention that these are scholarly subjects of very little use to the average college student. Universities require that students take them because universities don’t want to fire the professors they already have and they need to teach something. But, with a few exceptions, they are not teaching students to think better about life, they are teaching students about a narrow part of the scholarly domain in which they do research.
Here again we have the clash between the research university and what students expect to learn when they go to college.
The Chronicle of Higher Education represents professors and they think its great news that students are being required to take the courses that professors want to teach. I think this is awful news. Students need to learn to live in the real world. There are very few scholarly jobs so there is no practical reason to teach such courses. If these course teach human skills, as we all assume, that would be great, but they don’t.
Scholars need to stop running universities.
As I have said many times I don’t think Yale has to change. We need to produce some scholars after all. But there are 3000 colleges in the United States all copying Yale’s model.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
How can you tell if it is a school or a prison?
I read a blog (http://essentialemmes.blogspot.com/2010/02/genius-on-education-roger-schank.html) that pointed out that schools and prisons look alike, but there is much more in common between school and prisons than their looks:
1. Students/prisoners (s/p) must stay in the place they have been assigned unless given specific permission by the guards/teachers (g/t)
2. s/p may eat only with permission of g/t
3. s/p may go to the bathroom only with permission of g/t
4. assigned tasks must be completed by s/p
5. questioning the task you have been assigned is not allowed
6. expressing a point of view contrary to the g/t about rules is not allowed
7. the g/t may humiliate an s/p at any time
8. the s/p may intimidate and terrorize other s/p s
9. all recreation is supervised by g/t at specified times
10. reading material is deemed suitable or not by g/t
11. all visitors must be vetted prior to visitation
12. failure to follow the rules will result in punishment
13. failure to behave properly may add extra time onto one’s sentence
14. approval by g/t is determined by extremely arbitrary standards
15. freedom of expression is strictly controlled
16. dress codes are strictly enforced
17. getting the g/t to like you will make your time go more easily
18. resting is not allowed
19. pursuing one’s own interests is not allowed
20. deciding you have better things to do than be in prison or school is definitely not allowed
I realize that not all prisons and school are exactly the same in all this, but you get the idea.
1. Students/prisoners (s/p) must stay in the place they have been assigned unless given specific permission by the guards/teachers (g/t)
2. s/p may eat only with permission of g/t
3. s/p may go to the bathroom only with permission of g/t
4. assigned tasks must be completed by s/p
5. questioning the task you have been assigned is not allowed
6. expressing a point of view contrary to the g/t about rules is not allowed
7. the g/t may humiliate an s/p at any time
8. the s/p may intimidate and terrorize other s/p s
9. all recreation is supervised by g/t at specified times
10. reading material is deemed suitable or not by g/t
11. all visitors must be vetted prior to visitation
12. failure to follow the rules will result in punishment
13. failure to behave properly may add extra time onto one’s sentence
14. approval by g/t is determined by extremely arbitrary standards
15. freedom of expression is strictly controlled
16. dress codes are strictly enforced
17. getting the g/t to like you will make your time go more easily
18. resting is not allowed
19. pursuing one’s own interests is not allowed
20. deciding you have better things to do than be in prison or school is definitely not allowed
I realize that not all prisons and school are exactly the same in all this, but you get the idea.
Monday, February 15, 2010
How the U of Alabama at Huntsville murder story highlights the disaster that is our university system
In my last column I discussed the problems caused by our notion that universities must be populated by researchers who are working on finding out new things and publishing about those things, instead of seriously teaching.
If it takes a murder to make clear what the problem is, then consider the case of Amy Bishop “a Harvard-educated biology professor who felt she had unfairly been denied tenure,” who recently murdered her colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
The Chronicle of Higher Education says that “The dean of the chemistry department, William N. Setzer, described Ms. Bishop as smart but weird. As for why she had been turned down for tenure, Mr. Setzer said he had heard that her publication record was thin and that she hadn't secured enough grants. Also, there were concerns about her personality, he said. In meetings, Mr. Setzer remembered, she would go off on "bizarre" rambles about topics not related to tasks at hand—"left-field kind of stuff," he said.”
I have been on enough tenure committees to know that the real reason she was turned down for tenure was that people thought she was nuts. But that is really unimportant. Why does it matter that a faculty member have a publication record at a university that is very far from being one of the top research universities in the country? Why do students at such a school need to be taught by Harvard PhDs whose specialty is neuroscience when they are studying biology?
Students at schools like this study biology prior to going into a field in the health sciences because they are required to do so. Why does it matter that their teachers have a research track record in a specialty that in no way relates to the needs of the students? Why do we keep pretending that every university in the U.S is a serious research university? When do we start demanding a curriculum and teachers who teach things that students actually will need to know how to do in their future lives? Can’t we just let Harvard and Yale etc train researchers and let the other schools train citizens?
According to the Chronicle: Nick Lawton, the son of Professor called her a competent lecturer who was willing to help students who needed it. But her teaching was "not inspired."
Her teaching is not once mentioned as a possible reasons for her tenure denial because I am sure it was hardly even considered. Who cares if a professor at a teaching institution is any good at teaching? Not the system. What they care about, even at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, is how many grants she had gotten and how many papers she had published.
The system is so stupid it is beyond comprehension.
People all over the country are reading about this situation and I think they need to understand the underlying real issue. Yes there are crazy people who do crazy things. But the system encourages professors to worry about all the wrong things. The idea that all professors must publish and get grants creates awful teachers, and irrelevant courses, and unhappy students, (as well as some really miserable professors.)
If it takes a murder to make clear what the problem is, then consider the case of Amy Bishop “a Harvard-educated biology professor who felt she had unfairly been denied tenure,” who recently murdered her colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
The Chronicle of Higher Education says that “The dean of the chemistry department, William N. Setzer, described Ms. Bishop as smart but weird. As for why she had been turned down for tenure, Mr. Setzer said he had heard that her publication record was thin and that she hadn't secured enough grants. Also, there were concerns about her personality, he said. In meetings, Mr. Setzer remembered, she would go off on "bizarre" rambles about topics not related to tasks at hand—"left-field kind of stuff," he said.”
I have been on enough tenure committees to know that the real reason she was turned down for tenure was that people thought she was nuts. But that is really unimportant. Why does it matter that a faculty member have a publication record at a university that is very far from being one of the top research universities in the country? Why do students at such a school need to be taught by Harvard PhDs whose specialty is neuroscience when they are studying biology?
Students at schools like this study biology prior to going into a field in the health sciences because they are required to do so. Why does it matter that their teachers have a research track record in a specialty that in no way relates to the needs of the students? Why do we keep pretending that every university in the U.S is a serious research university? When do we start demanding a curriculum and teachers who teach things that students actually will need to know how to do in their future lives? Can’t we just let Harvard and Yale etc train researchers and let the other schools train citizens?
According to the Chronicle: Nick Lawton, the son of Professor called her a competent lecturer who was willing to help students who needed it. But her teaching was "not inspired."
Her teaching is not once mentioned as a possible reasons for her tenure denial because I am sure it was hardly even considered. Who cares if a professor at a teaching institution is any good at teaching? Not the system. What they care about, even at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, is how many grants she had gotten and how many papers she had published.
The system is so stupid it is beyond comprehension.
People all over the country are reading about this situation and I think they need to understand the underlying real issue. Yes there are crazy people who do crazy things. But the system encourages professors to worry about all the wrong things. The idea that all professors must publish and get grants creates awful teachers, and irrelevant courses, and unhappy students, (as well as some really miserable professors.)
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
“What’s new here?”: how academic research has ruined our education system
I gave a speech in Barcelona last week. (Actually I gave a lot of speeches in Barcelona last week.) In one that was meant for the general public, at least I thought that that was who was in the audience, I was asked a question about what was new in what I had said. I was speaking about the new experiential MBA program we are developing for La Salle University, in Barcelona, which will be soon available as on an on line web mentored degree program. And, I was talking about the 16 cognitive processes that need to be mastered in order to think and how they are used in our new MBA. A member of the audience, who identified himself as a professor at a local university, asked “what is new here?” The question took me aback. Last I heard, the world was offering classrooms, lectures, tests, and courses as a way of teaching people, not degree programs that were entirely on line project-based learning in a story centered curriculum. I had no idea how to respond. The question was beyond absurd. My colleague, Sebastian Barajas, who had presented before me and speaks the local language, jumped in and answered the question. I was relying upon simultaneous translation and got most of what was said but not all. Whatever he responded however, was not sufficient to quiet this man and he came back again with more or less the same question. I responded without mercy. Needless to say, impolite behavior is not well loved in Europe. No one who knows me has ever thought of me as being especially polite, but my response was over the top, even for me.
A flurry of twitters and blog chatter (in Spanish) later erupted about this, for example see:
http://trabajocolaborativoenred.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/no-todo-el-mundo-quiere-a-roger-shank/
The summary for those who don’t want to subject themselves to the awfulness of “Google translate” is that some people like me and some don’t -- no surprise. But, what I learned from this blog is that the audience was made up of academics, not the general public, as I had thought.
I had wondered about my own overreaction. I attributed it the fact that I was quite ill at the time having eaten something bad the day before. But after reading the blog I realized what the real issue was and felt the need to write this rather long column.
This is what infuriated me. The question he asked is exactly the question that has killed off our schools. Now it is a long road to my point here, so please bear with me.
Jonathan Cole, the former provost of Columbia University, and a man whom I like and admire, has recently written a book about the research universities in the U.S. that was reviewed in the New York Times on Sunday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Goldin-t.html
I haven’t read the book, just the review, but I am hardly surprised by, nor do I disagree with, the idea that the research universities in the U.S. are a great treasure and we should endeavor to take care of them. But, that having been said, it is the fault of the research universities that our education system is so awful. And, it is the question “what’s new here” that is the essence of the problem.
Here is what occurs in research universities. Students write PhD theses that are supposed to be original research in their field of choice. I have supervised over 50 PhD theses myself and have read and advised on many more. I am familiar with the process and understand what is wrong with it. This is it:
Think about how many PhD theses are produced each year around the world. Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many of these can really be original (much less be important)? Original is defined as something no one ever wrote before in an area of research. So there are many PhD theses, particularly in Europe, that are simply examinations of what other people have said over the years together with a point of view. Even in the best science universities, PhD theses are often about minutiae so incomprehensible that no one, not even the graduate student who wrote them, will ever look at them again. There are interesting PhD theses of course, but they are few and far between. The old joke
is that a PhD thesis is a paper written by the supervising professor under very difficult conditions.
Why do I mention this? Because it turns out, that the man who had asked this question has just written a PhD thesis in which he had examined various education theories and his conclusion was that since my work is derivative of Plato and Socrates and Dewey, something I am quite proud of by the way, then it wasn’t presenting any new theory, and therefore was not worthy of serious consideration. This is kind of like asking, in a disdainful way, at an unveiling of the new 787, “what is new in theory of flight” here? Only a newly minted PhD would even think such a thing. Real world applications and innovative changes matter a lot.
But in the academic world, the questions are always about theories, and applications are looked down upon, which is odd because no one asks Google what is new here (the answer is not much since the 1950s) but it sure has changed our lives.
Research universities produce PhD students who do original work. This would be just fine and dandy if there were just a few research universities and teaching was not affected by this process. But, while there are maybe 25 serious research universities in the U.S., there are hundreds that think they are research universities and because of that there is pressure for the faculty to do research and publish research. That pressure and that focus is the cause of the awful education system we have in place today around the world. Let me explain.
I will tell about a friend of mine, named Bill Purves. I met Bill Purves when he came to work as a post-doc at my Artificial Intelligence Lab at Yale. (He was a professor of Biology at the time. He has since retired.) People apply to work in prestigious labs all the time, but it is odd to find a biologist who wants to study AI. I was intrigued so I agreed to host him. He had a PhD from Yale and I thought he might just be feeling nostalgic for his old haunts. He had been a professor at what you might call secondary research universities. There are 3000 colleges in the U.S. and the top few hundred at least are trying very hard to act as if they are Harvard and Yale. They hire professors with PhDs from Harvard and Yale who then teach their students what they learned at those places. To put this another way, while the students who go to a state university expect to learn job skills they are being taught research skills and theories which is all that their research university trained professors actually know.
Bill’s research area had to do with some arcane feature of cucumbers. He had been doing work on cucumbers for over 30 years at that point. He wasn’t coming to visit me to learn more about cucumbers.
Bill had recently moved to a more teaching oriented college and had begun to worry about how people learn. We worked on learning at our lab so he came to learn what we knew. But it was pretty unusual to encounter a professor who did research who was so worried about teaching. Professors at research universities are more typically concerned with teaching their PhD students (via the apprenticeship method) than they are with lecturing to undergraduates. They pay their dues by teaching so that they can do their real job - which is research. This is a very common attitude at the research universities.
I am not criticizing here. That was how I felt as well. My job entailed some teaching but was not really teaching. Professors at research universities think about their real work and teach about their real work. This is fine as long as they are training future researchers. They can criticize their students and each other about whether new research being presented is good work and they can compete for getting their papers published and their presentations at conferences taken seriously. But really, do you think that Bill's students in his biology classes cared about cucumbers?
This is a real problem, Students are taught about what interests the professor but what interests the professor bears little relationship to what students came to college to learn. They might want to be psychological counselors but they will be taught about experimental research methods. They may want to become writers but they will be taught about literary theory. They may want to become doctors but they will have to learn about cucumbers, at least they will if a cucumber specialist is teaching the biology course.
Now Bill was not like this at all. In fact he came to Northwestern when I moved there for a another post-doc year to learn more about what we were doing in building courses on the computer. Eventually he became the lead designer in our high school on line health sciences course. You can see him introducing biology here:
http://vista.engines4ed.org/home/index.htm
But Bill is a rare bird. He fundamentally cares about students. Now I am not saying that professors don’t care about students. I am simply saying they care about their research more. If students attend a research university they should know the truth. But Yale and Harvard don’t really explain the research orientation in a way that would help incoming undergraduates to grasp its significance.
I am not concerned about Ivy league students, however. They get a good education any way you look at it. But if every professor in every major university is playing the same game, then students at, for example, the University of Illinois, ought to know that every one of their professors cares more about research than they do about teaching. Students are not told anything like that. This matters because it means that the “what’s new here?” standard of assessing work will emphasize theory over practice every time. Since colleges hire professors trained by research instructions, every university is dominated by an issue that distracts from good teaching. Students want job skills and professors teach rearach skills.
This is why I was furious at this question. 2000 years ago Petronius asked why Roman schools taught so little of what would be useful in everyday life. Nothing has changed precisely because it is intellectuals and not practitioners who dominate the teaching landscape. Students are forced to learn things they have no interest in, in order to get college degrees.
In then end that is why we built a new MBA program. Even MBA programs emphasize theory over practice! This may sound hard to believe but professors in a business school also tend to have PhDs from Harvard and Yale and may never have actually run a business themselves. This is why I was asked to design a new learn by doing MBA program by La Salle. It is a program designed to upset the status quo. No courses, no theories, simply learning how to do what business people do.
What is new there? If this had already been done we wouldn’t have done it. It is new in the same way as the 787 is new. It is useful and important because it changes the way education works, not because it presents a new theory.
We must fight against the university professors who wish to dominate the discussion of what education should be like. Research professors should be encouraged to do research but do there really need to be so many of them? 25 research universities is a fine number for the U.S. Spain should have maybe one. But if every professor feels obliged to publish more about his work on cucumbers the world loses its best teachers. Bill Purves understands that and he devoted the end of his career to teaching -- not to cucumbers.
A flurry of twitters and blog chatter (in Spanish) later erupted about this, for example see:
http://trabajocolaborativoenred.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/no-todo-el-mundo-quiere-a-roger-shank/
The summary for those who don’t want to subject themselves to the awfulness of “Google translate” is that some people like me and some don’t -- no surprise. But, what I learned from this blog is that the audience was made up of academics, not the general public, as I had thought.
I had wondered about my own overreaction. I attributed it the fact that I was quite ill at the time having eaten something bad the day before. But after reading the blog I realized what the real issue was and felt the need to write this rather long column.
This is what infuriated me. The question he asked is exactly the question that has killed off our schools. Now it is a long road to my point here, so please bear with me.
Jonathan Cole, the former provost of Columbia University, and a man whom I like and admire, has recently written a book about the research universities in the U.S. that was reviewed in the New York Times on Sunday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Goldin-t.html
I haven’t read the book, just the review, but I am hardly surprised by, nor do I disagree with, the idea that the research universities in the U.S. are a great treasure and we should endeavor to take care of them. But, that having been said, it is the fault of the research universities that our education system is so awful. And, it is the question “what’s new here” that is the essence of the problem.
Here is what occurs in research universities. Students write PhD theses that are supposed to be original research in their field of choice. I have supervised over 50 PhD theses myself and have read and advised on many more. I am familiar with the process and understand what is wrong with it. This is it:
Think about how many PhD theses are produced each year around the world. Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many of these can really be original (much less be important)? Original is defined as something no one ever wrote before in an area of research. So there are many PhD theses, particularly in Europe, that are simply examinations of what other people have said over the years together with a point of view. Even in the best science universities, PhD theses are often about minutiae so incomprehensible that no one, not even the graduate student who wrote them, will ever look at them again. There are interesting PhD theses of course, but they are few and far between. The old joke
is that a PhD thesis is a paper written by the supervising professor under very difficult conditions.
Why do I mention this? Because it turns out, that the man who had asked this question has just written a PhD thesis in which he had examined various education theories and his conclusion was that since my work is derivative of Plato and Socrates and Dewey, something I am quite proud of by the way, then it wasn’t presenting any new theory, and therefore was not worthy of serious consideration. This is kind of like asking, in a disdainful way, at an unveiling of the new 787, “what is new in theory of flight” here? Only a newly minted PhD would even think such a thing. Real world applications and innovative changes matter a lot.
But in the academic world, the questions are always about theories, and applications are looked down upon, which is odd because no one asks Google what is new here (the answer is not much since the 1950s) but it sure has changed our lives.
Research universities produce PhD students who do original work. This would be just fine and dandy if there were just a few research universities and teaching was not affected by this process. But, while there are maybe 25 serious research universities in the U.S., there are hundreds that think they are research universities and because of that there is pressure for the faculty to do research and publish research. That pressure and that focus is the cause of the awful education system we have in place today around the world. Let me explain.
I will tell about a friend of mine, named Bill Purves. I met Bill Purves when he came to work as a post-doc at my Artificial Intelligence Lab at Yale. (He was a professor of Biology at the time. He has since retired.) People apply to work in prestigious labs all the time, but it is odd to find a biologist who wants to study AI. I was intrigued so I agreed to host him. He had a PhD from Yale and I thought he might just be feeling nostalgic for his old haunts. He had been a professor at what you might call secondary research universities. There are 3000 colleges in the U.S. and the top few hundred at least are trying very hard to act as if they are Harvard and Yale. They hire professors with PhDs from Harvard and Yale who then teach their students what they learned at those places. To put this another way, while the students who go to a state university expect to learn job skills they are being taught research skills and theories which is all that their research university trained professors actually know.
Bill’s research area had to do with some arcane feature of cucumbers. He had been doing work on cucumbers for over 30 years at that point. He wasn’t coming to visit me to learn more about cucumbers.
Bill had recently moved to a more teaching oriented college and had begun to worry about how people learn. We worked on learning at our lab so he came to learn what we knew. But it was pretty unusual to encounter a professor who did research who was so worried about teaching. Professors at research universities are more typically concerned with teaching their PhD students (via the apprenticeship method) than they are with lecturing to undergraduates. They pay their dues by teaching so that they can do their real job - which is research. This is a very common attitude at the research universities.
I am not criticizing here. That was how I felt as well. My job entailed some teaching but was not really teaching. Professors at research universities think about their real work and teach about their real work. This is fine as long as they are training future researchers. They can criticize their students and each other about whether new research being presented is good work and they can compete for getting their papers published and their presentations at conferences taken seriously. But really, do you think that Bill's students in his biology classes cared about cucumbers?
This is a real problem, Students are taught about what interests the professor but what interests the professor bears little relationship to what students came to college to learn. They might want to be psychological counselors but they will be taught about experimental research methods. They may want to become writers but they will be taught about literary theory. They may want to become doctors but they will have to learn about cucumbers, at least they will if a cucumber specialist is teaching the biology course.
Now Bill was not like this at all. In fact he came to Northwestern when I moved there for a another post-doc year to learn more about what we were doing in building courses on the computer. Eventually he became the lead designer in our high school on line health sciences course. You can see him introducing biology here:
http://vista.engines4ed.org/home/index.htm
But Bill is a rare bird. He fundamentally cares about students. Now I am not saying that professors don’t care about students. I am simply saying they care about their research more. If students attend a research university they should know the truth. But Yale and Harvard don’t really explain the research orientation in a way that would help incoming undergraduates to grasp its significance.
I am not concerned about Ivy league students, however. They get a good education any way you look at it. But if every professor in every major university is playing the same game, then students at, for example, the University of Illinois, ought to know that every one of their professors cares more about research than they do about teaching. Students are not told anything like that. This matters because it means that the “what’s new here?” standard of assessing work will emphasize theory over practice every time. Since colleges hire professors trained by research instructions, every university is dominated by an issue that distracts from good teaching. Students want job skills and professors teach rearach skills.
This is why I was furious at this question. 2000 years ago Petronius asked why Roman schools taught so little of what would be useful in everyday life. Nothing has changed precisely because it is intellectuals and not practitioners who dominate the teaching landscape. Students are forced to learn things they have no interest in, in order to get college degrees.
In then end that is why we built a new MBA program. Even MBA programs emphasize theory over practice! This may sound hard to believe but professors in a business school also tend to have PhDs from Harvard and Yale and may never have actually run a business themselves. This is why I was asked to design a new learn by doing MBA program by La Salle. It is a program designed to upset the status quo. No courses, no theories, simply learning how to do what business people do.
What is new there? If this had already been done we wouldn’t have done it. It is new in the same way as the 787 is new. It is useful and important because it changes the way education works, not because it presents a new theory.
We must fight against the university professors who wish to dominate the discussion of what education should be like. Research professors should be encouraged to do research but do there really need to be so many of them? 25 research universities is a fine number for the U.S. Spain should have maybe one. But if every professor feels obliged to publish more about his work on cucumbers the world loses its best teachers. Bill Purves understands that and he devoted the end of his career to teaching -- not to cucumbers.
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