Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

Rhetoric isn't the path to truth, but it can sure help with power.

Here it is online: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html

Edit: added link to 'Gorgias'.

This reeks of his attempting to separate culture into low and high, and no, he shouldn't have to explain himself. Oh really?

Computer science has a long border with linguistics. Somewhere on the other side of that border is rhetoric - the Liberal Art - so computer science is a roundabout way there.

This completely ignores the two most significant intellectual innovations - that of Claude Shannon, which revolutionized physics itself and of Godel, who diagonalized logic itself ( at least the Peano calculus ). These represent towering intellectual achievements unlike any other in history.

Trying to map classical society onto modern society is an exercise in futility. Classicals were bloody, venal, voracious and cruel. Our engineers, whether they're called that or not, made the difference. We live after the Scots Enlightenment, in which Man was freed from a destiny as a draft animal with thumbs.

As an exposition of the phenomenon in the article, I much prefer "I Am Charlotte Simmons."

Not that you're wrong, but TFA is talking about Canada:

> I wish to speak about third- and fourth-tier Canadian schools that are primarily undergraduate institutions.

which I find interesting.

Can you code with one tab open to Facebook chat? Because the overwhelming consensus here on HN is that coding requires concentration and lack of interruptions. So does learning.

Technology doesn't change the basic biological processes of learning, and the fact is that technology has proven itself to be a fantastic failure as applied to education. Remember the "multi-media in every classroom" shit that failed in the 1990's? Same thing with iPads today. Research even shows that taking notes on a computer doesn't help you retain material as well as writing it on paper. Until we invent neural downlinks Matrix-style, educational technology peaked with the invention of the printed book 500 years ago.

If you want to learn something that _really_ matters you have to give it full attention. That means total focus, not "continuous partial attention", not facebooking on another tab. Whether you use an ipad, a book, or sit across from a table from a professor, learning really does require undivided attention-- when has this ever changed?

But.

The internet is the new Forum. What the students do there isn't inherently valueless. So while declining academic standards are bad news for the academy, they're also not relevant to whether the students are able to participate in their culture and in civic debate. The problem is that, online courses notwithstanding, the humanities generally fail to take online fora seriously enough.

There are a lot of things students might expect to get out of college, but ideally one of them is the experience of having mastered something genuinely hard (doesn't really matter what—might be physics, might be Latin) and with that, the ability to bootstrap and improve their learning later in life. If all you come out with are "skills", you'll be toast when those skills become obsolete. I think the modern university makes it a bit too easy to get out without having done this, or at least trying to.

Paradoxically, I think this is one of the real values of humanities education: it's mostly not obviously and immediately applicable to the working world, but it's engaging, and if you've really engaged with it, you'll have the tools you need to understand what you need to learn in a future situation. "Learning how to learn" is a bit of a cliche, but it's the key to real success. It doesn't always happen in a classroom, mind you, but it can happen in a good one.

Not really. His point was that the act of learning hasn't really changed, and he's right. Undivided attention is still needed for most learning intensive tasks. I even see many posts here on HN about not being able to concentrate on business task X or Y because a person is surfing the net too often (I'm guilty of it too).

If you spread yourself too thin, you won't really learn much of anything.

"I think Universities need to realize their systems do not suit young people. And that's their fault."

Technology should be used to supplement learning and make it more efficient (IE: e-learning, etc). But it's not a complete replacement for it. There still are no shortcuts to success.

If a young person can't handle this, maybe they should go into the trades instead.

The days where book publishers vetted material are gone. Being in print is no guarantee of anything. The internet is full of every opinion and crackpot theory on the planet. The unguided student will find whatever information is most convenient at the time. Today more than ever students need to pay attention to someone with the experience to separate junk from the real science.

Multitasking is a myth, just check current literature (only book I remember now is http://www.amazon.com/The-Teenage-Brain-Neuroscientists-Adol... but there are others)

He is constantly complaining about "declining academic standards" but provides no quantitative evidence to back his claim. Grade inflation is likely a problem, simply because if one institution does it all are forced to inflate along with it or risk devaluing their degrees, but it's incredibly difficult to quantify. Incoming students have the higher standardized test scores, a huge belt of tools between the internet and computers, and an unprecedented network of peers for when the tools are sufficient. Should we surprised scores tend to rise, is it the university's responsibility to crank up the difficulty and keep averages as they were in the 80s? These are the questions dinosaurs like the OP can't and won't answer.

If you paid attention to university research, you'd know you're spouting things well-known to be wrong. Multitasking is detrimental to learning and knowledge.

I took a fiction writing class, public speaking and American government. Did you not have any electives like that?

The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea of what a University's place in society should be.

Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university was a place for the upper tiers of society to park their kids until they got their hormones out of their system and were mature enough to assume their new leadership role in society. By studying the humanities, students connected with the past and it elevated their spirits for the future (meaning, they could make lower class people feel stupid for not having read Goethe). Studying latin, greek, literature, ... has largely been irrelevant for centuries, but this did not matter one bit for the students (or their parents paying for it). For them, this was just a time to learn dedication to hard work, sharpen their mind, network, and hopefully not knock-up too many custodian's daughters.

Students who did not follow in their parents situation (factory owners, lawyers, physicians, what have you ...) could end up in Academia, as faculty. It kept them out of trouble, they got paid handsomely, it made for a cute dinner table story when they were rambling about their field trip to Timbuktu. The "set-for-life" (aka tenure, high pay) nature of Academia is the most important give-away that these positions had nothing to do with usefulness, and everything to do with protecting status, about ensuring excess spawn could live comfortable lives and did not embarrass their families. Academia was (is) a different kind of clergy; highly educated, a path to an unencumbered life, but also somewhat irrelevant.

The big shift is not that the humanities have become useless - they've always been. The big shift is that the university has become a vocational school. They have become, what used to be the technical and trade colleges, a replacement for the lifetime learning on the job condensed in a few years for the unwashed masses. In this neo-liberal meritocracy or ours (jk), people are widgets, and they need to be jiggered correctly so they can be slotted in to the correct spot and be useful for society. If you explained 150 years ago to Winthrop that in 2015 farmer Joe would send his kids to Harvard to learn how to operate some new fangled bleepy bloopy thingie (aka programming a computer), he'd think your nuts.

Yes, the infantile mental state of many humanities professors is baffling. I guess they dedicate themselves to their work because they are passionate about the content, yes, reading&thinking is fun! Some may even think they are useful. "I teach my students to think critically"! As if physics professor or your uncle cannot do that. "I teach my students to understand systemic societal problems!" Sure, but your adherence to those shift with the winds of political expedience, your own age and experience, and maybe that movie you once saw. But what they are really doing is that they've taken up the scraps of a role that no longer exists.

IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.

The wrong perception of humanities being useless is so embedded into today's culture that it would take a cultural change to fix it. And even changing the culture within a university is prettymuch an impossible task for one person.

There are still plenty of builders, protesters, and politicians, but it's just the drone of first world problems silences them.

PS: As to learners, you don't need to speak to your professors if you want to learn something. So, professors are going to hear more from people about there grades than the actual subject.

All I had to do was advertise some research opportunities and 10+ students were interested in doing work for no pay and no credit outside of class. Sure, they have no idea what they're doing -- but they know they want to be doing something interesting, and they took the initiative to follow up with me. What is so special about my students? They're pretty career focused, and not in a "learning-for-learning's-sake" kind of field. And yet they want to use what they learn in class to do meaningful analysis on extracurricular topics.

The vast majority of people who attend university don't really care about optimizing for that goal. The vast majority of people who require university attendance as a prerequisite for something else don't really, either. And the vast majority of people who provide outside funding to universities don't: they fund research, not teaching. And as a result, the vast majority of successful employees in this system are those who at best want the university to be a place where faculty and graduate students learn things, and only secondarily where undergraduates learn things.

The change to make universities, as a system, be about people who specifically care about being a better thinker would be greatly disruptive to society, and for what benefit? Those who are interested in becoming better thinkers can go to a different sort of institution.

Arguably there is such an institution already, namely graduate school. That you have to go through undergrad first is not particularly more onerous than that you have to go through grade school first. Grade school sucks a lot for people who care about learning.

The most interesting aspect of the exercise was the students were drawn pretty evenly from across the performance spectrum. There were students who got A's in everything, but there were also a number who we're just scraping through the degree. I was quite surprised at which students came.

[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-...

In my experience, they're not doing things to appease the students, they're doing things to appease the students' parents.

I've not taught quite as long as you, but I'll add that I like to tell students that life is going to be their ultimate punishment or reward: If they don't learn how to read and write (I teach English), they'll be the ones who suffer. Not me.

Some people of course don't learn anything and are fine. Many however don't learn anything and aren't fine.

He was even threatened with just that for expressing his complaints in a colloquium:

    I tried to illustrate this old-style understanding for colleagues and 
    administrators at a colloquium at my university a couple of years ago 
    by offering a pictorial representation of the university as I thought 
    it should be. First I drew a very large building named “Students,” 
    then another of comparable size named “Professors,” then a still 
    larger one named “Library,” and finally a tiny shed well off to the 
    side named “Administration.” I wasn’t attempting to insult 
    anyone by this, but simply to make a serious point in a mildly 
    amusing way. In the event, my meaning was not lost on one 
    administrator, who, noting the disparity in proportions and considering 
    it necessary to match wits with me, suggested that come time for the 
    renewal of my contract, I would not be found in any one of my 
    fictitious university buildings. How is that for real university 
    debate? Suggest a deficiency in university governance and it’s a 
    pair of cement galoshes for you.