Our superficial scholars
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I don't take these kinds of essays seriously anymore.
Rhodes scholars are chosen primarily because of their accomplishments, as a result of being widely successful in a field. What the author criticizes - single-mindedness - is what catapulted these bright stars in the first place, because people, like the author, in positions of authority and influence said, "Brilliant. She is a Physics Olympiad winner or he is a nationally recognized pianist. Let us reward them."
The same authors and leaders that lament the direction the nation's youths are taken have their hand in creating the very system they criticize. Why not look inward for the changes they can make rather than putting the microscope on other people? In the case of the Rhodes committee, they shouldn't even look at grades anymore. There are other ways to judge creativity and scholarship. Heavy grade focus already pushes students at top colleges into a narrow-minded pursuit of "excellence." And, yet Rhodes and other prestigious institutions reaffirm that idea. This is just an example - a rough one at that - but I hope it communicates the point. Don't pay lip service if you aren't willing to be part of the solution (and I mean taking action).
On a separate note, the Rhodes selection process is extremely competitive. While I didn't get in, I felt that just the process of applying forced me to self-reflect on my capabilities and accomplishments. I ended up making some positive changes in my life as a direct result of what I learned during the application process - sounds like the YC application eh? Heh Heh!
Lets take this line, "An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president's health-care bill but doesn't really know why."
Really? I find that amazingly hard to believe. What I suspect is far closer to the truth is that this person supports the health-care bill for a reason that isn't consistent with why Heather wants to repeal it. Here's a quote from one of her letters requesting donations for her Senate run:
"Repeal and replace Obamacare with market-based reforms that are much more effective at controlling the skyrocketing cost of healthcare without compromising choice and quality;"
While its important to judge writing on its merits, outside of appeals to authority. It is important to know the history and motivation of the author. Especially when the piece really has no data, and is just subjective anecdotal conjecture.
Back in the bad old days, students crammed lots of facts in into their heads. That gave them an understanding of how the world worked, how it has worked in the past, and a solid platform for thinking about how it might change.
Now, students learn "how to think". Of course, nobody can teach that. So instead, they learn how to churn out 3 point essays, pretend to examine both sides of the argument, then to declare that, on the balance, the side which they gave the most air time to has more points in favor of it.
I find it funny how whenever some problem with education is brought up there's so many people suggesting simple solutions like changes to the curriculum across the board.
Each and every curriculum/educational philosophy WILL have it's problems and WILL tend to produce a certain kind of a person. Nobody denies that there's so many other countries that have better results in certain fields on standardized tests as compared to the US. But not only are those tests poor in measuring proficiency in a single subject[1], they are a complete joke if you want to use that to reflect on the education as a whole.
Unified curriculum is the problem itself. Although it's not very obvious as of right now I think we'll see a HUGE decentralization in how the education works. I won't be surprised if in 20-30 years the whole primary-middle-high school system will get redefined.
You can also rant about the universities in the US, but they are still the best in the world. There are no more than 5-10 universities in other countries that could compare to the top US institutions.
Generally speaking I think it's a nonsense to compare average quality institutions at all. It's a contest of who is least bad. Compare the best. It's not hard for Europeans to have slightly better public education if private is very limited in it's operations.
[1]The problem with international standardized tests is that the way subjects are thought differs between each country. And it happens that US schools usually have a very different approach to teaching subjects like math as compared to the rest of the world. I can easily see how those tests are skewed against the US.
I think you would have to elaborate on that quite a bit to make it somewhat true. Lots of foreign students, including some of the brightest, get their higher-education degrees in the US, mainly at the graduate level. That happens because a good chunk of the brightest professionals are professors at these institutions, and the research resources are plentiful. Clearly the research experience for top-level students is outstanding, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In this pretty narrow sense US universities are the best in the world.
But… West Civ I? English Comp? College Algebra, including topics such as completing the square? Calc I derivative shortcuts? For the love of Pete, compare this kind of curriculum with what is taught in Europe, Asia and (gasp) Latin America. You will find that your average college graduate knows much less than elsewhere. Granted, the best may be future Nobel laureates, but that doesn’t hide the fact that undergraduate college education in the US has become a years-long remedial program for a disastrous K12 plan.
But this kind of "College Algebra" is, understandably, considered college-level material. That pretty much happens only in the US (considering countries with educational systems...), and choices such as this influence the overall academic level.
my freshman English Comp classes was one of the most intense, interesting, useful classes I took in college
That's great, and I happened to enjoy a lot my electives such as Theater 101 as a math undergrad (even if I was critical of the curriculum)... but the main point is: Should English composition courses be given at the college level? What, then, do you do during those twelve (OK... last three of those twelve?) previous years? I was puzzled when a student who clearly didn’t need English composition defended this setup, arguing that “a college student should know how to write”. Well, “a high-school graduate should know how to write”, was my response then and now, and if you press me elementary-school students should be well on their way to accomplishing this.
I’m not saying this has an easy solution. Some countries “fix” their K12 woes by resetting the academic level at the college admission tests. As a result, a good chunk of the population has to find a way to raise their level, which is not ideal either. But what the US opts to do lowers the undergraduate level, no doubt. I wonder if this will eventually trickle down to Ph.D. programs.
Edit: All this leaves out grade inflation and related issues... It is downright hard to fail most courses of some majors. This is bad enough.
You see until high school I was studying in my home country, an European one, next I went to high school for a year in the US which had a large population of Asian foreign exchange students. Then I did a year of non-degree studying in China (not very relevant to the discussion) and now I study on-line following a British curriculum.
I saw a LOT of Asians and Europeans struggle with the curriculum in the US. Language issues? For some, yes, but I knew a lot of people that struggled simply because they were not used to the way Americans are thought. I had friends complain that they were doing great back in their home country and now were just average. (I virtually only had foreign-Asian friends, foreigners didn't really hang with the Americans which is another story). And some courses were indeed simply more rigorous in the US than back home.
What an average student in any country learns is how to beat the game, that's what school almost everywhere is about, not about deep understanding. That's why it's enough to change a few variables in the game and those students that supposedly followed a more rigorous course find themselves struggling like my friends in the US. The same thing happens at average universities. You just have to beat the game to get the diploma. Europeans on average have to beat a slightly more difficult game, big deal.
Do you really think that there is a significant difference? I took AP calc and then “Maths 1” at that British school. The most notable difference? No calculator on the test. Of course, they do throw far more rigorous explanations at you, use fancier vocabulary, give you more trick questions, but to pass the test you don’t have to be much better, you just have to adjust to the game. European students will be as clueless about the simple Epsilon-Delta Proof as American are. They simply “cram” in a little more to students overseas. (cram as in learn without understanding rather than study hard). I don’t really see an European student being somehow smarter than you’re average American one. Trust me, after travelling a lot, getting to know many cultures average people seem average everywhere and extraordinary people are always extraordinary[1]. US happens to produce and draw most of those.
I don't know, I might be going too far with that argument, but I strongly believe that those few top-class people which will be leaders in their respective fields will contribute to the economy far more than having each average person be a little better. As in it's better to have 1000 stupid soldiers led by a genius than 1000 slightly less stupid soldiers led by a moderately intelligent person.
I'm not saying there's nothing to fix, there's tons of fixing to be done in every single country. I just think that as a whole country the US should focus on sustaining that comparative advantage in higher education, as long as it has that US is the world-wide leader of education, at least for me.
[1] For some people it takes a lot of time to get to that stage, some might outright disagree with me. Most people have trouble filtering cultural differences and often see falsely assume that people in a certain culture are just “better”, because they use their native benchmarks to judge people elsewhere and the other way around.
...
>The writer represented New Mexico in the U.S. House from 1997 to 2008.
seems to me that the author wasn't just an innocent bystander, instead she was too active and powerful participant in shaping the society and its education to blame the end result on anybody else without acknowledging her share of responsibility.
Even at the micro scale - her "blame the others" leadership approach clearly shows a leader who isn't tolerable to critical thinker and leader types even in her own staff.
The kind of person that deserves a Rhodes scholarship according to the author's definition of what one should be is the kind of person who would be unlikely to play the game necessary to qualify for one.
The best at what?
By "philosophy" I mean a broad meta study of the field: the philosophy of science, epistemology, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of language, etc. By "rhetoric" I mean both the construction and execution of persuasive argument in printed and verbal form. Everybody should have a few folks from history that they are intimately familiar with and feel that they faced similar problem in life.
Philosophy can give you a broad view of what is knowable, what is not, and how folks move from not being able to to know, to being able to know, to actually knowing -- a key component of both the advancement of science and the development of an individual. Topics like stoicism and existentialism, if presented appropriately, can provide a backstop of beliefs for any student, regardless of their religious or moral convictions. Rhetoric helps you spot when folks are trying to manipulate you, and it challenges you form coherent arguments yourself about things outside of one small area. History gives you context: every generation feels as if it is here at some kind of special and unique spot. Knowing that humans 500 years ago were the same model as the ones you meet on the street helps put your opinions and interests in context.
Unfortunately, if I hadn't defined what I mean by those three subjects my recommendation would be pointless. You can go to any college today and take courses under those headings and not receive those benefits -- perhaps this is because those who design the courses view them as introductions to a deep dive on a topic and not practical, broad, benefits-based interventions with young minds. I don't know. I understand that my advice is easier said than done: how would you introduce history to a large group of students in such a way that each student found their own historical figures that they would benefit from absorbing? How do you take topics that the students might find popular and feel-good and give them the ability to tear apart the fluff around them and find the good stuff underneath? Having a professor stand up and say something like "this is my opinion on X. I may be wrong, but we'll never know unless I give you the skills to identify and refute faulty argument" just isn't happening. Instead, classrooms are hierarchical affairs.
Instead of this discovery process, students get pre-canned little happy meals. Instead of taking charge of forming their own identity across multiple disciplines that they can describe and defend, we get these examples of kids simply being out of their depth once you stray just a little bit from their established path. An education that is both broad and self-determined is not an easy problem to solve. The system is not built for it.
This really seems to me the biggest problem of academia as far as i've experienced it.
In the first 8 years of school i've been very bad at school so at first it seemed impossible to me that i ever could become a student.
Therefor i just dreamed about it,taking the verb "to study" very seriously, imagining that i would be able to pull all the knowledge that i wanted just from the university shelves of knowledge and be able to built myself and my knowledge in that way. I thought i'd be working on cool projects which were driven by my ideas.
Instead when after really working hard on my discipline and other things to be able to go to university i find that all i can get, at least in germany, seems to be prepackaged happy meals. I can go and make my bachelor or masters in computer science without ever having built something that was my truly my idea. Of course i can do all those wonderful things i dreamed about when i was younger too, but i won't find many people that would help me do it and i would have a hard time doing it because i've not that much time on my hands.
To get through all those tests, all those university homework assignments(when i first heard of that i literally went "wtf") and still built up a parallel career, so you have something to show off on your CV other than "went to university", takes so much time that it seems going to university and doing the courses like they are laid out to me stands in the way of the kind of education i hoped to gain from going to university.
I'd like a university that takes "to study" seriously, allowing students to look at problems, find solutions from all angles and encouraging them to self-educate in a healthy way.
Strangely, given the parent comment, I did study the history of science later and have a research degree to show for it. :)
I'd say less than half of the professors were willing to really engage in anything that wasn't squarely in the specialty. Also they seemed actively hostile to cross-subject questions like post-modernism's impact on self understanding in a psychology class discussion. That disdain of learning about multiple subjects is modeled by their undergraduate and graduate students. It sets boundaries in their thinking and in their willingness to discuss, when they see others mocked. This overall trend is the majority of the reason I decided not to continue past a master's.
Even in classes and curricula that are supposed to be interdisciplinary, the boundaries are still rigid and the connections superficial. That compromises learning. And, I think one of the reasons for that is professors are afraid of being wrong and they're not trained to travel outside their domain of expertise. The ivory tower thrives on specialization. If the gatekeepers are not bold enough to cross-pollinate ideas, students are disadvantaged.