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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

I work in academia, and the pessimistic/cynic standpoint is that university is not about teaching, but about filtering. Making a lecture "fun", comprehensible, or even "innovative" may not have the desired effect of improving the level of understanding among all students, because a fun and easy course is a worse filter than a hard course.

Personally I always learned the most in courses that were very hard and had a nerdy teacher/professor who did not care at all whether you could follow the stuff on the blackboard / in the presentation. Theses courses required work on your own: you had to read the actual literature again and again to even remotely understand the topics on the weekly exercise sheets, or to pass the exam. This "learning by yourself" lead to a much deeper understanding than just memorizing some concepts from a streamlined lecture.

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If you're putting in all of the effort to make the material make sense to you, what is the role of the educator? If the way to learn things is to read a book a bunch of times, what value does my tuition money get me? A syllabus? The ability to ask questions of a possibly poor communicater?

The cynic answer would be: a highly standardized and comparable filter and testing environment. A more realistic answer: you are guided through and exposed to topics, motivated by exams, and in the end you will have proof that you understand the topics you received grades on. You also have - often direct and personal - access to top-level people in your field.

I paid all this money to get to a beautiful surf spot, and you’re telling me I have to paddle and stand up on my own?!

> If the way to learn things is to read a book a bunch of times, what value does my tuition money get me?

The real answer? You gained a piece of paper which certifies that you are educated in a field.

Depending on the school you may also gain access to an insular professional network.

That's pretty much it. The notion that university degrees are worth anything more than that is moderately outdated.

I am in my fifties, a software engineer, and I am enrolled in a masters program for mathematics and really learning at a ferocious rate compared to my job, where I can alternate learning with using what I've learned.

For me, learning a lot is very worthwhile. Not everyone shares that goal for education of course.

That last sentence sounds snarkier than I meant. For instance,for all my classmates they are enjoying the learning and also trying to make a career out of it somehow. Different altogether than my fun based curriculum

Often the sequence of topics will be deeply significant once you are up to speed. Also for really hard work, knowing someone that knows the material is going to grade your homework is (at least for me) extremely motivating to do my best to master the material. Also office hours- periodically I get stuck trying to prove false things due to careless reading, and the professors are quite good at backing up and asking why I am trying to prove something they know to be false.

As with many human activities it is startlingly easy to fool oneself and so things involving a more experienced person can help. Grading, code reviews, peer review, certifications, etc.

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