Teach or Perish | Hacker News Reader

Teach or Perish

chronicle.com

60 pointsbarry-cotter23 comments

There is nothing wrong with importing theory into studies of literature, art, cinema, and so forth. It was ill-advised to bring so much theory—and almost always the same dense and ideologically tinctured brand of it—to bear on our vast canon of texts and traditions.

Well, yes. If the answer to all questions is always the same a line of inquiry becomes uninteresting. And this is tied to the article's main line of reasoning about academia becoming a closed loop. They stopped engaging with students, let alone the general public. And the public has forgotten the importance of high culture, while always being vulnerable to anti-intellectualism. Couple that with the greatly increased cost of university making it a heavy financial investment, and the stream of curious undergraduates dries up.

Some good points made, but the author ignores a lot of things about the state of undergraduate (and graduate, to a lesser extent) classrooms. Factors like rampant grade inflation and students with large varieties of extra needs mean that the professor's attention is hugely split between teaching and administration. I'm happy to go on record and say that I do not want our best minds wasting a lot of time with course admin, metrics, evaluations, and "collaborative digital learning". Maybe there is a good reason that the senior, storied profs want to distance themselves from these things.

The solution I see is to disincentivize the university for the large swaths of students (again both grad and undergrad) who have no business being there in the first place.

I agree with you, but we can't de-incentivize high education without de-coupling educational certification with age-based grade advancement.

Everyone knows that 80-years-ago you could get a 'good' job with only a high school education, while you now need some level of higher-education. This isn't because young people are (necessarily) gaining important life/job-related skills during these four years after high school. It is social signaling, or - if you like - credentials inflation. The thinking is: if you can make it through a bachelor's degree then you must be reasonably intelligent to do entry-level work. This says nothing about the actual need for higher education.

By de-coupling educational attainment from age offers the opportunity to advance young people through stages of education based on their skills, not merely their age. In doing so, graduating from high school becomes a standard moment for progress benchmarking. Some students will show significant ability, others won't. Advanced students will go on to do advanced work and lower skilled students won't be penalized (as they currently are) with having their high school diploma withheld from them (a significant employment problem for many low-skilled workers).

It allows businesses to look at high school graduates and assess whether or not their skills are adequate for the current opening rather than merely assuming that a bachelor's degree is necessary to do the work. In this way, we incentivize trying to advance quickly through high school while also de-incentivizing the default choice of a four-year degree.

It's the law of unintended consequences. Political people saw how much better off the college educated were way back when and decided that "everyone should go to college". What they did not understand was that scarcity of college grads and the socioeconomic signaling it provided were the true source of better life. The now "everyone is college educated" are no better off because of the signaling and scarcity has been lost.

It's deeply connected to socialist ideals to have everyone go to college. If people are upset that everyone going to college don't get to be ahead of everyone, then what they're really mad at is socialism, not college.

A good end goal. The process of getting there looks complicated.

An interesting "kill two birds with one stone" idea is to merge medical records and care with the educational system.

So asking for someone's diplomas or GPA as a hiring criteria would be as socially unacceptable as asking a gay application for HIV status, a female applicant for her "measurements", or demanding genetic test results from anyone when hiring. A completely portfolio and experience oriented hiring procedure would look similar to how contractors get "hired"/contracted. "Sorry by HIPPA regulations I can't tell you my diploma or even what school I attended, but I wrote this really nice fizzbuzz just for you..."

The two birds with one stone idea is much as you wouldn't ban kids from grade school for the crime of not being born to wealthy parents, if the medical and industrial complexes merged, then presumably there would exist free health care for everyone, which would be a net societal good.

This is a really good article and I am glad it was submitted here for our discussion. The author makes a good point that professors and institutions of higher education that receive public subsidies (which is essentially all of them, in the United States and most other countries) need to be able to make a case that they are providing general public benefits through their activities to keep the subsidies flowing in a democratic political system. The author is helpful to emphasize mentoring and developing the next generation as part of a professor's core job.

What does democracy have to do with it?

That if they cannot demonstrate public good, the public may decide that they would rather not support the institution and said public subsidies.

Ok I see what you're saying now.

Here's what Elon Musk said during his conversation with Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy (that he invested) about online courses by talented teachers:

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Elon Musk: The analogy I sometimes use is, you've seen like Batman – like the Chris Nolan movie – like the original one. And it's pretty frickin awesome. Right? You've got incredible special effects, great script multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound. It's very... is very engaging But if you would instead say okay that you have the same script so, at least the same script, and you said, ok now that script, instead of having movies, we're going to have that script performed by the local town troupe. Okay and so in every small town in America, if movies didn't exist, they'd have to, then, recreate the Dark Knight.

SAL: Right.

ELON: Like with home-sewn costumes, and, like jumping across the stage – not giving their lines quite right, and not really looking like the people in the movie. And no special effects – that would suck. It would be terrible.

SAL: That's right. Very, very –

ELON: That's education.

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And here's the author's characterization of online courses:

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Our disarticulation of knowledge accumulation and knowledge transmission also leaves us exposed to an even more frightening adversary. I refer to tech and its maniacal destabilizing energy. Financiers have recognized that there’s good money to be made in conveying knowledge; their thoughts, naturally, do not linger on the costly infrastructure that produces knowledge. Working in tandem with the digital wizards, they wager that they can do it better than we can and cash out in the process. Given that they’re up against a cohort that has very little interest, or dexterity, in sharing its immense store of wisdom, the money and tech people like their odds.

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Also, lectures themselves are not that great to begin with, so that's something to consider too:

http://educationoutrage.blogspot.ca/2015/01/why-do-we-give-l...

As someone that enjoys going to theater and dance events, I only take issue with the idea that this would suck and be terrible. Less produced. Sure. More work for the audience to imagine what is happening? Sure.

Terrible? Not so much.

I do think it cuts to the core of some of the problems with education reform. No amount of work by the teachers will prevent the students from having to work. No amount of work from the teachers will prevent some students from failing.

My belief is that we need to make sure when a student fails, they use that failure as a lesson. Too often we beat people up with the failure such that they aren't learning from mistakes, but recovering from them.

> More work for the audience to imagine what is happening? Sure

But this kind of 'work' is meaningless though.

Books that contain a lot of typos/errors give students a lot of 'work' to 'imagine' what's going on, but that kind of work/imagination don't have to exist if the quality material was produced in the first place.

I feel we are shifting some metaphors here. The work I was referring to in that sentence was in the imagination of the audience during a theatrical performance. And I don't feel it is meaningless.

Yes, but it was Elon that did the shifting, and you that (unintentionally, I'm sure) took it too far. All Elon was trying to communicate was that centralization of production of cheaply replicable goods allows higher quality. If that applies to theater, explain that concept with reference to theater. If it doesn't apply to theater, throw it out for another metaphor.

Right, I was trying to throw it out. Production value is surprisingly low in value when it comes to education. My children have learned more from scrap paper laying around the house than they have from books, at this point. (They are young, so not yet in the target of these efforts.)

Basically, my assertion would be that no amount of production value will make up for experimentation done by the student.

I see now, and this is a good point. But I'm not certain that production value is a single variable in this case---there's production value that encourages experimentation, and production value that discourages it.

Certainly, I try and be careful not to make it sound like I have a solution here. Because I don't.

Well, this reminds me of the scene in Reign of Fire where the "amateur" Gerard Butler and Christian Bale put up a production of Star Wars http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCBA1wii70o

I think I would enjoy watching that, even if those weren't famous actors, but just the regular people in my community.

My general reaction to this perspective is not that it's wrong, but that it's insufficient. Obviously, great teachers are going to be more effective than lazy/inexperienced/incompetent teachers. What a great online teacher can't do is help a child who doesn't fit the mold (which, suprise!, a great many don't).

If a child isn't physically, cognitively, or emotionally prepared to learn they will just shut down when confronted with an online teacher (no matter how great that teacher may be). They will check Facebook, play games, or simply walk away from the computer. A flesh-and-blood teacher can intervene and redirect a student. Perhaps, they can substitute an element of the lesson to more closely align with the needs of that student (and often those needs may not always seem strictly rational).

It would be great if the full impacts of that great teacher could be distributed over audio-video - but there is no substitute for personal interaction. Concordantly, The answer should not be to substitute a bad teacher with a great digital lecturer - it should be to turn that bad teacher into a great one (or replace them if it's not possible).

Sal Khan actually has some predictions on how education will change in the future:

Year 2060: Education Predictions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiKrFcgVSIU

Even Sal Khan doesn't think lectures-in-digital-form is the solution or the endgame.

"There is one occupation, however, that rarely figures in their reveries. Few of these kids hanker to become professors."

Perhaps there have been so many words written about how teaching jobs are not only few and far between, but they are underpaid and unloved by the very institutions that offer them. If you have read about adjunct professors who are homeless, or post docs 10 years into their search for a teaching position, you start to get the idea that maybe that isn't a smart move.

I suspect that much of the writing is for effect, and to promote a discussion on the pay and benefits of being a professor but it has the effect to turning away people who might one day pursue that role.

I would say that academia has some blame for rampant anti-intellectualism in that many of it's fashions have led to it.

The identity politics of the 1980's, for instance, was a gift to the Republicans. Go tell a poor white that he has "white privilege" and should be ashamed for being white, and you've turned him off to the left forever. (This is just one example of how the academic machine erases people's experience; prior to 1970 in New England it did not matter so much if you were white or black, but what kind of white or black was everything)

Related, also harsh reading:

"Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University" Dr Mark Tarver, 2007

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm

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