wu :: forums - Print Page


    
      
        wu :: forums
        (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi)
      

        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> A devastating critique of academia
        
(Message started by: amichail on Jan 10^th, 2007, 3:12pm)

Title: A devastating critique of academia
Post by amichail on Jan 10^th, 2007, 3:12pm

Hi,

What do you think of this?

http://forwardingtree.com/#www.lambdassociates.org/2

Amir

Title: Re: A devastating critique of academia
Post by towr on Jan 11^th, 2007, 1:37am

I think the page layout is an atrocity against mankind. It's impossible to read confortably.
And the subject matter doesn't seem interesting enough for me to fix it on my end.

Title: Re: A devastating critique of academia
Post by THUDandBLUNDER on Jan 11^th, 2007, 3:00am

on 01/11/07 at 01:37:09, towr wrote:

I think the page layout is an atrocity against mankind. It's impossible to read confortably.

If you mean the effects of forwarding then this (http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm) may be better.

Title: Re: A devastating critique of academia
Post by towr on Jan 11^th, 2007, 3:48am

on 01/11/07 at 03:00:54, THUDandBLUNDER wrote:

If you mean the effects of forwarding then this (http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm) may be better.

It's better (at least there's no overlapping double scrollbars), but the text is still too wide to read comfortably. Such long lines are tiring for the eyes, as if reading from a screen isn't bad enough in itself.

Title: Re: A devastating critique of academia
Post by Icarus on Jan 11^th, 2007, 7:17pm

There is an easy fix for that: shrink your browser window.

But as for the content itself: That [edit] problem [/edit] is nasty. Of course like all rants, it gives a biased view of the situation - making everything seem as bad as possible. But there is a large measure of truth to it, I think. I don't know to what extent the teaching problems exist here in the United States (I wouldn't be surprised - rampant political correctness and "openess" has severely limited free speech and the free exchange of ideas here, and the things he described would fit right in), but what he describes on the research side does not sound any different than how things have been for ages. "Publish or Perish" was an old dictum when I was in college (there was even a cheap publisher by that name, set up so academics could get their books published when the major publishing houses rejected them).

As with the Cultural Revolution, this is bound to collapse under the weight of its own stupidity. Businesses will notice that grads of schools who have given into this more to perform worse than those from schools that have attempted to keep higher standards. The result will be a degradation of the reputations of the schools which will result in lower enrollments. One the process continues long enough, the bad schools will either reform to save themselves, or will perish. Unfortunately, this feedback takes a very long time to occur, and in the meantime, thousands upon thousands of students get their lives wrecked as a result.

Title: Re: A devastating critique of academia
Post by Three Hands on Jan 11^th, 2007, 11:37pm

I'd say that the problem with teaching/learning doesn't just exist at universities - the education system has become far more geared towards proving that they are getting "results", but not necessarily getting the results promised by the system due to streamlining the students' efforts so that they jump through the correct hoops. By the time they are reaching universities, most students have become so used to being told exactly what work to do, how to do it, and not necessarily have any real understanding of what they are actually doing, that they have never learned how to gain understanding of why things are - they've just always been told how things are and not to question this.

Bringing up generations in this way is probably wonderful for the politicians - if people don't ask awkward questions like "why is this so?" then they don't have to give potentially damaging answers - but not particularly good for furthering academic endeavours - if people don't ask awkward questions like "why is this so?" then they don't start finding answers.

Another worry is how long it would take for universities to re-establish "old" ways of doing things, like discussing research/issues within a department, and spending more time actually thinking about problems than writing grant applications saying what problems you want to think about, and generally not having to worry so much about proving that you are doing something to people who don't know much about what you actually do, since turnover in professorships is generally around 30 years, and the newer professors coming in will soon no longer have the benefit of the experience of older professors in pursuing such things. While the message that the system is failing is starting to get out, by the time it is properly noticed things may have gone too far out of hand to readily fix.

Title: Re: A devastating critique of academia
Post by Sir Col on Jan 12^th, 2007, 12:29am

Icarus, I wouldn't call it "nasty", rather good ol' British humour. I continue to realise that it simply does not export well into other cultures. At worst, some forms can be misinterpreted as being racist and celebrating undesirables, at best, other forms are deemed to be unnecessarily cruel and sarcastic.

I think he makes some rather sober points and I admire him for showing such integrity. But like you said, Three Hands, I do think that he has become so focussed on higher education that he has missed the root cause of this rot. In other words, the tragic reforms in universtities are purely a reaction to idiotic changes at a more elementary level of education. As a secondary (high) school teacher I see what comes in and what goes out, and often I feel quite ashamed of what I do (or don't do) in the middle.

We need to recognise that whilst improving accessibility to higher education is commendable, some people are just not equipped for it; and sadly these ambitions have reduced people's perspectives of vocational careers to second class. In order to increase accessibility it has become necessary to reduce education to the highest common factor, and when the mix of people are relatively prime we all know what this means. :(

Title: Re: A devastating critique of academia
Post by rmsgrey on Jan 12^th, 2007, 7:08am

And what are the two government initiatives I've noticed on the news in the last couple of weeks?

Increase the frequency of external examinations for under 16s (once you hit 16, you already get exams every 6 months or so for two years - or 5 waves of exams) and tweak the league tables slightly

Raise the minimum age for leaving education from 16 to 18, though to be fair, if they actually managed to implement the new 14-19 policies as a replacement for the current system rather than putting them in place on top of them, it could actually work reasonably well - assuming the transition is handled competently. Of course, the chances of that happening aren't particularly good...

To be fair, there was one other snippet of education news that caught my eye - and that's the shift to specifically counting Maths and English results in league tables, so a student who gets their "5 A-C"s in easy subjects no longer does as much for the school's standing as one whose 5 grades include Maths and English...

A few of fundamental problems with education in this country are:

1) Confusing equality of opportunity (which is a good thing, but very hard to measure) with identity of outcome (which is easy to measure, but only achievable by handicapping the better performers to prevent them outstripping the worst)

2) Looking for simple (generally superficial) statistics to improve rather than bothering to understand the problem and actually solve it (the quantity/quality issue in academic papers mentioned in the article is a good example)

3) Lack of communication between educators and parents. Education reform is all well and good, but one of the side-effects of the constant tinkering is that parents often have difficulty relating to the work their children are doing at school, which cuts off a major area of educational support - a recent example came up when I was playing a game with a friend recently, and, while keeping score, I mentioned some of my working and my friend, once I explained it a little more fully, realised that I was using something his 7-year-old son had been learning in school recently. I'm not saying my friend couldn't have helped his son with his maths homework before, but he now has an idea of how to do it using the techniques his son is being taught, and an idea of how those techniques are useful and why his son should learn them, both of which are going to help his son learn.

Title: Re: A devastating critique of academia
Post by Icarus on Jan 12^th, 2007, 1:28pm

on 01/12/07 at 00:29:16, Sir Col wrote:

Icarus, I wouldn't call it "nasty", rather good ol' British humour.

I was refering to the situation being described, not the manner in which it was described. I apologise for the confusion, as I see that because of how I phrased it, my remark is easy to misinterpret.