I don't have any formal thoughts on this, which is why I hope you all do. The question arises as I sit on Wikipedia, halfway through my attempt to learn the entirety of Macedonian history in one evening to make up for a semester of watching sports on my laptop in class. I can't help but wonder why exactly I attended (save for the practical reasons). The professor was an interesting guy, a good lecturer, but the St. Louis Cardinals are just a bit more important to me. And in the back of my mind all semester: The hell with it, Wikipedia will have my back before the final. And it's true. It does. I'm going to get an A, based completely on the reading I'm doing right now. (Side note: this stuff is better than A Song of Ice and Fire, because it's real.)
So I don't know. Obviously the process wouldn't be so easy if, for example, I hadn't paid attention in accounting all year. (Fortunately I did.) There are some things you can teach yourself, and some that are much more difficult to even begin learning. But the prevalence of Wikipedia only exacerbates what I see as a huge problem with higher education now, an even bigger problem than its cost. It's fucking pointless. My thoughts are occurring to me as I type them at this point, so I have no great insights to share, just -- is it all some great farce? (Don't answer that.) All the students I know understand and take for granted that they will self-educate at a convenient time instead of bothering much with class, but all the professors and deans (I think) believe that they are teaching and upholding a solemn tradition. Are they delusional? No. They're profiting. But also, on some level -- yes, they have to be. If you stop and look at the state of things, it's insane. An English literature degree? First you learn how to read, then you either enjoy reading or you don't, end scene.
I'm rambling. Hopefully no one is still reading, or at the very least hopefully Perdiccas has gone ahead and died so Antipater can turn around and get back to his real business, which is looking after Greece for another six months before he gets ill and dies as well. Or is murdered. Every illness is a potential poisoning in Macedon. Again, even better than Game of Thrones.
Anyway, not sure what the point of this post was. hubski, do you agree? I know mine is a tired, oft-repeated argument, but isn't it also so self-evident that its oft-repeatedness should have inspired some sort of new efficiency by now? I know the simple answer is that the people in charge benefit from the current system. However, the vast majority aren't in charge and don't benefit. And since I'm in media res tonight I'm sort of pissed off.
Editing in some follow-up questions to make this look legitimate: how soon does the public wake up and change the higher education system completely? And how? Is the future Khan Academy? We used to pay exorbitant fees for private tutors (well, if you were male, white, landed, etc.), then we moved on to paying crazy amounts to sit in 500-person lecture halls. Is $39.99 a month to partake in Coursera the next step? If so, how does that help anything? If not, why are we bothering?
Way way back in the day, a bunch of people who wanted to teach got together with a bunch of people who wanted to learn and we called it the free university. Now we have MOOCs. Is it the same thing? I don't think so. (mostly because free university classes had the potential to turn into orgies while studying Nietsche's The Birth of Tragedy or calculus.) I'd love to write more on what I learned at university that I didn't learn from a book. I'd like my students to write about what they learned in class that they didn't learn in a book. In fact they often do -- and I'd go on about it but, sadly, my computer is NOT WORKING and I'm on a borrowed MAC which I don't really know how to use. And I'm listening to the news about air attacks in the middle east. ... I'll get back to all of this when my computer is fixed. It is awful being disillusioned about school and wondering if it's all a scam so that professors can have jobs. It sounds like you feel continuing to attend classes is pointless in terms of real learning.An English literature degree? First you learn to read, then you either enjoy reading or you don't, end scene.
OK, just a second. I have one or two, actually almost three of those degrees. I also taught kids to read in grade one and taught bigger kids to read in graduate school. It wasn't exactly the same "reading" -- not even close.
I don't know man. I can buy a copy of a Flaming Lips album and know all the words and thoroughly enjoy the album but its another thing to hear then perform in person. Same with a lecture vs Wikipedia, especially if the prof is a gifted performer.
I think the "if" is smaller when you seek out that type of relationship. What I've found out, too late, is that most professors want to be that type if teacher and a good student can bring that out of them. You get what you put in. Wikipedia = a Wikipedia education. Seeking out a deeper interaction with your professor = a deeper education.
Depends on the professor. I have a business degree and some of my professors seemed to almost crave the ability to discuss beyond the topic. There's subjectivity in business too and where there is subjectivity, there can be great discussions to have. I would agree though that those moments are far more abundant in the arts.
I think the Wikipedia and MOOCs are perfectly good for learning a well-developed body of knowledge. I skipped a lot of my undergraduate classes because the lectures didn't add anything to the textbook. I don't think they're adequate for learning to practice most disciplines yet. If you want to do mathematics you need to learn to write proofs, and you're going to write an awful lot of wrong proofs in the process. You really need someone to tell you when you're doing it wrong. The same is true of science, engineering, philosophy, and writing. It's possible to be an autodidact, but most autodidacts end up eccentric as best and cranks at worst. Universities will still have a place until there's some other way for autodidacts to avoid compounding their misunderstandings until they end up like this guy. Computing is a special case, and I think that's what leads people with a background in computing to be so enthusiastic about MOOCs. In computing you can easily test yourself against the machine; if you implement your ideas and they work, you're probably not too far off. That doesn't generalize very far. If you're trying to learn math, you might check your proofs with Coq, but that's really the wrong level to be writing proofs at. In the physical sciences you could do experiments yourself if you have the money and can legally buy the materials, but you'll reach a point where you don't or can't eventually.
I think what you said about self-teaching raises a good point. There are so many 'bad habits' you can get into when teaching yourself. Often you need someone else to criticise your proofs/essay/etc to help you improve. A good example is playing the piano. You can spend years teaching yourself from sheet music, but you might end up with shitty rhythm, or bad posture or bad fingering because nobody was around to be harsh with you when you got those things wrong. You can sound like Mozart when you're by yourself only to have your ego cut to pieces when you are told that no you should be doing it like this. That said, I object to you calling autodidacts "eccentrics" and "cranks". Maybe your conclusion comes from sample bias - most people with the inclination/mental ability/etc to teach themselves end up going to university because it is the Done Thing, thereby leaving the slightly odd people to represents autodidacts. This would actually be a pretty interesting thing to investigate...
Underwood Dudley wrote several books about cranks in mathematics. Their prevalence is one of the reasons we don't have many contributions from amateurs in mathematics anymore, despite being a discipline with a history of important contributions from amateurs; so many mathematicians get letters giving oddball and fallacious proofs of statements already proven to be false that amateurs are just assumed to be cranks. Dudley's books are still encumbered, but libgen has them. Here's De Morgan's much less sympathetic study of 19th century cranks.
Institutionalized learning with a price tag is an anachronism.
Hahaha, it is fairly ironic.
so what about my diligent post-rant edits?
I don't know quite specifically what you're asking.
I mean, what's the future of all this. Despite the free courseware ascendancy, a degree from Princeton is just as powerful as and even more sought after than ever. And I mean, why exactly is it that institutionalized learning is an anachronism suddenly? Is it the internet? Is "the internet" the answer to every fucking question about change we can ask these days? Our education system used to work, I think. Maybe.
tl;dr on the article for now, I'm volunteering in four hours. It's the title. Princeton and every other "prestigious" school is a brand name that everyone loves. It's the same reason people buy a sweater with an Under Armor/Nike/Adidas etc. logo on it when a blank sweater right next to it is a fraction of the cost. It looks nice.
And (I'm going to get a bit cynical) that's what people have begun to buy into. It's no longer about functionality, it's about status and comparison. We feel that buying something with an Apple silhouette is better than a Samsung bought at a flea market (she's been good to me for over two years now). Why is that? Well, for a lot of reasons. Anyway. For whatever reason, businesses are still under than impression that a degree from Princeton is better than one from Joe Shmoe University because back in a time when institutionalized learning was appropriate, Princeton played off of their high rejection rate to accept only those with the best credentials which meant they could charge more thus higher better professors. I just realized I could rant forever and you probably already have thought of all of this and get what I'm saying.
But yeah. The internet has in essence made institutionalized learning obsolete. Except for the fact though that having a personal experience is really nice. I'm going to sleep.