People in the past did lots of things that seemed completely normal at the time, and seem completely bizarre or perverse to us now. Human sacrifice, slavery, mullets, that sort of thing. So it’s likely that lots of the things we enlightened moderns think normal will seem completely backwards and barbaric to our descendants. What might those things be?
Here’s one. Having millions of young people, in virtually every country in the world, spend three years of their life doing useless busywork. Having them all repeating the same tasks, producing work which is likely of no value to anyone, but will only be glanced at for about ten minutes by their taskmasters. I’m talking, of course, about the current university system.
Up until about, say, 1991, it made a lot of sense to tie research and education together. Professors were gatekeepers of knowledge at the limits of human experience, and it made sense for students to go to them to learn. Then the web appeared, and that knowledge has slowly opened up to everyone. But the universities have remained the same.
The main priority of professors is not teaching, but research. The main priority of students is not learning, but earning grades and getting their career passport. We’re so used to this situation that we rarely stop to question it. The part that will seem really weird to future generations is the monumental waste of labour involved. At this very moment, tens of millions of students are writing near-identical essays, solving near-identical equations, or debugging near-identical pieces of software. Bleary-eyed postgrad students will then be distracted from their research to mark all this work. Yes, the students are “learning”, but in an incredibly inefficient way. The system simply isn’t optimised for learning, but for ranking people by intelligence and the disposition to complete arbitrary tasks when ordered.
The current system was great at producing the bureaucrats needed to run an industrial society, and completely incapable of producing the knowledge workers needed by modern society. Evidence: youth unemployment is in the double digits, and university graduates are being forced to work menial jobs for no pay. Meanwhile, firms in the few areas of the economy that are actually growing cannot find the highly-skilled and enterprising employees they need.
Please, someone, disrupt education.
14 Comments
I think the Tories already did. Paying £9000 a year for access to information which is publicly available is insanity. I suppose if anything you might need to know what the information is before you can seek it out (i.e. via lectures) but in general, you’re right in stating that if you are interesting just in learning and not earning a meal ticket, undergrad courses are increasingly becoming redundant.
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if the higher tuition fees manage to drive people to more alternative forms of education.
True. I think you and others interested in this topic will be interested in Sir Ken Robinson’s talks on education. “We don’t need a education reformation; we need a revolution”
http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html
Check out his other two videos that are also on education.
Awesome, thanks for the link mate.
Issac great post. I love the learning issue between students and professors segment. I could not agree more. I work for a company called the Student Success Academy. I believe we are doing some disrupting in education. Check out our site and read over some of our blog posts. I think you would be relieved to see all the innovate and cool things we are doing.
Let me play devils advocate,
Although I agree with your sentiment that university is not preparing anyone for the ‘real’ world or with skills that any employers are looking for I do not believe that university is the place for these skills to be learnt. In my eyes the entire point of universities is that they should be completely separate to both industry and government allowing any topic in the philosophy of various subjects to be researched without any barriers or bias, remember we would have no internet and few tech start-ups without CERN – a purely research project with no commercial use to its goals. University was historically not used as a precursor to getting a job as you state above but was a way of rounding individuals in fairly useless subjects before they went either into academia proper or into jobs that they could have walked into before University. Remember buisiness, programming, management etc. although all laudable are fairly recent subjects in the academic sphere!
Prospective students should be choosing to become apprentices unless they feel an academic life could seriously be for them. Of course the fact that this does not happen is a failing of apprenticeship schemes and business not of the university system and so by raising tuition fees nothing at all is helped!
I will be very interested in your thoughts on my thoughts :p
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, I expressed my opinions, quite, er, vigorously in the above post, so the truth is likely a lot more nuanced.
The concept of “usefulness” is interesting, isn’t it? Things like literature, philosophy, history, have little direct commercial value, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study them. In fact, maybe some things are worthwhile because they have no commercial value. Civilisation has to be about more than money and goods produced.
But then again, if we’re greatly widening university participation to build the knowledge economy, are these subjects the most useful to learn? There’s a lot of unemployed graduates at the moment, but it’s quite a bit easier for those with “practical” degrees.
Then there’s people who do practical degrees like mine (computer science), or engineering, business, and so on. These are a bit like apprenticeships, since you’re learning “real-world” skills. But even in a field like mine, there’s still an abstract, theoretical component, and concepts we study just for the mathematical beauty of them. So there’s always a tension between theory and practice, “useful” and “useless”.
The thing is, I feel like I’ve finished my apprenticeship – I’ve worked twice as a professional software developer and know I know enough to contribute to an organisation – but I still have a few more months of unpaid labour before I collect my £12,000 job passport. That frustration is what inspired the original post.
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