Learning
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For at least the past few thousand years, people have been thinking and debating about what "education" should be like, what its goals should be, and who should get (what kinds of) it.
Among many other issues, there's the question of whether educational content is preparation for actual use in later life, or part of incorporation into a shared culture, or just an exercise to demonstrate adequate intelligence and discipline and attentiveness. Yesterday's Frazz:
And today's Frazz, illustrating educators' PR problem:
I'm agnostic about whether educational content should be practical or interesting or just fun — ideally all three. And I've always tried to avoid or at least ignore, perhaps naively, the "gateway" aspects of education.
A quote from Cory Doctorow's 2014 story "Petard" (the whole thing is here) —
“This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and a Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes, too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways.”
Based on my own educational experiences, that seems to be about 51% correct. Though what happens in the hallways (and other unofficial interactions) is also connected to what happens (or doesn't) in the classes.
We can close with one of Jesse Welles' recent songs:
Again, that's all too true, but also not. And to paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about about democracy, college is arguably the worst system except for all the alternatives.
Mark Metcalf said,
May 31, 2025 @ 9:08 am
Here's a slightly different perspective.
I was a Far Eastern Studies major – the name was eventually changed to something more PC – at the US Naval Academy in the early 1970s. In addition to Chinese/Mandarin, poly sci, literature, and history classes, our curriculum included an assortment of math, chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, electrical engineering, and other STEM courses that prepared us to understand how ships, submarines, and/or aircraft worked. And when we got to our first duty stations, what we had learned in those STEM courses proved very useful.
As an added benefit, when given the opportunity to attend graduate school in Monterey several years later, I had a sufficient distribution & number of STEM courses (when supplemented with a handful of upper-level undergrad STEM courses) to meet the requirements for an ABET-accredited undergraduate engineering degree. That allowed me to enter an MSEE program in electrical engineering.
As an ostensible humanities undergrad, I'd never considered completing a graduate degree in an engineering discipline. But once I had a few years of work experience and learned the value of a STEM graduate degree in my profession, it was nice to have a relatively straightforward path to that objective. Without those time-consuming non-major course courses, that never could have happened.
bks said,
May 31, 2025 @ 9:32 am
Public schools should run from 9am to 5 pm with no homework. In Berkeley International Women's Day was a school holiday, which Mrs. bks considered a cruel joke.
David Marjanović said,
May 31, 2025 @ 11:08 am
So, rather than having much to do with education (everyone is exhausted by 2 pm), they should be storage facilities for children?
I mean, that has been the global trend in the last 30 years…
Ebenezer Scrooge said,
May 31, 2025 @ 11:31 am
It's amazing what you need in the "real world." I was a banking lawyer, assigned to write a financial wargame involving a low-altitude electromagnetic pulse partially disabling telecoms where the pulse was tangent to the earth in midtown Manhattan. Since I didn't want the economists laughing at me, I had to drag out my high school trigonometry. How high would be tangent how far? (Fortunately, the economists knew math but not physics.)
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 31, 2025 @ 1:24 pm
That's one gem of a song, thank you!
J.W. Brewer said,
May 31, 2025 @ 2:59 pm
Re rebranding math to make it sound as cool as bebop*: I was recently in the "popularizing science" section of a Barnes & Noble with my 10-year-old and noticed a recently published volume titled _Love Triangle: How Trigonometry Shapes the World_. I found this "clever" title trying to import some sort of positive valence extremely off-putting, but perhaps I'm not the target audience. The author's previous works apparently include another pop-math one titled _Humble Pi_, so he's apparently a repeat offender when it comes to this sort of branding.
*The most interesting thing linguistically about bebop is how it yielded "bop" as a freestanding morpheme that could then be used to construct other subgenre labels like "hard bop" and "post-bop."
Tim Rowe said,
May 31, 2025 @ 4:31 pm
The author of Humble Pi and Love Triangle is Matt Parker, a "Stand-up Mathematician". I think his main market is folks (like me) who are already keen on recreational mathematics (and bad puns), though I'm sure he would be pleased if someone with no previous interest in mathematics *did* think the titles "cool" and bought the books.
Yves Rehbein said,
May 31, 2025 @ 7:04 pm
@ J. W. Brewer, no, bappen in some German variety must be closely related to paper (maché) and other words meaning to stick. The inhereted English word is pap, a vegitive mix rich in starch and close to wheat paste, what you call porridge.
Yves Rehbein said,
May 31, 2025 @ 7:13 pm
correction: vegetal – not sure, just learned this word today and thought it sounded smart, no excuses
Yves Rehbein said,
May 31, 2025 @ 7:27 pm
The comparisons makes no sense because walking is acquired intuitively, but maths is a cultural technique closely related to writing. Some would even argue that Sumerian accounting tablets proof its origins. Although I do believe that mathematical understanding is intuitive, to the contrary, I am pretty bad at footwork.
There's a deeper level to the joke because ball sports receive popular attention but cryptpgraphers, arguably the best payed mathematicians, receive little attention, to anyone's surprise. Jazz, at least in the usual case, requires classic instruction and a fair bit of mathematics to differentiate those logarithms on the fly that you call harmony.
David Marjanović said,
June 1, 2025 @ 6:57 am
Why would that be related to bebop and its derivatives?
Barbara Phillips Long said,
June 1, 2025 @ 1:50 pm
I have written before — here and elsewhere — about how public school gave me a mix of practical knowledge (sewing, cooking, personal finance, square dancing) and intellectual stimulation and learning. What I have not said is that my rural public school was a dreary social experience for me.
College gave me the opportunity to meet the man I married (in a linguistics class) and good friends, some of whom are still active friends. College put me in an environment where concerts, theater, lectures, and conversations in hallways and the coffeehouse and dining halls ranged from the fascinating to the mundane.My personal college experience was a social and intellectual bonanza. My parents and their lifelong friends also met in college, reaping social as well as professional benefits. But my children did not have quite the same experience.
Some people try to replicate the college social and intellectual ideal by moving to cities. Others hope that online activity will provide social connections and intellectual stimulation. But U.S. college these days, as the song notes, is now more often a gateway to debt and a genuflection to credentiaism. I feel we have lost something that was special, but when I look back, I realize the specialness was rationed out., and I have no idea how to mix social and intellectual pursuits into a stimulating environment outside a college town.