> Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago.[...] Yet, [sic] the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty.
If your statement is correct, you wouldn’t know it from reading the schlock that students pass off as papers even at “world class” colleges. Doing all the reading and writing clear, solid analyzes of difficult material is just as hard as it ever was. Harder, even, because there are a whole bunch of distractions that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students
Good god. High school is a stultifying swamp of concentrated terribleness. The whole point of college is that treating people like adults leads potentially to adult-quality thinking. Teaching college like high school completely undermines the purpose: raising a new generation of capable scholars and citizens.
> There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline [in liberal arts subjects].
Just because none of the liberal arts majors you took the trouble to really engage with actually took their studies seriously doesn’t mean that serious liberal arts students don’t exist.
* * *
Overall, I think you’ve confused the difficulty of making good grades in a college program with the difficulty of doing the assigned work. If you measure your growth by how many A’s you can pull, education is always going to be intellectually unsatisfying for you.
I don't refer to grades anywhere, that's a projection.
I'm addressing the day to day experience of most students. Most students spend very little time actively learning, and the work they do is diluted by technology.
Large universities aren't treating students like adults- they aren't engaging them at all.
I'm not recommending a high school format curriculum, but the trope that students spend two hours reading/working for each hour in lecture is used as a de facto standard explaining why students are receiving a full-time education. In practice this premise is false.
Comments
> Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago.[...] Yet, [sic] the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty.
If your statement is correct, you wouldn’t know it from reading the schlock that students pass off as papers even at “world class” colleges. Doing all the reading and writing clear, solid analyzes of difficult material is just as hard as it ever was. Harder, even, because there are a whole bunch of distractions that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students
Good god. High school is a stultifying swamp of concentrated terribleness. The whole point of college is that treating people like adults leads potentially to adult-quality thinking. Teaching college like high school completely undermines the purpose: raising a new generation of capable scholars and citizens.
> There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline [in liberal arts subjects].
Just because none of the liberal arts majors you took the trouble to really engage with actually took their studies seriously doesn’t mean that serious liberal arts students don’t exist.
* * *
Overall, I think you’ve confused the difficulty of making good grades in a college program with the difficulty of doing the assigned work. If you measure your growth by how many A’s you can pull, education is always going to be intellectually unsatisfying for you.
I don't refer to grades anywhere, that's a projection.
I'm addressing the day to day experience of most students. Most students spend very little time actively learning, and the work they do is diluted by technology.
Large universities aren't treating students like adults- they aren't engaging them at all.
I'm not recommending a high school format curriculum, but the trope that students spend two hours reading/working for each hour in lecture is used as a de facto standard explaining why students are receiving a full-time education. In practice this premise is false.