Cooper42 wrote:It can vary from Uni to Uni, but in the UK, by and large, Universities expect a large amount of self-learning. We have no equivalent of community colleges for post-18 education.
In my experience, Universities do a poor job of preparing students for this. Right through to the final year many still want to be "taught stuff"; they want to know what they need to know and be told what they need to know so they can parrot it back. The idea that the teaching is there to help them develop the abilities to criticvally appraise this "stuff" they should be learning for themselves never sinks in for many of them.
Independent thought, I've come to realise, is surprisingly thin on the ground.
I agree entirely with the above quoted material. In the US, I would blame the high schools. In general, high school teachers evaluated (at least in part) by how well their students do on standardized tests. Hence there is a perverse incentive---teachers are rewarded for spoonfeeding students and discouraging independent thought. High school teachers are not rewarded for teaching students to think critically, so they tend to neglect that part of their duty. This is, by the way, why I stopped teaching high school. What this means is that students arrive at university unprepared for the rigors of academia. They expect that they will be spoonfed knowledge by teachers.
I have seen a couple of programs that are trying to fix this. My sister went to a high school in a small town in Arizona where the principal of the high school has had the bright idea of scaling back the spoonfeeding slowly. Freshman enter the high school as (essentially) children who are held up (academically) by their teachers. Slowly, they are given less and less support (more reading to do outside of class, less time in class to get work done, more rigorous assignments, and so on). The scheme is new, but it is a good idea, and may ultimately be helpful.
The other program that seems to be helping is here at UNR: certain groups of freshman are given intensive advisement, required to attend tutoring, and given a great deal of additional support and/or spoonfeeding. The help gets pulled back through the freshman year, so that by the time they are sophomores, they can (hopefully) think for themselves. The students in this program seem to be doing very well. The only issue is that the only students who are eligible come from Title I high schools (basically, schools where most of the students are low income). I would love to see this program expanded greatly.
Xocrates wrote:The first is that despite focus on individual work, you're still not fully allowed to focus on your interests, meaning that many of the courses you have to go through are irrelevant to your interests and of little to no use outside of college. I believe I've said it here before that 90% of what you're "taught" is useless to 90% of the students.
I would argue that this is a good thing, at least at the undergraduate level. It is part of a liberal education, and part of building up well-rounded, critically thinking individuals. It is good to be required to learn things and engage with ideas that are beyond a narrow focus. This is, in essence, the foundation of the Western tradition of academia.
xander
