We had a dentist once in Hawaii by the name of Dr. Au. Seriously. We thought it was hilarious.
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Theoretically, the main skill one is supposed to get by any kind of education is how to think. Higher education is supposed to give you even more practice thinking. To look at college as a kind of vocational school is misguided, I think.
But I would hope that there will always be people spending four years learning about poetry, and even Vietnamese poetry, because without those people, life would be truly dull. The real problem is the lack of jobs, the unwillingness of companies to train their new workers, and the horrible way we fund education in this country. It’s not that we aren’t training people to work. People who have been trained to think and trained to learn new things can do a lot of different complex jobs.
That said, I went to engineering school, so what do I know.
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What you did there. I see it.
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I had a neighbor named Dr. Kwak.
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I hear you, but my problem is that when you give education such admirable-sounding-yet-vague reasons as ‘to learn to think’ or ‘become rounded human being’ you incentivize an education system which produces the vivid sense of having been educated rather than actually educating. Skills (and by this I in no way mean marketable skills) are more rigorous. You either understand the rhyming rules in lục bát or you don’t. You either speak Vietnamese, or you don’t.
Oh, I both personally wish that there can always be such people and I think them existing is a social good. When I say ‘skill’ I don’t mean one that’s useful in any sort of economic work. I just think that when you learn something it should come with a skill and if that skill isn’t marketable, well so much worse for the market.
A lot of things which I value, the market values poorly (and vice versa). It’s one of many reasons I’m not enamored with it.
Empirically speaking, quite a bit. 
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“Say my name!” 
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You know, two minutes before I got your reply, I realized that “learning to think” is kind of a vague term, just like you said! Here’s what I think I mean by it: the ability to take in information, analyze it against a set of rules of some sort, and come to some sort of conclusions – what does the information mean in summary form. It’s the ability to then decide what is the best thing to do in response, in summary form, followed by development of a more detailed something or other in response, and then performing whatever it is that’s needed (or directing others to do what’s needed). I imagine this covers a lot of what business does, but I recognize it’s just back-of-the-envelope mind-doodling on my part here.
Thus we learn (hopefully) to do this kind of stuff in school, in pre-college to some extent, and then in college to a more refined degree, regardless of the topic. It should be applicable to lots of things.
Now the other part of it of course, is learning the rules of the particular activity. In some cases, that’s a lot of what we learn in college – say, geochemistry or law. But in other cases, the rule part is specific to a business, and has to be learned on the job. Of course companies used to be a lot more willing to do that. Nowadays you need 10 years experience or your resume is thrown in the trash.
In such a complicated technical society, of course, learning the rules takes so long that a lot of a college education is devoted to that. So you get the problem of people who have learned all the rules of a particular field, but aren’t as good at problem solving, except in a very controlled environment (i.e., homework, tests, papers, etc.). I recall an assignment in an senior level engineering class – we were given a paper published in a journal relevant to the class, and asked to analyze it and write a page long report. I read the paper, the reread it, confused. Wait a minute. The authors seemed to be arguing in circles! It was a crappy paper, but written in such a way that it was hard to tell. Well, I wrote a scathing review, and did pretty well. Afterwards, the professor said that there were a lot of students who got A’s on tests, but did really poorly on the review. It really struck me that independent thinking and analyzing was REALLY important.
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Indeed it is a vague term, but I didn’t even think that you used it vaguely. I suspected that you had a pretty good idea what you meant by it (and I was evidently right to do so) but the problem isn’t really you, it’s that in the discourse in general ‘learning to think’ and ‘critical thinking’ are what Claude Levi-Strauss calls floating signifiers[1]—a hollow term without a meaning, a pointer to nothing. Except, of course, in the context of a mind, you can’t easily have those, so everyone who runs into them in the, ah, ambient discourse comes up with a meaning of their own, and since the phrasing of these particular signifiers is loaded with positive affect, everyone comes up with something that pleases them, and so is in favor of this this thing which doesn’t exist.
[1] Do be warned: my philosophy education is second-hand. I’m in computer science and applied mathematics, professionally.
Bit of an esoteric way, really, of saying: Learning to think, as you understand it, is a perfectly laudable and necessary goal for education. However, there isn’t a robust consensus on what ‘learning to think’ means in general and behind this vagueness you can hide a lot of shoddy practices.
I agree with you, I really do, I just wish that we could find a way to teach highly abstract courses while retaining the ability that we weren’t just producing the vivid impression that education is happening.
It’s customary to think that ‘soft sciences’ and humanities are easy to study—especially with the sort of person (both of us I suspect) who’ve had a couple of dozen of various mathematics courses over the years—but I don’t think that. I think learning, properly learning, most fields of scholarship is, in truth, quite hard. It’s just that teaching physics, say, is comparatively easy and teaching philosophy is, comparatively, very hard. And the adoption of conveniently vague language hides that, in the face of a hard problem, some people chose to fake it.
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They even have a special remedial school for “academically challenged” rich kids, Brown University.
Syncs up with Trump’s 'Keep America Ignorant of Facts" campaign.
Perhaps we should call it “problem solving” rather than “thinking.” I guess that’s what I mean when I say it. I hadn’t heard of floating signifiers, so thanks for pointing that out. Sometimes I think there are people out there whose job it is to take the definition of a familiar word (say “family”) and turn it into something else (white traditional Christian family where husband works and wife stays home tending kids). (I call that word the “f-word,” btw, ha ha). Then when a nontraditional family comes along, the word is thrown back at them like “not a traditional family!” Yuck.
I guess I like to pretend there are no shoddy practices in academia, but of course there are. It’s just that I think they pale compared to the shoddy practices in business and government. Why pick on academia, where some professor is sleeping at the job, when there is so much blatant corruption (with far greater negative consequences) going on elsewhere. But I guess if you’ve voted for those people, you want to believe they’re OK!
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A good idea, I’d think. “The student must be capable of solving a problem they have never encountered before using information they must acquire on their own.” I wish I could come up with a way of testing for that that scales.
You are welcome. I’m glad to have given you a new thing to think about. Just do be warned that I might be wrong. I acquired my philosophy education in a very piecemeal fashion and occasionally worrying gaps emerge.
Well, sometimes it’s a question of a fundamental disagreement on what the word means and the lack of anything resembling a consensus (just try to have people agree on what ‘the west’ means), and sometimes it’s a word with a powerful affect than many groups try to claim as their own or to foist on their opponents, just like the Family Values crowd trying to claim ‘family’ or a pair of people on the Internet going “No, you are the Nazi!” a each other.
Oh, easy, I pick on academia because I work in academia. It’s all in my own back yard and I can do things from time to time to fix it. I can’t really affect the horrible things happening in business and, as my various trips to the voting booth (the futility hutch, as I like to think of it) have shown me, I can’t really do much about politics either.
Also, Academia is important insofar as a properly educated populace is key to solving the business and politics problems, too.
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I maintain that will ever beat the neurologist I went to some twentyfive years ago: Dr. Frankenstein.
Hear, hear. I guess this is the main reason why the republicans don’t like it.
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A professor I met called the process of college education “turning information and data into knowledge, and hopefully acquiring wisdom when you realize information and data are two different things.”
A good liberal arts education would teach the synthesis of knowledge on a world level.
A good engineering school would teach it on a physical level.
A good vocational school would teach it on a focused level.
No matter the kind of education, we should be teaching kids, not just training them to take tests successfully.
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That’s very good. I put another level on top of data, information, knowledge: understanding. Knowing a thing is not the same as understanding a thing, and to accomplish anything meaningful or useful with that knowledge you need to be able to answer not just the “what” questions but also the “how” and “why” questions, to explain and interpret and discuss the causes and effects of a thing rather than merely recite facts about it.
That’s an excellent example of what “do anything meaningful” should include. That hits all the higher-level Bloom’s stuff right there: analyze the problem, synthesize disparate information into new, relevant understanding, apply that understanding to create and implement a novel solution.
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Google salaries are deceptively high. Unless your parents already own a house in Sunnyvale or something.
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And are often held in higher esteem than those of us with ACTUAL doctorates!
Which is exactly why we need to turn colleges into glorified trade schools! /s
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It’s probably more that imported talent is cheaper rather than it doesn’t exist here.
