Gripes with Formal Education

[aejones]

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What I intended, and perhaps what I should be stipulated, is that we require it to be of some great worth in society. Without a High school education, the opportunities are limited.

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Do you really have a gripe with losers who can't even keep from failing out of high school not getting high-powered jobs and being well-respected?

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Hell no. I was simply responding to the fact that you pointed out that we don't already require high school diplomas.

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in first year uni i wrote a long rant at the end of one exam about the pointlessness of everything we'd learnt for the semester, even though i was doing well in the subject I received just a pass, I realised afterwards it's not worth the pain of worrying it's uni man relax go out drinking do the minimum ammount of work and enjoy yourself.

[Morganballer]

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You'd be surprised what you retain. You're also learning how to cram; an important skill. You're learning how to extract the core facts from a curriculum's, a skill that will serve you well later in life

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Cramming is absolutly the worst way to retain information. Your memory retains what you learn by repetition as well as the amount of interest you have in the subject. "Cramming" information will stay in your short term memory and if you do not recall that information again sometime soon it will be lost. I remember learning about proofs in high school and im pretty sure I got an A on the test for it. But if you ask me to do one right now I would have no clue because i had no interest in it and I havent used that information since the test. So it goes to show that my test grade was basically meaningless because it does not show my mastery of the subject but that I can recall information from the night before.

[ConstantineX]

Like WordWhiz said, most higher education is a signaling device. It is pretty emphatically not about the rote learning. And I think college serves one more increasingly important role; just exposure to other people, other ideas, other places. Colleges now push study abroad and tout diversity statistics as they believe they provide a pretty unique service. Of course, its subsidization is increasingly making a bachelor's less precise one, but it does let employers know you have a few skills.

For the many people worrying about what college they get into though, it vastly doesn't matter for them except for a handful, 20 national universities, maybe 5 small colleges. The competition is just getting crazier because of the cachet some of those degrees bring means that one often needs to be truly brilliant, not just hardworking or "intelligent" to break into the upper echelons.

Anecdotally I've heard the MBA degree is being marginalized. How true is this?

[captZEEbo]

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You'd be surprised what you retain. You're also learning how to cram; an important skill. You're learning how to extract the core facts from a curriculum's, a skill that will serve you well later in life

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Cramming is absolutly the worst way to retain information. Your memory retains what you learn by repetition as well as the amount of interest you have in the subject. "Cramming" information will stay in your short term memory and if you do not recall that information again sometime soon it will be lost. I remember learning about proofs in high school and im pretty sure I got an A on the test for it. But if you ask me to do one right now I would have no clue because i had no interest in it and I havent used that information since the test. So it goes to show that my test grade was basically meaningless because it does not show my mastery of the subject but that I can recall information from the night before.

[/ QUOTE ]who says we want to retain information? We just want to pass.

[Pudge714]

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haha welcome to everyone's opinions [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

However, since people aren't motivated enough to learn things on their own, grades are used to make sure there's some base level of competency. College is basically just a training ground to make sure you can handle deadlines and learn some basic new material for subjects you might not have known much about before and that you can commit to something.

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I agree completely with this.
I have a friend who dropped out of school (a non poker friend) and he says stuff like "I can learn all the stuff you are learning on the internet." He is obviously pretty set in his ways and isn't going to change his mind, but he doesn't realize there is clear value in getting a degree and competing with others, being motivated by external factors and having to live up to some sort of an objective standard are really important in life.

[Morganballer]

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You'd be surprised what you retain. You're also learning how to cram; an important skill. You're learning how to extract the core facts from a curriculum's, a skill that will serve you well later in life

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Cramming is absolutly the worst way to retain information. Your memory retains what you learn by repetition as well as the amount of interest you have in the subject. "Cramming" information will stay in your short term memory and if you do not recall that information again sometime soon it will be lost. I remember learning about proofs in high school and im pretty sure I got an A on the test for it. But if you ask me to do one right now I would have no clue because i had no interest in it and I havent used that information since the test. So it goes to show that my test grade was basically meaningless because it does not show my mastery of the subject but that I can recall information from the night before.

[/ QUOTE ]who says we want to retain information? We just want to pass.

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That is the problem with the education system is that we put the focus on only passing. That is why our country is falling so far behind other countries in terms of math and science because we dont have anyone knowing anything simply passing the tests and losing when they go against someone from another country that truly knows what they are talking about. Retaining information is how one gets truly successful. If you don't retain anything you read in a poker book that information is useless to you except the day you read it.

[daryn]

i basically agree with everything you've said, grades, people that shouldn't be there, etc.

some people just should not be in college. education is key, sure.. but a large percentage, maybe more than half of people who are in college should not be there. they just go because they think they should. maybe they do need to though, maybe it's the system of hiring that's f'ed up and forces them to be there.

[yad]

I am drunk right now so this may not make sense.

but basically although you think you are learning about X, you are not. you are learning habits of mind, perspectives on how to understand the world, and ways of analyzing problems.

there are a variety of different perspectives on this, and the different academic departments are at least loosely organized around the different main such perspectives.

so when you take a variety of classes, you're getting exposure to all of these.

the fact that you are ostensibly learning about X is besides the point.

obviously some schools and professors are much better at conveying the real education than others, and most are relatively lousy. but so it is, teaching well is harder than learning well.

grading is a whole other matter. it is a lot of BS in most cases obviously. but some economists really hit hte nail on the head on this in some recent papers. basically there are a ton of people who employers can hire, and the difficult thing for them is to figure out who is best. so any way for them to evaluate this is hugely valuable, even if it is kinda lousy, because no better method exists. oh well.

when you say that you just want to learn about poker -- that's understandable, and maybe "efficient", but it leaves the vast majority of your potential intelligence untrained and probably untapped. educational systems in poorer countries are typically much more focused on what a person will wind up doing in the rest of their life -- indian electrical engineers know only about electrical engineering. they can't afford the broader education, and this is more efficient. but you are fortunate to live in a country which can afford to give you a broader understanding of the world, even though it's inefficient if you wind up spending your life playing poker. take advantage of this.

[adsman]

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i basically agree with everything you've said, grades, people that shouldn't be there, etc.

some people just should not be in college. education is key, sure.. but a large percentage, maybe more than half of people who are in college should not be there. they just go because they think they should. maybe they do need to though, maybe it's the system of hiring that's f'ed up and forces them to be there.

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Two things have happened in the last twenty years since university numbers have more than doubled, (this is for Australia, don't know if it translates for you guys in the States). The value of a degree has gone down. Not specific degree's like medicine etc, but your general business, arts, etc. The standard of education and teaching has dropped. Whereas before universities were seen as centers of knowledge, now they are seen primarily as a business.

On a side note, a very good friend of mine is doing a degree of construction management in England. Apparently it is the best university for this degree. I had him over to visit a few weeks ago and he was railing about the incompetant way the course is structured, (he is working full time in construction management while doing the degree), the hypocrisy in the fact that they were told at the beginning to use their brains and not repeat rote from textbooks, and then he got penalised for doing just that, and the fact that the course teaches methods that were formed in 1666 when London burnt down and which have little to no bearing on todays reality.

All good points I'm sure, but I then asked him why he was doing this degree. The answer was that it was required if he wanted to step up in his field. I then told him to just put his head down and do the degree, don't try and change the world, don't rail against the system. Get in, put up with the nonsense, get your degree and get back to the real world.