Our superficial scholars

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/21/AR2011012104554_pf.html

by sajid • 15 years ago

76 35 15 years ago

archgoon• 15 years ago

Sounds more like a problem with their selection process than anything else. Rhodes scholars are by definition not representative of students. It may well be the case that people who want to be Rhodes scholars are no longer the people the committee wants to be Rhode scholars.

iqster• 15 years ago

Good point. I applied in Canada about a decade ago. I do remember they mentioned at that time that they had toned down the "excellence in athletics" category. They now merely required participation and demonstration of sportsman spirit. This struck me as quite a reasonable decision on the part of the selection committee.

On a separate note, the Rhodes selection process is extremely competitive. While I didn't get in, I felt that just the process of applying forced me to self-reflect on my capabilities and accomplishments. I ended up making some positive changes in my life as a direct result of what I learned during the application process - sounds like the YC application eh? Heh Heh!

colincsl• 15 years ago

I totally agree and think that even if these awards aren't going to the "right" people it is still a worthwhile process for all of those involved. I was nominated by my school for the Goldwater scholarship and also applied to the NSF Graduate Fellowship and found both to be incredibly worthwhile. It wasn't until I wrote (and rewrote) my Goldwater essays that I had a good grasp of what I really wanted to do with life. Sure, at that point I had been doing 'research' and other creative activities, but I had never forced myself to really self-reflect and figure out how my interests come together.

atlantic• 15 years ago

If this is a real problem, I would suggest reintroducing the study of philosophy right across the board. It deals precisely with all the "meta-questions" that fall outside the scope of established disciplines.

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

Some countries (such as Norway) do precisely this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examen_philosophicum

auganov2• 15 years ago

As for the article itself I have similar thoughts to archgoon that it's more likely that their sample has changed rather than the actual population of students.

I find it funny how whenever some problem with education is brought up there's so many people suggesting simple solutions like changes to the curriculum across the board.

Each and every curriculum/educational philosophy WILL have it's problems and WILL tend to produce a certain kind of a person. Nobody denies that there's so many other countries that have better results in certain fields on standardized tests as compared to the US. But not only are those tests poor in measuring proficiency in a single subject[1], they are a complete joke if you want to use that to reflect on the education as a whole.

Unified curriculum is the problem itself. Although it's not very obvious as of right now I think we'll see a HUGE decentralization in how the education works. I won't be surprised if in 20-30 years the whole primary-middle-high school system will get redefined.

You can also rant about the universities in the US, but they are still the best in the world. There are no more than 5-10 universities in other countries that could compare to the top US institutions.

Generally speaking I think it's a nonsense to compare average quality institutions at all. It's a contest of who is least bad. Compare the best. It's not hard for Europeans to have slightly better public education if private is very limited in it's operations.

[1]The problem with international standardized tests is that the way subjects are thought differs between each country. And it happens that US schools usually have a very different approach to teaching subjects like math as compared to the rest of the world. I can easily see how those tests are skewed against the US.

ez772• 15 years ago

You can also rant about the universities in the US, but they are still the best in the world.

I think you would have to elaborate on that quite a bit to make it somewhat true. Lots of foreign students, including some of the brightest, get their higher-education degrees in the US, mainly at the graduate level. That happens because a good chunk of the brightest professionals are professors at these institutions, and the research resources are plentiful. Clearly the research experience for top-level students is outstanding, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In this pretty narrow sense US universities are the best in the world.

But… West Civ I? English Comp? College Algebra, including topics such as completing the square? Calc I derivative shortcuts? For the love of Pete, compare this kind of curriculum with what is taught in Europe, Asia and (gasp) Latin America. You will find that your average college graduate knows much less than elsewhere. Granted, the best may be future Nobel laureates, but that doesn’t hide the fact that undergraduate college education in the US has become a years-long remedial program for a disastrous K12 plan.

krschultz• 15 years ago

That's a stretch. Of the 40-50 kids I knew in college, not a single one took College Alegbra. Not to mention that my freshman English Comp classes was one of the most intense, interesting, useful classes I took in college. If some are guilty of comparing the tippy top of the US college system to the rest of the world's average, you are certainly guilty of comparing the bottom of the bottom to the world average.

auganov2• 15 years ago

You are completely right, US is best in the world in that narrow sense and this is what matters for me.

You see until high school I was studying in my home country, an European one, next I went to high school for a year in the US which had a large population of Asian foreign exchange students. Then I did a year of non-degree studying in China (not very relevant to the discussion) and now I study on-line following a British curriculum.

I saw a LOT of Asians and Europeans struggle with the curriculum in the US. Language issues? For some, yes, but I knew a lot of people that struggled simply because they were not used to the way Americans are thought. I had friends complain that they were doing great back in their home country and now were just average. (I virtually only had foreign-Asian friends, foreigners didn't really hang with the Americans which is another story). And some courses were indeed simply more rigorous in the US than back home.

What an average student in any country learns is how to beat the game, that's what school almost everywhere is about, not about deep understanding. That's why it's enough to change a few variables in the game and those students that supposedly followed a more rigorous course find themselves struggling like my friends in the US. The same thing happens at average universities. You just have to beat the game to get the diploma. Europeans on average have to beat a slightly more difficult game, big deal.

Do you really think that there is a significant difference? I took AP calc and then “Maths 1” at that British school. The most notable difference? No calculator on the test. Of course, they do throw far more rigorous explanations at you, use fancier vocabulary, give you more trick questions, but to pass the test you don’t have to be much better, you just have to adjust to the game. European students will be as clueless about the simple Epsilon-Delta Proof as American are. They simply “cram” in a little more to students overseas. (cram as in learn without understanding rather than study hard). I don’t really see an European student being somehow smarter than you’re average American one. Trust me, after travelling a lot, getting to know many cultures average people seem average everywhere and extraordinary people are always extraordinary[1]. US happens to produce and draw most of those.

I don't know, I might be going too far with that argument, but I strongly believe that those few top-class people which will be leaders in their respective fields will contribute to the economy far more than having each average person be a little better. As in it's better to have 1000 stupid soldiers led by a genius than 1000 slightly less stupid soldiers led by a moderately intelligent person.

I'm not saying there's nothing to fix, there's tons of fixing to be done in every single country. I just think that as a whole country the US should focus on sustaining that comparative advantage in higher education, as long as it has that US is the world-wide leader of education, at least for me.

[1] For some people it takes a lot of time to get to that stage, some might outright disagree with me. Most people have trouble filtering cultural differences and often see falsely assume that people in a certain culture are just “better”, because they use their native benchmarks to judge people elsewhere and the other way around.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

>For most of the past 20 years I have served on selection committees for the Rhodes Scholarship.

...

>The writer represented New Mexico in the U.S. House from 1997 to 2008.

seems to me that the author wasn't just an innocent bystander, instead she was too active and powerful participant in shaping the society and its education to blame the end result on anybody else without acknowledging her share of responsibility.

ericd• 15 years ago

It's a bit of a stretch to say that a congresswoman is responsible for the narrowing of university curricula, as if they're central planners.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

universities respond to society demands. She has been definitely an important player in shaping the society to demand (incl. reward higher) the highly specialized professionals with impaired critical thinking/initiative/leadership abilities. Cushy corporate or academia job vs. "not a team player" - who is to blame for such a choice posed before the youngsters? Universities?

Even at the micro scale - her "blame the others" leadership approach clearly shows a leader who isn't tolerable to critical thinker and leader types even in her own staff.

Emore• 15 years ago

Perhaps only tangentially relevant, but as they snarkily say here in Oxford: When you graduate as a Rhodes scholar you know your best days are behind you.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

Philosophy, rhetoric, and history.

By "philosophy" I mean a broad meta study of the field: the philosophy of science, epistemology, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of language, etc. By "rhetoric" I mean both the construction and execution of persuasive argument in printed and verbal form. Everybody should have a few folks from history that they are intimately familiar with and feel that they faced similar problem in life.

Philosophy can give you a broad view of what is knowable, what is not, and how folks move from not being able to to know, to being able to know, to actually knowing -- a key component of both the advancement of science and the development of an individual. Topics like stoicism and existentialism, if presented appropriately, can provide a backstop of beliefs for any student, regardless of their religious or moral convictions. Rhetoric helps you spot when folks are trying to manipulate you, and it challenges you form coherent arguments yourself about things outside of one small area. History gives you context: every generation feels as if it is here at some kind of special and unique spot. Knowing that humans 500 years ago were the same model as the ones you meet on the street helps put your opinions and interests in context.

Unfortunately, if I hadn't defined what I mean by those three subjects my recommendation would be pointless. You can go to any college today and take courses under those headings and not receive those benefits -- perhaps this is because those who design the courses view them as introductions to a deep dive on a topic and not practical, broad, benefits-based interventions with young minds. I don't know. I understand that my advice is easier said than done: how would you introduce history to a large group of students in such a way that each student found their own historical figures that they would benefit from absorbing? How do you take topics that the students might find popular and feel-good and give them the ability to tear apart the fluff around them and find the good stuff underneath? Having a professor stand up and say something like "this is my opinion on X. I may be wrong, but we'll never know unless I give you the skills to identify and refute faulty argument" just isn't happening. Instead, classrooms are hierarchical affairs.

Instead of this discovery process, students get pre-canned little happy meals. Instead of taking charge of forming their own identity across multiple disciplines that they can describe and defend, we get these examples of kids simply being out of their depth once you stray just a little bit from their established path. An education that is both broad and self-determined is not an easy problem to solve. The system is not built for it.

Roritharr• 15 years ago

>Instead of this discovery process, students get pre-canned little happy meals.

This really seems to me the biggest problem of academia as far as i've experienced it.

In the first 8 years of school i've been very bad at school so at first it seemed impossible to me that i ever could become a student.

Therefor i just dreamed about it,taking the verb "to study" very seriously, imagining that i would be able to pull all the knowledge that i wanted just from the university shelves of knowledge and be able to built myself and my knowledge in that way. I thought i'd be working on cool projects which were driven by my ideas.

Instead when after really working hard on my discipline and other things to be able to go to university i find that all i can get, at least in germany, seems to be prepackaged happy meals. I can go and make my bachelor or masters in computer science without ever having built something that was my truly my idea. Of course i can do all those wonderful things i dreamed about when i was younger too, but i won't find many people that would help me do it and i would have a hard time doing it because i've not that much time on my hands.

To get through all those tests, all those university homework assignments(when i first heard of that i literally went "wtf") and still built up a parallel career, so you have something to show off on your CV other than "went to university", takes so much time that it seems going to university and doing the courses like they are laid out to me stands in the way of the kind of education i hoped to gain from going to university.

I'd like a university that takes "to study" seriously, allowing students to look at problems, find solutions from all angles and encouraging them to self-educate in a healthy way.

daoudc• 15 years ago

This is similar to what I was once told is the foundation of the Islamic sciences: logic, linguistics and rhetoric. These are essentially the "meta" sciences, which teach you how to think.

goombastic2• 15 years ago

I studied in India. I didn't have any teachers for 4 years while i was passing school in the 80's. We had temps who would come and leave in a week since we stayed way out in a remote place while my dad worked on some government projects. Till this day, I haven't forgotten how I studied, the discovery process was the only thing that held my interest, I got a couple of US university level books and solved through them. The discovery process made an autodidact for life, but the rewards went to the people with happy meals anyway. However, till this day, I am able to reconfigure my skills to meet the need of the hour. I am a quick hack away from happiness.

ippisl• 15 years ago

Interesting . did it have the same impact to the rest of your class ?

mentat• 15 years ago

The problem starts often with professors who don't want to be teaching, or at least not teaching to anyone who disagrees with them. I was quite frustrated at the tendency to try to pigeon hole my position and put a nice label on it instead of actually grappling with my arguments. (And this is at an Ivy League graduate school.)

I'd say less than half of the professors were willing to really engage in anything that wasn't squarely in the specialty. Also they seemed actively hostile to cross-subject questions like post-modernism's impact on self understanding in a psychology class discussion. That disdain of learning about multiple subjects is modeled by their undergraduate and graduate students. It sets boundaries in their thinking and in their willingness to discuss, when they see others mocked. This overall trend is the majority of the reason I decided not to continue past a master's.

candre7172• 15 years ago

Mentat, to your second point, I have had the same experience.

Even in classes and curricula that are supposed to be interdisciplinary, the boundaries are still rigid and the connections superficial. That compromises learning. And, I think one of the reasons for that is professors are afraid of being wrong and they're not trained to travel outside their domain of expertise. The ivory tower thrives on specialization. If the gatekeepers are not bold enough to cross-pollinate ideas, students are disadvantaged.

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

Mmmm... pretty sure Adam Smith was on the money when he talked about division of labour and increasing specialisation, in 1776.

dorian-graph• 15 years ago

Would a returning of a type of 'old' classical education specifically in primary and high school help?

Daniel_Newby2• 15 years ago

Where would you get the teachers? The smart women who made the old system run these days work in commerce in industry.

kongqiu• 15 years ago

Excellent point; I hadn't thought of that, and don't recall hearing it discussed in any of the "educational quality" debates.

wisty• 15 years ago

I think that the problem is students are being taught "how to think", not "what to think".

Back in the bad old days, students crammed lots of facts in into their heads. That gave them an understanding of how the world worked, how it has worked in the past, and a solid platform for thinking about how it might change.

Now, students learn "how to think". Of course, nobody can teach that. So instead, they learn how to churn out 3 point essays, pretend to examine both sides of the argument, then to declare that, on the balance, the side which they gave the most air time to has more points in favor of it.

sili• 15 years ago

I think students should be tought "how to think" and not "what to think". Teaching what to think is, to some extent, brainwashing. The problem, as you pointed out, is that institutions try to teach "how to think" but fail at it.

rmah• 15 years ago

IMO, one cannot think without a base of knowledge and facts. To attempt to think without knowledge leads to erroneous conclusions base on what feels good. The profound level of ignorance that I see sometimes in the so-called educated young people of today is bad. Worse, they often don't even realize they're ignorant. And worst of all, some even revel in it and proclaim the knowledge is irrelevant.

goldmab• 15 years ago

"We interview the best graduates of U.S. universities..."

The best at what?

adestefan• 15 years ago

This is exactly the same thing the Mike Rowe article discussed, but on the other end of the spectrum. Rowe talked about how there is a lack of vocational training, while Wilson is arguing there is a lack of philosophical training. The problem stems from teaching everyone the same curriculum in US high schools. It's time the US realizes that not everyone should be learning the same things after their years of elementary/primary school.

candre7172• 15 years ago

>>>This narrowing has resulted in a curiously unprepared and superficial pre-professionalism.

I don't take these kinds of essays seriously anymore.

Rhodes scholars are chosen primarily because of their accomplishments, as a result of being widely successful in a field. What the author criticizes - single-mindedness - is what catapulted these bright stars in the first place, because people, like the author, in positions of authority and influence said, "Brilliant. She is a Physics Olympiad winner or he is a nationally recognized pianist. Let us reward them."

The same authors and leaders that lament the direction the nation's youths are taken have their hand in creating the very system they criticize. Why not look inward for the changes they can make rather than putting the microscope on other people? In the case of the Rhodes committee, they shouldn't even look at grades anymore. There are other ways to judge creativity and scholarship. Heavy grade focus already pushes students at top colleges into a narrow-minded pursuit of "excellence." And, yet Rhodes and other prestigious institutions reaffirm that idea. This is just an example - a rough one at that - but I hope it communicates the point. Don't pay lip service if you aren't willing to be part of the solution (and I mean taking action).

kenjackson• 15 years ago

This is just a right-wing attack on education, disguised as genuine critique. Heather Wilson is a right-wing politician who is making false complaints. She's running for the Senate in 2012.

Lets take this line, "An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president's health-care bill but doesn't really know why."

Really? I find that amazingly hard to believe. What I suspect is far closer to the truth is that this person supports the health-care bill for a reason that isn't consistent with why Heather wants to repeal it. Here's a quote from one of her letters requesting donations for her Senate run:

"Repeal and replace Obamacare with market-based reforms that are much more effective at controlling the skyrocketing cost of healthcare without compromising choice and quality;"

While its important to judge writing on its merits, outside of appeals to authority. It is important to know the history and motivation of the author. Especially when the piece really has no data, and is just subjective anecdotal conjecture.

jriddycuz• 15 years ago

The kind of people who are inclined to think across disciplines are the same kind of people that are inclined to look at education an think, "this is bullshit." They may not know why they think this, because it takes some real experience and perspective to understand why, but they can smell the stench from miles away. Training a mind to see patterns across disparate fields also gives it an intuition for seeing what is fundamental, central and essential to a thing. This intuition leads to the realization that grades, awards, scholarships and the like are but the mere artifice of achievement.

The kind of person that deserves a Rhodes scholarship according to the author's definition of what one should be is the kind of person who would be unlikely to play the game necessary to qualify for one.

Our superficial scholars

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