Science Forums 2

[lemit]

I forgot to mention in my earlier post the value formal education has of introducing students to subjects they wouldn't otherwise explore and wouldn't otherwise discover a love of.

I also dropped out of college, Alexander. Well, really it was kind of a plea bargain. I could drop out, be expelled due to grades, or be expelled for disciplinary reasons. But after a year, I went back and finished my degree and even worked on a master's. (The master's was in education with a focus on educational history, philosophy, and theory.)

Years later, I was asked at various times to go to library school, medical school, and law school. I declined, but I did work in higher education for 25 years, sat on advisory councils, developed curriculae, approved grants, and researched various administrative projects.

I tell all that partly because I've been writing as if I had intuited a bunch of educational theory. I've had both formal and (much better) informal training in education. The main thing I've learned is how little I know, because education (like medicine) should be adjusted for the individual needs of individual people. Too much of the time it isn't.

So, I can pretty much figure out what's wrong with education. It's fixing it that eludes me.

The failure of the education to meet my individual needs made school more difficult for me, but the main reason I failed in school was that I was lazy. I learned early on how to write, how to give the answers the teachers wanted, and how that would absolve me of any responsibility to learn. Eventually, like you, Alexander--and like James Thurber--I just stopped going to class. I went to the library and read things I wanted to read (like Thurber, Benchley, Twain, Will Cuppy, and Stephen Leacock, who proved useful later in studying educational theory) and avoided people and responsibility.

I'd love to be able to go back and change that but I can't. What I can do is to tell students to work at learning regardless of the educational environment in which they find themselves. That is what they will need to do the rest of their lives.

Of course, anybody who participates in Hypography instead of a more gossipy site has already started that process of individual learning.

--lemit