Left back

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1. jfarmerNov 2012
   Well, first, this

   "I see universities struggling to be everything to everyone"

   was exactly my point. :D

   For some people, education is about "jobs," for others its about other things, and as a result universities have dozens of conflicting mandates.

   I was rejecting the idea that we've somehow converged, as a society or whatever, on a consensus that education = jobs. That was not my educational experience. That's not the educational experience of people who attended an Ivy League school.

   But I grew up poor and rural, so I know the flip side...viscerally. I meant to draw attention to exactly your point, that we've set up a situation where universities are directionless because we've asked them to be everything to everyone.

   DBC is not everything to everyone. We hope that DBC will make it easier for universities to stop trying to be everything to everyone, too.

   "You claim that, in the US, we have been experimenting for 150 years, but you only provide as an example your own, personal anecdotal experience as someone who has become a co-founding entrepreneur."

   Happy to provide resources. :)

   I'd start with Diane Ravitch's "Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform"

   http://www.amazon.com/Left-Back-Century-Battles-School/dp/07...

   A video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T7jpyAG44k

   If you want names, I'd read up on the history of post-Civil War sociology, psychology, and philosophy in the US, especially the pragmatist tradition.

   Start with John Dewey and William Torrey Harris (for a counterpoint to Dewey).

   Here's a William Torrey Harris quote: "The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places ... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."

   Here's John Dewey: "The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences"

   Also read up on Booker T. Washington and "industrial education."

   Literally every point everyone has been making in this thread -- myself included -- was also being made by educational thinkers 100-150 years ago.

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2. saraid216Dec 2012
   > I'd start with Diane Ravitch's "Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform"

   I'll do that. I haven't read any of Ravitch's work directly yet, and enough time has passed since I heard her speak that I don't remember her position reliably anymore.

   > Start with John Dewey and William Torrey Harris (for a counterpoint to Dewey).

   I'm a fairly huge fan of John Dewey. I only barely hold back from calling myself a philosophical pragmatist in Dewey's tradition. On the other hand, I kinda recognize Harris' notion as a tradition I'd reject; Wikipedia's characterization of his supporters' arguments suggests that there isn't anything really useful in his ideas that doesn't require stripping it bare first. :P

   > Literally every point everyone has been making in this thread -- myself included -- was also being made by educational thinkers 100-150 years ago.

   But this is not experimentation. There is a difference between a thought experiment and an actual experiment. Schrodinger did not actually put a cat in a box and mysteriously wave his hands to express the quantum uncertainty of its aliveness.

   Yes, we have some tiny movements like Montessori schools or project-based learning or Quest to Learn or KIPP's character training or charter schools and so on and so on, but they make such an infinitesimal impact and are often so incomparable that it doesn't make sense to call it "experimentation". The fact that Will Wright, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos are all Montessori graduates, for instance, gets noticed sometimes but also gets mocked a portion of that. (That is, the term "Montessori graduate" is sometimes used derogatorily.)

   > I meant to draw attention to exactly your point, that we've set up a situation where universities are directionless because we've asked them to be everything to everyone.

   I don't think that the answer is to unbundle it, though. That's an easy, dare I say Silicon-Valley-esque response to a difficult and multifarious beast, but it's not necessarily the right one. I think that it'd be worthwhile to shed some of those things, yes, but for their invalidity or overgeneralizations on their own merits, rather than because they detract from a university's capacity to be itself.

   I am working on an answer myself, naturally... but I've so far declined to try to untangle the nature of a university on my own. It feels like putting the cart before the horse to do so. I've mostly held to a single, simple principle: a university experience should be optional. If people feel compelled to go to a university after some particular amount of basic education, such as high school, then the problems of a university are symptoms, not causes.

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