Western doesn’t get it
My old university just announced its new branding. The new look is competently executed, attractive, and elegantly consolidates the school’s various sub-brands. #
It also perfectly captures how fundamentally ill-equipped the school is to cope with the present, let alone lead towards the future. #
It’s no secret that the university has been trying to move away from its reputation as a party school, this rebrand is the most transparent attempt possible to do so. #
I’m frustrated because education is rotting from within, and this is how the school tries to stay relevant. For all the complaints about how the movie industry is stuck in the 1960s, our education system is stuck in the 1760s. And proposed updates, like Blackboard’s unforgivably bad software (WebCT in my day), do nothing to change how education works, they just digitally codify outdated practices and give university administrators the mistaken impression that they’ve managed to stay with the times. #
An “education,” whether for its own value or to help you get a job, is–at least to me–about developing the skills to find the information you need, assess its value, integrate it into the context at hand, and make a better decision than you otherwise could have. These skills aren’t taught at university; we develop them to cope with university. #
For example, before most of my exams, I would save a copy of my notes to my phone so that I could check discreetly check them if I got stuck. In other words, I set myself up to cheat. I never actually checked those notes, but it felt nice knowing that I could. (It’s worth noting that in Philosophy you either understood the material or you failed–notes or not.) #
In the “real world,” having a copy of your notes is called being prepared. Instead, university exams expect us to tie one hand behind our backs and master a skill we’ll seldom if ever use again. Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? Even students singularly focused on learning for its own value would get so much more out of the experience. #
“Western University” faced a branding problem and declining academic rankings. Instead of taking the opportunity to have the legions of smart, engaged stakeholders ask and answer hard questions about education, they made their official colour slightly darker and produced an awful video. This problem isn’t unique to Western, this just happened to hit close to home. #
Your brand is everything that you do, not how you choose to portray yourself. #
“Skills aren’t taught at university.”, said the man with a liberal arts degree. Professional degrees are designed to teach skills. That’s the only reason I’ve returned to post-secondary. That said, I couldn’t agree more with your issues with post-secondary service delivery and outdated models of pedagogy. I’m currently experiencing some of them first hand.
This is a problem with education as whole, not just with Western’s rebrand. From a young age, the most stressed skill is the ability to memorize information and regurgitate it, which is reenforced with practices such as the EQAO testing. Universities simply seem the most self-interested example, as they charge ever-inflating tuition rates to teach outdated material in outdated ways, and empty students into the world, penniless and unprepared, at the lowest earning potential of their careers. On top of this, there is often an expectation of unpaid labour to entering a given field, because businesses know that recent grads have little to offer.
Western’s rebrand seems like an elegant solution to their disjointed appearance, but it does not do anything to remedy that the cost of a university degree – of money, energy and time – seems out of line with today’s self-directed marketplace.
Didn’t you just get that first job because you knew more TV trivia than the drunk who interviewed you?
@Tiffany: Pretty much.
At my university there were one or two professors who did just that, setting open-book exams that actually tested your understanding of the subject. The result? Students avoided their courses, which had a (accurate) reputation as harder than the rest.
Universities won’t get better at teaching real-life skills unless and until there are incentives for them to do so.
@Amanda
> From a young age, the most stressed skill is the ability to memorize information and regurgitate it
I’m pretty sure I’ve used this exact phrase before. 100% true. I hated most of high school and middle school because of this. I definitely feel like a large percentage of my life thus far has been completely wasted.
@Amanda
> From a young age, the most stressed skill is the ability to memorize information and regurgitate it
I’m pleasantly reminded of an honors-track course in middle school. The teacher holds up an atlas, says “this is an atlas, are any of you unclear on how to use it?” pause… “ok, that was geography for the quarter, moving on…” We didn’t waste our time memorizing the states and their capitals or other facts that are easily-accessible, instead we were taught how to learn, analyze information and synthesize responses. Granted, I think my experience puts me in the minority of my peers, but…
The Real World
vs.
School
Doing
vs.
Learning about Doing
Which is the best way to learn something?
We all know the answer: Learn by doing, not by being told how to do.
So school isn’t the most effective, efficient way to teach.
Teaching yourself is. So long as you have human resources at your disposal. After all, no one knows your current state of mind like you do (or, at least, like you have the capacity to), so no one can guide your teaching as well as you can.
So what purpose does college serve? Why does it exist?
It’s civilization’s system for making sure that the *bare minimum education required to perform an occupation* gets taught.
Thus:
We should only use college for people going into occupations whose responsibilities involve ensuring public safety–i.e, engineers, doctors, pilots, lawyers, etc..
People who (in my opinion) are wasting a bit of time at college:
Musicians, designers, journalists, entrepreneurs, programmers, etc…
Now, I’m sure someone’s going to disagree wholeheartedly with me. That’s okay. I welcome lively discussion.
Btw Jeff:
You might want to put this at the bottom of your CSS file at http://jeffdechambeau.com/wp-content/themes/jdc/style.css :
#comments {
padding:10px;
background:#fff; }
it will mean better usability, I promise.
Love the simplicity of your site. Education is getting there – I’m in an MBA program right now and rarely if ever do we need to take traditional tests that require useless memorization. The curriculum is more focused on projects, presentations, and case studies.
The information a college teaches may be useless, but the saying “Universities teach you to find the answers” may be true.
My biggest gripe, in engineering classes, is that there is no creativity. The people who naturally thrive are the ones who, basically, are brainless computers. They have no innovation or dreams besides finding the stresses in a truss for example. Where’s the drive to do something new and radical?
These robots have consent confidence that they will be able find jobs and be able to thrive in a firm because the have larger DSP’s than the rest of us. And the university favors them.
I agree with you. Our education system is weak. I was recently on a field trip to a large data systems provider. They said that they where looking for people who ran networks in their basements and who programed for fun. That is the solution that I believe should be employed.
So if “Western” education is so lacking…why do so many “Eastern” foreign exchange students come here to experience it ?
Tests are flawed because you actually have to learn the material and you can’t just look it up ? Then why go to class ? All that info they teach is available in the book ! Just ask for the job without a degree in the subject, then when you need the info, just get out the book and look it up! what ? then the only thing left is for the school to take your money ? Then go to an online university. Personally, I like Full Sail university online. They never make me remember stuff or even show up at certain times. I can take all my tests online at my own pace, and when I need to know something, I just look it up!
whoops just realized you weren’t referring to Western education, but the university itself. My bad on the misunderstanding. See, I didn’t go to college because remembering things is too hard for me, so I never heard of something called Western University.
But my point remains about this: if you don’t like having to remember things, then don’t go to school.
@Louis: MBA programs are better (great, even?) because they *have* to provide an ROI or rational businesspeople won’t enroll. University has been so thoroughly packaged as a key to happiness/success in the middle-class life that an actual ROI never really enters the equation–and of course there’s the “well it has its own merits” argument, which I think is legitimate. Having said that, there is an ROI for a liberal arts education, it’s just so poorly branded. But that’s a topic for another post coming soon
.
The medieval paradigm of education, from which the modern educational system is only now tentatively escaping, was based on the fact that access to reference materials was effectively non-existent — if you didn’t know something off the top of your head, you had no access to it except through a laborious and time-consuming process that did most people no good. Couple that with the fact that the chief use of an education, for those who had one, was to persuade your boss in the hierarchy (secular or religious) to do things your way rather than someone else’s way, and you wind up with the ideal college graduate being what we today would see as the captain of the debate team. Think Newt Gingrich or Bill Clinton. Now shudder.
[...] Jeff de Chambeau has some interesting ones. For all the complaints about how the movie industry is stuck in the 1960s, our education system is stuck in the 1760s. And proposed updates, like Blackboard’s unforgivably bad software (WebCT in my day), do nothing to change how education works, they just digitally codify outdated practices and give university administrators the mistaken impression that they’ve managed to stay with the times. [...]
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