> "Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"
I'm not convinced that either of these is really important for a general education. I think educators fixate on romantic ideals of what is important to know while ignoring the subject matter that is relevant to ordinary life.
Where I grew up, the required high school curriculum includes a lot about ancient civilizations, creative writing, chemistry and physics, and algebra. It didn't teach how to write a persuasive proposal in a business context, string together a logically-sound argument, or form inferences from empirical data, and taught very little about contemporary politics or recent American or world history. It didn't teach how to mediate an interpersonal conflict at work, delegate a task, or effectively communicate an idea in a presentation.
I lament that I spent so much time "learning" in school and have so little to show for it. I know about different kinds of cloud formations, which extinct native American cultures lived where, the difference between the soil composition in different parts of the country, spectral lines in different gasses, etc. This is trivia.
I see the argument made by Snow as simply lamenting that there is under-emphasis on one particular set of romanticized unnecessary knowledge and over-emphasis on a different set. Most of physics, chemistry, etc, are neither directly relevant to your typical person nor readily digestible as being illustrative of more general principles that are relevant. A core educational curriculum would be better served teaching more fundamental concepts directly: scientific method, statistical methods, data analysis, etc.
What you propose is to simply replace the dichotomy science/humanities with another, that of applied/theoretical, which necessarily moves the division and fault lines. That way, in addition to the humanities, a number of theoretical subjects also fall off the cliff, namely theoretical physics, non-applied parts of mathematics, logic etc. This, in fact, does not transcend the dichotomy, it makes it worse by imposing additional limitations and essentially directly applying useful/useless as a criterion.
There is a dichotomy inherent in the task: some things will be taught as part of a general education, and some things will not be. I would argue that "usefulness" is a pretty great criteria for making distinctions to that end.
Also, "usefulness" does not automatically exclude theoretical fields. E.g. geometric proofs and logic and microeconomics are all theoretical, but I'd argue are also useful as part of a general education.
The problem with usefulness (like with "impact", in my downvoted comment way towards the bottom) is that it is exceedingly hard to define. Where do you draw the line between "useful" and "useless"? Are languages useful? If so, to what end? And how do you teach them to not carry "useless" things while teaching? Are particle physics useful?
The other comment draws upon the distinction between vocational and educational, and what you see there is the same problem. What is considered "useful" for a given task or job, and what isn't? Usefulness is a very difficult category to define and abide, simply because different goals and aims render different areas useful or useless.
And we circle back around to the original linked document, in its spirit what a scientist would find useful is can it generate specific falsifiable predictions that can be tested and evaluated, if so, its useful. Particle physics is on the border and depends on some pretty esoteric lab experiments, and that border has been exceedingly fuzzy over the past century or two so don't be too drastic about setting that border in stone... On the other hand the point the article is making about non-scientists is usefulness is defined as, lets talk about it, now was that fun or politically applicable (or at least acceptable) or plain old interesting, well then its useful. The claim is given the core difference in philosophical outlook the two are not going to see eye to eye on much of anything, and at best a rebuttal is sometimes they might agree coincidentally or its not really as bad as he claimed, etc.
To a scientist a language is useful if you can make certain predictions about proto-indo-european and what you'd probably find if you dug up an ancient city over there, and it turns out when you dig up that city and examine the writing on pottery the writing looks like ... whereas to a non-scientist a language is useful if you can get students to attend a lecture and write a term paper about it, and if the conference discussions are fun and interesting.
As an outlook on life its about as useful as asking whats better, music or artworks?
This is well travelled ground. And everyone hits the same obstacle: It's very difficult to guess what will be "useful" in 10+ years, when the students will be applying their knowledge .
Essentially your complaint boils down to why are educational institutions providing education instead of the training their students actually need. Part of the problem is most people do need training more than education, but for social class reasons "every child must attend college to obtain an education" and so on.
We have an excellent vo-tech system for training, its just only for lower classes. Like $100K/yr plumbers. The middle upper classes are supposed to get a degree in french lit before becoming life long minimum wage coffee baristas.
This creates a certain level of social turmoil and confusion.
There is a secondary issue in that if you're young enough, modern K12 only teaches to a test, providing no education or training, merely memorized trivia as an elaborate daycare operation, as you describe. You could have gotten an education about the native american experience, its an interesting topic... pity all you got was trivia to answer multiple choice questions on a test.
I think it's snobbery to imply that a class in business writing is "vocational training" while a class in creative writing is "education." Or a class in data analysis is "vocational training" while a class in algebra is "education." I'm not talking about vocational training, I'm talking about education.
I think you're missing the entire point I tried to make that the definitions (and traditions, and methods) of training and education have very little to do with the cultural goals, like people with vocational lives need educations.
Its very hard to argue a business writing class could be anything but vocational training, for example. What could even remotely be educational about learning the traditions and regulations of annual company reports or recent fads in employee evaluations? Creative writing could go either way depending on if its oriented more toward the rules of the game or the general ideas / concepts / outlook of synthesizing something meaningful out of multiple ideas.
Data analysis goes either way. Of course "this is how to use R, this is how to use excel, this is how to make a graph for a presentation" is purely vocational. If you go into the theory of how to think about what and why you're doing it, that at least could be educational. Algebra is a tough one to talk about but if you're willing to talk Trig its trivial to provide vocational training (plug and chug this memorized formula to drill a bolt hole circle or survey a plot of land without understanding how it works or what it means or how to apply it to other tasks) vs educational (notice how often pi appears in trig, now why is that? Well it seems all this has something to do with unit circles. And isn't it interesting that pi is irrational, and coincidentally your trig approximations have various infinite fraction representations and there seems to be a relationship there. And when you're willing to go multidimensional, what does all this 2-D and 3-D stuff imply about higher dimensions? And why are Quaternions showing up here and what is a noncommutative division algebra anyhow? And why would a 4-dimensional number system (sorta) turn out to actually simplify rotating 3-d stuff when intuitively adding a dimension should just make it more complicated not less)
This is massively confused because we send 1/2 or so of our population for "education" but demand they merely be "trained" because what they need vocationally is, no coincidence, vocational training. And it all comes from historical cultural background where only the idle rich had the lack of need and spare time to be educated, therefore the way to be upwardly mobile is to get an education, although you'd still like a job, so better scrap the education and demand vocational training from an educational institution.
To a crude first approximation, vocational training is what gives you skills you can trade for money on the job, or perhaps if unemployed, as a hobby, but an education gives you something "worthwhile and interesting" to think about, and if you can make money off it thats nice but its not the purpose at all. One makes better workers/employees, the other at least tries to make better people.
> I think you're missing the entire point I tried to make that the definitions (and traditions, and methods) of training and education have very little to do with the cultural goals, like people with vocational lives need educations.
I think you are conflating "useful" with "vocational." Targeting education to relevancy in the real world is different than just teaching people how to use a specific tool. To illustrate the distinction, consider different areas of the humanities. Nobody would say political science is "vocational" but I'd argue that it's a lot more useful to teach that at the high-school level then to teach about ancient civilizations. Both are educational--they help people to learn to think about the world around them, but the former does so in a way that's more directly useful and relevant.
> What could even remotely be educational about learning the traditions and regulations of annual company reports or recent fads in employee evaluations.
Have you ever taken a class in business writing? They don't teach you "recent fads in employee evaluations." They teach you how to make points in clear and concise ways while supporting your arguments and tuning them to your audience. They teach in fact precisely the skills teachers use to justify the existence of creative writing classes, except they do so in a direct instead of roundabout way. My empirical observation has been that people in the real world are spectacularly bad writers. I had a very painful experience in engineering school where I was in a group writing a project proposal for a competition entry and literally couldn't understand the ideas some of my teammates were trying to communicate. But who can blame them when they've never been taught to write with an eye towards communicating ideas, but instead spent a lot of time learning about the use of alliteration, etc.
> Of course "this is how to use R, this is how to use excel, this is how to make a graph for a presentation" is purely vocational.
Sure, but you can also teach a chemistry class as "this is how you operate a titration column." But neither subject needs to be taught in a vocational way.
"They teach you how to make points in clear and concise ways while supporting your arguments and tuning them to your audience"
What makes this a business writing class, it sounds exactly like Freshman English. It also sounds exactly like the term paper requirement for my literature credit elective which was sci fi, other than sci fi class additionally required we relate somehow to sci fi. It sounds like every term paper requirement I ever had to write for every class other than not being on topic...
Maybe your anecdotes were not educated the wrong way with the wrong topics, but just simply not very well educated? Half the students have to be below median and half of them will be stuck with the below-median teachers, by definition of median and assuming random distribution, and the result is likely to be some peculiar results from "educated" people. Or at least some weird anecdotes.
Its possible that for-profit business pressures at the school pushed poor teachers into creative writing instead of biz writing which got the good teachers. That may even be a universal cultural phenomena across the country, those pressures exist, math teachers really do seem as a class to be smarter than gym teachers and there are sound business reasons it has to be that way. But blaming the topic for employee results isn't going to change employee results, you'll just have more people signing up for biz writing requiring the village idiots to be reassigned from the now empty creative writing classes into biz writing, leading eventually to mysterious pondering about why biz writing class used to be great and now on average its not so good.
You can hope for an educational curriculum for poli sci but that might be a little abstract for all high school students. I suspect you'd be stuck with trivia or indoctrination, checkmark the year was Marx born, write a short answer about why America is great, who is the mayor of our city at this time, etc. Vocational poli sci would be "how to be an effective campaign manager" which might be interesting. Or just plain old "how to become a politician" class. True, very few grads will become POTUS but quite a few might end up local aldermen, board members, council members, or mayors over their lifetimes.
> What makes this a business writing class, it sounds exactly like Freshman English. It also sounds exactly like the term paper requirement for my literature credit elective which was sci fi, other than sci fi class additionally required we relate somehow to sci fi. It sounds like every term paper requirement I ever had to write for every class other than not being on topic...
These are different styles of writing, emphasizing related but not fungible skills. A business writing class focuses much more heavily on being concise, persuasive, and tailoring your writing for your target audience. I wrote a lot of term papers for a lot of humanities classes in college, and these skills were only indirectly implicated, not the central focus.
> Maybe your anecdotes were not educated the wrong way with the wrong topics, but just simply not very well educated?
Possible, but unlikely. Whatever the various high school rankings are worth, mine appears in the top 5/10 (in the U.S.) of most of them. The problem was the curriculum, and indirectly the teachers who brought with them a romanticized academic mindset. Your comments are essentially illustrative of that mindset: a snobbish overestimation of the importance of literature, etc, combined with rationalizations about how studying those subjects nonetheless indirectly develops relevant skills. This basic approach to education is fundamentally flawed. It's the product of PhD's in various fields who think a grade 6-12 education should consist of little tastes of a variety of those fields, and rationalize that approach by claiming that people will pick up relevant skills in the process, or "learn to learn" or something similarly vacuous.
To circle back to the writing example, there is no reason other than snobbery that literature classes are taught in grades 6-12 while business writing classes are not. Even though kids, too lost in learning about metaphors and allegories and whatnot to pick up any real writing skills, predictably graduate without being able to write effectively, it never occurs to anyone to say: "gee, if we want kids to know how to write, maybe we should teach them how to write!"
> Where I grew up, the required high school curriculum includes a lot about ancient civilizations, creative writing, chemistry and physics, and algebra. It didn't teach how to write a persuasive proposal in a business context, string together a logically-sound argument, or form inferences from empirical data, and taught very little about contemporary politics or recent American or world history. It didn't teach how to mediate an interpersonal conflict at work, delegate a task, or effectively communicate an idea in a presentation.
I lament that I spent so much time "learning" in school and have so little to show for it. I know about different kinds of cloud formations, which extinct native American cultures lived where, the difference between the soil composition in different parts of the country, spectral lines in different gasses, etc. This is trivia.
The point is to learn how to 'learn'. Yes, memorizing endless facts can seem pointless, but the entire point of the classics is to gain a greater understanding of humanity in general, and to learn understanding.
the implications of dept!
sorry, I couldn't help myself.
But really, I think most high schools do teach that. I went to a highschool that was not very good at all, and we spent a fair amount of time on that in math class
Anyone who owns a house? I just wrote one the other day: after a rainstorm we had a water leak and I paid the water mitigation contractors with a check. So far I haven't seen any contractors carrying Square Readers.
FWIW It's not very streamlined in the states. I once needed to accept a wire transfer, and it was rather difficult. I ended up needing to open a new one-off account at an entirely different financial institution to do it.
In retrospect it certainly seems like common sense. In practice I've met a number of not-stupid people who do not follow any sort of methodical recording keeping in their che ckbook and who do not understand the actual cost of having credit card debt and incurring interest that remains unpaid over time.
I'm surprised when someone tells me that are keeping money in a checking or low-interest savings account rather than paying off credit card debt. For whatever reasons they believe this is a common-sensible thing to do.
I'm surprised when someone tells me that are keeping money in a checking or low-interest savings account rather than paying off credit card debt. For whatever reasons they believe this is a common-sensible thing to do.
Because the amount of money you "have" (for spending, emergencies, whatever) is what's in the checking account rather than that plus the remaining credit line on your card, and there's an element of fear/panic about running out (and I guess getting hit with overdraft fees). That fear/panic means that logic suddenly doesn't apply.
The second law of thermodynamics is not that kind of trivia. It's probably the most fundamental law in science, the one that lets you derive almost any phenomenon if you think about it hard enough (e.g. there's a derivation of the law of gravity from it).
>> Where I grew up, the required high school curriculum includes a lot about ancient civilizations, creative writing, chemistry and physics, and algebra. It didn't teach how to write a persuasive proposal in a business context, string together a logically-sound argument, or form inferences from empirical data, and taught very little about contemporary politics or recent American or world history. It didn't teach how to mediate an interpersonal conflict at work, delegate a task, or effectively communicate an idea in a presentation.
I've nearly had the same experience as you but my perception of it was very different. I attended one of the top 100 high-schools in the US and one of the top non-magnet public schools in my state. My curriculum was comprehensive, but yes -- prima facie, very little of it was seemed applicable (other than intro to business -- which helped me deal with personal finances, maths -- which helped me write "demo" programs, and of course CS classes).
On the other hand, I enjoyed"knowledge for the sake of knowledge" tremendously (e.g., History courses) but most importantly -- I felt that I learned a great deal between the lines in those classes. I wrote a great deal of persuasive essays in humanities courses, I begin to see American politics beyond simple slogans, and I read books that taught me a great deal about the human condition that I may have missed out in my suburb (All Quiet On The Western Front comes to mind) and even when they didn't -- they taught me to be a better conservationist at lunch time.
I'll note, however, that high school could have done a great deal more. I came to the US in the middle of 7th grade from former USSR and stepping into a US middle-school felt like a horrible practical joke: instead of chemistry and physics, for examples, there was one class called "science", and the quadratic formula would not be covered for another year.
I suspect, however, we've a different personality -- many of my classmates echo your views on this matter, equally as many echo yours. There was a similar split in college: equally as many greatly enjoyed general education/core requirements, others saw it as a hindrance to taking my engineering courses. On a micro-level it happened within the discipline as well and to an extent I was guilty of this: I wanted to crank out of code and not do integration by parts by hand, so I went through the "motions" rather than learn this by heart, which I came to regret years later when I tried to grok the kernel trick in machine learning.
I am, however, inclined to agree with you: we should teach the fundamental concepts directly, but not at the exclusion of general knowledge. Some students are motivated by practical applications, others more so by knowledge itself -- and this may varies by discipline. Given a college-level education is effectively necessity (even if a paper saying "B.S. in CS" is not always a hard requirement, the requisite proficiency is still expected) students who are not as intrinsically motivated to learn the material use self-discipline to compensate. This is not good news, as it reinforces the popular perception of education as "boring" by necessity and attractive only to people who like being bored.
I'm not convinced that either of these is really important for a general education. I think educators fixate on romantic ideals of what is important to know while ignoring the subject matter that is relevant to ordinary life.
Where I grew up, the required high school curriculum includes a lot about ancient civilizations, creative writing, chemistry and physics, and algebra. It didn't teach how to write a persuasive proposal in a business context, string together a logically-sound argument, or form inferences from empirical data, and taught very little about contemporary politics or recent American or world history. It didn't teach how to mediate an interpersonal conflict at work, delegate a task, or effectively communicate an idea in a presentation.
I lament that I spent so much time "learning" in school and have so little to show for it. I know about different kinds of cloud formations, which extinct native American cultures lived where, the difference between the soil composition in different parts of the country, spectral lines in different gasses, etc. This is trivia.
I see the argument made by Snow as simply lamenting that there is under-emphasis on one particular set of romanticized unnecessary knowledge and over-emphasis on a different set. Most of physics, chemistry, etc, are neither directly relevant to your typical person nor readily digestible as being illustrative of more general principles that are relevant. A core educational curriculum would be better served teaching more fundamental concepts directly: scientific method, statistical methods, data analysis, etc.