School sucks. There, I said it. This is coming from someone who did his homework every night. I still can’t believe I just sat there and willingly learned what other people told me to learn. I believe every child should be taught how to learn. However, what they learn should be completely up to them. (Anton Lex on Medium.com)
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I have insisted for a very long time that the remote learning, cyber schooling, and home schooling folks are missing the point. This is because schooling has just two goals IMHO of course): to teach people how to learn and how to work with others. Mr. Lex agrees with the first point, but contradicts that belief elsewhere in his quote. In order to teach anyone how to learn, they actually have to learn something, including how to demonstrate that they have learned something, so the thoughts “teach them how to learn” and “leaving what they learn being left up to them” are in conflict, at least in part. (And this is why having a fixed curriculum, containing things everyone should know, is also bonkers.)
Allow me to use my personal experience as a source of information. I counseled, informally, a great many college students. Part of that was explaining the structures that had been created to be able to deliver a high-ish quality education into their laps. Part of that structure was the workload system, which varies a bit from place to place but basically goes like this: students sign up to take classes. Each class is assigned a credit-hour, or just “credit” or “unit of credit” value based upon how much work is involved for the average student. In the Carnegie System 1 credit hour equates to about 3 hours of work per week. A normal workload would be 15 credit-hours per week which would equate to a 45 hour work week. Complete the work satisfactorily and you accumulate 15 credit-hours toward your total. That’s 15 credit hours per semester, 30 credit hours per year, and 120 credit hours over a four year span. Typically a Bachelor of Arts degree requires 120 credits to accomplish, but not just any only credit-hours. Approximately one third of those, or 40 credits, come from major and/or minor courses of study. These courses are courses that people in those fields argue are necessary for you to master to be educated in that field. (As a chemistry major, I had requirements far beyond this, including extensive math courses and physics courses plus required chemistry courses, so that “about a third” is just a description, not a rule.) Another third of the 120 credit minimum for a BA degree was dedicated to “general education” requirements, which were courses that society in general suggested (through all of the various disciplines, not directly) one needed to be an educated citizen in society. These often included English, math, and U.S. history requirements. And the final third were “electives” courses you could take based upon your own interests.
As to “what they learn should be completely up to them” you can do that, but don’t expect to get a college degree. Note that all of the information one can learn in college is widely available, often for free. Public libraries, the Internet, etc. are all chock-a-block full of information that can be learned. But that will not get you one of the primary goals for an education, that is learning to work with others. Part of learning to work together involves working with other students but also working with teachers, being a person representing someone from whom there might be much to learn.
There is a great deal of choice in such programs: you get to choose your major and/or minor courses of study. Within majors and minors there are often choices to be made (concentration areas, this course or that course to meet a requirement, etc.). Within general education requirements, there are often choices to be made, and of course electives are pure choice.
One does get to choose what one learns even within courses. I was one of those students who didn’t necessarily do everything I was directed to do. I had my own goals and if there was a conflict between a professor’s goals and mine, well the professor didn’t always win out, at least for my attention. (As a consequence I didn’t have a sterling grade record. I just couldn’t be motivated to jump through every hoop.)
So, as to choosing what one learns in a college education, there are a great many choices but those are balanced against the system which was created which offers guidance in the form of recommendations, requirements, standards, etc.
So, what Mr. Lex suggests is available to anyone who wants to follow their own path, but it is a very difficult path. You not only need to identify what it is you want to learn, but also how to learn it, then manage your time and effort, plus figuring out when you have learned enough and how well you have learned that.
An endeavor that allows for this process quite nicely is that of becoming a writer. There are a great many “how to write” resources available, many of which are free of cost. And once you have some idea of what you are doing, you need to write, and write, and write. (It is probably best to throw away your first efforts or stash them away. I kept a folder of some of my college papers, labeled “Lest I Forget.” Every once in a while I would take some out and remind myself of what I was capable and it helped me be less negative about the efforts of my students.) On the Internet there are also quite a number of sites where you can “publish” what you write and get feedback on it, not necessarily helpful feedback but some feedback. You can even get paid for those writings, although not much. A number of authors have parlayed writing for the Internet into writing for general publication and made more than a nice living at it, but those people are few and far between. Even accomplished high quality authors have difficulty making a living at it. (Go on Quora and ask Mercedes Lackey or C.S. Friedman for advice, straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.)
The self-educated aren’t getting guidance from experts they can interact with, nor the benefit of the structure provided by a college (this professor and room are reserved for this class at this day and time, etc.) and they certainly aren’t learning how to work with others. To do that, you need “others.”
Too often, people complain about their educations as if it were something done to them. (I rail against teachers who have the same mindset.) A quality education is something you do with others, some of whom you grant some authority over you for a time. You do not have to do this, you choose to do this. If you do not like what you chose, choose differently.
And with regard to “I still can’t believe I just sat there and willingly learned what other people told me to learn,” all I can say is you weren’t holding up your part of the bargain. And I am not saying you should be constantly moaning “Why do we have to learn this?” at your teachers, but at least you need to look to see if you could determine why it is that you needed to learn that. (It is okay to go to your professor’s office and ask them, too. Asking that question in class can be disruptive, to those who already know or just accept that better educated people thought it necessarily for them to learn that and were satisfied with that.
Uncommon Sense 