[Jormundir]

People tend to forget information that is not useful to them. The age old problem with school curriculum is so much of it doesn't apply to day to day or even professional know-how. Getting students to retain more information is pointless if there is no value in retaining the information beyond final exams.

The better pursuit is for schools to work on constantly realigning their curriculum towards what is necessary for modern life and employment. Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in.

[mulmen]

I do not believe a university is a job training program so I don't think we should optimize for employment. Skills necessary for modern life include critical thinking and diverse perspectives on the world. This is the value of "general education".

College students don't know what they are interested in, that's a big reason for going to college in the first place. You can't ask them what they need to know because they don't know it yet.

[yorwba]

You may not believe that a university is a job training program, and I agree that it shouldn't be this way, but effectively, most students, educators and employers treat it as a training program. If universities weren't the only places to be trained for some jobs, few students would pay the high fees to receive "general education". If universities didn't provide job training, few employers would care about a degree any more than about the candidate's hobbies.

If universities are not supposed to focus on job training, then they need to be replaced in this function by some other kind of institution that does. But so long as there are no established alternatives, universities will need to continue looking out for their student's employment prospects.

[mulmen]

Technical schools exist for job training and have for decades. There is an entire industry built around technical training and certifications in the IT field.

University educations are valuable for more than just job skills, that is why they cost more and cover topics not directly related to one specific job.

[megaman22]

Unfortunately, technical schools have been very effective at giving themselves a black eye for being degree mills, scamming veterans, and churning out people who have little to no idea how to do the jobs they supposedly have credentials for.

Higher education is not a whole lot more than a filttation system; a wildly inefficient IQ and personality test for employers.

[abecedarius]

People with a degree tend to make more money than people without, even after adjusting for ability and conscientiousness. This is why most students are there at most colleges. It's very hard to teach people things they aren't willingly there for, so that they really get it.

[mulmen]

Ok but why do people with college degrees generally make more money?

[abecedarius]

Bryan Caplan argues it's mostly signaling: employers think (reasonably) that degree-holders tend to be more valuable employees than dropouts and people who didn't go to college, even though the education didn't add much to their productivity. They can't easily tell the able/conscientious/conformist dropouts from the others. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html

[MisterBastahrd]

I remember when I was in 7th grade and we were first introduced to the Saxon math books. We would learn new material, but our homework constantly reinforced information from previous sections so that we never needed to go back to study anything, because we were solving the older problems on a daily basis and could be expected to solve them on tests.

Requiring that students not only show that they understand current knowledge but also that they retain past knowledge seems to be a much better way to educate students. It obliterates the slacker cram mentality that many students have.

[vkou]

> Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in.

I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. I didn't have much of a classics education, but presumably, the value of it is not in learning the classics (Nobody actually gives two rat's asses about the the themes of the Illiad), but in learning how be analytical.

The purpose of general education classes is to turn us into better people, and the purpose of specialization classes is to make us employable. I think Silicon Valley could use a lot more of the former.

[rayiner]

It’s deeply ironic. We accept “teaching the classics teaches people how to be analytical” as a shibboleth to which we apply no scrutiny or analysis. Is there evidence showing that teaching classics helps with analysis more than say teaching math, logical reasoning, statistics? I strongly suspect that we would get better results if we replaced instruction on Greek myths with courses on Bayesian reasoning.

[jasperry]

You may be right that the classics aren't necessary for critical thinking. To me, that's not even the main reason they're important. It's more about the type of questions we ask.

We study humanities to help us realize that the values we collectively hold didn't come from nowhere, and that those are the things we should really be analyzing and questioning. You don't get that in a statistics course. And through studying thoughts on the big questions of life from people in different contexts from us, we can gain power to decide for ourselves what makes life meaningful. Or is education only useful if it makes us a better cog in the globalized economic machine?

[rayiner]

> Or is education only useful if it makes us a better cog in the globalized economic machine?

To the extent we require people to go to school for a big chunk of their life, and spend hundreds of billions of tax dollars per year on it, this should be the only function of at least a public education.

If people want to think about the “big questions” they should read the Iliad or the Bible or whatever of their own volition.

[mulmen]

This is an idea that seems to be common among technically (STEM) educated people, among others, and it scares me.

I believe we end up with a healthier society if we teach people diverse topics and introduce them to new ideas in an intellectually safe environment. Contrast this with going to school to double down on whatever you thought in high school and I hope you can see a benefit beyond pure economic gain.

In a democracy everyone should think about the "big questions". If we optimize for brainless robot workers then why ask them for input on how to run our society?

[crankylinuxuser]

> introduce them to new ideas in an intellectually safe environment

I do not think that means what you wrote. I've seen "intellectually safe", and it gets converted to "I accept nothing outside of my bubble". Worse yet, students get actively hostile to foreign ideas.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/safe-spaces-college-int...

I think the better term is "intellectually rigorous". Let people have opposing views, but instead challenge them on logos, ethos, and pathos. That discussion is where the truth lies.

[rayiner]

> I believe we end up with a healthier society if we teach people diverse topics and introduce them to new ideas in an intellectually safe environment.

That's great you have this "belief." But we spend $600 billion per year on education in this country. We make kids spend most of their childhoods chained to a desk learning about a variety of things teachers "believe" will help them that they'll never use in their lives. As a taxpayer and a parent, I want this whole expensive, time-consuming endeavor to be based on more than "belief."

Just watch a politician speak sometime: education is billed to the public as a way to help the economy and make sure people have jobs. If you told parents: we want you to spend all this time and money helping your kids learn "how to think" (oh and by the way, it will be based on vague humanistic values that may be quite different from what you would have taught your kids), then you wouldn't get very many people to sign up. And that's an incredibly dishonest thing to do.

[jasperry]

I didn't downvote you for that opinion. But I could never share it, if for nothing else but personal reasons. I have a Comp Sci degree, but I credit the humanities professors in my public university for playing a big part in helping me be liberated from the prejudices ingrained in me by the community I grew up in. For that, I'm eternally grateful.

[logfromblammo]

Anecdotally, I credit the humanities professors at my university for helping me tune my BS detector.

From my experience, I think it more likely that liberating a student from the prejudices ingrained in them by their previous environment simply opens the way for different prejudices to be injected into the void.

I am thankful that I was able to recognize the abuses of academia before allowing myself to get pulled into the Ivory Tower's stairmill-powered meat grinder. I still have to do stupid useless crap sometimes, but I actually get paid for that.

[arstin]

This is such a complicated statement to respond to! :) You could follow the thread of irony, of the kinds of abilities "analysis" is equivocal between, of what relevance evidence might have...what it might be applied against, what might even count as evidence, and, obviously, what results we even want!

Here's just one bigger picture thought to consider. For a reasonably motivated and bright person, it's pretty easy to teach yourself programming (I'd be willing to bet most people on this forum are self-taught). And, after you get some basics, pretty easy to teach yourself nice tidy applied math-y things like Bayesian reasoning. Likewise it's easy to teach yourself science. One reason why is that in every case you can self-correct: the program doesn't work, the calculation is wrong, the world says otherwise.

That simply isn't the case with the humanities. You need the guidance of an expert for a while.

I'll leave it at that for now, just noting that to the extent humanities help with "analysis" it's probably going to be especially beneficial with messy, open problems where even the criteria for success may be vague and shifting. Thinking critically about product design rather than improving an algorithm, to bring it into HN.

[DiffEq]

Well...the classics include logic and reasoning, or should. It is part of the Trivium (Classical Liberal Arts). The problem is that people only associate old books with a Classical Education when in reality Math and Science is indeed a great part of it. How can one be well rounded without math, science and logic - you can't be.

[matmann2001]

The best evidence is in the process.

When a literature class reads a novel, the professor doesn't just teach students to accept the words as they are. The students are encouraged to interpret and to understand how the author's thoughts originated, and then to extrapolate how that might be applicable in a modern context. Even the worst literature classes I've taken were taught like this.

When a math class is introduced to a new theorem, a professor will often breeze through the derivation of it (if you're lucky). This just trains students to find the right order of manipulations that solves the equation, rather than to understand what the equation and its transformations really represent. Sure, some classes at some schools might be better than this, but there are plenty more who aren't.

[phaus]

I suspect that you're right about being able to teach analytic thinking better if we designed a cirriculum around things more directly relevant to that. However, liberal arts schools that follow the classical philosophy don't just teach mythology, they also spend a lot of time on classical texts in mathematics, philosophy, and logic. So it isn't completely without directly relevant courses.

[danans]

Studying history, the classics, anthropology, etc may not increase analytical ability directly, but it increases the breadth of an individual's understanding of how human society got to where we are today, warts and all.

That knowledge is a very important input to any logical or statistical analysis, or resulting system, that affects people's lives.

It just may not be important for someone tasked creating a Bayesian model.

History is especially important for people to learn because without it, history can be (and is) used as a tool by those who have studied it against them.

[joebobiggs]

Actually there has been centuries of scrutiny and analysis applied to the classics.

Also, it seems a bit silly to say we should teach Bayesian reasoning instead of the classics, considering Bayes himself studied the classics.

[wu-ikkyu]

What kind of "better results" are we looking for?

Simply producing more STEM graduates does not necessarily lead to better results when so many of them sell out to companies with business models that are adversarial to humanity at large.

Perhaps reading Plato or Marcus Aurelius could lead those graduates to take a more ethical approach in their technological endeavors.

[vkou]

Teaching math, physics, and logic teaches you how to form and analyze, broadly speaking, chains of logical statements. This is an incredibly useful technical skill.

Teaching classics teaches you how to analyze writing. Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own. (This is also why I think that limiting it to Western European classics is bullshit.) We spend a lot of time reading and writing, and very little of what we produce or consume can be distilled down to chains of logical statements.

It's not going to help you derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, or figure out how to use the new flavour-of-the-week web framework, and that's fine.

[trentmb]

> Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own.

Right, a different set of axioms.

Any sort of analysis will, ultimately, be a series of arguments using the text and the set of axioms you mentioned.

[unit91]

Also ironic: "shibboleth" seems to be the new favorite buzzword of the HN shibboleth.

[rhino369]

Shibboleth is now a shibboleth for having watched West Wing.

[unit91]

Ah, thanks for that insight. It all makes sense now...

[gowld]

Anyone who has studied the Middle Eastern classics knows "shibboleth"

[unit91]

I know the term, I was saying it seems to be used much more frequently around here than in any of my other circles.

[ZephyrP]

anyone who has idled on efnet knows "shibboleth"

[chatmasta]

This seems like confirmation bias. Have you considered that what you learned in CS may have had similar abstract analytical benefits? That is, even if you retained 0% of the practical programming content (like you retained 0% of the Illiad), you still exercised the logical side of your brain and learned to think algorithmically/logically.

[eli_gottlieb]

>I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum.

Davka to disagree with you, I think that might just mean you had more life experience before going into those classes than most people do. IME, formalized humanities material really needs to build on, well, some basic foundation of personal worldliness.

[TheAdamAndChe]

That would be a great if school was actually about turning us into better people, but it's not. College nowadays is just a jobs training program separated from the employer so they can lower training costs. Almost all good jobs require degrees nowadays.

[dragonwriter]

“All good jobs require degrees” does not support that college is job training, only that it is used by employers as a filter. But the fact that it is used as a filter does not mean that it is indicative of needed skills, and even if it was that wouldn't mean it was training for those skills. It could be neutral impact as training but still tend to fail out unsuitable candidates, which would make it a useful skill or aptitude filter without being job training.

And, of course, it could be conmonly used as a (cargo cult) filter without actually being a useful skill/aptitude filter at all.

[TheAdamAndChe]

Yet an IT graduate is unlikely to be hired as a book keeper, right? And I bet a Law graduate would have a hard time getting a job involving direct healthcare. That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth.

[smsm42]

Bookkeepers, lawyers and healthcare professionals require very specific and specialized training and in many cases it is not even legal to be employed as, say, lawyer or doctor without having specific credentials. But many jobs aren't like that - and still require degrees.

> That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth.

For some jobs - definitely. But there are plenty of others where degree is just a very rough filter and degrees that do not provide any direct training for the specific job are still required (and accepted).

[dragonwriter]

> That association between college program and career does indicate that some job training is involved and necessary for career growth.

While I'd certainly agree that there are, in fact, at least some career paths for which that is true, but even a job having a preference for certain degrees doesn't have to imply that training is happening; different degree programs could have different filtering effects without being actual training.

And, of course, not all jobs that require degrees are narrowly focussed on specific fields.

[vultour]

> just a jobs training program

I was lucky enough to do my undergraduate at a university where this was sort-of true, we didn't do any math apart from some very basic things that I was taught early in high school, and most of the classes were hands-on programming. Most of the assessment was coursework-only as well, only about 20% of the modules had a final exam.

I barely had to do anything as I taught myself most of what they were teaching long before university, but for some of my peers that were only starting to code it was amazing. From my limited experience the quality of developers (at least the ones who actually put in some work instead of just trying to pass) coming from my university was miles ahead of the ones that studied at a 'regular' university where some of my friends went. They taught them theory, math, or even physics, but somehow forgot to teach them how to code.

[smsm42]

"Almost all good jobs" require degrees because it's a cheapest way (to the employer) to filter for certain qualities that they require (which usually have very little to do with actual content of the degree and more with being able to work in structured workplace, basic literacy and social skills, not being a career criminal, etc.).

For various reasons other ways have been made either hard to do or illegal, so the easiest way to select for candidates with certain capabilities is to require a degree. That doesn't mean candidates without a degree don't have them - but the cost of missing a viable candidate is near zero, and the cost of hiring bad one is substantial. Thus, degree is used as screener. The overall costs of it pretty bad, since degree costs way more than would a screening system that does screen for necessary qualities directly, but the alignment of incentives and costs makes it the best short-term solution for many employers.

[crankylinuxuser]

I believe where that started was after Griggs v. Duke Power, where pre-employment tests were found to discriminate against African Americans. These tests were effectively banned, even if the intent was not to discriminate against minorities.

What happened after that, was that the "testing" was legally sent to the colleges and universities for them to vet. And only with paper from them, could you obtain the job. It didn't matter, and doesn't matter, that many jobs would not need a degree. On the job training would completely suffice for most positions.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

citation of claim of aftermath: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1121428?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

[dragonwriter]

> I believe where that started was after Griggs v. Duke Power, where pre-employment tests were found to discriminate against African Americans.

That is not what was found that case. What was found was that any hiring criteria which had an unequal racial impact and was not sufficiently demonstrably tied to actual job performance was illegal racially discriminatory. It neither extended to all pre-employment testing nor limited itself to pre-employment testing.

> These tests were effectively banned

No, they weren't. Pre-employment IQ testing is still used.

> What happened after that, was that the "testing" was legally sent to the colleges and universities for them to vet.

Blaming that on Griggs v. Duke Power is especially rich because one of the hiring filters which was found to be illegal discrimination as applied by Duke Power in that case, because it was not demonstrably tied to job performance, was a diploma requirement.

Now, if you want to blame this on some kind of popular mythology about the legality of pre-employment IQ testing, based on a misperception of Griggs v. Duke Power, okay, fine. But that's a different story than the actual legality.

[mulmen]

Starbucks has an initiative to hire veterans and spouses of veterans. Starbucks is a for-profit corporation so they must believe at some level there is a benefit to the company in hiring these individuals. What skills do veterans and their spouses have that are useful to Starbucks?

To be clear: I think this is a great idea on Starbucks' part.

[lefstathiou]

I agree in spirit with this though I find internalizing the facts is less important than internalizing the method or theory of knowledge which they aren't getting either in my opinion.

Personal anecdote: I believe there is a broad and pervasive culture of extreme procrastination across liberal arts campuses (it's much harder to do this in the sciences because if you don't keep up you completely drop off). Vast majority of my peers were pulling all nighters and needed a looming deadline to finish any assignment. It is very difficult to retain information on no sleep.

[rayiner]

The fundamental problem with schools is that they’re run by professors and teachers, who have almost a pathological aversion to teaching people anything useful.