[mjburgess]

I guess you're down-voted for both having a non-obvious opinion and phrasing it in a hostile way.

You are correct however, but it's more understanable than you make out.

Rather, the education system is designed to impart the skill of information recall -- which was essential to actually acquiring the target skills (ie., you needed to remember lots about chemistry before doing any). Remembering sentences about a skill has no relationship to being able to do it, only, that as you're learning to do it, those will be an aid.

That hasnt been true for less than 20 years, perhaps 10 with the prevalence of smart phones in 2007.

The whole system is set up to impart the skill of recall and grade according to your ability to recall. There is a implicit general awareness that you're actually not aquiring the target skills.

eg., after 5-7 years of french in the UK, no 18 year old can speak french. And so on for every subject.

The same is true all the way up until PhD. It's our historical model of what education was for: giving you the library up-front.

The skills were to be obtained in employment, and with any self-motivated practice.

Today that is painfully ridiculous, and there's really almost no value in it. Leaving the warehousing, grading and certifying functions of educational institutions their only apparent use.

PS. There's an argument to say education hasn't needed to be this way since the advent of public libraries, cheap books, which is still late 20th C. This is plausible enough too. Our template of education is still basically a mix of medieval and Victorian, with the presumption that books are hard to obtain or difficult to survey oneself.

note that primary/elementary schooling isnt set up this way: it is deliberately skilling. This makes it very effective and very important.

[pvg]

eg., after 5-7 years of french in the UK, no 18 year old can speak french. And so on for every subject. The same is true all the way up until PhD.

Those seem like a series of stridently unrelated and evidence-free statements.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Completely unsupported, in fact.

Of course no foreign part-timer can speak French like a native, but able students can certainly hold a basic conversation and read French to a reasonable level.

Language degrees include an exchange program which offers extended full immersion, so it's simply nonsense to say that a graduate in French won't be able to speak it.

But... the problem with CS is that it has no idea what it is. Most engineering degrees have well-formed requirements, which include a lot of math and domain-specific detail.

The sciences and math have a core curriculum which hasn't really changed all that much for fifty years or so now.

CS has... what? What's the basic skill set, what are the core requirements, and how are they recognised?

No one agrees. Employers mostly want "Minimum Viable Developers" who can crank out code using the Framework du Jour.

Academics do what academics do.

You can certainly make the case for any one specific curriculum, which will include a mix of theory and programming projects in various languages and environments.

But there's really no such thing as a definitive core CS skill set. For everyone who says "You should know C" someone else is going to say "Bad example - learn this teaching language instead."

And so it goes for the rest. Machine code? Compiler theory? DSP? It's all optional.

At the same time, CS has spent far too little time on the psychology of programming and system design. There's a fair amount of unicorn chasing, in the form of tidy concepts like type theory and side-effect free coding, but far too little research into designing languages and practices that are verifiably better at managing concurrency, handling versioning, and minimising avoidable bugs.

So the "learn theory vs learn by practice" question is a side issue, and can't be answered unless there are specific goals. For now, there's no such thing as a "qualified developer" in the sense that there are qualified (actually chartered) engineers.

Until there is, how can anyone decide which teaching approach is better when there's limited agreement about what needs to be taught?

[javajosh]

School gives some a useful fiction, which is primary motivational. E.g. campus, classrooms, professors make you feel better about spending your time on some esoterica.

The other benefit is subject gate keeping. Departments at least in STEM, don't offer pointless classes.

An autodidact might not know what's valuable and might not always muster the energy to get through. They also might not have the integrity to give themselves a fair test.

So yeah, school is useful beyond addressing the scarcity of books.

[mjburgess]

School is useful insofar as its guiding and motivating, yes.

This is tutoring.

Everything else it does is a waste of time. That's where you'll find most of the actual time spent though, and it is certainly not an educational aim. The aim is to grade on recall. It is not to motivate, or guide.

[javajosh]

>The aim is to grade on recall.

No. At best this means you had a terrible experience, and are generalizing in ignorance. At worst you are dug into a position and are willing to defend it without integrity (a sadly popular and often successful approach).

Many (most?) of my tests were open book and they were hard because they were puzzles requiring you to have absorbed the book to the extent that you could reason beyond it. The tests would probe our understanding of an idea by asserting a small change in the initial assumptions, and have us complete the derivation with that new assumption. Test questions were novel complications of the problems in the book.

That was my experience, and it was a good one. I'm sorry you didn't get that.

[SimbaOnSteroids]

This is my current experience as well, open book open notes means be familiar enough with the concepts at play that when I ask you to do something fairly specific, you can reason out a series of commands/functions to get the job done.