Just because those things don't contribute to your final grade doesn't mean you don't do them.
At Oxbridge, for CS we still had lab work. We still had problem sets assigned for CS and for math which were graded. We had one large CS group project in, I want to say, our second year. Humanities students were still assigned essays. It's just that none of this stuff contributed to your final degree classification which was based entirely on your exams (although if you didn't do your CS practicals you wouldn't be allowed to pass).
Obviously Oxbridge isn't exactly representative but certainly my experience showed me that the American style is not the only way of making education work.
The “it does X for you” aspect of technology is not completely without its downsides, for various values of X.
For example, take “X” to be “walking”. Do we have the technology that allows us to pretty much never have to walk? Sure. As far as I am aware, though, we do not generally favour a lifestyle of being bound to a mobility aid by choice, and in fact we have found that not walking when able in the long run creates substantial well-being issues for a human. (Now, we have found ways to alleviate some of those issues for those who aren’t able, but clearly it is not sufficient because we still walk.)
The problem is exacerbated immensely as the value of X approaches something as fundamental to one’s humanity as “thinking”.
> "It does X for you" is the point of many technologies. You still require knowledge to work around it.
When running water replaced the need to pump water out of the ground yourself, were people urged to "learn faucets"? You kind of just need to twist a knob and water comes out, right?
Maybe there was an intermediary stage where running water was slightly more complicated and there were more steps to learn, but devoting time to learning those steps would have been a waste of time, since the end goal of the system was for it to function without much input.
Not at all. It’s a tool. It can be used well and it can be used badly, the difference often being others things thought in a CS curriculum. But a well trained engineer using the tool will be more productive than that engineer doing everything by hand, so leaving that tool out of the curriculum is doing a disservice to the students
At Oxbridge, for CS we still had lab work. We still had problem sets assigned for CS and for math which were graded. We had one large CS group project in, I want to say, our second year. Humanities students were still assigned essays. It's just that none of this stuff contributed to your final degree classification which was based entirely on your exams (although if you didn't do your CS practicals you wouldn't be allowed to pass).
Obviously Oxbridge isn't exactly representative but certainly my experience showed me that the American style is not the only way of making education work.