finally!

By alice | April 3, 2008

Here’s a great idea: the School of Everything.

It started in the UK, where people are more concerned about their education system than most Americans seem to be. The possibilities for homeschoolers are obvious. The criticisms naysayers will make are also obvious, but don’t matter because the School of Everything will grow as much as people want to use it (the “we shouldn’t bother with people who don’t understand the Internet because they’ll be dead soon” argument). So I won’t go into that stuff.

Anyway, School of Everything has attracted good attention already, and started up in the US now, and JP Rangaswami is a supporter, and those are all excellent credentials. But most of all this seems to be the first educational institution (technically you can give it that old-fashioned title) which has knowledge rather than qualifications as its raison d’être, and as such I find it very exciting indeed.

I don’t mind people going to college, really. What I don’t understand is the way so many of them attribute magical qualities to having a degree, as if it was somehow more than the knowledge of the lessons all combined. University life might be nice, but spending 3 years in the real world counts for at least as much experience of actual life-skills, doesn’t it?

Just call me a grumpy old X-er.

10 Comments »

10 Responses to “finally!”

beloml Says:
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:54 pm

So is it your opinion that education is about nothing but developing job skills?

alice Says:
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:24 pm

Not at all. Plenty of people learn things at college that are worth knowing but make no contribution to any job they will ever do.

Why do you ask? What is your view of education?

Specifically, what do you think college can offer that life outside college that includes the same amount of knowledge-acquisition would not include?

fjfjfj Says:
April 5th, 2008 at 8:44 am

Four years in America. (!)
Even more to learn the really useful things like Law etc.

Theocritus Says:
April 6th, 2008 at 2:10 am

I have mixed views. I spent four years at Rice studying math–which I didn’t need a bit for what I’m doing now. Still, it did fill my head with things which have been of great help me in difficult times. But one could say that of just about any knowledge.

A degree is proof of planning and attention. When I lived in Midland in the 80s I had fun in the service industry–barkeeps, waiters &c. Someone I knew rather well had stunning qualifications and they were all on the outside. I had just studied vector calculus and I was having to provide the higher bits of the multiplication tables to him. He and his little friends had an entire modus vivendi which astonished my middle-class background. They lived intensely but shallowly, never planning more than a few days in advance, if that. They lived in the present, and were transients in their own lives. They were, in short, unreliable.

28 years later I’ve moved into a house that I’ve spent a year redoing. It was where the burnt orange and avocado went to die in 1975, and it’s now, frankly, the prettiest home in Pecos, like being the best ski-jumper in Barbados. (I did have Katie’s immense help.) But dealing with the people who did the work, except the owners of the various subcontracting businesses, sent me back to Midland. Here are people who live in the present, making sure that they have enough to get by. And yet again I find I am the intercessor in other peoples’ drama.

A degree is proof that someone has an attention span. It is proof to employers. Or, in the words of a cynic friend, “A college degree is proof to a future employer that you’ve put up with four years of shit and can put up with more if you have to.”

It’s also a form of pre-screening. I have a very intelligent friend, Pat, who lives in Austin. Brilliant, almost an idiot savant. But he doesn’t present well and if he weren’t a geek and if geeks weren’t like this, he would be unemployable. In other professions proper dress gets a foot in the door. And a degree is proper dress.

(That said, I as an employer am not impressed by business college or touchy-feely degrees like sociology but by degrees which require a sustained application.)

Shefaly Says:
April 8th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

Alice: Theocritus words it well. Degrees signal a lot of things to employers:

The learning of specialised skills and toolsets;

The ability to immerse oneself in, persist with and finish something – especially in case of those who finish and defend their PhD theses ;-) which also signals a great degree of self-motivation;

The ability to manage things, think issues through and to take instructions (the biggest peeve in the workplace is juniors who cannot carry out simple instructions).

The experience of life has its value too in all cultures. The value of Uni education is higher in some cultures than in others and as we globalise and move across borders, no prizes for guessing which way the employers err…

alice Says:
April 8th, 2008 at 10:39 pm

But don’t you think employers would be just as happy if people studied things wherever, then sat an exam and got the same grade?

Is it really about attendance at the university?

There hasn’t been a lot of demand for an independent degree-level examination board so far, but it could happen. A free market in where you get your knowledge and learning, and in being tested on it.

Anyone who has learned a bunch of languages to an excellent level, for instance (computer or spoken), has proved all the things Theocritus and Shefaly mention. They can demonstrate it by demonstrating their knowledge. No degree required for that.

Rob Says:
April 10th, 2008 at 9:07 am

Alice, I think you miss the point that there are lots and lots of things you simply can’t learn effectively through self-study or life experience.

Ever try to teach yourself Latin? I did and it’s just not something a reasonably intelligent person can do. You NEED a teacher (or a teacher-equivalent, such as good software).

Think you could learn tensor calculus on your own? I couldn’t, I could barely learn it with a teacher. Most of the really hard subjects require good teachers to answer questions and explain concepts. Drill and practice are also important. You only really know something if you’ve had a chance to apply your knowledge.

Let me put it another way: would you drive over a bridge designed by an engineer who HADN’T been to college?

alice Says:
April 10th, 2008 at 9:19 am

The School of Everything is exactly about meeting up with other humans in real life because learning from people is often the best way- that’s why I posted about it.

College isn’t necessary for teachers, or for qualifications.

Theocritus Says:
April 12th, 2008 at 12:22 am

I do understand the value of sitting an exam and getting a qualification, but there is also the need for human interaction. For without it, everything that we do will be, quite without our wanting it to, be skewed toward our wishes and our preconceptions.

I’ve often thought that the most boring person in (common) literature had to be Robinson Crusoe. He would have been just as boring had he had the Bodleian with him. He might have quoted the entire Loeb oeuvre, but would have needed someone to ask a question just a little bit off from his mindset.

Since the School of Everything is about meeting with other people, that solves that problem. But again we get back to the accreditation. If it rises to point that it is thought of as bestowing serious knowledge then it will serve.

The flip side of this is that a degree nowadays often means nothing in real knowledge. Brown, for example, trains its journalists only in left-wing cant. One New York editor complained that a recent Brown graduate didn’t know what a dateline was. But could slant any story from a left-wing perspective. This is competence but not, I hope, the stated competence of the journalism department of an Ivy League University.

On the other hand, by credential I am a math major from Rice, which is, if I may say so, not a bad piece of paper to have. But it’s utterly useless to me in what I do. I own a title company and do nothing but practice real-estate law. And I’m not a lawyer.

If I applied for a job elsewhere in the legal field, now, I’d be crippled by not having the law degree. As it is my word is taken literally to the bank–and by bankers. My degree is one of experience, but only here.

As you can see from my equivocation I’m not really arguing either way. Merely to state that the perception of ability is important and, as of now, the School of Everything doesn’t have it.

But it could be a matter of bootstrapping. After all, the Rice Institute was started in about 1916 with $6 million dollars left by a man whose butler killed him, whose estranged daughters fought to have his will probated in New York, but Texas won. (As we did with Howard Hughes. We’re good at that, it seems.)

Let’s hope that something like that works. Harvard, for example, rakes in billions a year in income on its investments and still tuitions rise–why? They need competition. They all do.