Education vs. Training
I just came across an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times by Brent Staples on plagiarism in academia. Of course, blogger won't allow me to cut and paste it. The Irony. So I will most laboriously type out the passage I wanted to highlight:
Staples quotes a professor-friend: Nonchalance from students towards plagiarism "represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind."
Is this ideal of self-improvement and mental freedom unique to Western education? Eastern thought and pedagogy seems to strive for detatchment as opposed to independence. I could be wrong; I find Eastern philosophy rather convoluted and I retain only impressions and snippets of it. But I am thinking of the prominence of our Asian and Indian ("India-Indians" I mean) friends in math and science. The story we often find touted is this or that individual striving to better his economic station, not necessarily ars gratia artis or even liberal arts for liberal arts' sake. (Of course, most Americans have still to be convinced of the latter.) But the focus on economic gain could be a function of the relatively recent participation of Asians and Indians in our culture. I was reading an article in today's Wall Street Journal on the popularity of spelling bees among Indians and South Asians. Someone decided to pitch spelling bees to them in order to help them advance their English and the spelling bees have been enormously popular with Indians. The more power to them! But it seems another instance of training over education, simple input-output. Can they make sense of William Faulkner? His sentence structure challenges more than his vocabular)y. And whiz spelling doesn't help you determine paragraph breaks (as I look over this paragraph and wonder whether I've put too many points in one paragraph--I have a beastly time trying to keep points neatly packaged! they just ooze into one another).
Do you see how I have a tendency to think myself out of a point?
But it's interesting that whenever I've had opportunity to tell college profs about my education at New Saint Andrews, they've been nodding agreement all the way.
Is the emphasis on getting the right answer one of the reasons why students often hate multiple choice tests? Often multiple choice presents several nuanced answers and I usually find them blurring together in meaning and giving me a headache.
Staples quotes a professor-friend: Nonchalance from students towards plagiarism "represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind."
Is this ideal of self-improvement and mental freedom unique to Western education? Eastern thought and pedagogy seems to strive for detatchment as opposed to independence. I could be wrong; I find Eastern philosophy rather convoluted and I retain only impressions and snippets of it. But I am thinking of the prominence of our Asian and Indian ("India-Indians" I mean) friends in math and science. The story we often find touted is this or that individual striving to better his economic station, not necessarily ars gratia artis or even liberal arts for liberal arts' sake. (Of course, most Americans have still to be convinced of the latter.) But the focus on economic gain could be a function of the relatively recent participation of Asians and Indians in our culture. I was reading an article in today's Wall Street Journal on the popularity of spelling bees among Indians and South Asians. Someone decided to pitch spelling bees to them in order to help them advance their English and the spelling bees have been enormously popular with Indians. The more power to them! But it seems another instance of training over education, simple input-output. Can they make sense of William Faulkner? His sentence structure challenges more than his vocabular)y. And whiz spelling doesn't help you determine paragraph breaks (as I look over this paragraph and wonder whether I've put too many points in one paragraph--I have a beastly time trying to keep points neatly packaged! they just ooze into one another).
Do you see how I have a tendency to think myself out of a point?
But it's interesting that whenever I've had opportunity to tell college profs about my education at New Saint Andrews, they've been nodding agreement all the way.
Is the emphasis on getting the right answer one of the reasons why students often hate multiple choice tests? Often multiple choice presents several nuanced answers and I usually find them blurring together in meaning and giving me a headache.
Comments