[Broco]

Ah, so you're a law student CubaLibre. That partly explains why me and you always end up in arcane arguments!

I've idly considered going to law school myself, but ultimately based on what I'm hearing from practicing lawyers, I feel the work is unlikely to be more interesting than software (unless I were to land an appeals court clerkship or something), and it's definitely a step backwards in terms of quality of life. Well, I wish you good luck avoiding all the "trap" jobs I've heard you can end up into (corporate associate slave, dead-end small practice, eternal document review temping).

[Broco]

Felix, what's optimistic/frivolous about it? I never said there would be a magic trick hidden in those books that would make the debt go away. But he needs knowledge of the laws that control his relationship with financial institutions, things that can be negociated with them, anecdotes of other people's experience, and perhaps also potential overall strategies, to make good decisions to make the best of his situation. That's exactly the kind of information he was asking for in his top post, and I'll wager those books have it.

As for your "Marxist attitude", I take it you mean that the web is enough for you. Well okay, but the information available on the web at this time is generally superficial and disconnected. If you want in-depth information that is coherently organized, at this stage in the development of the Internet you need books. I'm not sure how you could claim otherwise on most topics. There are so many times that I read websites for hours on a topic, but my thinking was still confused and incomplete, and then reading a book made the subject fall into place. Books are a cheap and high-quality source of knowledge.

As for where books were useful in solving practical problems, well most of these don't necessarily fall under the category of "major life problems" but still:
- I taught myself C++ and Japanese from books. Neither web resources nor university classes were very useful in comparison.
- I decided on whether I would pursue graduate studies and perhaps a professorship after reading this book on choosing and succeeding in grad school. (I didn't.)
- I alleviated my back pain through books on ergonomics, stretching, posture, etc.
- I saved a few hundred dollars on my first taxes with a tax-for-beginners book.
- In a month I will hopefully go through the American border on my first try after recently read a book on the procedure for obtaining work visas. (My last attempt a year ago resulted in rejection -- this really sucks -- owing to my misunderstanding of the bureaucratic rules. Now I feel I know what makes them tick.)

[Broco]

[Broco]

[Broco]

CubaLibre: of course I have your attitude towards self-education as well, but I've heard over and over again many/most people telling me that they find it impossible to learn from books only and require a teacher.

To me this is difficult to understand, since teachers at the undergraduate level or below tend to simply parrot the content of the textbook in a somewhat unclear and disorganized manner. When I ask why, I usually get the answer that they get to interactively ask questions that way. But this sounds like an excuse since there is precious little interaction at least in most the classes I've ever been in. I suspect the true reason is that most people require much more mental effort to parse written sentences than you or I do, owing to either insufficient reading practice in childhood or dyslexia.

Try measuring your reading speed sometime; I have measured that mine is about 600wpm most of the time, and I suspect yours is comparable. The median is 200wpm. I have an idea of how it is for someone of average speed, because my Japanese reading speed is maybe 100-150wpm at best, and that can make reading a frustrating slog even when I don't need to look up any word in the dictionary. Anyway, for that reason, your reasoning only applies to a limited subset of the population.


Adilegian: yes, there's a lot to be said for a university that avoids the usual situation of the profs feeling their job is research and undergraduate courses are an irritating chore, like washing the dishes. Are there really no public universities that take this tack though?

[Broco]

Joe, since your approach is the exact opposite of mine (I skipped lectures and relied entirely on the textbook), I'd be interested in hearing your results in this reading speed test, to test my theory about reading speed correlating with preference for reading or listening.

[Broco]

Uhh, the settled parts of the sciences are fairly well-suited for top-down transfer of information. It would be a waste of time to encourage students to challenge claims that are firmly proven. Experiments are commonly presented to stimulate interest and to teach the experimental method, but in general there is no time to prove even half of what is claimed. And this is not a betrayal of the principles of science, either; science would go nowhere without trust for the results accumulated by the community.

Though you are still half-right in that students must still be personally engaged instead of passive receivers -- the way that is done in the sciences is by presenting specific problems to which they can apply the (ex cathedra) general principles.

[Broco]

Okay, that's far over average. So much for my hypothesis then.

[Broco]

Paradigm shifts are a little bit overrated. Kuhn himself identified "normal science", the incremental addition of details to an existing model, as the main task of scientists and something which is anyway necessary for the foundation for the shifts to be in place. It is not the role of our educational system to develop radical thinkers, since a small number of them will emerge regardless (and a small number is what is sufficient).


Also. There is an obvious resource allocation problem to your proposed teaching method. Where do you propose finding a dialectic teacher for every single student? I think it would be feasible to do that for only a small number of the most promising and dedicated students. Also, the teachers with such a method must be highly erudite and intelligent for it to be better than a standardized curriculum, so the average high-school teacher wouldn't do -- it should be reserved to university professors only. Oh wait, I just described grad school.

[Broco]

You have it exactly upside down, critical thinking is needed more than ever in modern professions -- there is an increasingly large class of less prestigious professionals ("knowledge workers") such as programmers and non-M.D. medical specialists that require a lot of reasoning in their daily tasks. Elementary and high school strongly foster critical thinking on average by teaching literacy, which was at a far lower level on average prior to public education. You are frustrated with it because the system is inflexible and not willing to accelerate for the sake of the very best students -- to a large extent a result of political pressures, "no child left behind" etc -- so you had the experience of extreme understimulation. I had the same experience. But you overextrapolate to everyone else.

You also seem to idealize the intellectual capacity of people of the past, possibly due to our bias towards discussing elite intellectuals from earlier eras (since they are the ones who left behind the classic texts we still read) instead of the huge mass of the uneducated. A focus on the silent majority shows low levels of literacy and reasoning ability (c.f. the Flynn effect).

As for the collapse of community, intimate relationships are disintegrated because it is more economically efficient to do so. It is necessary to foster the free movement of labor (i.e. ripping communities apart) as part of the process of specialization to increasingly narrow subfields and to get people with particular training to where they are economically needed. And there's a reason why "nepotism" is a dirty word today; intimate relationships get in the way of business. I am saddened by this personally, but from my point of view what is regrettable is the loss of valuable personal ties, not knowledge and intellectual ability which is steadily increasing across the board.

If you want a throwback to an earlier social model, that implies a throwback to an earlier economic structure as well, and the corresponding lower per capita GDP (not that this is an actual risk since there is no way to turn back the clock). There's a very real tradeoff here and the way American modernity does things has sounder reasons than you presume. And it's a change that happened largely from the bottom-up, with individuals in large numbers choosing to value prosperity over community.

[Broco]

[Broco]

Funny job choice, since judges are tightly bound by statutes, precedent, and directives from superior courts, and have precious little autonomy to do what they think is right. I find it hard to understand how you think you'd thrive in that environment.

Lately in the news there was an activist district judge who was always making off-the-wall decisions which were reversed by superior courts, and had sections in his opinions entitled "Recommendations to the Executive Branch" and "Recommendations to Congress". He quit being a judge after only a couple of years and went to academia.

It seems to me that if, like him, you would like to be highly autonomous in your work and influence policy, becoming a law professor would be much more comfortable for you. Sure you would probably be ignored and not actually influence policy, but you'd at least be putting your preferred arguments out there.

[Broco]