In a previous post, I outlined a curriculum based largely on reading books. Of course, there is more to learning any subject than reading and I have been careful in planning this curriculum to leave time for other activities. But, I think there are still many tangible benefits to reading books and I would like to outline some of those here.
Reading books improves your vocabulary: Reading good books (and by that I mean primarily non-textbooks) improves your vocabulary since you are quite likely to encounter words you have not heard or used before and assuming you look them up you can then add them to your reading, and possible, speaking vocabulary. Reading books improves your writing: Just as becoming a better musician entails listening to other good players, becoming a better writer entails reading other good writers. The best books are ones that allow you to improve your ability to express your thoughts in writing by showing you the best writing techniques in action. It’s one thing to see good writing examples in a textbook, but quite another to see them applied. Reading books improves your attention span: To fully digest an author’s thoughts in a book requires sustained attention. You need to be able to focus on and analyze extended arguments, illustrations, and narratives. The skills required for close reading are useful in other areas of life as well and a great way to cultivate these skills is by seeking out good books and sticking with them. Reading books deepens your knowledge: You can learn the basics of a subject by reading articles and encyclopedia entries but to get deep and detailed knowledge you need to read books. Authors can provide much more elaborate arguments and narratives in books than they can in any other format. The real payoff of your sustained attention to an author’s ideas is the depth of knowledge you can gain from it. I suspect the very idea of reading books as a basis for a curriculum is becoming less fashionable. The argument is that there are so many other ways of gaining knowledge now with digital resources that the place for books in a curriculum is shrinking. Besides, students today simply will not read books so why should we assign them? But, it seems likely that if students had been encouraged to cultivate a love of reading early in their life they would carry this with them to high school, college, and beyond. A reading-based curriculum encourages that love of reading. Start with the fun of reading and learning and let the rest of the benefits take care of themselves. A popular topic of education reform articles lately is the subject of student engagement. A common diagnosis for the lack of student engagement is that students are not finding the information presented in class relevant to them. The proposed solution is often that professors must show students how the subject they’re studying is relevant. I disagree!
If students are not finding the subjects they study relevant, then they are not looking for relevance. Why is it that professors must point out relevance? What responsibility do students have for making their education meaningful? It is often conceded by educators that the subject they’re teaching is not relevant so they simply change what they are teaching to suit the demands of students. This is a serious mistake. It ignores the real relevance that every (yes, I said every) subject has to a student’s experience. It ignores the importance of students finding out for themselves how a subject is relevant. And, it implicitly concedes that the only subjects worth studying are those whose relevance is immediately obvious. Let’s look at each of these in turn. Every subject is relevant: While this point may be difficult to demonstrate, it can be done with every subject in a standard curriculum. For example, if you have a student majoring in allied health and they want to maintain that taking your course in philosophy or economics or psychology is not relevant to their major that means they are not being active learners and searching for relevance. You can pick any major and any course not directly related to that major and find the relevance between them if you are willing to actively search. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself. If you can’t find the relevance email me and I will provide you with some guidance. Challenge your students to make these connections confident in the knowledge that they are there. After all, Steve Jobs famously found calligraphy relevant to his interest in computers. Students need to be active in their learning: This is an important component of student engagement but it is not often enough expressed in terms of the student’s responsibility. Why should instructors always be responsible for making a subject engaging? Does the educator owe the student an entertaining class? I don’t mean to imply that courses ought to be boring. But, a truly active learner can find interest in any subject matter. Sometimes they will be able to do this because of the professor’s engaging style. But, sometimes they may have to do this despite the professor’s lack of engagement. So much the better for the life lesson this presents. Everything useful will not be presented in a palatable form. Sometimes you have to do your digging. Relevance is not the only educational value: In the mania for relevance, we often forget that this is not the only reason for studying a particular subject. Art History is not relevant to the accounting major? So what! It might be that the study of art is a good thing irrespective of its relevance. Yes, I still maintain that it is possible to find the relevance but if you cannot this is no reason to maintain that a subject is not worth studying. Some academic subjects may never help your job prospects or contribute monetarily to your career. But, studying these subjects may end up doing much more for you. They may broaden and enrich your experience, introduce you to new interests, challenge you to think in new ways. The search for relevance seems somewhat narcissistic in that it rests on the assumption that the only things worth studying are things I care about. But, we don’t live in a solipsistic world. We live in a world of other people, other cultures, and other interests. Learning that might be one of the most important lessons to be gained from your academic studies. Is that relevant enough? What is creativity? Can it be learned? How do creative people think? These are some of the questions that Jonah Lehrer looks at in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. One insight I think is particularly important and provides a useful argument for the importance of learning as much as you can even if it seems irrelevant to your area of study or your current job. Creativity requires the mixing of ideas and to do this, you need to be exposed to many different ideas from many different areas of knowledge.
There are countless examples of this process that could illustrate the point. One of the most famous is the example of Steve Jobs being inspired by a course in calligraphy he took. This led to the development of many different fonts in one of the first Apple computers. In his book The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey Schwartz writes about using the insights of Austrian economics to help develop a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. In Lehrer’s book, he describes a similar process of combining ideas. Dan Wieden, co-founder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy came up with the “Just Do It” Nike slogan by thinking about a murderer named Gary Gilmore whose last words at his execution in 1977 were “Let’s do it.” He was originally prompted to think about Gilmore due to a discussion with one of his colleagues who happened to mention the writer Norman Mailer. As Wieden puts it “we were talking about Mailer, and I knew that he had written a book about Gary Gilmore. And that was it. That’s where the slogan came from. Just a little sentence from someone else. That’s all it takes.” The point is that’s all it takes if you have a sufficiently large store of ideas from which to draw and make connections. Where do these ideas come from? Well, one of the best ways to assemble this storehouse is to read widely, learn about different subjects, have a well-rounded general knowledge of the world, and remain curious. All of these are elements of a good education and are too often missing in what passes for education these days in most primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. Much of education these days seems to be very focused on relevance. We are told that students want to learn what is relevant to them and will respond best when given relevant information. As educators, we are told that this is the reason why students do not read many books, certainly not the classics. They just aren’t relevant. But, what is the a priori relevance of calligraphy to developing a computer? What is the a priori relevance of Austrian economics to treatment for OCD? And, what is the a priori relevance of the murderer Gary Gilmore to coming up with an advertising slogan? Judged by our current standard none of these are relevant and would not merit knowing about. So, the question becomes: How much creativity are we depriving students of (and they are depriving of themselves) by only focusing on the relevant? In a world where there is a premium of creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving don’t we need to be teaching more irrelevant information than ever before? There are significant changes on the horizon in higher education. While it may take years from them to fully take effect I think we are well into the beginning of a new era.
Straighterline: This platform allows students to take course for a reduced rate that will automatically transfer to participating colleges and universities. The courses are self-directed and allow students to work at their own pace. The website is clear that it is not a college and therefore not accredited but their coursework will transfer to colleges that are and will count the same as college credit. The Disruption: A major reason for students enrolling in community colleges is to avoid the high cost of tuition for introductory courses. This website provides an alternative to community colleges for the same demographic of students that community colleges often appeal to. Students who are self-motivated, have little time to waste figuring out enrollment and financial aid, already are working with families who want to streamline their college career can now do so with more ease and less expense. Udemy: Recently, a Stanford professor made news by offering a course in artificial intelligence and allowing anyone to enroll in the course online for free. Students who did so did not receive college credit from Stanford but they did receive a certificate of completion. The course enrolled over 100,000 students. Now, that same Stanford professor has created Udemy where other instructors can offer their courses to students in the hopes of reaching an even wider audience. While these college courses will not count for credit they do seem to be in demand perhaps because they shorten the distance between desire to learn and the actual learning. The Disruption: As with Straighterline an important advantage of Udemy is that it allows easy access to organized knowledge. This is an important, and often overlooked, benefit to students. Whatever advantages there are to enrolling in regular college courses one thing is clear, it is not an easy process. There are enrollment forms to fill out, financial aid forms to fill out, lines to wait in, advisors to see, signatures to obtain for permission to enroll in courses, prerequisite to fulfill to enroll in courses. The time lag between wanting to enroll and starting is quite lengthy. This was no big deal when it was the only way to get organized knowledge. But now, the process of gaining access to great scholars presenting organized knowledge is mere minutes. With websites like Udemy you can sign up with your Facebook account or if you don't have one you can sign up with e-mail, browse the courses, and enroll. Pearson: But, what about accreditation? What about getting a formal college degree? Well, it won't be long before colleges aren't the only game in town for this either. Recent developments in the UK will certainly set the precedent for change. The textbook publisher Pearson is now able to offer degrees of its own in the UK. If their venture is a success it will certainly inspire others to petition to do this and it will certainly spread to other countries. The Disruption: As many critics have been pointing out, free access to free knowledge means little if students can't get a degree from a fully accredited institution of higher learning. So, college still remains the gateway. But, this may not last. As this article in the Atlantic Monthly asks, "Can control of credentialing last for long without control of knowledge?" With free access to free knowledge, colleges are now essentially selling a credential. But, what happens when colleges no longer have a monopoly on offering credentials, certificates, and degrees? When employers begin to recognize the value of other alternatives, where does this leave colleges and universities? Mozilla's Open Badges Project: Still in its infancy, this project hopes to facilitate a system of badges to allow individuals who are learning new skills (be it from a college, university, or one of the other platforms mentioned above) to earn badges they can display to show prospective employers and clients what their qualifications and credentials are. The Disruption: Once developed this platform will essentially render formal college degrees largely irrelevant for many, many fields of study. With the buy-in of employers and others in a position to hire, this will allow personalized education to flourish because it will formalize credit without the complications and expense usually associated with earning a degree. Additionally, once a system of badges is in place it will allow platforms which provide free learning resources such as iTunesU, Zero Tuition College, and DIY U, to gain traction because the courses they offer can count towards badges. Conclusion: Certainly for the foreseeable future many academic degrees will remain necessary and therefore safe from major disruption. Medical degrees may be the most immune from disruption but many other formalized professions could transition with little difficulty to a system of personalized education and the use of independent credentials and badges to document skill and mastery requirements. After all, even now you can become a CPA by silly passing the exam. Granted a college degree in accounting is a good preparation for this exam but it is not required. Imagine when it becomes a matter of earning the required number of badges to sit for the CPA exam. Earning these badges can be done through a combination of resources including but not limited to taking courses through Straighterline, Udemy, iTunesU, and other resources I have not mentioned here. How will these changes affect higher education? What will be the reaction of those in higher education now to these disruptions? I'll consider some of these in my next post. |