Note: even with these great lessons, I still think that teachers will be useful. The lessons could be pretty good, so I’m not sure if they’d be necessary, but I suspect that they’d still be useful.
It seems you’re thinking of a system where teachers help students learn, and the students want to learn and apply some minimal effort towards doing so. And where really good lecture material is prerecorded and teachers don’t have to spend the majority of their time reading from standardized lecture notes.
But the biggest problems in modern education seem to lie in mandatory grade school, not in elective college degrees. Many students strongly don’t want to study (at least certain subjects); others simply don’t care enough to put in a lot of effort. The task of the teacher in practice is often to force students to study (or encourage them, if possible). For those students who do want to study, being forced to sit in the same class as those who don’t is often a problem in itself.
Man this brings back childhood memories. I just look back and wonder why I had to spend all that time with annoying morons. Really makes me wonder how differently things turned out but if we had the technology to contact the split universe where my other self is basically as best as it could be I wonder if I could still feel that it’s me. Not just a person who looks identical.
If you work with the annoying morons as one of them, you are probably doing something wrong. And if you are their boss… well, this is the part the school didn’t teach you.
Good point. As for whether or not we’d need these babysitters, I don’t know. Perhaps there’d be weekly/monthly tests that students would have to pass, and that would provide sufficient motivation. Perhaps the motivation to eventually get a job would be sufficient. Perhaps learning would actually be fun, and there would be sufficient intrinsic motivation. I really don’t know.
It seems you’re thinking of a system where teachers help students learn, and the students want to learn and apply some minimal effort towards doing so. And where really good lecture material is prerecorded and teachers don’t have to spend the majority of their time reading from standardized lecture notes.
But the biggest problems in modern education seem to lie in mandatory grade school, not in elective college degrees. Many students strongly don’t want to study (at least certain subjects); others simply don’t care enough to put in a lot of effort. The task of the teacher in practice is often to force students to study (or encourage them, if possible). For those students who do want to study, being forced to sit in the same class as those who don’t is often a problem in itself.
Man this brings back childhood memories. I just look back and wonder why I had to spend all that time with annoying morons. Really makes me wonder how differently things turned out but if we had the technology to contact the split universe where my other self is basically as best as it could be I wonder if I could still feel that it’s me. Not just a person who looks identical.
School is a prison for children.
It gets you used to working with annoying morons.
Maybe that lesson is overrated.
If you work with the annoying morons as one of them, you are probably doing something wrong. And if you are their boss… well, this is the part the school didn’t teach you.
Isaac Asimov had the same problem.
The neighbor’s grass is always greener and better to smoke.
Good point. As for whether or not we’d need these babysitters, I don’t know. Perhaps there’d be weekly/monthly tests that students would have to pass, and that would provide sufficient motivation. Perhaps the motivation to eventually get a job would be sufficient. Perhaps learning would actually be fun, and there would be sufficient intrinsic motivation. I really don’t know.