You certainly wrote quite a lot of ideological mish-mash to dodge the simplest possible explanation: a, if not the, primary function of elite education (as compared to non-elite education) is to filter out an arbitrary caste of individuals capable of optimizing their way through arbitrarily difficult trials and imbue that caste with elite status. The precise content of the trials doesn’t really matter (hence the existence of both Yale and MIT), as long as they’re sufficiently difficult to ensure that few pass.
I’m writing from an elite engineering university, and as far as I can tell, this is more-or-less our tacitly admitted pedagogical method: some students will survive the teaching process, and they will retroactively be declared superior. The question of whether we even should optimize our pedagogy to maximize the conveyance of information from professor to student plays no part whatsoever in our curriculum.
If you’re right (and you may well be), then I view that as a sad commentary on the state of human education, and I view tech-assisted self-education as a way of optimizing that inherently wasteful “hazing” system you describe. I think it’s likely that what you say is true for some high percentage of classes, but untrue for a very small minority of highly-valuable classes.
Also, the university atmosphere is good for social networking, which is one of the primary values of going to MIT or Yale.
You certainly wrote quite a lot of ideological mish-mash to dodge the simplest possible explanation: a, if not the, primary function of elite education (as compared to non-elite education) is to filter out an arbitrary caste of individuals capable of optimizing their way through arbitrarily difficult trials and imbue that caste with elite status. The precise content of the trials doesn’t really matter (hence the existence of both Yale and MIT), as long as they’re sufficiently difficult to ensure that few pass.
I’m writing from an elite engineering university, and as far as I can tell, this is more-or-less our tacitly admitted pedagogical method: some students will survive the teaching process, and they will retroactively be declared superior. The question of whether we even should optimize our pedagogy to maximize the conveyance of information from professor to student plays no part whatsoever in our curriculum.
If you’re right (and you may well be), then I view that as a sad commentary on the state of human education, and I view tech-assisted self-education as a way of optimizing that inherently wasteful “hazing” system you describe. I think it’s likely that what you say is true for some high percentage of classes, but untrue for a very small minority of highly-valuable classes.
Also, the university atmosphere is good for social networking, which is one of the primary values of going to MIT or Yale.