This is an edited version of a letter I planned to send to my accounting 201 instructor. It was in response to the suggestion that I write a custom spreadsheet entry for an accounting problem. Now we’re trained to think something like this is reasonable, but it absolutely is not.
Here’s the letter which explains why.
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I have to say, this trend is growing absurd.
I am not going to write a custom spread sheet for each and every problem and hope my spreadsheet skill matches my conceptual understanding. That is simply an unacceptable duplication of effort given that I have a finite life span. I will not effectively learn to churn butter by hand simply to help limit the number of butter manufacturers and protect the profit margin of the butter churning industry.
This argument is applying ever more widely in academic settings and the reasons are clear. The distance between education and actual use is being increased to artificially to suppress the number of graduates simply to perpetuate the value of degrees. (http://nplusonemag.com/bad-education) Value which is dropping partly as a result of technology making problems exponentially easier to solve with available tools. (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html)
I grow very weary of all forms of research and automation being ever more regarded as either classified or plagiarism, (http://motherboard.tv/2011/4/25/lessig-copyright-isn-t-just-hurting-creativity-it-s-killing-science-video–2) thus rendering every question necessarily deceptive.
If the point is simply to buy an entrance card to a given industry and limit the number of graduates to keep the sale price of said entrance card high, then trusting in apprenticeship, internship, and on the job training to provide actual practical understanding, then I’d rather simply be randomly selected and call my tuition fee a lottery ticket. Either that or actually cheat as best I can to offset the massive waste of time since clearly learning the way these things are actually handled is not the point.
In the context of accounting, someone somewhere has written a series of spreadsheets or the like that require little more than accurate starting figures to produce these answers. We as accounting students should be provided these tools, for the same reason culinary students get a stove and a timer instead of being expected to build a fire and a sundial.
This is not a math or a computer course, and yet I am either expected to do all this math in my head or I am expected to write custom software. Given the price I paid for the text and the course itself I think it’s completely reasonable to expect software to come with it, after all, if writing the text was sufficiently complex and difficult to justify the price then why not spend that effort on software instead? Because obviously this presents a problem, if they made such an app they would sell it separately, and not to students, for the reasons summarized above.
Basically if the app were useful only to students you’d have to admit the distance between education and reality, which would cast doubt on the value of education, or if it were useful to both students and professionals then again the value of the course is undermined because good software is intuitive and user friendly, and doesn’t require weeks of training to use, especially on something as mathematically simple as accounting. (It’s not exactly protein folding or weather models.)
Making the software hard to use, prohibitively expensive, or impossible to obtain is obviously a profit protection measure, and thus my obligation to learn to do all this on clay tablets is completely unjustifiable from an educational (as in the conveyance of useful and relevant knowledge, not the industry’s needs) standpoint.
Google is thick with free spreadsheets and software to do actual accounting problems, but it seems none of them are of any use in an academic setting, and that is deeply disturbing. The questions are structured to be outside the scope of the available industry applications, which by definition makes the value of the education in terms of practicality approach zero.
As the net and software get better at answering questions in a useful way, or put another way, better at giving technical answers to plain language questions (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), college questions must grow ever more deceptive and unfair lest everyone with access to the Internet actually pass college.
As society grows more adept at conveying knowledge, as college gets better at educating people, (assuming that’s its true purpose) the value of its product (the degree) will approach zero as educational skill ensures more and more graduates as a result of ever more effective tools for imparting knowledge.
In reality, people have access to the Internet to solve problems. As the Internet grows ever more sophisticated and available (via smart phones for example) the ability for college to trick people will diminish. Either they will arbitrarily deny student access to the tools which will be universally available in the real world, which will come ever closer to forcing college to admit it’s real purpose is not about training or conveying a useful skill but about orchestrating what is in effect a giant ponzi scheme, or they must invent ever more clever ways of complicating the various questions such that the Internet will be unable to answer them.
This trend is actually detectable to me. I remember my first year of college and it is radically different from my current experience. This is not I stress due to scaling of difficulty or a lack of intelligence or work ethic on my part as a result of more advanced subject matter, it is a direct result of the education industry being forced to obfuscate data or risk obsolescence.
Basically technology is making everything easier, and technology is growing ever more available, and thus school is forced to make things harder or deny access to technology. Thing is, technology is growing faster than college’s ability to defeat it at the student level, and the justifications for denial are growing ever more openly ridiculous and thus unusable.
Example: As a child I was instructed to use multiplication tables because calculators may not be at hand. How absurd was that argument after taking a look at today’s world? There are 4 of them within 3 feet of me right now.
As a result I am growing excessively frustrated at being repeatedly thwarted in some kind of perverse effort to trick me into failure merely to protect the industry’s profit margin and convince me in the doing that it’s somehow a personal flaw of mine for having been the victim of this scam. I fear this will be my last college course if this trend continues.
When I did my half year in the accounting field I didn’t once have to do anything even approaching what I’m being taught in the course.
There is a massive conflict of interest when expressing this to faculty and staff since it is their job, and as agents of the education industry I expect massive bias, or if they are primarily a professional who teaches on the side I would expect bias on the front that obfuscation and keeping the number of similar professionals low, or engaging in a public relations effort to make their jobs appear more difficult, directly and indirectly benefits all existing members. So I don’t expect them to agree with me, and if they did I wouldn’t expect them to admit it, thus I am not interested in a debate with them on these subjects (though I am not afraid to have it), because it’s not part of their job, it’s not personally their fault for the most part, and they individually lack the power to change it (which I learned during my time as body president, watching board members including myself slowly lose idealism in the face of academic, political, and fiscal reality).
After all, my dad works in education, I know for a fact many of them are great people.
When these issues were shared with my economics instructor, he responded with a glib dismissal implying that that if education didn’t ensure a high percentage of failures, by any means necessary, society would collapse for want of menial laborers. The question was why does every degree require math credits and why are those courses designed to prevent the use of technology. Well the answer in this context is obvious. Math’s unique subject matter is by definition extremely difficult to obfuscate as it is an abstraction expressly designed to simplify an understanding of reality, and it is also easy to automate, so the conflicts explained above press most firmly on the math instruction field. Math class is a window into the the future of college in the face of exponential technology growth.
That should terrify everyone.
As mentioned above, in a rare moment of cynical candor my instructor said of course the point is to make a certain percentage fail, because and I quote “society needs janitors.” He also borderline cheats via creative application of context to artificially inflate his perceived educational skill, and he is rewarded overtly and regualrly for this effort.
How this cheat is done involves measuring student improvement via two identical tests one given at the beginning of the course and one given at the end. The difference in score presumably measures the skill of the educator. He was always winning awards for exceptionally high averages.
But of course those people didn’t see how this was accomplished. What he would do is give the first test at the end of the first day, and say that the test did not count for a grade and you could leave when you’re done. Naturally people blew through it disregarding a total fail. The second one he gave as extra credit prior to and on the day of the final. Forcing people to concentrate and spend a fixed amount of time on it. By weighting the ends in this way he always got a huge difference without technically cheating.
I share that simply to express the kind of mind that fails to see a problem with these facts(and the kind of behavior that is rewarded in academic circles).
I’m starting to remember why I declined to run for a second term (one of my senators ran unopposed after me, my reelection would have been a forgone conclusion) and why I feel disgust every time I walk past my school.
It’s 2011. The 21st century. We manufacture synthetic life forms, patent genetic codes, build computers that beat the very best humans at jeopardy and chess, exponentially expand virtually every aspect of our knowledge of the universe, and yet, from education’s perspective I’m apparently supposed to live and train like the Amish/Taliban/Ted Kaczynski, doing everything from memory by candle light and abacus.
Screw that.
I’d rather fail if the price of success is my integrity or my intelligence.
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” ~Frank Zappa
Update: http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/college-education-2011-5/
To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam—college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”
And…
In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy—hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.
And…
On the one hand, a college education will likely saddle them with crippling debt and consign them to four underwhelming years in classrooms with fluorescent lighting and drop-tile ceilings. On the other hand, opting out will likely consign them to a lifetime of unsatisfying, low-wage employment. What’s an average kid to do?
As an answer I share a quote that should serve as warning to the 1% bent on wrecking the lives of those average children.
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ~H.L. Mencken
BRAVO!!! HEAR! HEAR! May the Masses be FORCED to read this article BEFORE they spend even another PENNY on this ROAD BLOCK to a Career!!!
“We the People…” need to vote with our Dollars and let these CON
ARTISTS know we’re sick and tired of the BS it takes to get a BS!!!
Excellent points made here. Education has lost its ability to educate. How sad and pointless that is.
Phil Smith, in response to Phil Sergent’s support for my essay (thanks Dad :), had the following to say. My response is as usual aimed at the general ideas and not the individual presenter. Since he was speaking on facebook and didn’t reply here, I have to present both sides. Here is his comment in it’s entirety, and my responses.
Here begins my responses:
My general reply is that you did not actually refute anything I said. I’m however happy to counter the things you’ve said.
…you are twice as likely to be bias and unable to see the situation objectively. You ave invested a huge amount of time and money into the things which I am presenting as nearly if not totally obsolete. Post purchase rationalization would seem likely to apply, if not Stockholm syndrome. 🙂
Prove that. Give me one example of a truly unique accounting situation that has happened in the past 20 years.
I’m quite sure I can find an equivalent situation in history that would have called for the exact same calculation.
And even if you can find one or two unique examples, the argument would remain that learning by rote and rejecting technology is far inferior would supersede it because my way of doing things would lead to faster better answers to Any novel problem.
The current methodology to its foundation is growing obsolete. We ignore that at our peril. A level of cultural danger whose shadow is already upon us.
Self fulfilling prophecy. The only reason they can’t expect it is because of the actions I expressed which artificially limit technological options. The professionals don’t want such access because it would threaten the value and existence of CPAs, and educators don’t want such for the reasons I laid out, basically that they consider any form of tool cheating.
I can refute that tired old cliche in thousands of ways. Let’s start with how arbitrary it is. Let’s carry that demand to it’s logical conclusion.
If I were to reset the surface of the earth to its condition prior to the arrival of human beings and place you naked and alone into the middle of it (somewhere temperate of course, though that is a gift on my part since much of the surface of the planet would be immediately lethal to most humans), would you be able to duplicate your surroundings in their entirety?
Put another way, is it reasonable to demand that any human be capable of walking into a forest naked and walking (or driving) out with a personal computer? Of course not.
Such things are the result of collective cultural effort depending heavily on individual specialization that precludes the possibility of anything approaching the level of general education implicit in your demand and demands like it.
The demand that everyone learn the “basic” skills to do X (arbitrarily selected) activity to Y (arbitrarily selected) level of expertise, absent Z (arbitrarily selected) technological aids and prior arts, is untenable in the face of a reality which includes, among other counters, such facts as exponential information growth and the limits of the unmodified human mind.
And that is only one of the possible directions I can attack from.
http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html
Virtually every argument presented by Mr. Wolfram in this presentation applies since accounting is by definition a mathematical discipline.
Culture renders humanity for the purposes of interaction with the material world a single entity. That accumulation is only possible because of the ability to store and recall information in an external way giving individuals the opportunity to exist (and thus specialize in other critical areas) without it.
Every argument you could lay against me in this context could be laid against writing itself. You and others making these arguments fail to realize that “looking it up in the book” was the previous generations “Googling it” it’s just that Google is qualitatively more efficient. Higher education stands in opposition to the growing ease of access because it wishes to perpetuate a system which would never have even been invented had such ease of informational access been possible.
The Internet is obviating current forms of education.
I’m a high school drop out, but pick a subject, and thanks to the mental growth I’ve achieved as a result of early exposure to the Internet, my embrace of technology, and simple human curiosity, there is a good chance I can discuss it intelligently.
By any practical objective measure I am an educated person, I simply lack the funds to purchase my secret decoder ring. This is going to be the reality for future generations whether we like it or not. The individual will soon not have the time to devote two thirds of their life to formal education.
“…one that is as great a threat to the world of higher education as any presented by instructors with unreasonable demands.”
Exactly. Look at what the Internet is. It is the essence of the library based education Zappa was talking about in the quote I gave at the end of my essay. That is the reason we have the phrase “formal education” because education is not to be conflated with the apparatus of degree provision. Formal education is not equivalent to either knowledgeability or intelligence. Giving a stone an honorary PHD doesn’t render it in any way intellectually superior to adjacent stones. This fact need to be squarely faced.
A degree is a product. And college sells degrees. Not intelligence, not knowledge. Sure they often go together, simple exposure to prior art is usually sufficient for interested persons to absorb the data and put it to use. And for a long time brick and mortar libraries and their ivy league offshoots where the only way to comb through the accumulated data of human knowledge. But no more.
That’s all a university degree program is. An organized exposure to previously recorded information coupled with a testing regimen that we hope accurately shows the degree to which that knowledge has transferred. That point alone is extremely arguable since the validity of standardized testing is far from proven, indeed we can’t even agree on how to define intelligence, much less measure it, much less prove formal education imparts it, or prove such provision is even possible.
http://talentdevelop.com/articles/WIIA.html
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Intelligence#Definitions
The whole concept of a generalist collective education was developed to serve the needs of industrial era factory owners, and is fading from usefulness, because of the exponential nature of information and the extreme specialization required of its populace by human culture simply to survive in the face of exponential population growth amidst finite resources, much less prosperity in the long term.
The demand that higher education as you put it continue to exist in perpetuity (which is implied by the expression that higher education is “in danger” and presumably in need of saving) is dogmatic, and ironically just the attitude you would expect from a hyper-specialist with no real concept of the purpose of the larger machine into which he has been ruthlessly adapted to fit.
I’m reminded of the phrase “too big to fail.” I’m of the opinion that we should allow useless things to fade from existence if the price of keeping them is too high or support for them is not ethically required.
Higher education is a massive waste in its current form. From both the individual perspective and the cultural one. Its service is basically about artificially delaying by the fabrication of scarcity the effects of what amounts to freely available eminently practical education. Not imparting knowledge.
The fact is that as a society gets better about making information available, the value of a person who has information (and things conflated with the possession of information, such as college degrees) grows smaller.
The very concept of higher education is going to be rendered obsolete sooner or later and the first large scale industrial society which shakes this rat from off it’s neck while replacing it’s function properly will gain a tremendous advantage. But such concepts simply will not be considered by those in power because of the level of change and devaluation, of what amounts to an aristocracy, implied.
The base principals you speak of are important of course, I don’t want human society to degenerate into helpless babies amazed by the magic picture box tended by perfect machine nannies either. But the argument that higher education is what prevents this is indefensible. In short the data in question needs to be backed up, but requiring every citizen to memorize it is completely unreasonable. Look at the man hour cost of current education and contrast it with its practical uselessness.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
As the man said, looked at objectively the purpose of education is to produce university professors, and little else. Culture is going to need a radically different approach if it expects to survive for any appreciable time into the coming future.
We need to be taught how to learn, not taught directly.
http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=558
Thank you Mr. Smith for your comments, they enabled me to elucidate my position far more clearly. 🙂
It is frankly depressing how unskilled at rational debate you are given your former social position as an educator.
My responses are as follows.
I think by “hard” you mean redundant busy work. By definition wasting time is an invaluable use of time. Pointless and redundant activity is still pointless and redundant, regardless of its difficulty.
Should we make our construction experts move earth via teaspoon as well? Perhaps we should outlaw the mop and require the use of toothbrushes in their stead?
The whole point of the article is how formal education cultivates ignorance. You conflate (as I explain in the essay) education with intellectual merit, in this case cognizance (the opposite of ignorance, in this context.)
I can hardly think of a better way to cultivate ignorance than to forcibly associate in the minds of children, a repetitive worthless and annoying waste of time with the trappings of research.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
So you admit to being dogmatically opposed to technology? You know there was another math fan of that stripe, he was rather famous, wrote a manifesto that I bet you would strongly agree with, got famous via the mail.
Absolutely. But forcing a whole generation of children to take up your hobby or suffer social and economic catastrophe, if not physical, catastrophe is hardly the reasonable middle way.
As Conrad said in the video you didn’t watch. “And this is not a small problem by any means. I estimated that, just today across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand. That’s an amazing amount of human endeavor. So we better be damn sure — and by the way, they didn’t even have fun doing it, most of them. So we better be damn sure that we know why we’re doing that and it has a real purpose.”
That’s basically the core of my point. We don’t have this time to waste.
Strawman again, I never said anything even approaching that, and again you conflate formal education with intellect.
Do you even know the history of formal education?
To those in my life who would talk me out of my personal choice to abandon formal education:
It seems I might have given the wrong impression. I am not quitting because of frustration or anything so transient. I’ve completed 3 years of college (my not having a degree already because of the combination of classes I’ve taken not fitting any prefabricated degree path is a whole other rant that is superseded by these arguments), I was body president of my school. I’m quite positive I could be re-elected if I so chose. You are right I could indeed pass the class if I wanted to. But that’s just it… I do not want to. And my reasoning, because it is deeply personal in origin, forgiven the egotism, is flawless.
I am not an anti-intellectual, first and foremost. The accumulation of knowledge and training in critical thinking is vital for the growth of any mind. And in so far as education promotes these things, and equips the mind with the tools need to indulge curiosity and explore reality as it wants to be explored, “education” has infinite value. My beef is with formal education based largely on the notion that cheating exists. A concept which undermines the very fabric of cooperation and collaboration, and psychologically distances us from each other by implying at every turn that while we may have fellow students, in the end they are the enemy and sharing with them or helping them is illegal and personally disastrous.
You see my beef isn’t primarily that I don’t have the tools, but that I can’t share the tools I’ve created. I can not form a culture of information sharing in a setting which is fundamentally opposed by definition to sharing in and of itself. In effect, college is by definition closed source.
The title of this post is how college is at odds with (read, opposed to) technology. Now, technology is basically my religion. Technology and the automation of effort are as important to me and humanity’s future as diversity itself. It is not a trivial thing of toys and games for me. It is the very destiny of mankind. Realizing it (formal education) is fundamentally opposed to technology by definition thanks to the formality itself, places me in fundamental opposition with it. Axiomatically. I take it on faith ultimately that humanity will properly use technology on the whole. This makes me a fanatic in many ways and though my subsequent reasoning is subject to evidence and possible logical attack, the base premise is not.
Had I realized these things prior to going I would have still gone for the same reasons I initially went. Grant money and a workstudy position. However, the underlying purpose of college was a secondary factor. I did believe formal education had value. Now that grant money is insufficient and workstudy is no longer available for personal reasons, the secondary because the primary, and this essay annihilates the new primary.
Well some may say it can be changed, fixed. Firstly, I tried. My experience as both SGA President and student representative to the faulty staff senate for the entire kctcs college system (having been elected by all the other SGA presidents), I can say unequivocally, there is no fixing it via cumulative improvements at the individual scale. But more importantly, a total fix is not possible because to do so would annihilate it by definition as formal education. My core problem is put simply one of classism and luddism. Without them we’d had an education system which embraces technology and has no classism.
But there’s a problem with that, do you know what you’d call a college that embraces technology and has no classism?
The Internet.
Thank you though, your concern is appreciated. 🙂