[MD] The Academy is Evil! Here's what I'd do instead...

[david buchanan]

> [Mark]
> College is just a training ground.
> 
> [Arlo]
> Well this gets at my recent comments to John about the function of the Academy
> as an accreditation agency for employment. How would you suggest we change
> this? 
dmb says:
Right, to the extent that education is treated as vocational training money is valued over actual education. Job training is rarely the same as cultivating the mind. In the same way that social values rule in high school but intellectual values rule in the colleges, especially the good ones, there is a continuum in the overall learning process. For small children, school is almost entirely about socialization and the proportion of intellectual content increases as they get older. There are a few truly intellectual high schools and it wouldn't be hard to find some third-rate community college with no real intellectual standards, but generally speaking we are supposed to evolve or develop so that we respect what's right and true just because it's right and true and not because somebody told us we ought to. Real education is NOT a matter of learning WHAT to believe. It's a matter of learning HOW to think critically and independently, and even creatively. 
To get a Ph.D. you are required to contribute something new to the field. This is not easy and most dissertations end up adding something of little consequence but that sure is an excellent ideal. You are supposed to understand a discipline well enough that you can add some small piece of original work such that it extends that field. In other words, you have to master the known and add to that knowledge just to gain entry into the club. That is a pretty good filter and it helps to keep things fresh at the same time. It's tough, but fair. And sometime the original work is spectacular. I believe Einstein's theories were born as a grad student and they would be an example of the spectacular variety. A major innovation like that is the reason we tolerate all the trivial, mediocre dissertations. We just can't know where the next one will come from and so you just set thing up to allow it anywhere. 
Academic freedom takes a lot of discipline.





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