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

[118]

Hi dmb,
I agree with what you said for the most part, below.  My experience of
the Ph.D. program was that it was intended to develop critical
thinking.  This seems to be what I was tested on mainly in the end.  I
got a patent out of my Ph.D. (Biotechnology has its perks in terms of
being very applicable to industry).  Of course there was never any
money going my way, that went to the College and the British Ministry
of Defense.  But it was kind of an added bonus.  There were several
publications as well, which made me proud.  My only stand out was that
I managed to do it in less than three years.  Guess I go lucky.

All in all, I found that I could converse with the best of them in
terms of science after the ordeal, and design experiments quickly;
that was the most satisfying.  My thesis is buried somewhere.  My post
doctoral work encouraged more independence, which was nice.

It is hard to create a demarkation between knowledge and wisdom.  But,
I think a graduate program should try to encourage the latter.

Mark

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 7:12 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
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>> [Mark]
>> College is just a training ground.
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>> [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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