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RE: Education (Was Re: Techwriting After the Boom)
Subject:RE: Education (Was Re: Techwriting After the Boom) From:Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 10 Jun 2003 08:09:26 -0700 (PDT)
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Keith Cronin wrote:
Let's be honest: there's a reason that many jobs require a college
degree, but don't specify what that degree should be in. They just want somebodywho *survived* college; who had the smarts, wherewithall and
resourcefullness to be able to conquer the intellectual, financial, and
stamina-based challenges inherent in aquiring a college degree. At least
that's my take.
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YES! And you're not a mercenary SOB, you're practical.
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Eric Dunn wrote:
More often that not, I passed these courses by being a pain in the teacher's butt through out the semester and being told that my points of view were incorrect and then getting perfect marks by regurgitating the teacher's "correct" viewpoint.
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That has also been my experience. Ye ol' "Every viewpoint is valid, but if yours doesn't match mine, you're wrong" grading system (mostly found in my English classes where I just couldn't see EVERYTHING in terms of a Femenist struggle). But the thing you have to realize is that many low-leve courses aren't there to teach you to think critically, they're there to teach you a body of knowledge as it stands.
Here's my take on college (my opinin, others are entitled to have theirs).
The lower-level courses are there so the students get a broad range of knowledge on a variety of topics (this is rote stuff, not critical thinking). What a student does with that knowledge (or doesn't do with it) is up to them.
But at some point, the student must pick a major. The higher-level classes within a major/subject are not there to teach the student to think critically, they're there to teach the student to think in the same way that others within the major think. So, for me, I was taught to think in terms of culture and worldview. English tried to get me to think in terms of feminism and Marxism (yep, I too was told that EVERYTHING was a phallic symbol and representative of man's dominance over woman.) Biology tried, and mostly succeeded, to get me thinking in terms of natural selection and evolution (perhaps a more appropriate place to talk about phallic symbols?). My history/western civ/eastern civ classes tried to get me thinking in terms of cause and effect in human actions and to connect the events of the past to explain what went on. My math classes, particularly the statistics classes, tried to get me to think in terms of describing patterns with numbers, or interpreting patterns from numbers.
What was lacking in all of those classes was how to think critically. But that's not really their goal. Their goal is to teach you how to think their way. And I don't have a problem with that (that's why I took reason and logic classes). Yes, it's hoops. But you can glean quite a bit of knowledge from jumping through those hoops and in the process of jumping through hoops, you learn a lot about managing your life, meeting expectations, setting goals, and getting stuff done on time. All things that you must be able to do to be successful in work and life! :-)
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"And in the morning, I'm makin waffles." ~ Donkey
Sean Hower - tech writer http://hokum.freehomepage.com
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