Attention Caplanites: School Is Less Wasteful Than You Think
After reading both the blog post and the contained link to the article published in The Atlantic, I have some reactions that reflect thoughts I’ve felt about our education system. While I have a PhD, I have largely felt this way since I was a junior in undergrad. I would also like to preface this by saying I just finished a beer league softball game and am thus tired and had a few beers.<p>First, I think our K-12 education fails Americans in a lot of ways. Many classes are taught following some traditional pedagogy that doesn’t provide students with the actually useful skills they need in life. I went to a highly ranked high school, aced all my standardized tests, AP exams, and attended a top college, but I didn’t realize how high school failed me until I struggled in college during my early years. The two examples I think about the most are math and writing.<p>For math, the only proofs we ever did were in geometry class, using the two column style. We did not explicitly learn how formal logic worked, nor did we learn how to write “paragraph” proofs which are what every professor and math textbook expects you to understand. Every proof was a two column proof because, I assume, that was much easier to grade. However, more importantly, we did not prove _anything_ after geometry class. Because I was “good at math,” I took geometry my freshman year of high school, and took AP Calculus BC by the time I graduated. Despite doing well in those classes, I struggled in both college-level calculus, differential equations, and the “discrete math for computer science” class. If we were asked to prove something, I basically didn’t know how to do it (it had been three years since I even thought about proofs!). If it was a computational problem, I could only do it via memorizing an algorithm because I didn’t have the built up mathematical familiarity to figure things out on the fly.<p>I spent a summer basically going back to basics on my own when I felt like I had to in order to learn the topics in which I was interested, and on the other end I really felt robbed. I didn’t feel smarter than I was in high school, I just felt like I hadn’t been prepared to do these proofs nor had they motivated why I should care about a lot of the math we learned. Instead of spending months on algorithms for solving integrals, basic analysis would have been both more useful and better explained where these rules were coming from. The curriculum past geometry, containing trigonometry, pre-calculus, Calculus AB, and Calculus BC felt like it could have been hugely compressed (on day 1, we were told the first half of BC would just be a review of AB, and I don’t even remember what we covered in pre-calculus beyond explaining what a function is). My period of self-study ended, I was much more academically successful, had no further problems with math, better appreciated the subject, and overall felt more capable of using math to solve problems.<p>Second, with writing, we were highly encouraged to just churn out pages. I was writing a 10 page history essay every week. While our teachers were fairly good at getting us to go do research, the only way we could hit the expected page count was to write things in the most drawn out and convoluted way possible. Even then, I still felt like I had a cheat code others didn’t in my class by going to a physical library and checking out academic books on the topic instead of relying on two books and a bunch of internet sources. It felt like I was able to find more relevant information for my arguments than half of my peers. In college, I had to totally relearn how to structure and write an essay because the challenge switched from filling pages to writing the best argument possible in a small number of pages. In this instance, I felt like I got a good basic education in high school of how to analyze history, but a terrible education of how to articulate my analysis.<p>Ultimately, my feeling is that high school fails us. Success in college and beyond required me unlearning the compilation of bad habits that made me very successful in high school. I’m sure that I had peers who came in and were ready to go right off the bat, but I doubt I was alone in this. In fact, from the amount of people I have seen online complaining about how they should have learned how to file taxes in high school (like they’d retain that information), I feel like I was better off than a lot of people. Theoretically, the liberal arts education our K-12 program aspires to give students should equip graduates with the skills to conduct the basic research (I.e., Google these days), understand the instructions (critical reading), and fill out the appropriate paperwork (basic math). Moreover, many jobs don’t require beyond those skills as a foundation to learn the task-specific skills you learn on the job and not in college anyway. I’ve even known a lawyer or two that maintained a quality high school grad would have no problem with law school.<p>My conclusion is that, in additional to social signaling, college has become a way to compensate for a poor K-12 education. A lot of your tuition is spent fixing poor skills as opposed to broadening horizons. A college graduate with a decent GPA likely needs far less handholding than an 18 year old fresh out of high school, and that’s highly desirable to companies when hiring.<p>This ends my slightly drunk, sunburned rant.