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Comment by hbosch | Hacker News Reader

In all honesty this writer sounds utterly curmudgeonly. He writes passionately about what "real education" is, dispenses some good ol' Hard Facts About Life, and urges us all to put down those dang computer-devices and just learn! This is classic finger-pointing, angsty whining.

I'm sorry, but the conceit here flagrantly disregards modern reality. Learning is easier now than it's ever been. People don't need to give undivided attention to professors anymore. Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another. The education system in generally feels like an industry that is just barely stepping into a technological age in terms of format, expectations, and content.

I don't think young people need to force themselves to regress to the antique stylings of almost all Universities, I think Universities need to realize their systems do not suit young people. And that's their fault.

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> Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another.

Can you code with one tab open to Facebook chat? Because the overwhelming consensus here on HN is that coding requires concentration and lack of interruptions. So does learning.

Technology doesn't change the basic biological processes of learning, and the fact is that technology has proven itself to be a fantastic failure as applied to education. Remember the "multi-media in every classroom" shit that failed in the 1990's? Same thing with iPads today. Research even shows that taking notes on a computer doesn't help you retain material as well as writing it on paper. Until we invent neural downlinks Matrix-style, educational technology peaked with the invention of the printed book 500 years ago.

I can think of at least one university class where the pace was well below what I could handle. In order to prevent myself from getting bored and falling asleep (both figuratively and literally), I regularly took a newspaper to class and read that. Occasionally, I would look up to make sure I was still following the class. Sometimes, having a distraction can actually improve your attention to otherwise boring material.

Clearly, this is not going to apply in all or even most university classes where the level of the material being presented is quite high, but my point is that different things work for different people or even the same person at different times.

I was too smart for the pace of learning at my public junior and high school (not too smart for college, but that's another story), and regularly either doodled, wrote stories or poetry, or programmed simple text-based games in TI-BASIC on my calculator in order to get through my classes, while looking up periodically to make sure I was still following everything they said. And this was during the 1990's that I was in junior/high school.

I graduated with almost a perfect GPA too, so at least in my case, yeah, I could code and learn at the same time.

I still can for some coding tasks professionally, but not for all. I'll have podcasts or Netflix while programming sometimes. When I really have to concentrate, though, yeah that's when the lyricless music gets put on.

No you didn't do it at the same time. You did learning at a higher pace than the average pace (which is the pace at which the teacher will cover material), and then did not learn for the remainder of the time. That's completely different from doing things simultaneously, i.e. at the same time.

In some cases that was definitely true, perhaps most cases, but there were several times when I was being taught brand new material and was coding while I was listening to the teacher. In math class especially there was almost never a moment when I wasn't doing some form of programming during the class, since I could get away with having my calculator out the whole time.

This was TI-BASIC, though. I mean, it didn't get much more complicated than "PRINT", "INPUT", "IF THEN ELSE", "FOR", and "GOTO LABEL". I wasn't trying to figure out how to integrate a horribly documented third party API or anything.

That's just you being ahead of the curve. Distractions mean you aren't at your best either way.

That's kind of my point. I didn't need to be "at my best" at those times. When I really need to figure something out at work, I do my best to eliminate distractions as much as possible so I can be "at my best" (I work in an open office). But even that's not needed 100% of the time.

Sometimes you're just doing grunt work that needs to get done, sometimes you're doing something you've done thirty times before. But sometimes you're figuring out one of the trickiest interlocking puzzle you've ever come across, and that's when I need to be at my best.

I actually code with one tab open with Facebook...I trained myself to ignore it unless I have a free moment. Sometimes it's necessary for me to be responsive there due to having plans to do something later with friends (i.e. meeting up in the afternoon to run or have dinner at Facebook). However, if I have important tasks to do, I keep a mental reminder to respond later and focus on my current task first.

I agree with the rest of the points made though. Multitasking is generally difficult.

Same here, though at work I keep just the Facebook Messenger on (it's on http://messenger.com), mostly to stay in touch with my SO. I used to keep IRC too, but I find myself either too distracted by it, or too frustrated by being afraid of missing out.

I find that my ability to divide attention is directly related to how much I'm enjoying the task at hand. At work I can barely keep focus, but when I get into the flow while working on a personal project, I can IRC, respond to e-mails, chat with few people on IM and browse HN while still doing solid work on the project, and without losing focus for a second.

(Funnily, I remember that I was turning off my IM for coding when I was a kid, but that was only because my computer wasn't very strong, and the compilation would take 3x as long with the communicator open.)

There certainly are more opportunities to learn than ever before, but learning requires effort.

If you want to learn something that _really_ matters you have to give it full attention. That means total focus, not "continuous partial attention", not facebooking on another tab. Whether you use an ipad, a book, or sit across from a table from a professor, learning really does require undivided attention-- when has this ever changed?

But often in university a good 80% of the material doesn't _really_ matter

What the hell are people majoring in that 80% of the material doesn't matter? I'm sitting here post-MSc wishing I'd done 80% more material in undergrad so I'd be properly qualified for the stuff I want to do!

Computer Science. 80% of the material in each course is useless (except maths courses and a couple theoretical ones). The rest 20% can be learned in a couple of afternoons. If you're American YMMV tho.

>80% of the material in each course is useless (except maths courses and a couple theoretical ones).

Soooo what courses were you taking, in which the non-theoretical material was 80% useless? When I think about applied computer-science subjects, I think of operating systems, embedded programming, circuit design with FPGAs, networking, program optimization, compilers... all eminently useful subjects.

Also a lot of stuff you internalize better when you get your hands dirty in it. That OpenMPI class may not be very practical or relevant on the job market, but it can teach you quite a lot about the problems and approaches in the field of distributed computing.

OpenMPI classes were actually very interesting. Same with e.g. prolog. I didn't mean that kind of courses.

First thing that comes to mind is MFC. Also CLIPS, graphics, operating systems (the way it was taught anyway). Most part of the java courses too.

I had an epiphany about feedback loops one day and since then I wish I paid attention during the 1.5 years of control theory classes I had at university. It also made me finally realize that a lot of this "useless" stuff is actually important, but we may not realize it immediately.

This view is a bit too sanguine --- in general we really have lost the ability to engage deeply with printed matter. Those students who continually monitor facebook while doing their assignments are just phoning it in, and the poor quality of their work shows it. Declining academic standards are real. Students aren't getting an education for their money.

But.

The internet is the new Forum. What the students do there isn't inherently valueless. So while declining academic standards are bad news for the academy, they're also not relevant to whether the students are able to participate in their culture and in civic debate. The problem is that, online courses notwithstanding, the humanities generally fail to take online fora seriously enough.

It's a crappy essay, but it does point at a couple of systemic problems with the modern university. Grades used to be better correlated with actual performance, and they aren't anymore, yet they're still used as metrics. It might be better to have 2 metrics: pass/fail that counts on your transcript, and a letter grade that's private, but maybe available for internal statistical purposes (I believe a handful of teachers do this now, but the "private" grades are really private). Too much teaching is done by underpaid labor. There's not enough focus on teaching, period.

There are a lot of things students might expect to get out of college, but ideally one of them is the experience of having mastered something genuinely hard (doesn't really matter what—might be physics, might be Latin) and with that, the ability to bootstrap and improve their learning later in life. If all you come out with are "skills", you'll be toast when those skills become obsolete. I think the modern university makes it a bit too easy to get out without having done this, or at least trying to.

Paradoxically, I think this is one of the real values of humanities education: it's mostly not obviously and immediately applicable to the working world, but it's engaging, and if you've really engaged with it, you'll have the tools you need to understand what you need to learn in a future situation. "Learning how to learn" is a bit of a cliche, but it's the key to real success. It doesn't always happen in a classroom, mind you, but it can happen in a good one.

"I'm sorry, but the conceit here flagrantly disregards modern reality. Learning is easier now than it's ever been. People don't need to give undivided attention to professors anymore. Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another"

Not really. His point was that the act of learning hasn't really changed, and he's right. Undivided attention is still needed for most learning intensive tasks. I even see many posts here on HN about not being able to concentrate on business task X or Y because a person is surfing the net too often (I'm guilty of it too).

If you spread yourself too thin, you won't really learn much of anything.

"I think Universities need to realize their systems do not suit young people. And that's their fault."

Technology should be used to supplement learning and make it more efficient (IE: e-learning, etc). But it's not a complete replacement for it. There still are no shortcuts to success.

If a young person can't handle this, maybe they should go into the trades instead.

I think it is actually moving in the opposite direction. With information so easily available, and so much of it out there being false, professors are today more important.

The days where book publishers vetted material are gone. Being in print is no guarantee of anything. The internet is full of every opinion and crackpot theory on the planet. The unguided student will find whatever information is most convenient at the time. Today more than ever students need to pay attention to someone with the experience to separate junk from the real science.

> Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another

Multitasking is a myth, just check current literature (only book I remember now is http://www.amazon.com/The-Teenage-Brain-Neuroscientists-Adol... but there are others)

That was my impression as well. I love how, in one anecdote, he talks about how students "don't read" and puts the example that given they know they can get a B without the book, don't bother; some how this is the students' fault. Just the selective blindness to it all, how can anyone be surprised that given no external nor internal motivation any human being is going to be arsed to go out of their way to do things.

He is constantly complaining about "declining academic standards" but provides no quantitative evidence to back his claim. Grade inflation is likely a problem, simply because if one institution does it all are forced to inflate along with it or risk devaluing their degrees, but it's incredibly difficult to quantify. Incoming students have the higher standardized test scores, a huge belt of tools between the internet and computers, and an unprecedented network of peers for when the tools are sufficient. Should we surprised scores tend to rise, is it the university's responsibility to crank up the difficulty and keep averages as they were in the 80s? These are the questions dinosaurs like the OP can't and won't answer.

Huh. 18 out of 230 students bought the text they were studying. That sounds like statistics. 'C' grades for what used to be failing exams - more data. And rising test scores? In what universe is that happening? These are 2nd-tier liberal arts colleges at issue, not Stanford.

Tool belt? Its nonsense to imagine googling a subject is as effective as learning it. That's twaddle, and any student who skates over their lack of education by faking papers from online resources is involved in a self-destructive sham. The paper is supposed to demonstrate a mastery of the subject. The paper is not the point. Producing a likely-looking one is not the point. Actually knowing the subject is the point.

18 out of 230 bought bought a book, widely accessible and read by most in the early hs, from the over priced campus book store. FTFY. That's not statistics, that's just a single (unenlightening) data point.

A personal anecdote about the fact the OP now feels his standards have dropped (providing no numbers for this nor writing samples so we the readership can appraise the truth of this claim) is also ~not~ statistics.

As for rising test scores, unfortuantely for you and your "twaddle" most colleges maintain a factbook detailing past admissions data. Lets look at a couple of state schools from the worst part of the US shall we:

Clemson University: [1]

Engineering school 2014: ACT = 29 SAT_M = 674 SAT_V = 622

                   2004: ACT = 27 SAT_M = 655 SAT_V = 596

LiberalArts School 2014: ACT = 27 SAT_M = 610 SAT_V = 604

                   2004: ACT - 27 SAT_M = 606 SAT_V = 595

Auburn University:[2]

Entire university 2014: ACT = 27 SAT_M = 591 SAT_V = 577

                  2006: ACT = 24.3 SAT_M = 575 SAT_V = 554

Francis Marion University[3]

Entire Universtiy 2011: ACT = NaN SAT_M = 481 SAT_V 472

                  2004: ACT = NaN SAT_M 476 SAT_V 472

It appears you have to go down to at least the 76th ranked southern university[4] before the gains in test scores begin to look more like noise and even at that level there's a non 0 increase in performance. We're clearly not talking Standford here.

Finally, the internet represents a tool because it allows for more mental bandwidth to be used on analysis over memory. No longer must you remember the exact quote to make an allusion, just the fact that it exists. This is then indexed to other supporting works a student can draw upon to further support their argument. Machines are excellent at recalling and storing information, however struggle with analysis (especially in the context of humanities). Students are more free than ever to peruse these lines of thinking, to demonstrate meaningful mastery you might say, now that names, dates, formatting, indexing, etc have been outsourced to the machine. Just for an example, when a blind blow hard comes and makes assertions comfortable his eloquence will make up for the lack of facts, the internet allows for the rapid synthesis of numbers to render the argument hilariously invalid. [1]http://www.clemson.edu/oirweb1/FB/factbook/minifactbook.cgi [2]https://oira.auburn.edu/ [3]http://www.fmarion.edu/about/factbook/article12711c7605652.h... [4]http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

EDIT: number formatting

Thanks for the analysis! We can only hope that the SAT is not also inflating.

Oh! They did! SAT was redesigned and rescaled in 2005 to 'reflect today's high school curriculum'. And that whole debacle over the written exam part. So I'm not sure how much we can learn from comparing scores before vs after that watershed year.

But ok accept that scores might be going up. The meat of the OP's rant was, college is no longer a place of learning but instead a place of 'earning'. The degree is what matters, and nobody is expected to actually learn, master, internalize subjects particularly in the liberal arts which are termed 'fluff'.

That is an argument worth examining. Notwithstanding the codgerness of the ranter, and his evident desperation at being ignored and shouted down for a decade.

>> The paper is not the point. Producing a likely-looking one is not the point. Actually knowing the subject is the point.

Tell that to the people handing out the grades/scholarships/acceptance letters. Students today see assignments as hurdles, not opportunities for learning. At school today the first and most relevant question is always "But will this be on the exam?" If no, then the activity is dismissed as a waste of time.

> Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another. The education system in generally feels like an industry that is just barely stepping into a technological age in terms of format, expectations, and content.

If you paid attention to university research, you'd know you're spouting things well-known to be wrong. Multitasking is detrimental to learning and knowledge.

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