Faculty Conflict and Critique of Subject‑Based Education System

98 Teaching Minds clamoring for what is now offered. Ninety-eight percent of them want to be programmers, Almost none of them want Ph.D.s. I cannot go to a faculty meeting any more. I get into a fight at every faculty meeting. I argue about teaching and education and they think they know because they are professors. I cannot subject myself anymore to their abuse. These problems exist precisely because of the subject-based education system. That system is about factual knowledge, and it is this emphasis on factual knowledge that has given rise to the testing mania that has swept the country. These problems exist because the real mission of the university is very different than the general public imagines. Here is a quote and a story that I rather like: A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.—John Ciardi Benjamin Franklin told the story of some Massachusetts commissioners who invited the Indians to send a dozen of their youth to study free at Harvard. The Indians replied that they had sent some of their young braves to study there years earlier, but on their return “they were absolutely good for nothing, being neither acquainted with the true methods for killing deer, catching beaver, or surprising an enemy.” They offered instead to educate a dozen or so white children in the ways of the Indians “and make men of them.”(From Benjamin Franklin, An American Life, by Walter Isaacson) What has changed? Key life skills no longer include catching beaver. Otherwise, things are pretty much the same. Change “catching bea- ver” to any modern daily skill, and Franklin’s story is just as valid today. What do students really learn at a great university? Parents never really ask this question. They just know that their kid got into a good college and that their child is lucky to go there. Should you avoid sending your child to top schools because they don’t teach so well there and really don’t plan to improve the situa- tion any time soon? HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023844