Almost every education reformation started as "The current education system is not suitable for the future generation!", "We need to teach our kids "portable" knowledge!"
Unfortunately, worse than what Mr.Wolfram said at the beginning of the video, I think "We got a real problem with college education right now!" will be suitable for describing the college education system here in Taiwan based on the past 3 years I had as a student of EE.
What Mr.Wolfram presented in this talk is definitely refreshing. He did pointed out a few really important factors in existing education systems:
(1) Dumb down the questions so that we students can solve them by hand. Yes...By hand! And maybe a little help from an engineering calculator which is often useless except doing stupid and straightforward calculation(i.e. IC=Is*e^(Vbe/Vt)... that sort of things).
(2) Spend most of the time doing/teaching students how to do the calculation rather than the process of how to construct appropriate equations to be solved, how to verify the calculated results, and most important of all, the limitation of everything you used in the process.
To make matters worse, I think we got a bigger problem in Taiwan(and maybe other countries) due to what most college students need to get into graduate school: Another test...and that implies tons of stuff to memorize! After spending years in our adolescence cramming and memorizing stuff that you immediately forgot after the test, why the hell to we need to repeat all that stupid routine again as a college student? As the result of this brainless system, the teaching style of professors must change accordingly, so do the way of midterms are held in schools. (It might need a 10-page long essay to discuss why college students here "must" get into graduate school so I'll just leave it out.)
For example, to prepare for the midterm of most subjects in EE department:
(1)read through the text, class notes and handout to fully understand the concepts.---------------------->An interesting process and really helping the students!
(2)Instead of practicing exercises or problems provided, we students need to memorize equations and some properties, cause none of them will be provided in the test, and you won't have time to derive them from the concepts due to the 2-hour limitation of midterms------------------------->A STUPID and brainless step which require pretty much no or few intellectual activities in our brain.
(3)"If" we have time left, we can finally start working on the exercises and problem sets.
Based on my experience(I'm some sort of hard-working type so I study everyday),
the time left for step 3 is often approaches 0, cause most of the time was taken out in step 1 and 2. But step 3 is actually much more important than step 2 for any future engineers cause that's what we will be doing in our career! We solve real-world problems!! And step2 shouldn't even be a "step"!
To be more precise, if you already gone through the text(i.e. finish step 1) and there are 7 days left before the midterm of a subject(that often happened on us,what just taught this week will be on the midterm next week), you'll still need to spend at least 3 to 4 days memorizing everything you already understand! What if there are midterms for 2 subjects or even more next week? A:You'll end up spending all the time memorizing things for 2 subjects and got very less time for step 3.
Okay! Now it comes to how do we prevent the brainless step2? The answer is obvious: the way of midterms are held and how we enroll the grad school should be changed! A great living example will be the course I took this semester: Analog Communication. The professor allow us to bring in a double-sided notes which contains equations, properties, but no solutions to any homeworks or problems in textbook(A few TA are responsible for checking the notes right after the exams). This is great cause I can now spend my time on something more creative than cramming stuff into my brain.
Sadly, there's no sign of changes to this brainless system so far. I can only try my best to learn.
