Re: Geekery, education and high-powered brains ...

Guy Barry wrote:
On Jan 27, 6:10 pm, Paul Wallich <p...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Guy Barry wrote:
On Jan 26, 10:54 pm, "Dr. Brat" <epc...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There's a world of difference between a freshman in college and a first
year graduate student, don't you think?
No, only three years (in the UK anyway). Why should someone be so
much more capable of making their own mind up at the age of twenty-one
than at eighteen?
Because they've had 3-4 years of intensive education in a bunch of
subjects fairly closely related to the one they think they might like to
specialize in?

So your argument appears to be "yes, we should let students decide
what they're interested in, but not until we've instructed them in a
whole load of stuff they're not interested in". To spend three years
requiring someone to learn about something just so that they can
decide they don't like it seems like an awful lot of wasted effort to
me.

One hopes that they will be interested in everything, but fascinated by only a small range of things. And yes, exposing people to stuff that they might not, in hindsight, be interested in seems to be the only way to make sure they find things they are, in hindsight, interested in. If you'd shown 16-year-old me a list of the course I was going to take in college and asked me which ones I thought I would enjoy and want to pursue further, it would have been rather seriously different from the evaluations I had made by the time I was 21...

paul

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