++ Jenda

"even if it means that the universities have to accept and let finish every alternatively intelligent dude."

.....doing Mickey Mouse degree courses

Students are no more intelligent now than they were 40 years ago, the only difference is the goal posts have been moved.

Students are no more intelligent now than they were 40 years ago, the only difference is the goal posts have been moved.

Whilst I agree that kids are no more intelligent today than they were 40 years ago, I have a different take on what constitutes a "useful degree". 'David Beckham Studies' seems trivial (and boring!) to me; and 'Media Studies' doesn't sound like it would stack up against Applied Physics or Chemistry for academic meaningfulness.

However, if you look at the number of millionaires (as one possible measure of 'success'), that have been 'created' over the last twenty years--at least in most Western societies--far more of them will have achieved that success as a result of being footballers or media types than as physicists or chemists, or all the other 'hard sciences' put together. It's easy to see why, on a purely objective basis of looking around to see the type of careers that are most likely to produce (at least visible) signs of success, that teenagers are opting to 'soft' degrees rather than the hard ones.

I also question whether the traditional degree subjects actually prepare their recipients for the real world of work any better than the newer Mickey Mouse ones. About half of the time I spent in formal CS education concerned itself with teaching me about dates, people and places involved in the historical background of things like The Jaquard Loom, The Difference Engine, Ada Lovelace and other quite interesting titbits of historically relevant, but otherwise ultimately pretty useless information that had to be rote learnt and regurgitated for the exams, and then discarded from ones mind when you moved out into the workplace where it is completely irrelevant.

It is also easy to condemn the politicians for opting for 'easy statistics' to "prove that they are taking action" to address the concerns of parents; but you have to remember that it is those parents--seeking the best for their kids--that drive the need for near immediate feedback from the changes they crave, each time they switch governments. With four or five years terms, and the electorate demanding ever increasing standards; exams results and SATS scores are the only way to satisfy them. The trouble is, it takes about 4 or 5 political cycles--20+ years--before you can really measure the effects of changes in the education system by their effects on the success and prosperity of those educated under them. And in that time, you've had four or five changes of government, and four or five changes of tack in the education system; and there is no way to truly attribute ultimate success back to individual changes.

All of that is further compounded by the fact that the state of knowledge in many areas relevant to modern society are changing faster than ever before--and faster with each passing decade. With new technologies supplanting old ones every other day; and new theories supplanting old ones before the ink is dry on the text books.

Personally, I think that the whole basis of education is going to have to change. We need to discard the whole tradition of rote learning and regurgitation of (a limited set of) facts and figures.

The early stages of education should stop concentrating on "the 3 Rs"--calculators do the 'rithmetic; spell-checkers and speech recognition will take care of the 'riting. Instead, those early years should be devoted to teaching: 'How to learn', 'How to research' along with 'how to type' and 'how to use the calculator'.

And the rest of education should avoid 'teaching', and concentrate on tracking--individually--how individuals progress in their ability to find data; interpret what they find; derive information from that data; and assimilate it in a meaningful way.

With the boundaries of knowledge expanding ever faster in all directions, someone has to question the value of every kid leaving school knowing that the Romans arrived in Britain in AD43, built a few roads and hypercausts and left 400 years later; or that the Battle of Britain took place in the Summer and Autumn of 1940; or how to derive the quadratic formula from first principles. With the right skills, all of this can be looked up in seconds. Acquiring the right skills is the important bit.

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Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

"Too many [] have been sedated by an oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion."

While I agree with much of what you say, I have to disagree with this point.

The early stages of education should stop concentrating on "the 3 Rs"--calculators do the 'rithmetic; spell-checkers and speech recognition will take care of the 'riting.

The ability to do basic math is extremely important. We have enough trouble with people unable to distinguish between reality and stuff that's real because the computer said so. I remember back during my engineering education, one professor spending a lot of time trying to get students to understand the numbers they were working with instead of just believing what came out of the calculator. GIGO still rules.

We see many examples daily of bad writing that has been blessed by a spell checker, but not actually proofread. Wrong homonym chosen. Misspelling that happens to be a legal word. The number of errors can sometimes be amusing. Worse, it can sometimes completely mangle the communication.

I would guess that teaching the 3 Rs should be supplemented with "How to Learn," "How to research," and "How to troubleshoot". Unfortunately, I'm not certain that kids are quite up to those subjects in the early years. Research in cognition suggesting that certain concepts can only be mastered at a certain level of maturity, etc.

I will agree, though, that most of the knowledge I gained after the basics in elementary school has been long forgotten. Things I picked up in non-traditional study has been retained and expanded.

As you pointed out, people want to be able to measure to determine how changes are working. But, as we see often enough in software, what you measure determines how the system is optimized. If you measure rote memorization, the system emphasizes that.

Too bad true understanding is so hard to measure.

G. Wade