I have been in the 'business' of education for past six year now. I guess I have earned a bit of right to comment on education! The big question hovering over all of us today is "are we prepared to educate the future"? Contrary to popular belief "What do we teach" is a much bigger thing to decide than "How do we teach". Hamming roughly proved in one of his futuristic books (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-Learning/dp/9056995006) that the amount of knowledge almost doubles every one to one-and-half years! Its a bewildering fact. So the first question is how do we keep ourselves abreast of all this huge amount of knowledge? And the second (and more difficult) question is how to make sure that you teach the thing that the student will really need? And there are many sub-queries like how to make sure that the student is not drifting aside from what you teach by the availability of limitless facts and knowledge in the cyber-space. This makes the whole vintage University education system inefficient and, if I may dare say, useless! I strongly believe that what the Universities are selling for the exuberant amount of money they take is not knowledge or education; its a brand name. And if you think my job as an educator is difficult, then think of the poor man who is assigned to choose the employees for a firm! How does (s)he make sure that s(he) is not fooled by the name of the degree? How does s(he) keeps abreast of the knowledge so as to examine the candidates? And more importantly, what would s(he) examine the candidates on? Surely s(he) can not expect them to be aware of the narrow domain in which the company is working! Hence, a quick on the job training is a must for the new employees. This makes the university education even more redundant!
I, sincerely, do not know the answer. But I think the way to go is to scrap the high sounding degrees in applied stuffs, like business administration or engineering. They are impossible degrees in the current world. Anyone who claims s(he) can teach engineering or management is a lier and I can say it to anyone's face! My firm belief is that the time has come to go back to the basic degree system of pure science and arts with at least one years of generic training on mental and physical wellbeing.
I, sincerely, do not know the answer. But I think the way to go is to scrap the high sounding degrees in applied stuffs, like business administration or engineering. They are impossible degrees in the current world. Anyone who claims s(he) can teach engineering or management is a lier and I can say it to anyone's face! My firm belief is that the time has come to go back to the basic degree system of pure science and arts with at least one years of generic training on mental and physical wellbeing.
