Public School Education System Thread

[Martin Hash]

I have some experience with that. I taught 4 sections of CS101 at U of Idaho one year & marveled at the institutional inertia, gatekeeping & empire building. It's hopeless.

[Speaker to Animals]

It's hard to change the curricula, and every department has their program.

[jbird4049]

It's hard to change the curricula, and every department has their program.

I have some experience with that. I taught 4 sections of CS101 at U of Idaho one year & marveled at the institutional inertia, gatekeeping & empire building. It's hopeless.

True. What's worse is that the students, and to some extent the teachers, are the ones who get hurt while everyone is fighting over who, what, why, and how. Education always gets cut first except for health and everyone wants to either feather their beds or push an agenda.

Until you reach 2nd in college, 90% of what's needed to be taught hasn't changed in 40-50 years. And how to teach hasn't changed either. Hell, even those from messed up families and neighborhoods want to learn when young! It just takes patience, teachers, a peaceful spot, and yes money.

So I don't see why there is a problem.

[doc_loliday]

I have some experience with that. I taught 4 sections of CS101 at U of Idaho one year & marveled at the institutional inertia, gatekeeping & empire building. It's hopeless.

Just curious, what kind of empire building goes on in the university?

[Okeefenokee]

I have some experience with that. I taught 4 sections of CS101 at U of Idaho one year & marveled at the institutional inertia, gatekeeping & empire building. It's hopeless.

Just curious, what kind of empire building goes on in the university?

When they add additions, they dedicate them to certain people. They put up plaques and everything. That's as permanent as digital stone.

[Speaker to Animals]

I have some experience with that. I taught 4 sections of CS101 at U of Idaho one year & marveled at the institutional inertia, gatekeeping & empire building. It's hopeless.

Just curious, what kind of empire building goes on in the university?

Administrators and other people at the top want to build lots of stuff. They want new buildings, auditoriums, research labs, etc. The more money they can rake in from the student loan gravy train, the more shit they build. A small fraction of the tuition actually benefits students at some universities. It really is best described as building an empire. The more money they collect, the more facilities and programs they can create, the more tuition they can collect, etc. Then they want bigger stadiums for the sports teams, which requires more money spent on advertisement and other marketing programs. They buy more real estate to expand the campus grounds. But when you look at where the university actually expands in terms of academics, it's usually in marxist indoctrination programs like women's studies or some other bullshit pseudo-academic discipline. STEM departments are expected to get their funding mainly through grants. Because that marxist garbage is not real academics, they don't really get much in terms of grants, as far as I know. It's mostly useless garbage papers (we sometimes poke fun at them in the SJW thread). That's what gets expanded in terms of academics, and the students who go into that pay HUGE tuition bills for all the other stuff (like the stadiums, student centers, etc), and when they graduate they are stuck with enormous student loan debt accumulating interest year after year, and no real job prospect other than working in the service industry serving people coffee or waiting tables.

It's really quite fucking evil. These people are essentially enslaving an entire generation to enrich themselves now.


edit:

Even with all of that, in a computer science program you have people who control the curriculum and the philosophy behind it. It's extremely difficult to challenge that program they set in there, even if it's not particularly good. A lot of these computer science programs are damned near trade-based, teaching basically only how to write code (which really is a trade) and not so much actual computer science. Students go on to graduate school and they have to be put through remedial courses to teach them actual computer science because all their coursework was business-related instead of computer science-related. For instance, you might want to expose students to totally different ways of thinking about programming early. They usually get exposed to Java or C++ and that becomes the basis for dealing with data structures, object-oriented programming, design patterns, and so forth. But it might help to expose them to functional programming in something like Lisp. Teach them to consider writing code that generates code so they can solve a general class of problems instead of one instance of that problem. Lots of undergrads also never get exposed to a solid background in algorithms, complexity, formal grammars, and basic theoretical computer science. How do you graduate with a bachelor's of science degree in computer science and not understand things like the Church-Turing Thesis or Recursion Theorem? But to try to bring computer science back to it's mathematical basis, and away from this IT-focus, at a lot of universities is impossible. They are selling a product to businesses and they don't really care about producing future computer scientists.

The real education, these days, begins in graduate school. That's when your advisor and you put together a reasonable plan to make you into an actual computer scientists. The undergrad stuff was not that useful. The mathematics were more useful than the "computer science".

[Speaker to Animals]

For years, my shtick has been the suggestion that we separate what passes for undergraduate computer science today into two different things: (1) a trade-school or engineering-based software engineering degree that is geared towards making software engineers that businesses want to hire; (2) a true computer science degree that is quite heavy on the mathematical foundation of computer science and focuses more on stuff you now usually only start to learn in your first year of graduate school. (2) would be quite a lot harder, but it would be a true computer science, whereas (1) would take all the engineering stuff out of the current programs and be quite heavy on practical skills. If you want to learn about design patterns, UML, human-computer interaction, etc., in the context of getting a nice job with your bachelor's degree, then go with track (1). If you want to be a researcher or professor, then go to track (2). Track (1) could potentially be a terminal degree program as well. You could shorten it into some kind of tech school if you really wanted to.

Programming classes themselves I don't think should even be for credit. Those should be things you can pick up at a community college if you want, or just do it online. I can't imagine students a generation from now needing to learn programming as a freshmen from the ground up. They should have gotten a lot of that stuff in high school.

And for that matter, high school should prepare kids for the programs they plan to enter. If kids want to study computer science, then teach them programming. I could probably teach motivated high school students enough to get by starting at data structures in their first year of college.

[Martin Hash]

I have some experience with that. I taught 4 sections of CS101 at U of Idaho one year & marveled at the institutional inertia, gatekeeping & empire building. It's hopeless.

Just curious, what kind of empire building goes on in the university?

I was trying to answer this but it was over a decade ago, then while I was thinking on it, StA posted the brilliant analyses above, and I'd rather you read them.

[Fife]

[Okeefenokee]