Universities are also supposed to be pure meritocracies, rewarding students and faculty primarily on their academic accomplishments. Unfortunately, the structure of modern universities and their surrounding educational-industrial complex includes myriad insidious elements that exacerbate the disadvantages faced by less financially secure students. Here are some of the worst offenders.

1. Student loans instead of grants

Student loans are supposed to provide funds for full time students to live on during their studies. Student loans systems generally suffer from two serious problems. First, the amount of money a student receives depends on their parents’ income, regardless of whether those parents are willing or able to contribute to their childrens’ education. Second, in the U.S., Canada and many other countries, you have to pay them back. A $120 000 loan to go to medical school is much more daunting to the child of a medical secretary than to the child of a neurosurgeon. (In some countries, like the U.K., you only pay back a portion of your student loan depending on how much money you make after your education.)

2. Busy work

Universities in general (and business schools in particular) inundate their students with repetitive, unchallenging assignments – busy work. Busy work serves no pedagogical purpose (by definition). You learn nothing from it, and it does not separate good students from bad students. It is primarily used in subjects like business where the material is straightforward. Since faculty cannot or will not provide challenging problems, they make getting through the endless barrage of menial tasks the challenge. This discriminates against students who have to work part time (or even full time) to fund their studies.

3. Lack of evening and distance classes

Again, as many poor students have to work to fund their education, offering classes only during conventional business hours forces students to choose between attending the class or making the money to pay for the classes.

4. Participation marks and punishing absenteeism

When a student has to choose between a work shift and a class, between next month’s rent money and this term’s participation marks, poor students’ marks suffer one way or another. Punishing absenteeism also facilitates pandemics, but that’s an issue for another post.

5. Market-priced student housing

The purpose of a University is not to educate the populace and produce high-quality research, not to turn a profit. When universities are located in areas with high real estate prices, they can accommodate financially challenged students by providing housing at cost. However, where “at cost” means $400/month, and similar apartments in the area go for $800/month, universities smell the opportunity to extract more money from students and provide “market-priced student housing”.

6. Pressuring or forcing students into volunteer work

When I was an undergrad, many professional programs pressured students to engage in “resume-building” volunteer work or unpaid internships. Volunteer work is all well and good when you’re on a full scholarship and daddy pays for your Benz. When you’re already pulling 20 hours/week cleaning a movie theatre to pay your tuition, volunteer work is money out of pocket, plain and simple.

7. Pathetic pay rates for research and teaching assistants

Many faculty view students as cheap (if not free) labour. I got paid less per hour as a research assistant in undergrad than most gas station attendants. Worse, foreign students’ visas often stipulate that they can only work within the university, so they take these jobs regardless of the pay, removing the pressure to increase salaries for lack of willing workforce. Poor students have to turn down more educationally beneficial research jobs in favor of better paying menial labour jobs. In the words of Chris Rock, that is fucked up.

8. The tuition-economy link

Recently the UK elected a conservative government, which drastically cut university funding. In response, universities are tripling their tuition fees, in the middle of a recession. Where tuition fees are directly linked to the economy, they are highest when people have the least money. This flies in the face of basic Keynesian principles … but then, since when have conservatives ever understood Keynes?

Conclusion

One could argue that there are good reasons for all of the practices criticized above. I would simply counter that improving social mobility in society and reducing class discrimination is more important.

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1. Find a Reasonable Supervisor

The single most important part of a PhD is finding the right supervisor. Most people will tell you to try to work with someone who is 1) a (famous) prolific researcher, 2) brilliant, 3) similar in research interests. Bullshit. The most important quality in a supervisor is reasonableness. Your supervisor can indefinitely forestall your graduation and make your life so miserable you’ll quit. If you get an unreasonable supervisor, you’re hosed.

Many academics become prolific by cracking the whip over an army of grad students and then taking credit for their hard work. Worse, truly important research is often time-consuming, so those who do the most important stuff rarely publish the most articles. Brilliance is nice, but not necessary for the same reason as overlapping research interests: your PhD should be your own. Never mind your supervisor’s agenda, or your department’s, or your school’s. You need to pursue your interests, your project, your way – otherwise your job talk will be uninspiring and you won’t get a good position.

2) When Choosing a Program, Focus on Past Graduates

Most people compare programs based on two factors: the overall reputation of the school and the research reputation of the faculty in your department of interest. This strategy suffers from two problems: 1) famous universities aren’t necessarily strong in your particular field; 2) having a bunch of prolific researchers does not imply that the school’s PhD program is pedagogically sound.

To choose a program, ask consider two questions. First, where did previous students from this program get jobs? Second, how long did they really (not officially) spend in the program? If students like you went to this program, and got the kind of job you want after a reasonable time, then it’s your kind of program. Of course, you also have to watch out for changes in the program or faculty.

3. It Usually Takes Longer than you Expect

Longer than they tell you. Prospective students are commonly told fairlytales about three- to four-year programs. In some countries, like the UK, this is still accurate because university funding is sometimes tied to program duration, but this is unusual. Find out how long previous students took, and don’t take their word for it. PhD’s have ambiguous end-dates: there’s the date you finished writing your thesis, the date of your defense, the date you submit your corrected thesis, the date you accept a position, the date you begin your position, and the date you get your diploma. You want the last one. When did you start, and when did you receive your diploma? Seven or more years is terrible. Six is bad. Five is realistic. Four is fantastic. Three is a myth. But it varies by field.

4) Be Damn Sure you Want to do This

As far as I can tell, PhD students fall into one or more of three categories: aspiring academics, egomaniacs, and people just aren’t sure what else to do with their lives. If you’re not an aspiring academic, think long and hard about whether you really want to go through five to eight years of hell, followed by an anticlimactic post-doc position. Then read every strip at PhD Comics, and think about it again.

5) Difficulty comes from Politics, not Research

PhD’s are supposed to be difficult, and they are. However, they’re not difficult for the reasons you would expect. A PhD is supposed to be difficult because doing good research is wickedly complicated. A PhD is actually difficult because of all the political wrangling, endless debates about inconsequential minutia and general academic assholery.

6) Go Big or Go Home

Doing good research is easy. Pick a real group of people who are in trouble, and use all that expert knowledge you’ve accumulated to improve their lot in life. It doesn’t matter if you’re in physics, medicine, anthropology, or English, helping real people is a powerful thing. The trouble is, all the while you’re trying to do something real, people around you will bitch and moan about how it’s risky, too novel, methodologically questionable, and doesn’t make a clear academic contribution. During my proposal defense, I desperately wanted to say “If you’re not going to help, get the fuck out.” In hindsight, I wish I had.

7)Most Academics are Simultaneously Geniuses and Morons

At the end of middle school, someone always gives a motivational speech about how “when you get to high school, you won’t be spoon-fed anymore – you’ll really have to work hard.” And then you get to high school and the spoon-feeding continues. And then you get the same speech at the end of high school, and you get to university, and the spoon-feeding continues. And then at the end of undergrad, you get a similar speech, but with the “now when you get to grad school you’ll meet some of the smartest people in the world and they’ll knock your socks off” twist. Yeah? Where?

Academics are almost all intelligent, because many of the tests you have to pass to get in (LSAT, MCAT, GRE, GMAT, SAT, etc.) are glorified IQ tests. The trouble is, intelligence isn’t the only thing you need to become a great intellectual. You also need rationality, creativity, and persistence. And the other trouble is, none of these are highly correlated with the kind of IQ. The result of this misalignment between entrance criteria and required characteristics is an academic system populated by intelligent yet irrational people. This leads to all sorts of hilariously demotivational exchanges:

“I never authorized you to buy that!”
“Yes you did. You said right here in this email, ‘go ahead and buy it.’”
“Yes but you were supposed to confirm first.”

“You should have used grounded theory”
“Yes, and I would have, if you hadn’t told me not to when I proposed it three years ago.”

“I don’t think you should rely on this reference.”
“Then why did you send it to me?”

“You’re supervisor didn’t actually read your proposal, did he?”
“Considering that the answer to his question was in the abstract, I suspect not.”

“Just pick the survey questions that will give you the answers you want.”

Conclusion

In summary, don’t do a PhD unless you’re absolutely certain you want to be an academic or you have some other extremely compelling reason. If you decide to do one anyway, choose a school that graduates students quickly and gets them reasonable positions. Then find the most reasonable, easy-going supervisor you can. Choose an ambitious topic that matters, and go make someone’s life better. Then do your best to ignore all the negative bullshit around you, and keep putting one foot in front of the other until you can stand up at a conference and identify by name real, living, breathing people whose lives are better today than they were yesterday because of you.

I have personally met computer science professors who believe each of the following things. I make no claims as to how widespread these beliefs are; you can judge that for yourself.

1. Java is a good first teaching language

I don’t know how many computer science programs start teaching programming using Java, but there are more than a few, and that’s too many. When you’re going over variables, loops and conditionals, the object-oriented overhead of a language like java is unnecessary and confusing. Inquisitive students can’t just memorize things (i.e. public static void main (String args[])) without demanding to know what it means and why it’s there.

2. Machine language is “basic”

Comp Sci people seem to be terribly confused about what ‘basic’ means. When one learns to drive a car, starting the car, making a right turn, a left turn, parking, etc. is basic. Building a parallel gas-electric hybrid engine is not basic. Driving a car is more basic than building one because the latter requires significantly more expert knowledge than the former. In the same way, using a simple scripting language requires less depth of understanding that writing in machine language; therefore, computer science education should start with higher level languages and proceed to lower level ones, not vice versa.

3. You should write code on paper before you write it on a computer

Writing code by hand is stupid. It is entirely inconsistent with the interactive and iterative design process that comes naturally to hackers and painters alike. Professional software developers make extensive use of API documentation, reference guides, forum discussions, etc. to make troubleshoot problems and make their code more efficient and effective. Writing code by hand tests your ability to write trivially simple software without making errors. Real programmers must be capable of making complex software and detecting their errors with a variety of automated tools. Teaching or testing coding using pencil and paper is inconsistent with both the natural mode of human action and the practical realities of software development.

4. Lectures are an effective method of teaching programming

Programming is like algebra. You can’t learn how to write code by watching someone write code on a blackboard or listening to elaborate explanations from professors. You can’t learn math from watching someone do math. You learn to do things by doing them.

5. Algorithm design is learned by reading existing algorithms

Designing algorithms is about finding innovative solutions to difficult problems. Algorithm design courses are about studying existing solutions to rather simple problems. Learning how a particular problem can be solves provides approximately zero insight into how to solve problems you’ve never encountered before.

6. You can just ‘pick up’ prolog in a week for a course

There’s this crazy belief among Comp Sci. faculty that all languages are basically the same, so after learning the principles behind languages you can use whatever. This is bullshit. This is like claiming that since someone studied Spannish grammar in grade school, they can speak Spanish fluently, in any of Spanish, Mexican or Columbian accents. The leap between structured and object-oriented programming is huge, and it pales in comparison to the leap between object-oriented languages and declarative languages.

7. Exams measure understanding of programming

Teams of professional programmers spends months and years building intricate software systems in response to poorly-understood, ill-defined and changing problems. To accomplish this, they employ API documentation, online tutorials and forum discussions, team problem-solving sessions, reference books and an infinite number of phone-a-friend lifelines. Exams test your ability to write simple code to solve a trivial, well-defined static problems, without consulting and references. One is about resourcefulness, the other about memory. Exams test the wrong thing.

8. GUI’s are not an important aspect of learning to code

At the university where I did my undergrad, it was easy to finish a B.Sc. in computer science without ever building a graphical interface. While I agree that many software projects do not have graphical components (e.g., developer APIs), to marginalize GUIs as some kind of specialty endeavor is short-bus crazy!

9. Programming Requires Calculus

I have been told that development involving sophisticated work with graphics and animation involves calculus. Outside of this particular subfield, however, I haven’t seen much calculus in software development. Certainly I’ve seen a lot more GUI development than graphics.

10. Linux will rapidly overtake Windows among consumers

Comp. Sci. profs have been saying this for years. Hasn’t happened. And it’s not going to happen until Ubuntu and company take the dicking around out of computing the way Apple has.

11. LaTeX will overtake WYSIWYG text editors because LaTeX gives you more control

Yes, believe it or not, a computer science prof said this during one of my classes in undergrad. It goes directly to a deeper misunderstanding among Comp. Sci. academics that power and control are the primary factors driving adoption. They’re not. Simplicity and ease of use are far more important.

12. You can buy gates at RadioShack

The same idiot who thought LaTeX was the future also told his class to go buy gates (the things transistors are made of) at RadioShack and play with them to see how they work. Again, this evidences how completely out of touch some of these people are. Gates are microscopic. You can’t go buy them at an electronics store.

Update (25MAR2011): As so many helpful readers have pointed out, 1) gates are made of transistors, not the other way around, and you can now buy gates at Radio Shack online. However, the prof in question told me to go buy gates at a physical Radio Shack store in 2001, and they had no such thing. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote “the things transistors are made of.”

Conclusion

I have long argued that society needs a professional certification for software developers and that universities need undergraduate programs dedicated to training people for these certifications. It’s worked for accounting, engineering and medicine. There’s no reason it can’t work for software development. One of the primary barriers to this sort of progress is the raging incompetence of academics in computer science, computer engineering, management information systems and related disciplines.

Have one or a few to add? Comment away.

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The strange thing is, grad schools seem to be constructed around the assumption that grad students are desperately inept and have no idea what they want to do for their thesis or beyond. This premise has so profoundly affected the structure of graduate programs that when a student does know what he’s doing and has a clear idea of how to go about it, the program seems to work against his initiative at every turn.

To understand just how silly this is, consider that only the most elite students are supposed to do PhDs in the first place. Thus, assuming that PhD students will be inept and confused is either the heights of cynicism or just plain nuts.

Universities have four basic purposes: 1) educate the public; 2) undertake scientific research; 3) train new researchers; 4) create innovative artifacts. The problem at the heart of the North American education system is that educating the public has nothing to do with purposes 2, 3 and 4. Furthermore, the qualities that make a good educator of the public and the qualities that make one a good researcher have little overlap. Education is about empathy. Research is about brilliance.

For any of the suggestions in the aforementioned article to make sense, we have to split up universities into centers of public education and centers of research and development (which would also train researchers).

Public Education

John Q. Public does not need a well-rounded education including Shakespeare, calculus and at least one foreign language. John Q. Public needs a ‘trade’ certification. And by trade, I do not mean just carpentry and plumbing. All the so-called professions are just trades – medical doctor, lawyer, electrician, peacekeeper, forklift operator, scientist – what’s the difference? Yeah, you need more education to be a good scientist than a good forklift operator, but so what? Practically all jobs beyond migrant fruit picker require at least some specialized knowledge.

We can divide this knowledge into that which can be codified and that which must be learned through experience. The trade schools understand this. That’s why, in countries all over the world, an electrician must first pass an exam, then work as an apprentice, then pass another exam, then work as a journeyman, etc.

Yet universities are largely not set up this way. If you want to be a professional technical writer, for instance, what do you do? B.A. in English? What the hell do Keats, Shakespeare and Beowulf have to do with technical writing? And where would you learn to express complex topics in a simple manner? English degrees teach you to use bigger words and more convoluted expressions. Technical writers need basic vocabulary and simple sentences.

What is clearly needed, then, is a proliferation of trade certification programs and exams designed to educate the capable and weed out the incapable. These certification programs should be as short and to the point as possible. At least 90% of the people who currently inhabit undergraduate programs belong in this kind of job training.

Research, Grad Students and Innovative Artifacts

The remaining 10%, the 10% who go to grad school, need to immediately begin research training in what are now called universities. Since only the brightest will get in, they should be able to cover something similar to existing undergraduate degrees (minus all the fluff) in two years, followed by an internship in a research lab. Then it would be on two another two-year masters program, followed by a research assistantship. Then a two year PhD. Only two years for a PhD? Hell yes, once you cut out all the bullshit. Most of a PhD is dicking around, administrative crap, classes you shouldn’t be in, exams that don’t prove anything, and endless hours perfecting documents nobody reads. If they just dumped all that bullshit and stuck to designing and executing good studies, a PhD would only take two years.

As I mentioned above, Universities are in the business of scientific research and creating innovative artifacts. There’s this thing they do in arts that they call research – writing analyses of historical documents, pondering existentialist dilemmas, weaving baskets. I don’t know. It all seems crazy to me. I have no problem with a university employing English profs who write experimental novels and music profs who compose wonderful pieces. Those are innovative artifacts, just the same as new building methods created by engineers. But classics? That’s beyond me.

Coming back to the point, this research must be directed toward the horrifying problems plaguing our society: overpopulation, climate change, lack of energy, poverty, disease, religious fundamentalism, anti-rationalism, etc. It’s not tenure that has to go, it’s government funding of research that doesn’t address these critical problems. Of course, some percentage of funding must be held for research of unknown value by mathematicians, theoretical physicists, etc., but most research funding must be directed toward projects that matter to society. It’s taxpayer money after all.

Conclusion

In conclusion, teaching and research have nothing to do with each other. 90% of universities need to be converted into trade certification schools, where any job requiring specialized knowledge is a trade. Those who would be scientists need to go directly to the remaining 10% (the actual universities). The majority of scientists at these Universities must be directed toward solving the problems that pose an imminent threat to humanity as we know it.

Unfortunately, we’ll run out of scientists before we run out of problems.

6. No trials

If a students is accused of wrongdoing, he has no right to any sort of trial or tribunal, and sometimes no opportunity to defend himself. Consider, for example, the no-tolerance policies for fighting at some schools. Self defense? Bah. Never through a punch? Bah. You’re suspended anyway.

5. No elected government

Schools are dictatorships. The students get no say in who’s in charge or what the rules are.

4. No mobility rights

Just imagine if, as an adult, you got up to go take a piss and some dude told you to sit your ass back down and hold it. I’d be so shocked, I don’t know if I’d even have the presence of mind to tell him to go fuck himself.

3. No right to privacy

Here’s a favorite in movies: the teacher intercepts a note and reads it in front of class. Who the fuck does she think she is? Interfering with the post is a federal offense in many countries, but nabbing student’s notes is ok? Another: police need a warrant to search your house or car, but your kids locker in school? Nope. Here’s one that’s far more nefarious: a Canadian school board is considering mandatory drug testing for students.

2. No freedom of association

Something that always rotted me was when teachers give detention to whole classes because some of the students were loud or otherwise misbehaved. This is taught in education degree programs as a method of encouraging students to self-police. Bullshit. It teaches students that punishing people for the actions of others is ok and that freedom of association is nonsense.

1. No freedom of speech or expression

And here is the kicker. Uniforms. No Swearing. No criticizing your school on MySpace. No describing scientific research that conflicts with the views of the school. No criticizing human-rights-violating referendums. Et cetera.

So when the Bush Administration turned the US into a dictatorship, when people are held in prisons without evidence or trial just because they were near by where trouble happened, when people are told to watch what they say and not criticize their governments, when the government spies on its own citizens and taps their phones with no prior evidence, don’t expect outrage. Nobody’s surprised, because that’s what they grew up with.

Suppose you have a sore shoulder – nothing special, just a vague pain in your shoulder. If you go to a GP, you’ll probably be told to rest it for a couple of months (the ignore it and hope it goes away approach). If that doesn’t work, the doc may offer you a cortisone shot. This is a direct result of the doctor’s training: joint pain = inflammation; cortisone is a good drug for fighting inflammation.

Suppose you don’t want to get a shot, so you go to a physiotherapist. The physio ices your shoulder, puts an ultrasound on it, and then uses electrical stimulation to strengthen the muscles around it. He may give you exercises to do with bands or weights. If that doesn’t work, suppose you go to a chiropractor. The chiro will look at your spine and its relationship to your shoulders, tell you your spine isn’t straight, and adjust it. If that fails too, and you go to a massage therapist, the RMT will inspect the muscles surrounding the shoulder, find that they are too tight and compressed, and try to work out the knots.

The problem is that none of these “medical professionals” have a clue why your shoulder hurts. Instead, they look for things the kind of bodily imperfections they have been trained to treat. You may, in fact, have inflammation in the shoulder joint, weak muscles around it, tight muscles compensating for the weak muscles AND a crooked spine. However, none of these quacks knows what combination of these things, if any, is causing the pain. All they do is look for things they can fix, and assume that what they can fix must be causing the problem.

Ideally, the first person you visit should be the GP. Your GP should identify the cause of the problem and refer you to the appropriate treatment; e.g., if it’s tight muscles, go to an RMT. This, however, reveals the fundamental weakness of medical education: GPs are primarily trained to treat viral and bacterial pathology using drugs. Many of them simply cannot diagnose biomechanical ailments effectively. They don’t know who to send you to.

This problem is and will likely continue to become more pronounced in the next decade. As we continue to encourage people to become more active – to run, to lift weights, to play sports, to hike, to bike to work, to swim – people become less susceptible to heart disease, cancer and bacterial illnesses at the cost of increased minor biomechanical ailments. The occasional torn tendon, trained ligament or sore muscle is the price of protecting ourselves from the obesity and muscular atrophy that threatens our lives overall. Healing these minor biomechanical ailments is an integral part of caring for the populace and making exercise more pleasurable and sustainable.

The increasing importance of treating biomechnical injury, therefore, makes improvements in the training of GPs imperative for a healthy society.

4. Not everyone is entitled to a college degree.

Part of the current incarnation of the economic stimulus plan passing through Congress includes tax credits for students attending a four-year university. This sounds like a great idea, right? Put more people through college, and we’ll have better-educated adults entering the work force.

The problem is, we don’t need more college-educated adults. We need more people with functional educations who can do actual, physical work – not more liberal arts majors who function in some service-based field. Take a look around your house. How many things weren’t made in China? How many of those things not produced by the Chinese were made in Mexico, or Korea? We don’t make a damn thing anymore. What’s worse, you can’t even find qualified carpenters or plumbers or mechanics in this country, because we just don’t produce citizens capable of these necessary jobs.

One of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had some ideas on education that unfortunately Americans never bought into. Jefferson believed “every citizen needs an education proportional to the condition and the pursuits of his life,” and this couldn’t be farther from the typical American practice. Jefferson’s education model was based on the idea that any student was entitled to a free education… so long as that student continued to progress and excel. If you’re only book-smart enough to be a plumber, that’s okay, you’re just done with school in the 10th grade and spend a year or two apprenticing with a plumber. If you’re sharp enough to be some kind of paper-pushing clerical worker, maybe you get to go through the 12th grade, and on, and on, and on.

Unfortunately, we’ve become a nation too wussy to tell a kid he’s not achieving at one thing, maybe there’s another path; so instead we tell the child a lie, and he ends up wasting years of valuable time and daddy’s valuable money going to college and skating by on a D-average.

5. There are too many levels of bureacracy.

Bureacracies are some of the worst purveyors of bullshit. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a state university registrar’s office, has worked for a state office, or has had to get assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency knows this well. Education is a prime example.

First, you have the school administrators; then you have your local school board – eight or nine of (if the district where I live is any indication) the least educated individuals in town. Then you have whatever state board of education has authority. Then there’s the feds. This isn’t counting whatever idiotic committees exist on all those levels to ‘advise’ these authorities.

With that in mind, it’s no wonder there’s so much bullshit floating around in our educational models. Pretty much any time you see some state board sending schools lesson plans that get passed down to the 5th grade teacher, you’re witnessing bullshit in action. Anyone who has ever taught a class knows that every student is an individual, every class is different, and every lesson plan and pedagogy had better reflect that. You adapt your teaching to each class’s needs. Anything passed down from some board that has never even seen these students will not be effective for them.

6. We completely fail at teaching critical thought.

This is probably the biggest problem facing education. We no longer teach students to think critically, not just in their scholastic pursuits, but in everyday life. I asked a few college student friends how much training they had in critical thinking, and their reply really brought it home; almost every one of them said, “You mean like in English class?”

For whatever reason, critical thinking is something that we’ve associated with text. Sure, students learn how to analyze a poem, or read a book critically and write a response to it. But we don’t teach them how to apply that to daily life. English teachers rarely use items from world events, political rhetoric, or daily life to fuel students’ projects. Why not?

I’ve got an English degree. Certainly I value literature and its contributions to society. Yet I also realize that in the grand scheme of things, being able to read and understand Yeats is probably less important than being able to understand the logical flaws in something the president proposes. This is where we fail in critical thinking training, and it happens, as I’ve written before on this blog, because our school systems to not foster dialogue and dissent.

Our classrooms are designed like little dictatorships, with a teacher who is to remain unquestioned and obeyed. Controversy is stifled. School uniforms are a fine example. While there are many good reasons for implementing uniforms in public schools, one of the bad reasons people use to back up this action is the idea that we should stifle any potential conflict between students. Perhaps this is why they grow up to be passive adults, unable to communicate their disagreements or fight for their beliefs. Adults do tend to reflect the way in which they are raised, and our kids spend most of their day in school every week.

7. Problems start at home.

This issue is, along with critical thinking training, the biggest problem facing education. Unfortunately, it’s also the hardest problem to deal with. Most of the problems in education start at home. When teachers are playing catch-up with students whose parents did not read to them, give them any sense of discipline, or foster any love of learning, they are wasting precious time.

One issue here is that parents are simply too busy to raise their kids. With both parents working all day, how can we expect one caregiver to have the time to read to their kids at night? A family should be able to survive off one income. With fat-cat executives and families like the Kennedys debating whether they’ll take the Cesna or the Mazaratti to work, there’s no good reason why we can’t pay people who work full-time jobs enough to feed their families.

The other, of course, is one of productivity’s worst enemies: television, and all the other forms of entertainment we feed our nation’s children. We’ve all heard it before. The television is not a baby-sitter, nor is the Wii, but they are, unfortunately, used that way far too often. It doesn’t matter how many episodes of Reading Rainbow your kid watches, it’s not the same damn thing as reading a book with your parents.

Unfortunately, what do we do to solve this? Cross our fingers and hope the next generation of parents is more responsible, I suppose.

Conclusion

There are good teachers out there, and good schools. There are students achieving everywhere in America. But what about the rest of them? Those who are not blessed with some brilliant administrator with innovative ideas for running a school are often left behind to deal with old ideas, the pains of bureacracy, and students who just don’t seem to give a shit.

These are not all the problems in education by any stretch, though. These were those that came to mind with very little thought or research. What are some problems you see in education, and what are the solutions? And don’t just tell us on the War on Bullshit. If you’ve ever seen Idiocracy, you may have glimpsed the future of the United States of America, so for God’s sake, tell your local school board.

Related posts: Three Reasons Why Your Kids Might Be Stupid; The American Way: Three Absolutely Backasswards Practices

 America, you want your kids to stop growing up stupid? Here’s your solution:

1. Stop letting idiots teach your kids.

This one’s pretty friggin’ obvious, America. You can’t stick your kids in a classroom for eight hours a day with someone who spent eight hours a day in the same broken system and expect results. Now, the optimist might hope that those future educators pick up the knowledge they didn’t gain in high school during their stay in college, but unfortunately, young teachers are usually education majors in their larval stages.

Have you ever taken a look at the curriculum in most education departments? How about spending a little less time teaching people how to teach, and a little more time teaching them what the fuck they’re talking about. Call me crazy, but I suspect the English teacher who spent her four years in college writing big-ass papers and reading big-ass books will probably know a hell of a lot more about teaching kids to read and write than the English education major who took as many hours in courses like Educational Psychology as in actual English classes.

2. If your test is a Scantron, you didn’t learn anything.

I’m not against standards, or accountability, or any of the other buzz words educators use to defend federally mandated tests. I’m just against the whole idea of a multiple-choice, Scantron-type test. Yes, it makes for easy grading for a teacher. Unfortunately, it also doesn’t show that your students learned a damn thing.

The ability to memorize facts and formulas is only half of education. The other half is your ability to put all those pieces together and formulate actual ideas of your own. Otherwise, your ‘education’ is useless. Essays, short answer questions – hell, even oral exams – demonstrate a hell of a lot better whether or not a child has actually learned anything in school.

 Accountability tests are a good thing. Multiple choice tests are not. And speaking of accountability…

3. Teachers are students too.

And I don’t mean this in the hippie “a teacher always learns from his students” way. Yeah, no shit, a teacher always learns something from his students. More importantly, a teacher should still be learning from friggin’ books and classes.

If students have to take constant federally-mandated tests, then teachers damn sure should. Fields advance, conversations progress, and society evolves. Why should our teachers be a relic?

You ever wonder why your college professors were a hell of a lot more intelligent than the majority of your elementary and high school teachers? Well, more schoolin’ helps, but the other reason is because your college professors are supposed to continue educating themselves throughout their career. Most university teachers won’t acquire or maintain a job at a good school if they don’t continue to research, write, and advance their knowledge of the field. Why do we not expect the same out of teachers at lower levels? It’s bogus. Don’t just replace the old ass books in shitty schools, replace the old ass teachers, or expect them to keep up with the field.

Conclusion

Should we even have to explain this to our school boards, our education departments, and our government leaders? These solutions are common sense. Will this solve all the education woes of America? Of course not, but it’s a start. Next week, I’ve got a few more suggestions in the area of education: more dialogue, shorter school days, and the dreaded removal of sports from school.

Here’s a few American practices and institutions that just don’t seem to make much damn sense when you really examine them:

1. Innocent Until Proven Guilty… on the Radio?

This is one of my personal favorites. We’ve all been told a thousand times that the greatest part of the American judicial system is that the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty – and, hey, I like this. It makes sense for a legal system to assume someone is innocent unless there is substantial evidence to the contrary.

What doesn’t make sense is that it’s alright to plaster the faces and names of individuals charged with a crime all over television, the newspaper, and any other media you prefer. What the hell is that? I’m presumed innocent, but CNN can tell the world that some jerk sheriff thinks I might be a child molester? Thanks, guys, that’s gonna endear me to the neighbors!

If a teacher is charged with a sex crime, do you think it will be easy for that educator to find a job teaching kids again, even if found innocent? Or a man charged with a murder that is later determined to be a suicide – will everyone shrug it off, or do you suspect there might be just a tiny shadow of doubt in the back of everyone’s mind?

Innocent until proven guilty is great, but then wait until someone is found guilty to tell everyone about their awful crimes. To do otherwise is, well, kind of a dick move.

2. We beat our kids, but ground our criminals.

Parenting is tough, and there are many schools of thought on how best to discipline a child, but one that has never made much sense to me is spanking. Now, I’m not talking about the one-two swat on a three-year-old’s behind right before they stick a fork in the socket; I’m talking about the middle-of-Wal-Mart-I’ll-give-you-something-to-cry-about-boy spankings that are part and parcel of daily life in the south.

Before I lose “y’all” spankers (that’s how they say it in the trailer park, right?), I’m not one of these hippies who thinks a kid can’t learn anything from a beating. Kids aren’t stupid, and they’re quick to realize that A+B=PAIN. There are just other ways of discipline that are just as effective – but more importantly to the topic at hand, it just doesn’t match up with what kids experience when they grow up.

Wouldn’t you think a more effective way of disciplining criminals would reflect, in some fashion, the discipline us adults remember from childhood? Those readers who were spanked will probably still shiver a little if they see Dad’s belt wrapped around a fist. Yet we don’t punish criminals with a belt. We punish them by grounding the shit out of them – for years. What’s wrong with this picture?

So we ground this guy…

…but beat this girl? WTF?

If I’m an immature kid, and mom catches me smoking marijuana, she uses physical violence to punish me; if I get caught doing the same thing as a damn adult, I just get grounded? What’s worse, if someone suggested beatings as a punishment for crime, there’d be inevitable comparisons to awful totalitarian regimes like China, where caning criminals is still a fun past-time (I guess it’s to occupy the folks whose kids have already grown up).

I don’t know what the solution is here. Should we cane our criminals, or ground our kids? Hm…

3. We use totalitarian education to teach future citizens of a democratic society.

Maybe this is the source of all the bullshit we post on here: the sad state of American education. Hey, it’s no secret that our schools suck and our kids don’t want to learn, right? But to be fair, would you want to learn if the fucking SS were teaching your class? Me either – that’s why I was homeschooled.

We’ve got a president who talks about spreading democracy to the world (and thankfully, we’ll have a different president hopefully talking about different goals by the time I update again), and while I realize that our American ‘democracy’ is a far cry from true democracy, it is at least founded in democratic principles. So why do we adopt such a fascist model for our schools?

Democracy and free society in general cannot function without an educated, critical citizenry who engage in free and open dialogue. Democracy without debate isn’t democracy at all – just look at the Bush White House, where dissent from Dubya’s plans is frequently silenced.

Yet we have an educational system that seems to be violently in opposition to dialogue. Have you ever tried correcting a teacher in an elementary school, or questioning information in your text books? Children are taught early on to accept whatever authority figures tell them is The Truth, and to always be mindful of anyone older, richer, and wiser than them.

Schools pass regulations to stop any conflict between students – because it’s too hard for unqualified educators to handle the conflict and let it be resolved in a civil fashion. Classes are set up with multiple choice exams where students memorize and repeat, instead of contextualizing and discovering information. Even the placement of the teacher in the classroom, standing before the whole class like Stalin before the proletariat, as a form of visual rhetoric, makes them seem like some distant and quasi-divine entity sent to the chalkboard to impart wisdom.

And now there’s the move in school districts across the country to go toward more uniforms and stronger dress codes.

Pictured: American schoolchildren, eagerly modeling their new Hitlerjugend uniforms.

Some people see children headed to school in their perfect uniforms and smile; I shiver. I shiver because those kids aren’t going to school to learn. They’re going to school to be indoctrinated. They’re going to school so our nation’s educators – blissfully unaware of how they are being used to subvert democracy – can teach them everything they need to know to ensure that a viable democracy will never exist in this country to take power away from those who already hold it. Next week, we’ll expand on this fatal flaw in education, and take a look at how an educator can be democratic rather than authoritarian.