Reminds me a bit about Feynman’s story about Brazilian physics education, where the students were developing no idea how to apply the theoretical content they learned into actual application. I’ve also read a similar bit about French physics students, who are very good with formal methods, but tend to get stumped when they are given an open-ended tricky physics problem and need to figure the appropriate method to use themselves.
Then there’s the whole mess of teaching people software engineering, that seems to fail on both teaching theory (since we don’t really have good theory for how to make software yet) and no aliveness training, since it’s being taught at universities where the organization assumes that you have a theoretical subject you can lecture at people, not something where you’d need to basically do apprentice training to learn it properly.
It’s apparently not just software engineering either:
We know that there are profound problems with university science teaching via traditional lectures and we are making some discoveries about how to improve it. For example, Nobel-winning physicist Carl Wieman decided to test how successfully he was teaching science. To his shock he discovered that the vast majority of his students did not understand what he was talking about. His graduate students would arrive in his lab but after 17 years of success ‘when they were given research projects to work on, they were clueless about how to proceed’ and ‘often it seemed they didn’t even really understand what physics was.’ However, after a few years in his lab they would be transformed into expert physicists. This was ‘a consistent pattern’ over many years.
Reminds me a bit about Feynman’s story about Brazilian physics education, where the students were developing no idea how to apply the theoretical content they learned into actual application. I’ve also read a similar bit about French physics students, who are very good with formal methods, but tend to get stumped when they are given an open-ended tricky physics problem and need to figure the appropriate method to use themselves.
Also, the Street Fighting Mathematics book and course uses the practical martial arts metaphor.
Then there’s the whole mess of teaching people software engineering, that seems to fail on both teaching theory (since we don’t really have good theory for how to make software yet) and no aliveness training, since it’s being taught at universities where the organization assumes that you have a theoretical subject you can lecture at people, not something where you’d need to basically do apprentice training to learn it properly.
It’s apparently not just software engineering either:
From the Some notes on education paper.