I had some lessons on psychology and philosophy, and was extremely disappointed. (Not sure how much of that is general, and how much I just chose a bad school.)
At psychology, most lessons were a combination of learning some things the famous psychologists said, and learning some historical trivia about them. The part that was missing completely was applying any of that knowledge, whether to real or fictional examples.
As an example, when we learned about Freud, we were given a list of ego-defense mechanisms to memorize. What I would naturally expect next, would be a set of exercises, for example to read a written dialogue, and then answer “what ego-defense mechanism was used here?” and to underline the specific sentence; or something like that. But this way of thinking was complete out of every teacher’s mental space. The lessons were simply “here is the list”, and the exams were “give me the list”; if you repeated the list correctly, you passed. (My point is that even if you think that Freud is complete pseudoscience, this is still a wrong way to teach his theories, because you just teach the keywords, not the—actual or imaginary—concepts those words were supposed to refer to.)
Also, if you tried to ask something like “Maslow says that people first need to have their biological needs met, and only then they do things like art; but Freud says that people do art because they are sexually frustrated… so, which way is it actually?”, you would be met by a blank stare. What do you mean by “actually”? We don’t teach any “actually” here! We teach what Freud said. Then we teach what Maslow said. Those are two separate lessons, you are not supposed to mix them together. There is Map#1, which you need to know at Exam#1, and there is Map#2 for Exam#2. There is no territory.
At philosophy, that was also mostly an overview of historical philosophers, and what they said, but just quotes, not even trying to explain the concept, explore its boundaries, thinking about whether the actual world actually works that way. Plato said that specific things were imperfect reflections of ideas. What specifically did he mean by an “idea”? Is there a general idea of a “dog”, and also a more specific idea of a “poodle”? And a more general idea of an “animal”? A hierarchy of ideas? Is there also an idea of a “black poodle”, or is that too specific? I don’t know. All we learned was to quote that Plato said that “specific things were imperfect reflections of ideas”, full stop.
It’s not like subjects other than STEM are inherently bullshit, it’s just… most people who study and teach those subjects simply don’t care about making sense. None of my humanities-oriented classmates saw a problem with that. Learning means memorizing words. What else could it possibly mean?
...and then I see people complaining that teaching math is not more like this, and I get triggered.
I had some lessons on psychology and philosophy, and was extremely disappointed. (Not sure how much of that is general, and how much I just chose a bad school.)
At psychology, most lessons were a combination of learning some things the famous psychologists said, and learning some historical trivia about them. The part that was missing completely was applying any of that knowledge, whether to real or fictional examples.
As an example, when we learned about Freud, we were given a list of ego-defense mechanisms to memorize. What I would naturally expect next, would be a set of exercises, for example to read a written dialogue, and then answer “what ego-defense mechanism was used here?” and to underline the specific sentence; or something like that. But this way of thinking was complete out of every teacher’s mental space. The lessons were simply “here is the list”, and the exams were “give me the list”; if you repeated the list correctly, you passed. (My point is that even if you think that Freud is complete pseudoscience, this is still a wrong way to teach his theories, because you just teach the keywords, not the—actual or imaginary—concepts those words were supposed to refer to.)
Also, if you tried to ask something like “Maslow says that people first need to have their biological needs met, and only then they do things like art; but Freud says that people do art because they are sexually frustrated… so, which way is it actually?”, you would be met by a blank stare. What do you mean by “actually”? We don’t teach any “actually” here! We teach what Freud said. Then we teach what Maslow said. Those are two separate lessons, you are not supposed to mix them together. There is Map#1, which you need to know at Exam#1, and there is Map#2 for Exam#2. There is no territory.
At philosophy, that was also mostly an overview of historical philosophers, and what they said, but just quotes, not even trying to explain the concept, explore its boundaries, thinking about whether the actual world actually works that way. Plato said that specific things were imperfect reflections of ideas. What specifically did he mean by an “idea”? Is there a general idea of a “dog”, and also a more specific idea of a “poodle”? And a more general idea of an “animal”? A hierarchy of ideas? Is there also an idea of a “black poodle”, or is that too specific? I don’t know. All we learned was to quote that Plato said that “specific things were imperfect reflections of ideas”, full stop.
It’s not like subjects other than STEM are inherently bullshit, it’s just… most people who study and teach those subjects simply don’t care about making sense. None of my humanities-oriented classmates saw a problem with that. Learning means memorizing words. What else could it possibly mean?
...and then I see people complaining that teaching math is not more like this, and I get triggered.