Posted by Reilly Atkinson on June 13, 2000 at 18:27:55:

In Reply to: Re: KM in education posted by Denham on June 04, 2000 at 15:56:35:

Denham -- When I was a young professor during the Vietnam era, tossing out ROTC, creating Winter Reading Periods, tring to diminish the gaps between faculty and students, I never dreamed that in my later years I would become so conservative about education. But I've been able to experience pre-60s and post 60s education, personally and through my children. There's no doubt in my mind that the pre-60s "sage on the stage" is generally the best way to go -- it really works (there a bad apples to be sure)

The "sage on the stage approach" provides students with the workings of a well educated, if not a great mind -- a mind that has spent a great deal of time understanding and organizing the subject matter at hand, someone who can immediately answer questions, and participate in dialogue. (I used to spend about two to three hours of writing lectures for every class hour, and handed out copies of my notes) Also, there is the magic of human presence that is never there with "learning at a distance"

Cooperative work, community learning are terrific things; we used to call them study groups. But they cannot help students much with digging out the subtleties of a subject, they operate, generally at an amateur level. The whole point of learning a subject is to get past the amateur level. Both sages and groups are needed.

Take a student string quartette. They can work through the mechanics of, say a Beethoven quartette -- that is they can play the notes. But only if they work with a master teacher will they go past playing the notes to play music. In my view, education is about the music, not the notes.

When I taught, there were many students who were simply not ready to go to college. As far as I can tell, rather than require immature students to go to work for a while, many colleges and universities actively take on a baby sitting role. As a result, these institutions dumb themselves down -- even Princeton requires now only half the number of courses required for an English major that it did in the 1950's. What a shame.

There's much else I could say, but I'll end with the observation that in working with young people over the 70's, 80's and early 90's I saw a steady decline in the ability of these youngsters to think clearly and to write clearly -- in fact their ability to write grammatically correct English was increasingly compromised. For those of us with a few years on us, this decline is a major topic of conversation and concern. If KM and/or all the new technology can help bring back more intellectual rigor to education then so much the better. If it can help colleges and universities reject immature students, even better.

Regards
Reilly

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