DISQUS

juliana65 · 1 year ago

"In a dynamic era does educational access have much of a chance of keeping up with technological improvement?"

Not whether it can, but rather **how it can** because it absolutely must!

IMHO Elitist gatekeepers like Harvard or Stanford or UC Berkeley or U of Mich are essential drivers of excellence, but:

1. Supply has not expanded proportionally with the demand of qualified applicants, too many 4.0 high school graduates cannot get into their idealized university, so it admissions becomes a lottery (or at least the criteria are not predictable in advance).

2. Coverage in courses and research is not expanding to keep up with knowledge.

For example, whole large parts of the world are neglected. I gave up ages ago looking for a place to do PhD work in Burmese history.

Unless the instructor was a geek, the IT instructors at a foreign university I taught at were clueless about open source software (probably what this blog runs off of, either OS or applications software). This leads to clueless decisions down the line when students graduate and get jobs in IT, whereas if students were actively participating in these projects, they would be doing apprenticeships during their coursework.

3. Skill set diversification with a eye towards what you would do if your whole sector of the economy was laid off, like combining carpentry with computer programming, i.e. cross-training.

4. Never-ending education, education should account for a fraction of the work day, continual technological upgrade.

5. It doesn't have to be like it is, because near costless self-education via the internet is quickly becoming much more of a reality, everywhere in the world.
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juliana

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