A blog post at Wired claims to give the Top 5 Reasons It Sucks to be an Engineering Student. Discussion is in the comments there and at this lively thread at Slashdot. The reasons given at the Wired blog are (in reverse order):

1. Awful textbooks
2. Professors are rarely encouraging
3. Dearth of quality counseling
4. Other disciplines have inflated grades
5. Every assignment feels the same

It sounds to me like the blogger at Wired is stereotyping, based on what goes on at large research universities. A student could avoid #2, #3, and maybe #5 just by doing a 3+2 program where the first three years are done at a liberal arts college (…shameless plug alert…).

As for the grade inflation, I admit there’s no solution to this short of doing the right thing and forcing real academic standards on some of the touchiest-feeliest portions of the liberal arts world. But I think that would lead to mass chaos, as the stability of many liberal arts college depends on having some department on campus to be the “good cop” which offers refuge to students who just aren’t that interested in getting good at something difficult. All I can offer is some sympathy, that math and science professors are often eviscerated on course evaluations by those very students, who are shocked — SHOCKED — that deadlines would be enforced, hard material would be on tests, and so forth.

So to all engineering students out there, keep on keepin’ on. It might suck a little in the short term, but when it’s over you get to run our entire society!

Following up on his three posts on classical education yesterday, Gene Veith weighs in on mathematics instruction: 

I admit that classical education may be lagging in the math department. The new classical schools are doing little with the Quadrivium, the other four liberal arts (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The Trivium, which is being implemented to great effect (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), has to do with mastering language and what you can do with it. The Quadrivium has to do with mathematics (yes, even in the way music was taught).

This, I think, is the new frontier for classical educators. Yes, there is Saxon math, but it seems traditional (which is better than the contemporary), rather than classical, as such.

Prof. Veith ends with a call for ideas about how mathematics instruction would look like in a classical education setting. I left this comment:

I think a “classical” approach to teaching math would, going along with the spirit of the other classical education posts yesterday, teach the hypostatic union of content and process — the facts and the methods, yes (and without cutesy gimmicks), but also the processes of logical deduction, analytic problem-solving heuristics, and argumentation. Geometry is a very good place to start and an essential to include in any such approach. But I’d also throw in more esoteric topics as number theory and discrete math (counting and graph theory) — in whatever dosage and level is age-appropriate.

At the university level, and maybe at the high school level for kids with a good basic arithmetic background, I’d love to be able to use the book “Essential College Mathematics” by Zwier and Nyhoff as a standard one-year course in mathematics (and in place of the usual year of calculus most such students take). It’s out of print, but the chapters are on sets; cardinal numbers; the integers; logic; axiomatic systems and the mathematical method; groups; rational numbers, real numbers, and fields; analytic geometry of the line and plane; and finally functions, derivatives, and applications. You have to see how the text is written to see why it does a good job with both content and process.

(I took out the mini-rant against the gosh-awful Saxon method.)

Any thoughts from the audience here?

Gene Veith, one of my favorite religious writers and the proprietor of the terrific Cranach blog (and provost at Patrick Henry College), has three quick posts today on classical education. He touches briefly on teaching content rather than process, and how classical education teaches bothl; on critical thinking; and on learning styles and the teaching of “meaning”. Some clips: 

The key factor in learning is grasping meaning, a concept that evades any of these sensory approaches. (While cultivation of meaning is what classical education is all about.)

and:

More substantive scholars say that being able to think critically requires (again, see below) CONTENT. You have to think ABOUT SOMETHING. Whereas much of the critical thinking curriculum is all process, trying to provoke content-free thinking. (The classical solution: DIALECTIC, featuring questions AND answers, as in that great model of classical education, the catechism, which, properly used, helps the student answer the question, “what does this mean?”)

I am pretty sure that Prof. Veith has this overall definition of “classical education” in mind, but I am not sure exactly how he defines it. And I wonder if all of what he says still works if you replace “classical” with the more generic “liberal arts”.

Inside Higher Ed has this fascinating (and too brief) interview with Patrick Awuah, president of Ashesi University in Ghana. While Ghana has several large universities, Ashesi is the first (and only) liberal arts college in this African nation. Awuah was asked about the Ashesi’s liberal arts focus:

I think that the liberal arts focus is probably the most important thing that we’re doing at Ashesi and it’s driven in part by my experiences at Swarthmore, but also comparing that with the experiences of my colleagues who were educated in Ghana for college. In Ghana the educational system is very heavily dependent on rote learning, just memorizing facts and repeating them to faculty. It does not prepare people to be problem-solvers. So what we’re doing at Ashesi is trying to set this example that we hope others will follow, where the process of education should be about asking the right questions and looking at issues from multiple perspectives and thinking critically and thinking analytically, both qualitatively and quantitatively. [Emphases added]

I think that’s a worthy definition of the liberal arts in any setting. It would be nice if every liberal arts college in the United States — and the students, faculty, and administrators who inhabit them — had a similar approach and a similar sense of purpose. You can bet that the Ashesi students, intent on bettering themselves and their country, are probably more concerned about the process of education than they are about which sorority will give them a bid, who’s throwing a party this weekend, or who they’re playing in sports next week.