Ady, what is your opinion about the education system?
Ady: You caught me completely unprepared. But I’ll try to give you a short answer. It needs a serious reform. The problem is that while the amount of knowledge grows, the system is stuck in a very anachronistic structure. For example, in the Toronto area I guess there are thousands of math and computer science teachers, and about 200 math and computer science professors. In math and computer science, all the material up to high school fits in 10 books. The material for university undergraduates fits on a single shelf. The rest of the material fills libraries with thousands of books, not to mention online resources. While the elementary material stays about the same, editions like Springer publish more than a new book every day. So the number of people who are responsible for most of the knowledge is disproportionately small. One result of this is that undergraduate students study from professors whose daily research and expertise becomes more and more remote from the material of their courses.
When student move from undergrad to a graduate program, they often feel that the program "ended". Suddenly, it is not clear what is "the material", the books are incomplete and not up to date, there are not enough good short assignments, and courses are not sufficient to start research. It seems not economical to prepare comprehensive programs for small classes. Preparing a really good two-hour lecture in areas like computer vision, with up-to-date summaries, could take more than a week. Writing books on advanced material is much more complicated than elementary material, sells less, and will quickly become outdated.
Many people are not aware how much of the education system is shaped by the interests of the teachers. Let’s take an extreme example. Teacher A teaches 100% of the material, and the students grasp 90%. Teacher B teaches 200% of the material, and the students understand 50% of his lectures. Who is the better teacher? In today’s global world, teacher A failed his class without them knowing. There are millions of students that study exactly the same things, whereas teacher B gave his students some chance to get beyond other classes. But teacher B worked harder and will get hurt in course evaluations.
I once stumbled upon a book on grade inflation. The thesis of the book is that there is a new type of selfish lecturers in America. One technique is known as "pass the parcel". It means not checking if the students know the prerequisites (that’s the job of the previous lecturer), or making sure they know the prerequisites for the following course (that’s the problem of the next lecturer). These instructors give the student all the material on nice slides, high marks, and make everybody happy (they might give tough exams after evaluations have been filled). Old-school professors started to see their classes being deserted. In response, some of them went to test whether marks affect student evaluations. In experiments where marks of real students were manipulated, they found that students believe teaching was better when they got higher marks. My point here is that for the sake of standardized evaluations, both of students and teachers, there has been created a system that covers a tiny fraction of the existing knowledge.
The traditional format for bringing recent material is seminar courses, which I find obsolete. A seminar course with 3 papers a week covers about 40 papers in 4 months. Without the course, a student can easily read these papers in 3 weeks. By the time the seminar ends, there could be 40 new papers published in the area of the seminar (depending how broad the area is). So these seminars are covering a drop in a flooded sea. Moreover, skipping the historical development of a field creates holes. Years later students think they invented something, and years after they discover it was already done but nobody told them. In fact, there is a long list of people who became famous for ideas that in a way have been suggested before.
Here is an example. Many people know about the debate Galileo had with the church on the question whether the earth surrounds the sun. Many people also know that Galileo got the idea from Copernicus. Less people know that Philolaus described a system where the stars rotate around a central fire 2000 years before Copernicus. Moreover, Copernicus knew about Philolaus, but in editing his book he suppressed the citation.
There is a lot of stuff online today that fills the vacuum in the official education system. It is only a question how much people want to know. I personally heard about Philolaus while watching "Cosmos", which is definitely worth 15 hours of your time. It is not only about Carl Sagan, the music by Vangelis and the computer graphics of Jim Blinn. It is an historical document of how fast things change.
I once met a guy at a conference who graduated 10 years before that conference and didn’t follow closely developments in the field. He said he was amazed how things changed in 10 years, as half of the applications didn’t exist when he graduated. I was about to tell him that I can’t see many original works. But then I recalled that when I came to U of T after 6 years away from university, I noticed big changes. So apparently education is changing, whether it is in a formal way or mostly outside universities. But again, this is only a short answer. If you want a more thoughtful answer, maybe another time.
