A thought-provoking piece:
One highlight from the article –
“The traditional
higher-education system works great for lots of students. But it forces
countless others, like my nephews, to choose between two bad options: either
enter a four-year bachelor’s degree program for which they are not ready,
academically or emotionally; or pursue some kind of job-focused training
program that, while valuable, may effectively put a ceiling on their careers.”---
UPDATE
Reforming Math Education
Conrad Wolfram (of Mathematica) notes in his FT piece
“Most students
dislike maths, do not understand its connection to their later lives and do
badly at tests even as the questions grow easier. Universities and employers
complain that they cannot find people with the right skills. … At its core, maths
is a problem-solving process. You specify a real-world problem, develop an
abstract representation of it, calculate an answer for the abstraction and then
translate back into the real-world language you started with. Before computers,
almost all human energy was focused on the third stage: calculating. Now it is
usually focused on the other steps instead.”
Not surprisingly, Wolfram wants students to start mathematical
modeling (I am guessing with Mathematica) on computers as early as possible.
Given that many college students barely understand basic mathematical tools
such as logs, exponents and calculus, one wonders how any sort of useful abstract
modeling of real world processes can be taught even at the university level. Math
education reforms need to be implemented at the K-12 level. At the college
level, instructors need to shift away from emphasizing rote learning of quant
techniques based on endless sets of useless practice questions (which, often
with only slight modifications, are reposted as exam questions) that appears to
be the hallmark of higher education – especially in America.