Robin does stuff

Our higher educational system is flawed in many ways. Two of these flaws particularly grab my attention. The first is that in a digital and constantly online world our universities still require their students to memorize facts that are just a Google-search away. The second is that, at least for the educational system in Europe, these universities produce people with a very restricted worldview, or more specifically: these institutions do not play a large enough role in countering this narrow-mindedness.

Iʼve been reading Jeff Jarvisʼ “What Would Google Do”, in which he looks at how various businesses and institutions can make their step into the “digital age”. One of the institutions he talks about is universities, a specific section of the book which he also put on his blog in February:

“Who needs a university when we have Google? All the world’s digital knowledge is available at a search. We can connect those who want to know with those who know. We can link students to the best teachers for them (who may be fellow students). We can find experts on any topic. Textbooks need no longer be petrified on pages but can link to information and discussion; they can be the products of collaboration, updated and corrected, answering questions and giving quizzes, even singing and dancing. There’s no reason my children should be limited to the courses at one school; even now, they can get coursework online from no less than MIT and Stanford. And there’s no reason that I, long out of college, shouldn’t take those courses, too.”

Although I might not agree with his notion that students could be able to take courses at different schools – it might be pessimist on my behalf or Utopian on his, I donʼt know – I do agree that our universities are too invested in the transfer of facts. Students in their first year of university have to stuff their heads with vast amounts of easily researchable factual knowledge in preparation for their exams: who the painter of a certain work of art was or the year in which a book was written. This might have been necessary in the 19th century, but why would we memorize these things in an age where all knowledge is – as they say – at our fingertips?

If universities would stop forcing us to memorize loads and loads of facts, the focus could shift to the way facts could be interpreted and by doing so broadening the spectrum of our knowledge.

It is the case in Belgium and other European countries that a student who chooses a certain academic field, he will never receive a course unrelated to that particular field of expertise. This produces engineers who arenʼt interested in culture whatsoever and have trouble communicating. This produces language or art history students who have never learned the first thing about science or the law. Why not give engineers one or two hours of literature or philosophy a week? Or give Art History students some biology?

One might argue that, since the information is freely and easily available, students can educate themselves. To them I say: Newsflash: They won’t, or at least most of them won’t. Most students and most people refuse to take a leap into the unknown, even though there might be things to learn, things that might arouse their interest. We (the students) should be forced to take that leap. Give us a course or lecture of one hour a week on something that is as far away as possible from our field of study, donʼt make it too hard (thereʼs a reason we do what we do), show us the benefits of what you are teaching us and we will become better, more versatile people.