LifeItself

This blog follows two closely related posts that are 15 months old: Why Good Engineering Education and Research Are Inseparable? Part I - Teaching    Why Good Engineering Education and Research Are Inseparable? Part II - Research and Technology   Now that I am a little more knowledgeable on the subject of secondary and higher education, a few more remarks are in order. First, Church and Academia (read Universities) are the only two institutions that span over 2000 years of history of our Roman and Catholic civilization.  As I focus on education, I will leave Church alone.  I will also omit the epochal contributions of the early Arab Caliphate universities and Indian schools.  Both contributed invaluably to the rise of Academia in Europe. In particular, Arab schools preserved most of what we know today about ancient Greek philosophy, mathematics and medicine, and greatly added to this knowledge. Empires, states, emperors, kings, princes, presidents,...

On May 14, 2011, Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published an unsettling Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, entitled " Your So-Called Education ."  In it they show that roughly 1/2 of all undergraduates learns little or nothing in college, regardless of tuition costs. Never mind, much of the tuition goes to nicer dorms, bigger gyms and other amenities, while education is left behind . Apparently, education is not on top of priorities of the young undergraduate "customers" and their overly protective parents. I presume that the authors refer mostly to the non-science and non-engineering students, because no engineering student would ever survive learning for just 11-13 hours per week.  This is why practicing engineers make only o ne-half of one percent of the population in the U.S.  It gets really lonely out there when we talk about rigors of engineering education, while other people stare at us in silence, their eyes saying: " You guys think too muc...