Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner & Ted Dintersmith

Author:Tony Wagner & Ted Dintersmith [Wagner, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2015-08-17T22:00:00+00:00

There’s a Reason We Use the Phrase “It’s Academic”

Colleges view themselves first and foremost as repositories of research and knowledge, with a faculty dedicated to pushing “knowledge boundaries” forward.

It’s tempting to gloss over what a university views as “knowledge,” but that would be a mistake. Most of us view knowledge as information that is true, insightful, and useful. That’s not the way it works in most colleges, though. Academic research generally holds itself to high standards of being truthful and breaking new ground, but the concepts of “insightful” or “useful” don’t carry much weight in academia. This outsized emphasis on pushing forward the boundaries in esoteric research is a major factor in why college students learn so little.

An anonymous blog called “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School” has found a wide audience; it currently has over three million page views. In a post entitled “Virtually No One Reads What You Write,” the author points out that the only person you can assume will read your dissertation is your adviser. Not even others on your dissertation committee are likely to read it, let alone anyone else.

The blogger continues: “The same fate awaits the vast majority of published academic writing. Typically, it takes months of research, writing, and revision to produce a journal article that will be seen by fewer people in its author’s lifetime than will visit this blog in an hour. Academic presses print as few as 300 copies of the books that their authors have labored over for years. Most journal articles and academic monographs are written because academics need to be published to keep their jobs, not because there is a demand or need for their work.”27

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