The School Revolution by Ron Paul

Author:Ron Paul [Paul, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781455577163
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

If what I say is true, then why does the student have to go off to college at all? Why does he have to go into a classroom environment? Why does he have to listen to lectures, especially lectures delivered to hundreds of students in a large lecture hall? Why is he subjected again to an inefficient system of education? The answer is simple: It is traditional. It goes back almost a thousand years, to the very first medieval universities. There were no books for most students at that time. The printed book did not appear in the West until the mid-1400s. So students had to write down the material. They listened to a lecture; they wrote very fast. This mode of education stretched back to priestly classrooms in ancient Egypt. This is how education was always conducted. But when movable type became used in the West to produce books, this ancient form of education became far less efficient when compared to the educational system based on the careful reading of printed books. The continuing justification for classroom teaching was that this enabled students to interact with one another and with the professor. In other words, it was some form of Socratic dialogue. It was not based on the lecture system.

The fact that university students today are expected to sit at a desk and write down notes from a live lecture is silly. It is a denial of the power of the printed page and the video lecture. In the twenty-first century, it is also a denial of the power of digital communications. Why in the world are students required to sit silently at their desks, frantically writing down what they hear in a lecture, always falling behind, because they cannot write as fast as the professor is lecturing? It is preposterous, and it is universal. Parents are asked to pay up to a quarter million dollars to send the student to a major private university whose teaching methods became obsolete sometime around 1450.

This is not an argument against a tutorial system. A small class of students who discuss the material they have read is a legitimate form of instruction. It is the old Socratic method. But it is extremely expensive, and it is suitable only for students of the very highest caliber. It is used with undergraduates mainly at Oxford and Cambridge, as it has been for about a thousand years, and in graduate seminars everywhere.

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