Supposedly, education and chronological maturation are not the same thing. We follow the practice of sending children to formal schooling at about age 4, 5 or 6. In the US, the common practice is to supply 12 years of schooling so a person with a high school diploma has "12 years of education." If you are 18 years old, it makes little sense to ask how we might have gotten you to that age in less than 18 years. We lack control of time and we can't compress it.
However, with better research and better teaching, we might be able to have a person attain a high school education in less than 12, a bachelor's degree in less than 4 years. The weird thing about a such-and-such education is that it is arbitrary, at least partially. In this country, we have more or less independent schools and no national curriculum. We can define education as we wish. It is weird that we talk about the high demand for education, the value to both the individual and the nation of education as though it is a natural thing, like a good diet or adequate drinking water.
Where I taught, many students are themselves interested in becoming teachers. There are many departments at all universities that love their subject area and know a great deal about it. They can see their subject's application to every branch of life. They would usually like to have more students specializing in their subject and they certainly work to require future teachers to know something about their special subject. So there are vigorous forces at work to require students to pass courses in every department that knows and loves its specialization. There is steady struggle to get all specializations included in the courses that are required, so much so, that there is a steady counter-struggle to keep the full list of required courses short enough to be accomplished in four years. This is true even though the counter-struggle is weak and few students complete their bachelor's degree in only four years.
The weird thing is that we know that education is important but we don't know what components of it are. Sit through any day at an elementary or high school, any college or university and it is easy to find students who already could pass a reasonable test on the material of the day, students for whom the day was repetitious and time-killing. We could compress our schooling and subtract out material that is not needed but we don't.
We have this precious good, knowledge, but we are not wise nor careful in dealing with it and its effects. Few workers are working backwards from maturity to try to verify what is needed and needs to be mastered and what we could jettison. This situation was noted in 1937 and we are worse off today.
I can teach basic statistical methods in ten clock hours but in nearly all cases, more like 45 hours are required. There is a movement afoot to get more specific about what a student needs to be able to DO (speak, explain, perform) for each degree. I did read the other day of a program that moves students to the high school degree and the first two years of college (associate degree) in less than the usual time.
The situation is as though we can create as much oil as we want but we don't. I hope we do better sometime.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
