Learning for learning’s sake
Posted by tiffany613 on February 25, 2007
This week’s blog is about the high education system, click here to read the artile: As Harvard Goes …
My point of view:
What is the essence of education? This seemingly simple question has concentrated the minds of academics for too long.
It is also the question that is currently agitating the minds of renowned academics at the Harvard University.
An article in last week’s Time magazine put the issue in perspective. The easiest way to start an academic brawl is to ask what an educated person should know. Harvard University authorities have not only asked this question, they have also proffered an answer by developing a new curriculum, which establishes eight primary subject areas that all students have to take.
Significantly, Harvard is not the only institution that is rethinking its curriculum. The article reveals that Yale, Rutgers and the universities of Pennsylvania and Texas have already made the necessary changes to their curriculum.
Some critics have accused the university of sacrificing scholarship on the alter of pragmatism. Such critics, mainly academic traditionalists seem to be arguing that the emphasis on knowledge application negates the idea of “learning for learning’s sake.”
Such criticism is misplaced because it has been proved that many students remember just an infinitesimal fraction of the content of a previous week’s lecture. But a hands-on approach to teaching and learning has proved more efficacious.
My experience at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies has proved that when students apply theoretical knowledge to real life situations in the process of learning, the tendency to forget is reduced drastically.
In a rapidly changing world that lays more emphasis on what people can do, rather than what they know theoretically, Harvard is definitely on the right academic track.
