David Brooks on the Purpose of Universities

In this New York Times column, David Brooks says the best thing about the rise of online education is that it challenges universities to justify themselves. Are they “mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high-school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them?” he asks. “Are  universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully, and hand things in on time?”

Turning serious, Brooks says universities help students acquire two types of knowledge:

• Technical knowledge – This is what you need to undertake a task – for example, the statistics to understand market research or the biology to understand what nurses do. “Technical knowledge is like the recipes in a cookbook,” says Brooks. “It is reducible to rules and directions. It’s the sort of knowledge that can be captured in lectures and bullet points and memorized by rote.” Online and hybrid courses can do as well as in-person professors at conveying this kind of knowledge, he says, and in the future, online offerings will surpass humans – “more imaginatively curated, more interactive, and with better assessments.” The growing availability of online courses means that in the near future, students won’t pay tuition for courses that convey mere technical knowledge. “That business model simply does not work,” says Brooks.

• Practical knowledge – This is “the wisdom a great chef possesses that cannot be found in recipe books,” he argues. “Practical knowledge is not the sort of knowledge that can be taught or memorized; it can only be imparted and absorbed. It is not reducible to rules; it only exists in practice.” Brooks draws examples from Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In: “the ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t.”

These skills are surprisingly rare among adults, he says. They can, in fact, be learned from a university’s professors, seminars, and activities. And perhaps technology can enhance these low-tech formats, using videos and data analysis to take them to an even higher level.

“The Practical University” by David Brooks in The New York Times, Apr. 5, 2013 (p. A23),

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/opinion/Brooks-The-Practical-Univ...

From the Marshall Memo #480