Essay 5

Essay 5: Why Hard Courses are Good For You

There is no shortage of people, these days, who are wringing their hands over the decline of the educational system. Some say that students are being indoctrinated rather than educated. Some say that students are allowed to slide through without actually rising to the intellectual challenges that will make them independent thinkers and good citizens.

The real problem is that we don’t know what we want from our educational system. For example, all education is indoctrination. So, the real question is what should we be indoctrinating them for? There are two dominant views on this. The older one of the two is that we should be indoctrinating students to become self-reliant citizens and independent thinkers.  Generally, I agree with this. But I could easily provide an argument for why it is a bad idea. The newer view suggests that students should be indoctrinated to redress evils of the past. Generally, I do not agree with this and if I had to come up with a list of legitimate goals for indoctrination, this would be close to the bottom. You might wonder what other possibilities there are for indoctrination, and I would offer two off the top of my head. First, students could be indoctrinated into seeing the value of their place in the social hierarchy. Rather than everybody fighting to move up, they could find dignity in serving their role to the best of their ability. Second, a class structure could be superimposed on the social hierarchy and students could be indoctrinated into the history, traditions, and values of their class. I am not necessarily advocating either of these positions. I am only providing examples to show that there are other ways to look at it.

On the second problem of easy classes, we don’t know what we want either. One of the roles of the educational system is to socialize students (indoctrination) and if that is primary then what they learn in classes becomes less important. Some people see public education as day care. And if that is the case, then you don’t really need to teach anything. Just keep the students busy so they don’t make any trouble. I see why people may hold this view, but I strongly disagree with it. This is because I think that an important role of public education is to strengthen students intellectually. So, I thought I would pick some classes that I felt provide significant intellectual betterment and briefly state for each what students get out of them.

Logic helps you understand arguments so that you can evaluate claims from a variety of sources. This helps you defend yourself against spurious political claims, misleading advertising and so on.

Statistics helps you understand likelihood. How likely is it for an event to occur, or if an event occurs, how likely is it that it was caused by another event?

Calculus helps you understand rate of change so that if you leave a window open on a cold day when the heat is running, you can understand why your heating bill goes up.

Programming helps you to understand efficient ways to achieve a task. For example, if you have several errands to run on a given day, what is the best order in which to perform them given time, gas, and individual constraints.

History helps you to understand how we got here and where we might be going in the future given specific decisions.

I apologize if I left out your favorite subject. I just wanted to make a point and did not want to get tedious about it.

Students often grumble, “I’ll never use calculus or statistics in any work I do. History is just a bunch of boring facts. Logic teaches you to mislead people. And I am a people person, so programming a cold-hearted computer holds no interest for me at all!” But this misses the point entirely. It is like going to the gym and not using any of the equipment on the basis that the treadmills simply doesn’t go anywhere, and nobody is going to pay you to lift weights. You go to the gym to be physically fit so that you can handle other challenges in life better. And the so-called difficult courses make you intellectually fit to handle challenges in life that do not appear to have anything to do with these classes when they actually do.

I am assuming here that the purpose of education is the intellectual betterment of students. I realize that there are other purposes as well.

This essay is about 800 words. And the recording is about 6 minutes long.

Send an email to me at drjohnartz@gmail.com if you have a comment on any of my essays. And please check out my website at DrJohnArtz.com to see other things I have written.