March 18, 2011
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Educational Institutions
QuantumStorm put this up:
It’s a perfect example of how old, dead philosophies still have our society by the roots. In the Middle Ages, the philosophy of gardening was applied to students: it’s totally OK for a gardener to lose a rose, or even a dozen roses, in pursuit of one perfect, single rose. It was similarly considered ethical for a teacher to sacrifice a poor student, who “would never amount to anything anyway,” in a manner that gave object lessons to a first-rate student.
We don’t believe in that anymore – or we say we don’t – but many of our institutions persist from a time when that kind of thinking was the norm. Don’t graduate students and postdocs still follow the master-journeyman-apprentice model? An undergraduate working in a lab aspires to be an apprentice; a graduate student is a direct apprentice; a postdoctorate is a journeyman, traveling to a new setting to further her education and capable of initiating projects but still requiring the input of a master.
When are we going to throw out the old system? Beats me. After all, we still shake hands, and that’s a holdover from the Ancient Roman era (where it was done to check for knives up one’s sleeves.) We are basically hurrying to meet the future while dragging the corpse of the past with us.
