What did the university bring?

Soon, thousands of college students will walk through a semester. Many of them and their families may have invested considerable time, effort and money (debt) for the past few months or years. Is it worth the effort?

Some evidence suggests that investing in the university is a matter of value. The Pew Research Center this year, a survey of the quality and satisfaction of higher education in the United States shows that 74% of graduates think their education is "quite useful for growth" and 69% say "education makes them more mature." , 55% said that "education is very helpful for future jobs". In addition, 86% of people think that "college is a good investment for them personally".

College education: Deviation from utilitarian perspective

Still, the sound of "failure" in higher education continues to flow. Most of them are related to unequal access to resources, such as high tuition fees, unfair admission policies, high drop-out rates, and so on. More disappointing than that, graduate and part-time faculty have been squeezed and flashy things have been sought after (see the level of professional college sports teams and ornate student dormitories and activity centres), and one after the other, the executive posts that are in the middle of nowhere and cost a lot.

The issues pointed to by these criticisms are important, but the optimism shown in the Pew survey is not contradictory-the core values students gain in education are still learning, learning, and preparing for a career path in the future.

However, these negative comments also make it clear to us that the quality of education in the present is indeed worrying. Most obviously, the current college curriculum allows students to break away from what they should be learning. In the view of today's college students, most of the courses are "boring", only in relation to employment, or teachers in a pleasing way of teaching (more fun, a little passion, "tide"), the classroom content is worth listening to.

As a result, students will be satisfied only if they get enough credit, and they are only willing to pay the time to learn. Professors do not expect students to be able to put in earnest, even if the work handed in at best is barely qualified, they tend to give a good score (B or higher).

The lack of academic passion is true even in institutions with excellent students and first-class teachers. As the overall quality of the school decreased, this phenomenon became more and more obvious. This stems from the misconception that students and teachers have about a fundamental problem:

What does college do?

The university: Constructing the Academic ecological circle

First, the university is not only the institution that teaches the student, this is an important function of it, but it is not the reason of its existence (note: The original language is French). The most fundamental function of university is to nurture an academic ecological circle, a fertile soil for academic thought, and here is a stirring of our understanding of science, of human experience, and of the expression of art.

Today, the academic circle is dominated by faculty and students from various faculties of the university: scientists, humanists, sociologists, and academics who delve into the Arts. There are also law, medicine and engineering, and the applied skills of these disciplines are deeply rooted in scientific theory and humanistic knowledge. If higher education is starting to focus on practice over theory as well as vocational education or skills training, then we are divorced from the core characteristics of higher education-academic culture.

Only when the academic culture is regarded as an essential part of our society, higher education is of great significance. Otherwise, we can--let's say--use a large comprehensive school that brings together vocational schools, technical colleges, college and various counseling and training functions to provide young people with vocational training at low cost and to teach them the basics of being a person. So we don't have to pay a great deal of money to feed the professors of experts such as physicists, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians. If we do not promote knowledge and respect the pursuit of all disciplines, then the university will lose its value.

Good teaching is not to make courses interesting, but to make them more interesting.

This has an important impact on how we view the status quo of college classrooms. Teachers should first position themselves as scholars, whose mission is to focus on poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology, etc., their own professional exploration and thinking. Teachers should also recognize that this focus stems not only from their individual interest in certain issues, but also from the belief that, even if the present practice is not visible, these issues are of universal significance to all mankind. Because of this, every discipline has both a student and a researcher: the public needs to know what the experts are working on, and the experts make sure that their research is always connected to the average person. The classroom is the key to maintaining this connection.

In turn, students should realize that college education is of vital importance to their knowledge growth and elevation. Teaching is not, as we often say, a means to make a dull subject interesting (poetry, physics, philosophy, etc.), but to let students see how interesting the subject itself is. It is more important for the students to keep up with their teachers than to adapt them to the students. Good teaching is not to make the course interesting, but to develop more interest for the students and make them more interesting.

As the saying goes, the most important study in college is outside the classroom--students are very much in favor of this statement. In view of their laboratories, libraries and research projects, many faculty members will agree. But the fact is, whether for students or teachers, the most critical learning happens in the classroom.