My personal experience confirms that the famous or “highly reputable” schools are, to an extent, a scam. I ended up a PhD student and TA at one of the famous schools while also being an adjunct at a no name liberal arts school with a low student-teacher ratio and high emphasis on rigour. I have been significantly more impressed by the students at the no name school than at the well known school. Name brand means nothing without good pedagogy.

Like I said knowing is NOT an obsolete idea!

Knowledge is required for UNDERSTANDING.

The trouble is we have lots of people who have memorized stuff and BELIEVE they UNDERSTAND.

Except that all the guys in this video fall into the .005 Percent of the human population that are not totally stupid. What are the rest of those morons uploading and representing as facts? If I don’t need to know how to tell fact from fantasy until I need to know, how am I going to look that up in a virtual world filled with crap and have any idea what is what. Oh…wait…I don’t need to know.

Hell…I posted this and nobody cleared me for internet posting. I just have a Yahoo Account.

This is more liberal crap that will further ruin our children. We need to teach our children that self worth is based on achievement and continuing to try, even when we fail.

Those who give up will fail.
Those who know nothing won’t even know how to start anything.

When I need to know how to think critically, I’ll just look that up on the internet, as I’m certain that I can learn that in a few minutes. Too bad all those nuns wasted all that time teaching me critical thinking when I was a child.

In fact, I would take as evidence of well developed critical thinking capacities the ability to see through all this empty rhetoric.

I mean, look at the examples of Knewton, they are all true/false, multiple choice type questions and math problems – which is great if you want to convert learning models to an algorithm, but how do you quantify critical thinking? How do you evaluate the quality of research, argumentation, or writing? It’s presented as such a complex and nuanced approach to education, but underpinning it are the most simplistic and arguably even pedagogically outdated models for evaluating learning outcomes.

And then there are all the vacuous sound bites and historically false claims about how education changes from “pre-printing press” to “post-printing press” and about “how technological revolutions work”.

There is even the troublesome fact that Ericsson is effectively territorializing the whole concept of the “networked society” without even a nod to the vast literature and research on the very concept that predates this documentary and marketing campaign (not a single citation on their blog). I mean, my goodness, surely someone involved in this Ericsson campaign can do what the “digital natives” idealized in this film supposedly do with their boundless “access to information”, and just Google the term or type it into wikipedia!