Survey Finds 40% Of Colleges Have ZERO GOP Professors

[Dill]

(05-08-2018, 03:11 PM)masterpanthera_t Wrote: Teaching high school students is obviously different than teaching early college students and even more different than teaching advanced college students. Even though we call them all "teachers" the roles become different as the level of subject expertise changes and the knowledge of the student changes. In high school, students are being exposed to subjects that they many not be familiar with and/or possess a cursory understanding only. Part of the goal there is to inspire and show them the potential for those disciplines in the real world and also to provide them a chance to learn how to think (at the early stages of this type of thinking). As you get into college, the professor's goal is to teach some specific skills that show how the discipline is applied in the real world (to work more on intermediate stages of learning how to think) and teach some specific stuff. I'm basing this on STEM classes in College. It might be slightly different in other "liberal arts" courses, but overall I think the concept of refining how students learn to think still applies here. As you get further along (say third year or later in College), the courses build on specializing in different aspects of the discipline (again, in my experience in a STEM field), and to build on initial level knowledge about the applications of your discipline.

Just a quick note here--there are some skills students need to learn at the HS level to get on in college. E.g., how to write, a rudimentary knowledge of how to construct research papers.

In Liberal Arts and social science fields, it seems to me that the first two years lay a basis for later work in that one cannot do "depth" without sufficient breadth.  The relation between Masters and PhD work is also like that in some fields, with the Masters aimed at breadth and the PhD a specialization--though that specialization presumes breadth.

Also, liberal arts education isn't all about getting jobs. It is--or should be--about producing a more general understanding of the world and one's place in it.  Thus people learn all kinds of things that will never be job-knowledge--like where Afghanistan is on the map and why there are Catholics and Protestants.