A very short, but also a very painful post

Seth Godin wrote a post that was painful to read for me, and if you’ve been reading my posts recently you’ll know why. The title of the post was “What does it mean to do well in school?“:

Is it the same as “doing well on some tests”?
Because that’s what we report–that perhaps 240 times in a college career, you sat down for a test and did well on it.
That’s hardly the same as doing well in school.
Where do we look up insight on your resilience, enthusiasm, cooperation, curiosity, collaboration, honesty, generosity and leadership?
Because it seems like that’s far more important than whether or not you remembered something long enough to repeat it back on a test.

https://seths.blog/2021/02/what-does-it-mean-to-do-well-in-school/

Yes, so much yes. But of course, those of us involved in running academia excel at designing tests. The other things, not so much.

And then, to add injury to insult (not a typo), this Twitter thread:

Two major problem with colleges:

– they are not preparing students to be great at the jobs they’ll end up doing post college
– the ability of the student has little to do with placements / heavy reliance is on college’s ability to get companies for placements

— Gaurav Munjal (@gauravmunjal) February 16, 2021

Education as we know it is changing in front of our eyes, and for the better, but it is happening in spite of colleges, not because of them.

And nobody seems to care.