look to the stars, for hope burns bright

hautepop:

“One company getting buzz is ConnectEDU, sometimes described as an eHarmony for college matchmaking. Its founder, Craig Powell, dreams that students won’t even have to apply to college “because an algorithm will have already told them and the schools where they would fit best,”

The algo dream: to replace human agency and choice.

We must start to ask, what is so bad about making a non-“optimised” decision? Do we not learn things - do we not sometimes learn more - from the things we do that don’t quite work?

This quotation is taken from an article, Colleges Mine Data to Tailor Students’ Experience, where “analytics” is posited as the saviour of everything from college choice, to course choice, to who you work with on a calculus problem.

I offer myself as a counter-example: applied to university to read Philosophy. Realised it didn’t interest me, applied for Social Anthropology and started a course at LSE. Realised I actually needed to find out what I should be doing with Mathematics: left, went to Bristol, started a maths degree. Realised my heart was in Anthro, returned to LSE, finished that degree.

Any salesman with an algorithm would think they could “optimise” that journey. But for me at least, the chance to make those choices on my own and get empirical experience of studying both subjects was essential to be at peace and commit to my final decision.

We regret the roads not travelled. Let’s be careful about letting the gospel of “efficiency” too near these choices: rational “optimisation” may potentially be distinctly sub-optimal for a sense of life satisfaction.

Agree with this entirely. While optimisation may be very important for decisions in business or resource allocation, it cannot allow for that which we struggle to quantify: life satisfaction. Education does not just convey information or skills, it also fills out our world view by exposing us to new ideas and other people who have different priorities. The astronomy course which I took in my undergraduate studies has been of zero practical use to me in my academic career, but has left me with a true sense of wonder at the possibilities of science.

In the past 10 years I’ve hoped from studying philosophy, to psychiatry, to neuroscience, to psychoanalysis and now to psychology, and I don’t regret any of these choices. This could be seen as inefficient in terms of material learned which was not essential to understand my current field of study. But it has provided an understanding of the much broader context in which my research is situated, and the ability to analyse and incorporate insights from other fields.

Creativity and original thinking requires a degree of flexibility and openness, and in my experience this is best encouraged by a broad and varied education, in which people are exposed to new ideas from different topics. My fear over the optimisation of education is that it encourages the opposite of this: that students focus purely on the subjects which align closely with each other and reinforce each others’ assumptions. Efficiency is just another word for stagnation.