Quote Originally Posted by BayonetBrant View Post
One of my MMC professors at South Carolina once said of "higher education" -
As an undergrad we tell you what to think
As a master's student we teach you how to think
It's not until the PhD level that was ask "so, what do you think?" *

* caveat: my experience with Ohio State these past 6 years has led me to believe that they are unable to get beyond step 2 in the process, and they reach that step only occasionally and almost always by accident.
Quote Originally Posted by Steve Blair View Post
And that to me is one of the lingering and most malign influences of the 1960s on higher education. And I have heard professors of that same mindset bemoaning the fact that their masters students can't write coherent papers or essays. They always got defensive when I pointed out that they had some of those same students as undergraduates and obviously failed to prepare them for the demands of a masters program.
What I find fascinating about BB's quote is that it is really a fairly recent introduction to the academy showing up (variably) in the 1950's-60's. It is tied into a couple of important social changes that happened post-WW II: increasing credentialization, loosening of overt class boundaries, etc.

Quote Originally Posted by Steve Blair View Post
Simply because the system currently functions that way doesn't mean that it's ideal or that it accurately reflects what education *should* be, both for the teacher and the student.
Yup. Of course, Steve, that "should" is predicated on an idealization of the pre-WW II (more likely WW I) values of "education" .

This "should" idea is worth expanding on significantly since it relates to a whole slew of issues. Let me first expand it by analogy: we talk a lot about "ends" and "means". What is the desired end state of an education / training course / program / career? All of the discussions around pedagogical tactics and strategies rely on implicit ends, including "shoulds", but what are they?

For one thing, the choices made will inevitably impact the class structure of the society in question. Go back to Dewey and the Industrial Age education system he was pushing, and you will see that it lays the formal basis for a society where class is based on a combination of economic status and social positioning based on educational credentials (the infamous socio-economic status). Implicit, and by the 1960's it was explicit, this system is predicated on some variant of the Fordist production system where wealth is generated through the transformation of raw materials into consumer products. Does that sound like the type of society we have today? If it does, not only do you fail SOC 101, I also have some great waterfront acreage in Florida for sale .

Okay, let's shift it to who we are fighting. Would you train people in Napoleonic tactics? Unless you're a Napoleonic recreationist, I would hope not . How about other Industrial Age tactical systems - what we (inappropriately) call "Conventional Warfare" (it's inappropriate because it is a recent convention stemming from the Netherlands at the end of the 16th century). Um, yeah simply because other groups still use it, just not the ones we are currently fighting. Of course, the people we are currently fighting don't use it; they are using a totally different conceptualization of warfare, so we have to educate (and train) for that as well.

So, if we take as an operating assumption that both training and education have to be focused on both "conventional" and "non-conventional" forms of conflict, one of the first things we should be doing is analyzing exactly where the overlaps and disjunctures are, i.e. mapping out the total area of knowledge. The ACC and ALDS did this to a very limited degree, at least at the broad (pseudo)concept level, with details promised "later".