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From: murphyn@cell.mot.COM (Neal P. Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: CS education
Message-ID: <489@cherry5.UUCP>
Date: 5 Dec 89 15:36:09 GMT
References: <16315@duke.cs.duke.edu> <7296@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Organization: Motorola Inc. - Cellular Infrastructure Div., Arlington Heights, IL 60004
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billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 ) writes:

>From crm@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Charlie Martin):
>...
>> university should "educate" or "train", which is buzzwordery for "Should
>> a university equip people to reason, understand, and learn new things,
>> or should a university teach people to become useful code jocks
>> instantly on exiting school?"

>   Both; the former can be done within the context of the latter.
>...

Wrong! Either Mr. Wolfe is an extremely arrogant and argumentive SOB, or
he has absolutely no idea of what education is. There is an exceptionally
vast difference between `training' and `education'. Animals can be trained
to perform specific tasks. Of course, humans can be trained to perform
specific tasks. That is training. Education involves training. It also
involves much, much more. It involves learning history - what events have
lead us to where we are today; it involves learning the geography of our
planet - where those events took place; it involves learning political and
social science - why we have society and government, and how they evolved;
education involves learning literature - how the art of communication has
developed from primitive grunts and tones and diagrams to today's
verbal, musical and pictorial media; education involves the study of
philosophy - why we are here, if, in fact, we are anywhere at all, or even
if there is anywhere to be in the first place!

Education involves much more than training. The purpose of college or
university is not to train students to perform a specific task. Its
purpose is to enable students to learn as much as they can about as many
different topics as they can, so that by the time they graduate and enter
the industrial/business world, they will know how *and* where to find
answers to questions, solutions to problems, without having to pass the
problem on to someone else. A technician, who has been trained, passes an
unknown problem to an appropriate engineer, who has been educated, who
solves it and instructs the technician how to fix it.

A college/university education enables one to communicate effectively with
anyone:  co-workers, management, fellow countrymen, foreigners in his land,
or natives in their own land. An education teaches him that the needs of
other people aren't necessarily the same as his needs, that these
differences are part of what make up the dynamics of this planet. An
education enables one to realize that people like Mr. Wolfe do come along,
people who are incapable of learning anything new because they already know
everything, that their way is the one true way. How many times have we
heard *that* in the past? Mr. Wolfe, why did you bother going to college
and wasting all that money, when you were born omniscient? You obviously
didn't get anything out of your time there, at least nothing you couldn't
have learned by reading a couple books. The purpose of college is to give
the student as broad a background as possible, so that that student will be
able to lead as productive, good and independent a life as possible.

A college/university has only four years to perform its task, so there are
compromises. And, since nothing is perfect, there will be those who slip
through with a narrow base, or little to no base at all. And yes, in
addition to the standard classical education, a college/university trains
its engineering students to be wizards who can mix potions, mix signals,
mix dirt, or mix bits and create new and wonderful things from these
mixtures.

NPN
uunet!motcid!murphyn