Subject: Re: micro-rant [Was: job opportunity ]
Wed Nov 11 15:15:07 1998



>> my grouch is that the person who can make a contemporary college education
>> meaningful is very nearly self-taught.   that kind of person could receive
>> nearly as much benefit from reading a couple dozen books on the subject at
>> hand.
>
>     Why not turn that knowledge into a degree in a non-traditional 
>school?


actually, i'm planning to do just that, as soon as i can pull together
the capital and clear up my schedule.   it's going to be a *very*
non-trad school, tho'..

what i want to do is hire a couple of grad students from the local math
department as tutors, at $10/hr for 120 hours each semester, and have
them help me work my way through the standard curriculum of a math
degree.   the cost will be about $5K per year for a 2:1 teacher/student
ratio, with high feedback, and running at my own pace.   once i'm
familiar with the major disciplinces, history, and literature, i'll
choose a topic and start researching a thesis.   once that work is done,
i'll distribute my conclusions for discussion and challenge, according
to the practices of the original (medieval) colleges.

the place where all this will happen will be my favorite bar, so once
i've gotten general approval on my thesis, and demonstrated that i can
pass all the standardized tests, i plan to award myself a master's
degree in theoretical mathematics from the Dublin Underground.  ;-)




>I'm also now a strong believer in the principle that
>whatever you want to learn about, don't study it  :)  'Study' the larger
>subjects that guide the field, and 'memorize' the skills . . .

a mindset which works for me, (and which i've stolen, BTW.. i don't
begin to claim it as original to me), is:  "everything is history".

whatever you want to learn, start by learning where it came from.  
learn the context for each decision which was made along the path of its
development.   the collective understanding of an issue over a couple
centuries tends to be much like the individual understanding of that
same issue as they become more familiar with the subject.   

if you start off trying to understand object-oriented programming from
ground zero, it will seem that you're having to memorize a huge batch of
arbitrary practices and assumptions.   if you study the history of
software scaling, structured programming, multi-developer programming,
and the ways compilers translate language structures into machine
instructions, all that apparently arbitrary stuff begins to make sense.  
you can see what alternatives were explored, and how they took people to
a point where they needed more powerful mental tools.

the same is true of any other discipline.