The bulk of the second half of All Space Considered was spent hearing from David Helfand, Chair of the Astronomy Department at Columbia University. He didn't talk much about Columbia University, instead focusing on his past seven years at Quest University in British Columbia, Canada. I'm not much for discussion on the process of education, but Dr Helfand made many very good points and shared how Quest University has attempted to address them.
His first critique of the modern University system is its adherence to traditional lecturing. In the age of the mobile Internet, the idea that some wizened elder can bestow knowledge upon a class of curious children in a way they couldn't obtain themselves is a bit archaic.
His second critique was the isolation of disciplines. It's rare for an economics professor to talk to a music professor and even rarer for either to talk to the physics departments (I guess physics is notoriously exclusive).
His third critique was that many of the skills required to succeed in the modern world are lacking. When employers are asked what they find problematic in their interviewees, it's never a lack of coding speed or inability to use a particular piece of software. What concerns them is someone's ability to communicate and ability to think about issues from many different perspectives.
To that end, Quest University has block scheduling, no departments and a very open-ended means of earning a degree. Block scheduling means that each student only has one class at any given time. That class lasts a month and they have no other educational obligations during that month. This completely eliminates scheduling conflicts and allows for studying topics in incredible depth. When the geology class goes to Hawaii to study a particular type of volcano (which is a typical sort of experience in Quest's classes), no one can say "Oh, but I have a test I need to study for."
Instead of departments, the faculty offices are all in one giant oval and are assigned by random lot. Not only does this get people thinking about creative and original collaborations, it really serves the open-ended degree mechanism well (which I'll get to next). Of course, any University could set up physical environments to encourage cross-disciplinary mixing (though most would balk at the very mention), the lack of the very concept of "department" sets all the instructors completely free. They don't have to adhere to some special set of rules for their own department that no one else even knows about.
The open-ended degree is the most interesting part to me. After the first year, students are asked to write a problem statement. They then spend the remainder of their time addressing the problem statement. That's it. Dr Helfand went into further details about the nuts and bolts of how that's done, but from a philosophical standpoint, the student chooses what to study and is simply guided by the faculty on how that might best be accomplished.
Honestly, the whole thing sounded a little too good to be true. But then again maybe that's just jealousy. I think I would definitely have enjoyed myself quite a bit in such an environment. Everyone around me seemed to think the same.
