Yup. Heard it before. The entire time I was at the University of Calgary I kept hearing about how important research was and based on how resources and rewards are handed out, how UN-important teaching was.
Lately, I keep reading these “If we’re not careful, we’re going to loose our greatness” kinds of articles. Living where I do (in the shadow the the no-longer-so-great US of A) I often hear this sort of bellyaching in two main contexts:
- The formal education system (including the academy and the school systems)
- All things American
My advice: Quit worrying about what might happen if you loose your superiority / greatness / magical powers / whatever. I think that ship has sailed.
Time to start the,”Now that we’ve screwed it up, how do we recover.” inquiries.
Newsflash:
- Formal Education is profoundly broken. We DON’T need to patch things or tweek stuff, or even try to get back to the good ol’ days when men were men and women and children knew their place. Formal education needs to be re-designed from the ground up. We are no longer in the industrial age folks.
- The rest of the world no longer looks to the US for any kind of leadership. Not in science, not in entertainment, not in how to be civilized, and not in how to manage freedom (cause you’re really not doing a good job of that one). You’ve lost that role guys.
Bah.
I heartily agree. The flaws are apparent. The question then becomes, how do we fix it?
What about doing more of what Animation Mentor is doing? They have an interesting Master – Apprentice model. I would be interested to see if there model can’t be expanded to cover more disciplines.