“How many calculus professors do we need in the world?” he asked. “Maybe it’s nine. My colleague says it’s four. One to teach in English, one in French, one in Chinese, and one in the farm system in case one dies.”
What is to stop a Coursera from poaching Harvard Business School faculty members directly? “Nothing,” Mr. Nohria said. “The decision people will have to make is whether being on the platform of Harvard Business School, or any great university, is more important than the opportunity to build a brand elsewhere.
Science and Math Don’t Have to Be Practical to Be Worthwhile
For instance, Green said, for many years, there was little funding available for research on “biofilms,” which is basically bacterial slime. (“It’s the plaque on your teeth, the gunk in a pipe, the rind on your cheese,” she explained.) “There was no apparent translational application, so it went underfunded and understudied for years,” Green said. It turned out, however, that understanding the development of biofilms was enormously important in understanding the microbial roots of infectious disease. “We’re now playing catch-up,” Green said. “There are certain basic aspects of biology that you have to understand in order to treat infections.”
The lesson seems pretty clear: If you guide the flow of money based on current needs, you’ll miss deeper truths that you’ll later find yourself wishing you had understood.
Young Minds in Critical Condition
Instead of trying to find mistakes in the texts, I suggest we take the point of view that our authors created these apparent “contradictions” in order to get readers like us to ponder more interesting questions. How do we think about inequality and learning, for example, or how can we stand on our own feet while being open to inspiration from the world around us? Yes, there’s a certain satisfaction in being critical of our authors, but isn’t it more interesting to put ourselves in a frame of mind to find inspiration in them?
.. The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not totally without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers — or, to use a currently fashionable word on campus, people who like to “trouble” ideas. In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the chance to learn as much as possible from what they study.
.. When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are, at least temporarily, overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand an experience from another’s point of view.
A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute
The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.