Spherical Knowledge

My son Matt, back home for winter break, is a junior at Washington University studying electrical engineering. For the first time, I heard from him a seed of discontent. Why? The school, he feels, is not preparing him for a job when he graduates.

The coursework is so theoretical that is seems to be missing an essential link, between the practical and the theoretical. How to apply this knowledge? It doesn't seem within the curriculum.

This got me thinking about my graduate school days at the Jane Addams Graduate School of Social Work, at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. I too, was disgruntled.

I remember complaining bitterly to a professor who had become a friend, that there seemed to be precious little actual practice in the art of working with people in therapeutic and service-delivering situations. I was intensely interested in "group work" the discipline of creating forward movement in groups of people, whether in a work, therapy or self-help environment. The only way to gain skills in this field is to actually do it.

My professor's answer, "This isn't a trade school. This is academia."

I guess, in the minds of those who design "higher learning," the institution provides a theoretical framework, and the work place provides the practice. If this is more universally true, I can imagine scores of disappointed college students, who dream of being prepared for and capable of performing well in their first big job, yet feel the embarrassment of unpreparedness when the big day comes.

My comment to Matt: Maybe, in a way, you are being prepared for the real world. If you feel that you need something to round out your education, you need to expend real effort and pursue it. The outside world does not cater to your every need, why should the university? If you want something, go out and get it.

I was happy to hear that he was able to structure his next semester by getting more involved in hands-on experiences, just the way I also learned to cope in social work school so many years ago. I managed to find real-life practical experiences within the academic environment, and now so was Matt.

This started me on my next academic sore spot. I remember numerous times in school where the teacher seemed to jump to point #2 without even acknowledging that a predecessor point #1 existed. I remembering this occurring to me in biology, Latin, calculus, algebra 2, and computer science. These are the ones I remember. I am sure there were more.

When I shared this feeling with Matt, he said he shared some of the same experiences. At school, theories of electrical signal propagation were cast out without a foundation or unifying principals. Ok, I get the formula, he said, but how does it all fit together?

I expressed my wish that "first things should be taught first". Whoever writes these curricula, I said, should always remember to teach the foundation first then build upon that foundation.

Matt agreed, but then took it farther, into a realm I love known as Matt's brain, where recursion and inversion are folded and unfolded playfully like an origami flower.

He said, "The subject is a set of variations on the same formula. Sometimes energy is the variable. Sometimes time is the variable. There is no start. There is no end. It is like a sphere."

"Maybe the best way to learn is to first fly around the sphere and see the big picture, then dive inside the sphere and look out from within." He cast that pearl out while casually munching on a piece of chili omelet.

After pondering that one, also chewing on an identical chili omelet, I said the only thing which seemed appropriate, given the circumstances. "Arf", I said.

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