Ashley Ambirge of The Middle Finger Project recently wrote a post painting the educational system in the US as a factory dedicated to turning out slaves of the capitalist system: unthinking, unquestioning cogs.  I agree that the system is in desperate need of improvement.  We bemoan the teaching to the standardized test, we proclaim that there’s no “one-size-fits-all approach,” but then we obsess about tracking hard metrics to see if we’re really “closing the achievement gap.”  It’s a mess.

Enough about the system. It’s more clear to me than ever that any change in the educational system needs to come from the bottom up, and it needs to start long before we enter the ivory towers of the university system or jostle our way through the crowded halls of high school.  It needs to start before our first day of kindergarten.

The real problem with public education stems from a lack of personal responsibility, and it begins with parents.

I loathe Baby Einstein videos and Leap Frog learning machines.  They’ve spawned an industry worth over $1 billion a year that simply serves to assure people that their babies will grow up to be brainiacs regardless of their involvement.

Our society is producing a nation of media-inundated zombies that lack the ability and initiative to draw conclusions for themselves and engage in critical thinking, and the process starts the moment parents plop their little pumpkins in front of the plasma screen and pop in Baby Einstein at the Farm.  From the time they’re old enough to sit up on their own, we expose our children to a litany of pre-formulated questions and answers that rarely encourage them to think for themselves.  When you put an electronic wand in your kid’s hand and send him off to learn how to read, who’s going to be there to ask him questions about the story (or answer any he might have)?

We continue to find ways to remove the element of human interaction from the teaching and learning process.

In a meeting I was in on Monday, a man was discussing the process of getting his kids to school every morning.  He mentioned that he was glad to be out of car pool duty because “the kids wouldn’t always agree on what DVD to watch.”

Headphones on, juice box in one hand, Nintendo DS in the other and Sponge Bob in the DVD player: when did we become so reliant on hitting play and hoping the kids would just shut up?  Instead of letting the kids entertain themselves (fostering creativity, make-believe, and a litany of questions that makes you want to pull your hair out), we outdo ourselves to find mindless ways to keep them occupied.

Growing up, my mom read to me nearly every night until I was 12 (and she worked full-time).  If we were traveling in the car, we listened to books on tape, or played “I Spy.”  We sang along to Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and I knew every word to Les Miserables by third grade.  I also grew up in a city with three stoplights.  She took it upon herself to begin fostering my life-long love of learning, music, culture and creativity because she cared about my future.  How can we expect the system to change when so many parents view education as stopping when the 3:00 bell rings?

The US Department of Education found that on average, mothers spend less than 30 minutes a day (and fathers spend less than 15) talking to their children.  And though study after study has shown that children who are read to regularly “experience boosts in literacy development and socio-emotional gains,” only 55% of parents read to their children every day.  Science Daily reports that “describing pictures in the book, explaining the meaning of the story, and encouraging the child to talk about what has been read to them and to ask questions can improve their understanding of the world and their social skills.”  A recent study in the UK found that children ages 4-9 spend 7 hours and 46 minutes per week (or 16 days 19 hours and 49 minutes per year) in front of the television.  In comparison, they spend 7 days, 9 hours and 40 minutes reading with an adult.

We can overhaul the system – but what good will it do if from the get-go, we come to school unprepared to actively learn?  To ask questions?  To read and discover on our own accord?

I’m always reading and discovering new information online, but I still miss having the structure and guided approach to new subject matter that a traditional college course provides.  I thought about taking a few courses at MATC or through the programs at the UW, but they’re not cheap, and I don’t necessarily want to commit 3 hours a night twice a week to something I’m just “doing for fun.”

Luckily for you and me, there’s a better (and cheaper) alternative.  You can learn from some of the nation’s best and brightest professors (for free!) from the comfort of your living room couch, thanks to the adoption of “Open Source” education at some of the most prominent universities in the U.S.

I’ve selected a handful (ok, it’s a pretty meaty handful, but there are so many interesting courses I couldn’t limit myself to just 5 or 10) for you to peruse and see if any strike your fancy.  You can find another nice listing of interesting courses here via OpenCulture.com.

Stanford makes a nice array of their courses available for free download on iTunes – often including video lectures and lecture notes.

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders

The Future of the Internet

iPhone Application Development

MIT offers more than 1900 courses through their Open CourseWare initiative.

Bestsellers: Detective Fiction

Introduction to C++

Designing and Leading the Entrepreneurial Organization

Japan in the Age of Samurai – History and Film

Marketing Strategy

How to Stage a Revolution

Competitive Decision-Making and Negotiation

Entrepreneurial Marketing

Dynamic Leadership: Using Improvisation in Business

Writing and Experience: Exploring Self in Society

Writing on Contemporary Issues: Imagining the Future

A smattering of courses from Yale:

The American Novel since 1945

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era

The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food

University of California – Berkeley (most of these courses are audio-only)

Contemporary Japanese Literature

Introduction to Modern Japanese Literature and Culture

Psychology of Human Happiness

Foundations of American Cyberculture

Buddhist Psychology

Shakespeare

Have you downloaded/used any open source course materials before?  Is it something you could see yourself doing?

Last night, @CarleeMallard threw an interesting idea out into the Twitter-verse: “I think we were all more interesting people in college.  Why is that?”

I was taken aback at first – I cringe to think that freshman Ellen with a penchant for power hours was more interesting than the slightly more mature, slightly less naive Ellen of present.  But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Carlee might be right.

In college we’re immersed in 4-6 completely new learning environments every September and January. Those eight semesters (or ten if you’re like me) can be entirely fresh starts – new classmates, new professors, new subject matter.  Rarely do we encounter a similar situation in the working world.

While many of us continue to seek out educational opportunities after graduation, the scope of our new learning tends be limited to those subjects in which we already have an interest.   In college, we’re often forced to explore topics that we’d never consider on our own simply for the sake of fulfilling some obscure “Communications B” requirement.

Case in point: during my sophomore year, I went out on a limb and took Genres of Asian Religious Writings (to fulfill that very requirement).  Growing up in a Catholic household in a town of less than 4,000, my knowledge of (and initial interest in) Asian religions was roughly zero.  The one thing I thought I knew about Buddhism was promptly proved incorrect during our first lecture (The Buddha is NOT a fat Chinese gentleman).  Three months later, I was enamored with Buddhism, knew a thing or two about Confucianism, and had read an abridged version of a Hindu epic.  I loved it.

Three years, I graduated with a Certificate in Religious Studies.  I took an entire class on Dante’s Divine Comedy.  When else in our lives do we have the opportunity (or the time) to do something so…obscure?

In general, I think we’re much more focused on possibilities than on actualities during our college years.  Our lives seem more…unscripted.  If we stay up until 4 in the morning discussing our life story with our new best friend, we can still roll out of bed 10 minutes before class and get where we need to be.  While we might not retain much, it’s not as though we have to worry about the professor doling out a poor performance evaluation because we’re dozing off during a meeting.

I wouldn’t completely agree that our “apex of interesting” occurs in college, but I think outside of the university, it’s easy to fall into routines and habits that limit our exposure to the new and unexpected.

Were there any classes you took in college that led to more than you’d ever expected? If you’ve already graduated, how have you continued to expose yourself to new/previously unexplored interests?

After the responses generated by Unengaged, I started thinking about additional resources that could have left me better equipped to begin life after college.  We can bemoan apathetic students and the shortcomings of the university system all we want, but that energy would be better spent on developing and implementing a few simple ideas that would benefit both parties.

1. Career planning should start at college orientation.

Universities seem to assume that students attended a high school in which they were exposed to a wide range of career possibilities.  In my high school, the “business” courses consisted of Keyboarding and Accounting (we did, however, have Small AND Large Animal Science).  I’d never [knowingly] met anyone who worked in marketing in my life.

When I attended my orientation at UW-Madison, it seemed as though fully half of the students I met declared they were “pre-med” or “pre-law.”  At the time, I felt I was bound for a career as an OB/GYN.  I bumbled through my freshman year, still confident that I wanted to be in healthcare…until I encountered Organic Chemistry.  It was a wake-up call, to put it mildly.  I hated chemistry.  And physics.  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a career in healthcare really didn’t capitalize on any of my personal strengths, nor did it hold much appeal to me outside of a lucrative salary.

By commencing career planning before students begin their first day of class, universities would immediately reinforce the idea that college is a period of preparation for what’s next, not four years of papers, projects, and all-nighters.  Students should complete a simple online personality test at orientation, like the MBTI. It’s short, painless, and the results could be shared with both students and their career office.  Advisers would follow-up during the student’s first semester.  Not only would this provide some concrete information to guide the adviser’s recommendations, it would get students thinking about how their personal strengths relate to their intended major…well before they’re in the last semester of their senior year and realize they have no idea what they’re going to do with a double major in Religious Studies and Global Cultures.  I’m not advocating that students should immediately decide on a career path, but having a better sense of their unique abilities could encourage them to explore options they’d never considered.  Compared to what I now know about myself, at 18 I had the self-awareness of a sea urchin, and could have used some direction.

2. Offer a general course in personal financial management.

Given that two-thirds of undergrads leave college with student loan debt (the average of which is $23,000) and have a median credit card debt of over $1,600, it goes without saying that we need to take control of our personal finances.  We know this, and we’d like some guidance: 84% of undergraduates want more education regarding financial management

“Over half of 20-somethings don’t contribute to retirement accounts. Forty percent don’t even deposit money regularly in a savings account,” says Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You To be Rich.

While we’re not alone in our lackadaisical saving habits (roughly half of all Baby Boomer households have little or no retirement savings), we’re set up to draw the short straw.  Kimberly Palmer points out that Generation Y seems “…likely to pay higher taxes and perhaps receive lower benefits from these entitlement programs [Social Security and Medicare]. The Social Security trust fund, for example, is scheduled to run out in 2037. After that point, if no changes are made, there will only be enough money from tax revenue to pay about 75 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits.”

When you’re confronted with a barrage of fund options for your 401(k), advice about Roth IRAs and factor in student loan payments, insurance co-pays and a milieu of other new financial responsibilities, it’s easy to go into system overload and put off financial planning.  Our first real exposure to these instruments and other financial management tools shouldn’t come in the midst of a major transition.

3. Foster stronger relationships with recent alumni and emerging businesses.

Don’t sever ties with recent alumni and look to rekindle them 10 years down the road when nostalgia has kicked in and the paychecks are meatier.  Recent grads have more to offer current students than can be accounted for by a financial contribution from an entry-level salary.  We know what the job market is like.  We sympathize.  And we’re doing something about it – many of us are going out into the world and starting businesses on our own.

While many schools seem content to relegate their alumni to a directory containing minimal (and often outdated) information, the online career center of Williams College puts their alumni in the limelight.  The center features a wide array of alumni profiles, encouraging students to establish contact with and seek guidance from those who have gone before them.  Not only does it make the prospect of reaching out to a complete stranger less daunting, it illustrates that many graduates end up in a career entirely unrelated to their major, and shows how individuals have leveraged the skills (and not necessarily the specific knowledge) they acquired in college to establish a successful career.

It’s our responsibility to provide constructive feedback about the challenges of the college-to-career transition to our educational institutions, and to make the most of what they currently have in place.  We can’t expect them to make significant investments in creating more programs if what is currently available is largely ignored.  And, if we get what we ask for, we need to show up.

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What are your suggestions for improving the transition?  Is there something that your university does particularly well that others could learn from?

Modite’s Rebecca Thorman raised some excellent points in her recent posts on Gen Y and the university system.  While there’s no doubt in my mind that system has room for improvement, the responsibility for many of these so-called failings lies with students themselves.  During my time at UW-Madison, and particularly during my courses in the business school, I felt both embarrassed and frustrated by my peers’ utter lack of engagement, unrealistic expectations and muddled priorities.

1. College is not a four-year period to “delay adulthood.”

When my marketing research professor posed a question to the class, he was more often than not greeted with complete silence, interrupted only by the sounds of rustling newspapers and students typing away on their laptops.  This scene was repeated time and time again in nearly every course I took, regardless of subject or size.  How would this bode in the “real world?”

If your manager posed a question during a meeting, would you stare blankly at him for 30 seconds and then resume not-so-discreetly checking Texts from Last Night on your iPhone? Would you break out the daily Sudoku during a particularly boring conference?

Perhaps this is why the transition from college to the “real world” can be so tumultuous – college students act as though they answer to no one.   This is true, to an extent: college brings with it the challenge of being accountable to yourself. It can be a time best remembered for drunken shenanigans and last minute cramming, or as an opportunity to develop the skills, work ethic and sense of professionalism that will someday be an expectation, not an option.

Treat college like it’s a job.  Be engaged, show up on time, and quit Facebook stalking during lecture.

2. “Ease” is not the most important criterion in course selection.

With the advent of websites like RateMyProfessors.com, it’s easier than ever for students to cherry-pick classes and instructors not based on their merits, but on ease.  I can say without hesitation that the most difficult and demanding courses I took were ultimately the most rewarding.  Several professors I found to be incredibly thought-provoking, dedicated and insightful received negative reviews because their course was “too demanding and required too much work outside of class”…“they didn’t follow the book”…or “they treated questions as dumb and insignificant.”

College is demanding; how you balance those demands with other relationships and responsibilities is not an instructor’s concern.  Designing courses that pander to the social agendas of college students would be akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.  Students shouldn’t shy away from taking a course because of online reviews.  Find out for yourself if the reviewer was “in the dark” because they failed to adequately prepare for class, or because the instructor really does do a poor job.  If the latter is true, drop the class.

It is true that the responsibility for much of the “teaching” falls on students themselves; college professors are expert guides.  The best teach students how to approach problems from new angles and push them to think for themselves. RateYourStudents.com provides an interesting perspective on this issue from professors and academics, and is worth a look if you have the time.

3. “Competitive pressure” is not a valid excuse to lose your ethical compass.

The soaring prevalence of academic dishonesty in the university setting is disconcerting.  56% of business graduate students and 47% of non-business graduate students admit to cheating within the past year, a finding that is mirrored in undergraduate students, reports cheating expert Donald McCabe.

“It’s not just a matter of cheating on a test and getting ahead; there are all kinds of systemic implications that result from academic dishonesty,” says Marianne Jennings.  Rampant cheating draws into question the legitimacy of the diplomas awarded by an academic institution, and makes it nearly impossible to measure the true scholastic merit of all students.

While students may use the intense competitive pressure of the college environment to justify their behavior, their propensity to cheat doesn’t disappear upon receipt of their diploma.  Jennings continues, “Students don’t just say OK I cheated in school, but now I’m in the workplace and it ends here. They are forming bad habits that carry over into the market.”

If an employer hires a student who cheated their way to good grades only to find out that they’re incapable of producing the quality work one would expect from such a high performer, it reflects poorly on the institution.  As the W.P Carey School of Business points out, this is especially problematic for business schools, who often rely on corporate partnerships for funding and recruiting.

Universities assume that students want to further their education; professors should not be expected to spoon-feed and coddle students whose priorities lie elsewhere.  While the opportunity to attend college should be available to everyone, the decision to seize that opportunity and make the most of it is ultimately our own.  Perhaps the startling drop out rate and the “lack of preparedness for the real world” stem not from the system, but from the students themselves.

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This month, I’m participating in Scott Bishop’s 28 Day Blogging Challenge.  Check out the other bloggers signed up for the madness over at Real Time Marketer.