College was once reserved for a small minority of people seeking highly advanced education, but now a four-year degree is essential if a person wants to succeed in a career in which they hold some degree of authority or expertise. However, this trend continues to expand, and soon eight or more years of higher education will become the standard. As the amount of knowledge needed in order to contribute to society grows, so does the amount of time spent in school. But will the amount of time spent in school reach an impractical limit, and if so, how will we deal with it? Another effect of the rising amount of information being compiled is the way such advanced ideas are conveyed to students. Professors were once students, but somewhere along the way it seems they forget what it is like to be a student, and some have trouble with effectively communicating their material. It might be that what they are teaching is extremely abstract that leads to the difficulty in communicating the information, but no matter what the cause, the effect is that students are left without an intuitive grasp of the basic concepts necessary to learn more. Also, our current approach to knowledge assessment, the letter grade system, seems to have been based on rudimentary knowledge rather than collegiate level information. This system of assigning letters to determine whether a student has comprehended a subject is not conducive to true understanding, and its place at the collegiate level is hindrance to education. How is it that educators of the near future will deal with these problems in order to teach students of technology and medicine effectively and efficiently?

Five years of elementary school, three years of middle school, and another four years of high school followed by even more college education is the standard in the United States. It seems only logical that as the amount of information we learn about our world increases, the more schooling a person will need in order to function in society. However, will people be willing to spend over two decades of their lives in school? Who will be able to afford getting and education while not holding a job until they are almost forty? I think that this issue of time spent in school most directly effects students in technologically intensive areas such as biomedical engineering students. Technology is growing exponentially, and to be a functional member of any field in which technology plays a large role requires a lot of schooling as it is. However, it is not feasible or logical to ask future generations to go through thirty-plus years of schooling. The number of people that would be able to accomplish this is very small since in order to survive, people need jobs, particularly sometime before adulthood. We cannot simply skip over subjects, or else we will create professionals that cannot do their job very well. If we teach students even faster than we already do, then we risk creating incompetent people. I do not have a solution to this problem, nor do I think an easy solution exists. I think societal norms will need to be redefined as humans confront this issue. In order for progress in the fields of science and technology to continue, longer standards of schooling will have to be accepted, and new educational techniques and policies will have to be enacted that condone the necessary changes.

There is no doubt that the way we studied in high school contrasts greatly with the way we study in college. In high school we could get by with sitting and listening in class. Topics and expectations were explicitly defined, and you could be sure that anything you saw on a test had been covered. Our teachers dwelled on subject matter, and it seemed that the idea was to practice until the topic was burned into your mind. All of these aspects are almost entirely absent in the collegiate world. We are lucky to find professors that can effectively convey their knowledge. Often times we are given very sparse or no practice at all with the topics covered in class, and especially not to the degree we received in high school. I feel that the vast majority of professors are genuinely concerned with teaching their students, but at the same time, too few of them actually get their message across. It is as if they have forgotten what it was like to be in our situation. They speak to us under the assumption that we know more than we actually do. I think it is extremely difficult for people to imagine as if they do not know information that they actually do know, so when a professor tries to teach you, it is hard for them to estimate the extent of your knowledge, and some information goes over your head. As students are required to learn about even more abstract ideas, it becomes even more difficult for professors to teach this information. Sometimes I feel as if I lack an intuitive feel for what I am learning. Furthermore, I believe this lack of intuition stems from not spending enough time gaining hands on experience. But, in reality I do not have time to gain that experience because there is too much to learn. So, there is a cycle that comes with advances in technology that leads to a loss of intuition in new students, and in the end will lead to an eventual slow in the progress of technological advancements. In order to deal with this problem I feel it is necessary to revamp the current scientific curriculum, and create a program that has more access to applicability and actual experimentation, and not just theory that we read from textbooks. As I look back on subjects that I have learned previously, say calculus for instance, I notice that at the time I was learning about it I had no idea what was going on. However, after a few other courses dealing with actual applications of the mathematical concepts, I now understand calculus. So, from repetitive practice and insights into applications, I better understand the concepts that I need to know. However, now this takes us back into the issue of time constraints on schooling. The more hands on practice a student gets, the more time they must spend in school if they are going to learn all that is expected of them. We need to find some balance between teaching in a thorough manner and teaching the appropriate amount of material that most effectively and efficiently creates well-rounded and competent students. Defining these boundaries is difficult, but as it stands now, I think too much emphasis is placed on the amount of material learned, and not enough thorough teaching is being done.

Our grading system is counter-productive. When students are judged solely on letters that correspond to values of their assessment, then students strive only for those letters, not knowledge. Administrators of this system see it as a way to rate students in order to meet standards; if of people are making A’s then standards are good, if of people are make F’s then there is a problem. Therefore, teachers dictate information to the students, the students copy the information down, and then take a test on the information to see if the “know” it. Thus, education gets reduced to simple memorization of topics that will be tested, and true knowledge is not gained. A study was done by a group of researchers. They told one group of teachers that they were to teach their students their topics, and afterwards the students would be tested to see if they met the necessary standards. Another group was told to teach the same topics, but that they needed to facilitate learning. At the end, all the students were tested, and the group that had teachers facilitating learning did better than the standards group. “The teachers in the standards-oriented classrooms in effect became drill sergeants, removing virtually any opportunity for the students to play an active role in designing their own learning” [1]. I believe that learning is extremely interactive and an introspective procedure. One needs to find things out for themselves to a certain extent. However, when we are told everything explicitly learning does not take place, but rather memorization takes over. Learning comes from building off prior knowledge and forming conclusions about new situations based on one’s own reasoning, not from being told what is right and wrong. When concepts are simply spelled out for us and then we are given a defined set of practice problems, then we learn only how to work out those practice problems, and not how to apply the concepts. In order to fully learn topics, I suggest interactive classrooms in which professors raise questions which students can draw conclusions on in order to facilitate their learning of the material. We should try to get away from the memorization aspects of teaching that comes when we set standards that need to be met, but rather focus on true learning and understanding of concepts through interactive reasoning.

There are many problems that face educating students in technologically dependent fields. As technology grows, more time will be needed to learn and understand the field in order to get to a point were a person can contribute to making novel discoveries. As concepts become more abstract, the ability to teach the concepts becomes more difficult. Finally, the letter grade system creates an educational environment were students strive to meet standards, and not understanding. The solutions to these problems are not obvious, nor are they simple. I think that eventually, big changes will need to be made in our educational systems. Possible reconsiderations on they our evaluation system operates and redefinition on societal expectations of schooling will need to be made.

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