Experimental university focuses on teaching thinking skills over facts

by Ben Reilly Wed Oct 29, 2014 10:09 pm

How You Think, Not What You Know

Minerva is a four-year, for-profit college housed within Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California. Its students all live together on a traditional residential campus, but that’s about the only way in which Minerva is traditional. For starters, it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate, which is lower than even Harvard or Stanford. Its students take all their classes online, and after their first year in California, they spend each semester in a new country of their choosing. What’s more, tuition is just $10,000 a year. This fall, Minerva admitted its first class of 29 students and recently landed $70 million in funding, enough to offer the founding class of students full scholarships through graduation.

But while there are many things that make Minerva unusual, the curriculum is what makes it truly unique. Minerva toys with the notion that in a world where information is never more than a click away, what matters most is not what you know off the top of your head, but how you analyze and interpret everything you learn. And so, the school takes a hard stance against teaching hard skills. You won’t find any of the typical gen-ed courses in its freshman curriculum. Instead, freshmen take esoteric-sounding courses like “Empirical Analysis” and “Multimodal Communication.” The entire first year at Minerva is dedicated to teaching three things and three things only: critical thinking, creative thinking, and effective communication.

“It’s basically like brain hacking. We’re changing the way you perceive the world around you,” Nelson says.

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/minerva-project/

Pretty interesting. Maybe it's enough to teach the general-knowledge and basic skills stuff before university, considering if you really want to know how many elephants survived Hannibal's journey through the Alps, you can just look it up. As an example, right now as of 5:05 p.m., I don't know how many did ...

... and by 5:08 p.m. I understood that there's no completely reliable record, but that tradition says he took 37 elephants and that 20 survived.

by Original Quill Thu Oct 30, 2014 3:52 am

Yes, emphasis on something other than facticity. The Claremont Colleges are outstanding higher education institutions. Very experimental.

On the matter: I have always felt that education qua memorization is a wasted effort. Know enough to know what and where to find what you don't know, has always been my creed. Finding the rest is just clerical work.

One exception: logic. There's no substitute for reason. A person who doesn't recognize logic instinctively, is like a person who hears music in flats...if you sing flat, you'll never get it right.

by veya_victaous Thu Oct 30, 2014 4:01 am

As some posters on here Prove, no amount of University can teach some people to Actually Think..

this is a good move, Google make Academic parrots obsolete.

by Original Quill Thu Oct 30, 2014 4:05 am

http://www.claremont.edu/

by Guest Thu Oct 30, 2014 4:05 am

Original Quill wrote:Yes, emphasis on something other than facticity. The Claremont Colleges are outstanding higher education institutions. Very experimental.

On the matter: I have always felt that education qua memorization is a wasted effort. Know enough to know what and where to find what you don't know, has always been my creed. Finding the rest is just clerical work.

One exception: logic. There's no substitute for reason. A person who doesn't recognize logic instinctively, is like a person who hears music in flats...if you sing flat, you'll never get it right.

Logic is the predetermined factor here but even then most things will have to be based off basic facts, like mathematical equations for example. It will be good for theoretical thinking but it will have limitations to certain topics and subjects.

by Original Quill Thu Oct 30, 2014 4:15 am

Didge wrote: It will be good for theoretical thinking but it will have limitations to certain topics and subjects.

Of course...but that's all I'm asking. Facts are always underlain by values ('All facts are in se values." --Sepastain de Grazia). But the idea that facts, as they are, can be easily retrieved vastly increases the human cognitive capability.

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Experimental university focuses on teaching thinking skills over facts

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