Swat profs help students "learn how to learn"?

achat
Tue, 07 Jun 2005 08:49:22 +0000

I think the emphasis with many good professors at Swarthmore is ‘how to learn’. Interesteddad put up the blog that you should look at in this forum (see many threads down). It is one example of someone who wants to show people how to think critically.

My son is a rising sophomore at Swarthmore and I’ve seen his critical thinking abilities go up a whole lot, in leaps and bounds, since he’s been there. It is hard to know if his thinking ability would go up if he went to some other colleges he got into, since he can go to only one college! But I am very happy to see he can think critically and come up with issues that are hard to find in everything he is interested in. This includes for example, what he thinks of op-ed contributors at the NY Times or what the Economist magazine thinks about something, or the New Republic. I am impressed that a soon-to-be-19 year old can think in depth of so many issues in such a sophisticated way. And it’s not just my son who does that at Swat, almost everyone he knows, does; I’m not making him out to be a genius (I know I am biased as a mother).

My son also said when he took the Econ final last semester, the questions were aimed at the student trying to understand global issues in Economics and their impact on the world (I don’t mean MacroEconomics, what I mean is looking at the forest from the trees); not just math questions.

Interesteddad said the same thing about a Math course his daughter took in the first semester. The questions she encountered were aimed at trying to give a student an in-depth feeling for how Math can be used in a situation…what impact a theorem has etc.

And last year, a roomate of his had to write a paper on ‘In an ideal world, what kind of government could you have, if people of the same ideology, no matter what the ideology, wanted to stay together. How would you design laws, what would be ‘ethical’, what would constitute a violation of ‘natural laws’ versus man-made ones’. I remember, my son said, the entire quad of 4 kids stayed up all night to discuss the issues and help him write this paper. It was an immensely, immensely, gratifying experience for him and the 3 other kids! That’s what caused him to think of Political Science and Philosophy as potential majors.

Anyway, the excitement he feels to go to the classes he loves are palpable.

I don’t know anything about any other small college, so I can’t speak for them.