By the time I graduated from high school, I had dissected three frogs, a pig and countless earthworms in my quest for a well-rounded education. I had also learned how to use a Bunsen burner, mostly to heat substances to create a reaction guaranteed to produce that great sulfur smell. I was lucky in Chemistry -- my total bill at the end was around $8 for assorted tubes I could not find. My lab partner's bill was over $150 because he broke that really big beaker they tell you not to break. All of this lab angst may be coming to an end, according to the NYT, with online high school laboratories.
Obviously, labs are expensive. So students at some high schools find themselves unable to take a class in say, zoology. Voila, the Internet! Through online high schools, students can take courses they are interested in and create chemistry explosions or dissect animal cadavers online in video-game like simulations. Some educators are skeptical, arguing that no simulation can duplicate a real chemistry lab or biology lab. One educator expressed disdain that a student would graduate from high school without learning how to turn on a Bunsen burner. Surely this teacher was speaking metaphorically; I'm not sure what the act of igniting a gas flame teaches a person who wants to be pre-med. (I've used a gas stove thousands of times for cooking. I should be an M.D. by now.)
Some of the arguments seemed familiar to me. During my five-year journey teaching legal writing, I often witnessed heated arguments over whether teaching students electronic research could replace traditional library research. Often faculty would invoke the same rhetoric: "To do research, you have to smell the books." "How can someone graduate without having to wade through four volumes of Shepard's citations?" "I just like the way the case looks in the book." Ah, the Bunsen burner!
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1. Posted by Cathy on October 23, 2006 @ 9:11 | Permalink
Here's why the book-based research is important to learn: because now that I'm out of school and without a Lexis ID, if I want to do my own legal research, I'm going to have to go to a library to do it. So it would be nice if I had a better idea of what I was doing.
(FWIW BU did teach us book research, but a quick run-through of the various sources available at 6:30pm on a couple Thursday night does a sound lesson make for an important life skill...)
(On the other hand, I, too, can dissect a frog. And a pig. And a worm. Maybe I'll put THAT on my resume...)
2. Posted by Jake on October 23, 2006 @ 20:59 | Permalink
To extend the debate to basic Newtonian physics, consider the high school student (common these days, alas) who never undertakes a physical experiment in a laboratory. So instead we turn the kid out on the roads to conduct physics experiments in a 5,000-lb motor vehicle. The idea that students can learn real science from watching computer simulations (i.e., cartoons, which they understandably favor), at the expense of real hands-on experimentation, is deplorable.
3. Posted by JamesT on October 24, 2006 @ 6:24 | Permalink
Up until about two months ago, I worked for a very small state agency as general counsel. Our budget was fee funded and was very tight. As a result, I did not have Westlaw or Lexis to research the myriad of issues I was presented with. For that, I had to schlep to the state supreme court library, only six blocks away, and do my research the "old fashioned" way. It is always a good idea to know how to research in a non-electronic way.
On a less practical note, the acquisition of knowledge and answers to questions should require effort. The easier you make it to learn something, the less of a chance that it will be remembered.
4. Posted by kristine on November 5, 2006 @ 10:08 | Permalink
Never mind the money factor--how about just plain efficiency as a motivation? When researching statutes, or digging into a totally new area of law I know nothing about, Lexis and Westlaw are next to useless. If you don't know anything about, say, intervention, wading through the overwhelming number of results from a search engine is just pointless. Far better to go to ALR, AmJur, or just a treatise, figure out the lay of the land, and then go find some cases and law review articles, when you know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.
In the real world, yes, that efficiency translates into money. But it also translates into less frustration and more satisfaction, things which are difficult to quantify economically.
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