Re:Article summary (Score 1)

I must disagree here. I attended Engineering school in South America and North America. I've found that the teaching style made a world of a difference in how I approached learning and what purposed it served. Back in that South American institution, we were constantly challenged to think for ourselves, to solve difficult problems and encouraged to find original solutions to conventional engineering problems. Due to the difficulty of the program, my grades were average, but that pushed me to try harder and learn more. Once I came to the new institution in North America, I've found the system to be more like training for a job. I got nothing but straight A's. But the university experience became a burden, it was not exciting anymore to come to school. Teachers were somewhat like described in the posted article. They followed the book so if the book sucked, the class sucked (With rare exceptions). The teacher-student interactions were minimal and professors rarely knew who we were. Tests were simple with examples taken from the book. The math/phyisics courses were limited to the minimal necessary to solve problems (why learning more than you need?, why learning quantum physiscs, right?). Labs were like following step-by-step instructions. It was definitely not my performance which made frustated but more the system which failed at any opportunity to promote creativity and originality. That's the point here, although some inspired students will do well even in this scenario, how many couldn't also be inspired and be great engineers but were lacking the chance to flourish? The article's value is to consider if we are being inspiring at university or if it is rather more of a training experience. Just to make it clear, I am not saying South American universities are better, I'm just using those particular insitutions as a basis to compare teaching methodology.