That’s the title of Fredrik Reinfeldt’s book from 1993 as a “ung moderate” claiming that Swedes were a brainwashed people. Now, you won’t find me agreeing with Reinfeldt on too many things, but a discussion yesterday on pedagogy makes me wonder if he has a point …
I went to the discussion hoping to make what I thought was a rather uncontroversial point: that a university like Chalmers, which aspires to class itself as among the best in the world, should adopt a flexible and multi-faceted approach in deciding on “pedagogic competence” among its staff, new and existing. In particular, pedagogic courses could be one of several criteria, but they should not necessarily be mandatory.
How wrong and naive I was! The discussion started with claims about how Chalmers has higher requirements for pedagogic excellence than other places, which turns out to consist of insisting on the requirement of pedagogic courses, and the discussion never seemed to get away from this point.
Rhetorical arguments were presented of the following form: suppose I was looking to appoint someone to teach algorithms at Chalmers – would I accept someone who had 20 years working at Ericsson as a programmer who had no formal qualifications to teach algorithms? Well, let’s consider this a bit more carefully. Suppose A has worked 10 years at Ericsson in a strong research group working with networking algorithms. A has been active on the international scene, presenting cutting edge research at premier algorithms conferences. A has taught courses as a guest lecturer at Chalmers and KTH in algorithms, been in demand for giving summer courses at international schools on algorithms … However he doesn’t have something that B has: namely a pedagogical certificate pinned to the wall asserting competence in teaching algorithms. Moreover, B has no research record at the international level, has never taught at Chalmers or KTH , Lund or Uppsala … and never even heard of international summer schools in algorithms.
At the trial lecture, B proceeds in a very “pedagogic” fashion: he has neat powerpoint slides one labelled “Introduction”, the final one labelled “Summary and Conclusions” and in between a slide for “Greedy Algorithms”, “Dynamic programming” and “Divide and Conquer” with textbook examples of toy problems. A on the other hand, begins with a real problem that Ericksson had to solve in its mobile networks and starts by challenging the audience to offer solutions. Then he proceeds to illustrate how the problem could be approached with different strategies, their respective strengths and weaknesses, false turns, errors … and finally the solution (all with non Microsoft crap, to top it all!).
Who should one hire at Chalmers? No brainer you say? You’re right: by Chalmers high standards of pedagogic excellence, we would disqualify A for not having the competence to teach and hire B!
Time to make yet another of my bold sweeping invandrare claims about Swedes. First a clarification of my motivations. Like most other invandrare, I recognise that compared to most other places – foremost India, but also the EE for example – Sweden is, in general, a very enlightened and progressive place where reason, integrity and harmony hold sway. Thus it is all the more frustrating for an invandrare that when they are so reasonable about most things, how could they possibly be so stupid about others? For example, “coursophilia“: to be considered competent in something, you must have certificates and points from courses – pedagogic courses! – otherwise you’re incompetent to discuss the subject. Thus:
Noam Chomsky shouldn’t write about politics
Jared Diamond shouldn’t write about history and societies
Olle Häggström shouldn’t write about climate change …
Because none of them have taken 101 courses on the subject, nor courses on how to write … hence are incompetent on those respective topics, no matter how much independent reading and research they may have done, no matter what their experience and track record is, and no matter how insightful and accurate their arguments may be. (Evidence for my claim: I’ve explicitly been asked about the claims listed above, and other invandrare strikingly had similar experiences. Counterexamples: three people from my own Dept. who made outstanding presentations against the pedagogy course requirements.)
There was also an interesting bootstrapping argument: Chalmers should insist on pedagogic course requirements because other universities – in Sweden! – are doing so. Thus, people at D&IT shouldn’t end up at a disadvantage when they apply to other places in Sweden and are required to show their pedagogy course points … Meanwhile these universities of course are probably using the same argument in reverse to enforec their pedagogic course requirements. A beautiful self-reinforcing – mutually recursive as CS people would say – circle.
So it seems to be a long and hard battle ahead to get Chalmers to think outside of this framework of courses and points in judging pedagogical competence. One thought that occurred to me – fleetingly – was to compile a list of the world’s leading universities that are universally acknowledged to achieve the highest standards in research and teaching excellence – MIT, Stanford, Oxford , Cambridge … – and document how they evaluate competence, in particular that they do not have pedagogic courses as mandatory requirements. But then Chalmers will merely take that as definitive proof that we have higher standards of excellence!
