Yes, this is education

Hello! In this post, I would like to talk about how I imagine the educational process in high school and highlight my attitude to students who want to get everything quickly, without straining and freebies.
I will tell a little about myself. At the moment, I am a 3rd year student at the Department of Computing Techniques at SPbGUITMO. I am fond of programming under embedded computing systems and partly by computer circuitry - even in the simplest UART controller many interesting things for the human mind can be hidden. And the LED that flashes on the training board with the ADuC812 microcontroller inside can bring a lot of joy and pleasure.

Initially, a little autobiography, so you can understand how I "came to this life."
I entered the university back in 2007. I remember how I was euphoric about the fact that I will not be stuffed with hated humanitarian subjects, school lessons on which introduced me to a state of despondency. But seeing the schedule, I realized that I was cruelly deceived - there were very few items related to the specialty. I remember computer science - it was led by the late Anatoly Andreyevich Pribluda, who gave us the very basics: number systems, computer bus architecture, schematic device of the processor, and so on. Unfortunately, I did not attentively listen to his lectures - then I was more interested in ordinary programming - I was fond of C and C ++. Therefore, the second subject that I remember most of all is programming in high-level languages ​​under Tatiana Alexandrovna Pavlovskaya. It was interesting when, for me, they gave me to write a parser of a subset of SQL on Pascal — surprisingly, I did it and my program even worked (albeit incredibly podglyuchivala).

In the second year, the workload increased - it became the norm to come to the university in the morning, before sunrise, and leave in the evening, after sunset. But despite all the difficulties, it was in my second year that I understood how an interest in the subject being studied can help in my studies. We had an item called system software, in which we were given the basics of Unix's internal structure, command line skills and a scripting language - bash. At that time, I was fascinated by Linux and all of the above was pretty easy for me. Everything that had to be memorized lined up in my head in some sort of an ordered system, which allowed me almost instantly to find the answer to the problem I had already worked through, and also to predict solutions to a problem previously unknown to me. I did not think about the answer - the answer itself appeared in my head. I do not know how to more accurately describe this thing in my brain, but the sensations from it bring me pleasure so far. It turns out that if you study and study the subject with interest, then the training will not be so hard, boring and useless.
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Then, in the second year, I learned about an interesting teacher in our department - his name was Klyuchev Arkady Olegovich. As I was told by acquaintances from senior students, he didn’t ask at the defense just the whole theory in a row - he was interested in how the student knows how to think - he gave some interesting task or question and watched how the student would get out. It was so different from what I had already seen enough that I went to this teacher for a summer practice. Practicing with Klyuchev allowed me to improve my programming skills and gave me a certain understanding of the whole philosophy of program design.

Now, in his third year, Arkady O. leads us "Information management systems." The principle “to study with interest is easier” works here. All technical documentation related to the course and knowledge of it again begin to line up in the head in the above described system of knowledge. It comes to the point that, looking at the list of questions for protection or control, I am surprised to understand that I already knew most of the answers, although I hadn’t been interested in anything like this before, and I didn’t memorize the material of the lectures at all.

However, alas, not everyone is so interested. Some students do not understand why they need to study all this and why teachers do not seek to chew on the material, but give it to self-study. Some people are not interested in individual subjects in their specialty, such as computer circuitry, although it is clear that the teachers are trying and lectures are held with a twinkle.

As the discussion on the forum of the department of the direction and individual comments here on Habré shows, many students believe that the university should give them some knowledge of modern technology so that they can go to work as coders and get a lot of money. But such an approach leads to getting a cog-man at the exit from the university who knows and can only do one thing. Imagine that tomorrow the Java language will lose its popularity, the salaries of Java coders will fall, and the Erlang language will become popular. Where, then, go to all those who at the university chewed mostly Java? Not the fact that all of them will still be needed and in demand. Will you have to spend time and pay money for Erlang courses?

I believe that the essence of learning is not to give the student a set of knowledge on the demanded modern technologies and throw him into the world to work by profession. This is a dead-end way of development: how will a person develop if he was stupidly fed with data from textbooks both at school and at the institute, and was not forced to think with his head? Where does the ability to think critically, to assess reality, then appear? In my opinion, it is necessary to train the student to search and process information on the subject, to learn new things independently, without support from the outside. Learn to learn. I can not imagine how you can admire the new knowledge about the world, the boundlessness of the Universe, the bottomlessness of the structure of matter without the ability to perceive new things and the desire to learn new things? How then can we talk about the future of mankind, cities on Mars and so on, without craving for continuous development, especially when one main thought is in my head - to sit down warmer and get more money?

Maybe I'm an idealist. Perhaps I have reread Efremov's Hour of Bull and Andromeda too many times in my childhood. One thing that I’m sure about is that without curiosity and craving for a new person, not a person, but just a machine, a kind of biorobot. Unfortunately, starting from school, we are destroying the craving for the new and are accustomed to mechanical learning of formulas, theorems and proofs, without trying to show the beauty of all these constructions of the human mind. What to do with it - I do not know. I am one, and one in the field is not a warrior.

In conclusion, I would like to warn applicants entering this year at the university. In no case do not go to learn that to which your soul does not lie or where there is a complete stagnation. Do not go "for company" to study where your acquaintances went or where your parents force you to go - they are not you and not your future. Your future is you yourself, and it depends only on you what it will be like - a senseless waste of 5 years of life or a time full of discoveries and amazing accomplishments.