Restructuring the University 165

Restructuring the University 165 processes discussed above. Second, students could choose to think about diagnosis in some areas as opposed to others. Art experts might teach about art fraud, and lawyers might teach about detecting busi- ness fraud. In each case there would be similarities, and these should be taught by a group of faculty from different areas, but at the end of the course students should be able to start to actually do diagnosis under the tutelage of an expert in an area that interests them. They actually may not know much about that area of knowledge, of course, and that would be the objection of the faculty to this idea. But it is my contention that faculty have had this wrong all these years. Teaching the basics to students, who have no concept of their possible use, is really not helpful. All these introductory courses are just an excuse to pack kids into lecture halls and pretend to do educa- tion while saving money on hiring more teachers. Teachers should pose real-world problems to students and encourage students to gain the knowledge they need to solve them. Diagnosis is a perfect area for this. One can try one’s hand at crime detection, without knowing everything about the details of how one does it, with the help of an expert looking over one’s shoul- der. This kind of just-in-time learning is how humans have always learned what they needed to know. The idea that school should teach you what you need to know before you need to know it, is seriously flawed. People can’t remember what they learned, years after they learned it in school, if they haven’t been practicing what they learned all along. Judgment. Law typically is not part of any college curriculum because law schools are recent inventions on college campuses (that is, they are from the past century and not the century before) so law never got to be part of the required or even elective set of college courses despite the fact that so many students want to be lawyers. Judges make judgments all the time, and those lawyers who teach judges to make judgments should be teaching freshmen to make judgments as well. Of course, artists and musicians and literary critics make judgments of a different sort, as do philosophers and businesspeople. All of these people could be teaching a course together on how to make judgments fairly and how to determine what is fair. This is where ethics and morality come into play as well. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023911