The other day I came across a blot about ‘reading courses’,[Link] and obtained a rush of memory and consideration. These courses go by different names – ‘independent reading’, ‘guided reading’, ‘independent research’, … – not all of which are uniform. The blot meant a ‘reading course’ to be a course of study outside the established curriculum (i.e., no formal course offered on the topic) by one student and overseen occasionally by one faculty. The text implies that it is also a subterfuge for students who who completed coursework but not research or writing and have to have course hours to be in ‘good standing’ with the legume enumerators. Hence some such enrollments are a cover for hours in lab or writing.
This latter is familiar to me. When I had completed my coursework, passed exams, and had research topic accepted I still had to be enrolled for a minimum number of hours to officially be a student even though I was putting in all my not-working, not-asleep hours on the research/dissertation. The trick was to sign up for some imaginary course, pay a considerably less than imaginary tuition bill, and the administriviaists were placated. Aside from the cash, the only real difficulty was that occasionally some zealot faculty would actually expect the signed up students to do something measurable in the context.
I also recall taking a ‘special seminar’ course that was an utter disaster. The course was essentially a ‘reading course’ except extended to several students. The professor did not lecture but did facilitate. He handed out weekly reading assignments and we met once a week to discuss the assignments. The class was small – four or five – and about evenly divided between theory and experiment folks. So the discussions tended to be critiques of either the experiment procedure in the readings or the theoretical developments in the readings. Not very much constructive occurred.
But since I got out of the academic environment I have come to like ‘reading courses’. The problem is finding ways to do them. In theory, at least according to academic mythology, anyone with a doctorate (a ‘terminal’ degree) is supposed to be self-educating. That is supposed to mean that if I get interested in a topic, I am supposed to be able to read my way to competency in it. In practice, the absence of someone to recommend (and warn about other) books and answer questions is often crippling. This is reflected in one of the chief problems of self-education, which I refer to as the “wheat-chaff problem’. This deals with how in reading a textbook on a subject, one distinguishes the wheat, the nourishment, from the chaff, the socially necessary packaging foam. Of course the other problem is getting into the Four T’s of the topic. I won;t revisit that here since I have beaten it jellyish elsewhere.
So confronted with a desire to learn a topic one searches for some guidance on what to read. In general, ‘dummy’ books are nonexistent on interesting topics – they are economically motivated to prey on bogs after all – and would be well nigh useless anyway because of their shallow information sparse format. Sometimes you can find lists of books on a topic but seldom and they are often dated.
Back when I worked for the Yankee army they were big on ‘reading programs’, which were similar. And they published lists of books that people should read. The problem with this is that about three-fourths of the books on any list were blatant and banal propaganda, low in information density and largely comprised of some pseudo-mystical social message totally irrelevant to the topic but dear to the organization. This seems to be typical of organizational reading lists. They serve the organization first and anything and anyone else only coincidentally, despite the advertising and moral claims.
That reading programs do not work outside the academic environment – and given the subterfuges it is not clear they function even there – after all less than one-quarter of the population actually reads regularly and best sellers and bosom rippers are not generally educational, would seem to be self evident. But given the overall decrepitude of the educational apparat, including colleges, basic human competency has to be coming from somewhere.
But that doesn’t keep me from continuing to read. And I do rather appreciate the old saw about the blind leading the blind. Although self-leading at least has pretty good hindsight.
Simple Country Physicist 