Yep, agree, and had the same feeling through undergrad.

If it helps, I’ve had the same feeling through post-grad too! The whole world is on timelines and productivity goals these days … no one is allowed the time to just explore and see where things take them.

The recent Nobel Prize for medicine (for the mRNA vaccine) being a fairly glaring indictment of how much it has maybe taken academia off course. For example, here’s a psychology professor trying to address the issue on mastodon. Another example I noticed was that any older paper I’d read, though the technology and understanding (in some cases) was obviously older and less advanced, would obviously be of a better quality compared to modern papers. The main difference was that older papers were more likely to report on the story of an investigation. There’s be assides about things they’d checked or doubts they’d had etc. Modern papers tend to lean more into “marketing” and feel more rushed and manufactured. Any colleague in similar areas to me that I’ve spoken about this has shared similar feelings. Academics are pressured to publish at nearly a breakneck speed and none of them like it. Not because it’s got them working hard (though it does have that effect through secondary affects because of just how many things academics have to do to keep the system running, including peer-review), but because they aren’t allowed to work as hard as they’d like on solving problems and actually finishing projects.

Back to the topic of education … yea I agree that curriculum and its modularity is a big part of the problem. Bottom line is, along with the above, education is manufactured now, not cultured. Allowing a student to try and inevitably fail and struggle at actual research and asking their own or at least not spoon fed questions doesn’t fit neatly into the current design philosophy of education.

Thing is, I’m not sure there is much more of a point to education than allowing and helping someone learn and experience this process. It’s as simple as the “teach a man to fish” aphorism. All of the assessment and metrics driven design of education and curriculum to make sure someone is capable of knowing something for a short window of time is a rather superficial view of what being educated is about. With AI, chatGPT etc, the specter haunting academia and the hollowness of its value proposition is looming very large IMO, but few who are around academia or who genuinely found it valuable or value it as part of the self-worth want to question it.