Agreed! Students need to be socially, globally, and politically aware. They should also be willing to collaborate with others and be able to integrate the diverse viewpoints brought by others with their own. And yes, teachers should not act as the 'dispensers of knowledge' but they should enter a classroom with an inquisitive mind to learn something in the process of teaching.

Oh, I totally agree with you, Amy. We need to move beyond the narrow conceptions of intelligence, learning, education, and academic success. We need to acknowledge that one needs to have EQ as well as IQ in order to live a meaningful life. We need to look as academic success in terms of how well the graduates are doing in life instead of measuring how much money they are making or what grade they are getting in classes. We need to see if student and graduates have the ability and the will to take actions for the good of all.

Ross, I totally understand your concern about whether education really prepared you for work. But I would ask a more broader question that we often fail to ask. Is our education preparing us for life? Is it teaching us how to face the ups and downs that life leads us to? Is it making us emotionally intelligent? Is is enabling us to raise voices against injustice and discrimination? Is it turning us into effective citizens? Is it empowering us to go against the institution that employs us if the later is indulging in an unethical practice? There are many more such questions in my mind but I guess you get the drift.

I think the day education starts preparing one for life, only then it can be called education in the true sense of the term. Otherwise, it just remains a way to prepare one to become a more productive worker or employee. And as you said, your education (and probably many others’ including mine) did not even do that well.

Yanliang, I think it is inappropriate to look at the value of one’s education in terms of the salary one gets after graduation. As you yourself mentioned there are some skills one learns in the educational process that cannot be measured easily. But one still does acquire those skills through education. Sometimes, a few of these skills may not directly translate into one’s salary but I do not think the aim of education is to earn more money. It is rather to develop effective citizenship in people. And as long as education helps people acquire effective citizenship and the ability to think critically and work for the good of all, I think it serves its purpose. While there is a huge opportunity cost in going to college to get educated, there is even a bigger cost in not getting educated. And I do not think everything in the world can be measured in terms of money.

While I myself enjoyed taking classes from the Humanities and Social Sciences classes during my undergrad in India in Electrical Engineering, I saw a lot of people devaluing Humanities and social sciences as academic disciplines. So, my education experience was not very different in terms of how STEM fields were given more importance. However, I now see how Humanities and social sciences are important for all the people irrespective of whether they are pursuing STEM or something else. People design systems or technologies for the society and the people living in t and hence they need to know different aspects of human life. Fortunately, people in engineering, at least, have started recognizing the value of liberal education. In fact, my PhD research somewhat overlaps with making engineering education more liberal.

Guided by Freire’s idea of critical pedagogy, I believe that education should be a tool that empowers students to be socially and politically aware, recognize authoritarian and dominant tendencies, and raise voices against them. Instead of teaching facts, education should enable students to interact with it and transform it.

Sarang, I personally do not think that taking pride in one's culture and respecting others' cultures are mutually exclusive. One can do the both. However, I agree with you that the courses that are taught these days focus a lot on the Western civilization and do not pay attention to what happened or is happening in other parts of the world. That being said, there are some teachers who are trying to break the hegemony of Western civilization in their classrooms. Donna Riley, currently a professor at Virginia Tech, had taught a class in Smith College in which she had tried to point out inventions and discoveries that happened in the non-Western world. You can read more about it here: http://ashish-dss.blogspot.com/2015/10/critical-pedagogy-in-engineering.html

Yangxiao, I completely agree with you that we should not make a decision for our students to use electronic devices in classrooms. I usually am guided by the following two factors for not enforcing any social media or electronic device policy that bans their use in my classes. First, my classes, most of the times, require students to use computers. And hence, it is very difficult for me to monitor the tabs they have opened when they are on their computers. Second, I personally do not want to decide for them whether or not they should be using electronic devices. They are young adults (well, most of them are) and hence, they should be able to make smart decisions for themselves. And to add to that, sometimes, people (including myself) need to zone themselves out for a few minutes to engage with social media or any other “distraction” to bring their focus back to the classroom.

Answering the question in the first bullet, I think having emails coming to us on our phones makes our lives complicated in some ways. I am personally tempted to look at emails as soon as they come on my phone. And sometimes, I am also tempted to respond to them. This means, if its a work-related email, by checking it, I doing work at times when I should be enjoying with friends and family. While there are many benefits of smartphones, I personally think smartphones keep us to work all day, and sometimes all night too.

I teach first year engineering classes and I would say I do not rely on technology as much as most of instructors in my department do to teach the same class. A lot my colleagues ask students to submit responses/feedback on a DyKnow panel in which students can just write responses and submit the slides to the instructor. I personally do not like that and instead ask my students to speak up in class. Apart from that, I try to use the minimum amount of technology and avoid it unless required. I use power-point slides for my classes. My students have a copy of the slides before the class begins.There have been times when 1) I have forgotten my computer to the class or 2) the projector has not worked. In the first case, I modified my class so that I did not have to use power-point. I discusses the content with the class without using slides. In the second case, I asked students to look at the power-point slides on their computers. Similarly, when the audio system did not work, I asked my students to listen to an audio clip in class using their own laptops or their peers’ laptops.