Usually I write about IT - on different, more or less, highly specialized topics like SAN / SHD or FreeBSD, but now I will try to speak on a foreign field, so for many readers my further reasonings will seem rather controversial or even naive. However, the way it is, and therefore I am not offended. However, as a direct consumer of knowledge and educational services, sorry for this terrible clericalism, as well as an enthusiastic amateur eager to share urbi et orbi with his dubious “finds and discoveries”, I can hardly keep silent.
Therefore, you either skip this text further until it's too late, or humble yourself and endure, because, freely quoting a famous song, all I want to do is drive my bike.
So, to put everything on the shelves, we will start from afar - from a school, which in theory should teach basic things about sciences and the world around us. Basically, this baggage is presented using traditional methods of scholasticism, such as cramming a thoroughly emasculated school curriculum containing a limited set of conclusions and formulas prepared by teachers, as well as multiple repetitions of the same tasks and exercises. Because of this approach, the clarity of the physical or practical meanings is often lost in the topics studied, which, in my opinion, causes critical damage to the systematization of knowledge.
In general, on the one hand, school methods are good for mass hammering the minimum required set of information into the heads of those who do not really want to learn. On the other hand, they can inhibit the development of those who are able to achieve more than just train the reflex.
I admit that over the 30 years since I left school, the situation has changed for the better, but I suspect that it still has not gone too far from the Middle Ages, especially since religion has returned to school and is feeling quite well there.
I have never attended a college or other professional educational institution, so I can’t say anything about them in essence, but there is a great risk that learning a profession there may come down solely to training specific applied skills, while losing sight of the theoretical basis.
Move on. Against a school background, an educational institution, or university, from the point of view of acquiring knowledge looks like a real outlet. The opportunity, and even in some cases the obligation to study the material yourself, greater freedom of choice of methods of knowledge and sources of information opens up wide opportunities for those who can and want to learn. It all depends on the maturity of the student and his aspirations and goals. Therefore, despite the fact that higher education has to some extent earned a reputation for being inert, lagging behind the development of modern IT, many students still manage to develop methods of cognition, as well as gain a chance to compensate for the deficiencies of school education and re-master the science of learning autonomously and independently to get knowledge.
As for all kinds of courses organized by suppliers of IT equipment and software, it must be understood that their main goal is to teach consumers how to use their programs and equipment, therefore often algorithms and theoretical foundations, as well as the most important details of what is hidden “under the hood” are considered in the classroom only to the extent that the manufacturer is forced to do this in order to give general information about the technology, without revealing commercial secrets and not forgetting to emphasize their advantages in comparison NIJ competitors.
For the same reasons, the certification procedure for IT specialists, especially at the initial levels, often sins with tests of insignificant knowledge, and tests ask obvious questions, or worse: it checks the applicants for reflex knowledge of the material. Like, for example, why not ask the engineer “with what arguments: -ef, or -ax should run the ps command” during the certification exam, referring to this particular version of UNIX or the Linux distribution. Such an approach will require the test taker to memorize this command in advance, as well as many other commands, even though these parameters can always be specified in man if the administrator forgets them at some point.
Fortunately, progress does not stand still, and in a few years some arguments will change, others will become obsolete, and new ones will appear and take the places of the former. As it happened on some operating systems, where over time they began to use the version of the ps utility, which prefers the syntax without "minuses": ps ax.
And then what? That's right, it is necessary to re-certify specialists, and it’s better to take it as a rule, every N-years, or with the release of new versions of software and equipment, revoke “obsolete diplomas”, thereby encouraging engineers to get certified according to the updated version. And, of course, certification must be paid. And this despite the fact that the certificate of one vendor will significantly lose its local value if the employer of a specialist changes the vendor - he begins to purchase similar equipment from another supplier. And okay, if this only happened with "closed" commercial products, access to which is limited, and therefore, certification on them has some value because of its relative rarity, however, some companies quite successfully impose certification on "open" products, for example, as is the case with some Linux distributions. Moreover, the engineers themselves try to “get hooked” on Linux certification too, spend time and money on it, in the hope that this achievement will add weight to the labor market.
Certification allows you to standardize the knowledge of specialists, giving them a single certain average level of knowledge and hones skills to automatism, which, of course, is very convenient for a management style that operates with concepts like: man-hours, human resources and production standards. The roots of this formal approach go back to the golden age of the industrial era, to large factories and industrial enterprises built around a conveyor belt, where it is required that each employee perform specific actions accurately and within a very limited time, and he simply does not have time to think. However, to think and make decisions, there are always other people at the factory. Obviously, a person in such a scheme turns into a “screw of the system" - an easily replaceable element with known performance characteristics.
But not in an industrial enterprise, but in IT, such an amazing quality as laziness makes people strive for simplification. In the Skills, Rules, Knowledge (SRK) system, many of us voluntarily prefer to use the skills worked out to automatism and follow the rules developed by smart people, rather than make efforts, explore problems deep into and acquire knowledge on our own, because it looks like the invention of another meaningless the bike. And, basically, the entire education system, starting from school and ending with courses / certification of IT specialists, condones this by accustoming people to cramming instead of research; training skills suitable for specific instances of applications or equipment, instead of understanding the root causes, knowledge of algorithms and technologies.
In other words, during training, the lion's share of time and energy is devoted to working out the approach “ How to use this or that tool”, and not to finding the answer to the question “ Why does it work this way and not the other way?” For the same reasons, in IT, the “best practices” method is often used, which describes recommendations for the “best” setup and use of certain components or systems. No, I do not reject the idea of ​​best-practices, it is very good as a cheat sheet or check list, but often such recommendations are used as a “golden hammer”, they become indestructible axioms that engineers and management follow rigorously and thoughtlessly, without bothering to find out the answer the question "why" is given one or another recommendation. And this is strange, because if an engineer has studied and knows the material, he does not need to blindly rely on an authoritative opinion, which is suitable in most situations, but it is very likely not applicable to a specific case.
Sometimes it comes to the point of absurdity in connection with best-practices: even in my practice there was a case when vendors supplying the same product under different brands had slightly different views on the subject, so when they conducted an annual assessment at the request of the customer, one the reports always contained a warning about the violation of best-practices, while the other, on the contrary, praised for full compliance.
And even if it sounds too academic and at first glance it doesn’t apply in such areas as support for IT systems, where skills are required rather than subject matter, but if you want to break out of the vicious circle, despite the scarcity of truly important information and knowledge, There will always be ways and methods to figure it out. At least it seems to me that they help:
- Critical thinking, scientific approach and common sense;
- Search for causes and study of primary sources of information, source texts, standards and formal descriptions of technologies;
- Research as opposed to cramming. The absence of fear of “bicycles”, the construction of which makes it possible, at least, to figure out why other developers, engineers and architects have chosen one way or another to solve similar problems, and, as a maximum, make the bicycle even better than before.