[Edu-sig] Computer science without all that "heavy math" stuff...?

[Christopher A. Craig]

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"Alan Gauld" <agauld@crosswinds.net> writes:

> I think the article is understandable and I agree with 
> the underlying sentiment. I think the autheor is 
> simply revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of 
> what Computer Science is about as a subject.
> 
> What he is really lamenting is the lack of a computer engineering
> discipline.  Thus we have the equivalent of Chemistry being taught
> but no Chemical Engineering.

I disagree that this is what the author is stating.  I know people who
majored in Chemical Engineering and they had to take differential
equations, electro magnetism, computer science, English, etc.  All of
which are useless to their jobs, just like "calculus, linear algebra,
physics and differential equations" (quoting the author) are to most
CS jobs.

He asserts that because 95% of "IT jobs" don't require them that they
should not be required of a CS major.  This flies in the face of the
entire university ethic.  Most jobs working on airplanes will never
need high-level physics, differential equations, calculus, or
chemistry but I bet if you check the curricula of the top 10 Aerospace
Engineering schools in the country you will find all of these courses
listed.  This is because a university is not a technical school.  

If you want to learn how to do a job in the IT field, you should go to
a technical school.  If you want to learn about the science of
computation you should go to a major university.  The job of
universities is not to fill the openings of the millions of Java
weenies and NT administrators that are in the industry, it is to
educate people.  While I was in college I met quite a few people who
whined about how they didn't have a class in <insert popular
language>, or they had to take "useless" classes in <insert theory>.
I never understood why they didn't transfer to a school that offered
what they wanted.

I think the problem is not the universities themselves, but rather the
light with which universities and technical colleges are viewed.  I
think many people currently look down on technical schools as being
basically just like universities, but for the people who couldn't get
into universities.  This isn't a very useful view.  I know several
people with associates degrees from technical schools, they aren't
dumb.  They just wanted to gain immediately useful skills, and didn't
care how to prove that the recursion 5*j+1 modulo 2**i is a cyclic
group of order 2**i (or what the last half of that sentence meant) It
would be better if people saw technical college as places to get
skills currently needed in the industry (or people with said skills),
and universities as places to further your education in the base
theory of a certain field (whether that field is CS or Mechanical
Engineering).

- -- 
Christopher A. Craig <com-nospam@ccraig.org>
If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now.
Tom Christiansen
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