Why Professors Should Stop Lecturing

Have you ever felt that you didn’t understand what professors say in the lectures? In most cases, students don’t get the key information in 50+ lectures. There is a strange phenomenon, the students who don’t go to lectures get higher grades than those who go to lectures. Isn’t it unfair? I spend more time studying but only to get lower grades.

The answer is that lecture is an ineffective way to learn, i.e. it is useless. Lecturing is a way to acquire knowledge that dates from ancient Babylon. It means the lecturers reading books for students because most people are illiterate at ancient times. However, all college students can read. I have textbooks and we can read very well by myself. Why do I need professors read for me?

Actually, smart students study by themselves, and many of them don’t go to lectures at all. They say they get happiness from reading textbooks. They enjoy reading rather than listening to professors. Every smart man gains his knowledge through self-learning. Because self-learning doesn’t have time and space limits. You can control your own pace and study whatever you enjoy. In fact, professors become professors because of good self-learning. The president of my school, Prof. Xu Yangsheng, a robot genius who received his doctoral from Univ. of Penn, said that he never went to any lectures when he was an undergrad.

What are the benefits of lectures? They do have some. For example, they are good for deep wandering and making new friends, anything except studying.

Lectures not only wastes students’ time but also wastes professors’ time. The most important fact is that most of the professors are not good at teaching, and their teaching skills are far behind high school teachers. And their TAs teach much better than themselves. They are good at researching but bad at teaching. Moreover, they are unwilling to teach because undergraduate knowledge is too easy and they can do more research if not teach. Professors could have done more great jobs.

So why lecture? The most helpful work that professors do for students is the office hour. Professors can answer questions that students ask. During the rest of the time, they should spend their time doing researches they like.