While this may be true for the classics it is not at all true for a field like Artificial Intelligence (AI). Artificial Intelligence as a field is being invented today. The people who are inventing it reside at big, well-funded research labs that allow them to build their toys and experiment with all kinds of hardware. They don't do this at Amherst. If you want to learn about AI you can take a course about it at Amherst, but the teacher of that course will be someone who read some books about it rather than someone who is doing it. (Actually Amherst students can sign up for AI courses at the University of Massachusetts nearby which despite not being a university considered to be of the quality of Amherst is far better equipped to teach them.) At the very best the small college teacher is out of date on the subject, at the worst he really doesn't understand the issues all that well. I have been doing graduate admissions in AI for thirty years and I can count on one hand all the applications we have gotten from students at the "best" small colleges. Students at these schools never even find out about this subject much less decide to make it their life's work.

Of course, you could go to MIT (a very good AI lab) and take a course from the best professors in AI. But these are the very same people who don't teach all that much, who don't value teaching, and who, when they do teach, have classes with hundreds of students in them. The best professors in AI are not professors because they want to be teachers, they are professors because they want to be researchers. They want to build robots or explore how the mind makes generalizations or figure out how to get a computer to be world chess champion. Teaching is one of the last things on their minds.

So, the short answer to the question is that in the best schools they teach because they have to not because they want to, and in the good teaching schools there is a very good chance that they teach what they don't understand all that well.

JB: Let's talk about curricula.

SCHANK: The curriculum is one of the major problems with today's schools. When you tell a professor he is to teach a certain class, you might assume this means he will teach what any other professor might teach in that class. One high school history course is like another, so one might assume that this is true of college as well. But curricula in college are professor-dependent. This wouldn't be such a problem if it only meant there was slight variance in how a given course was taught from year to year and professor to professor. Unfortunately, the issue is bigger than that.

Professors teach what they know. There is no standard set of things to be taught in anything but the most introductory courses. So, introduction to psychology is pretty similar in every university, as is freshman calculus. But, any advanced course is subject to the professor's unique view of his field. This is fine because one goes to university to meet interesting faculty and to learn what their view of the field is. Or one ought to. This is what universities have to offer, an opportunity to engage a world expert on his own turf to discuss ideas he created or is deeply involved with and for just a few weeks to pretend that you are a world class economist or sociologist dealing with issues just as professionals in those fields do. This is the ideal. The reality is something else again.

One of the problems with this view is that students by and large don't share it. Most college students go to class expecting to learn the facts. They want to know how economics or sociology works. When I teach a class on how the mind works, students want to know how it works and I should please tell them. The difficulty with this view is that most professors don't actually know the answers to the questions students pose. Economics professors don't know how the economy works and sociologists don't know how society works and I don't know how the mind works. What we all do have are deeply held beliefs about these subjects. And we all fervently want to get students to see things our way, to absorb our point of view and to understand why our academic enemies are idiots.