Are good schools a myth?

I occasionally take a look at the discussions that go on at the Princeton Review website. Someone started a recent thread with the slightly starting claim that there's not much of a difference between "good" schools and "bad" schools. To support his (?) claim, the poster points to the fact that the same material is covered at schools all over the country. Organic chemistry at MIT, for example, is going to be pretty similar to organic chemistry anywhere else.

It might be the case that similarities like this hold for certain subject areas. Math and the natural sciences seem likely candidates for a fairly standardized curriculum. The humanities and social sciences present an entirely different picture. For one thing, there's much less of a progression of knowledge. There's no need, for example, to know the history of ancient Rome to study the American Civil War. On the other hand, it's hard to get far in mechanics without a knowledge of calculus. A history major at Swarthmore isn't going to learn the same things as a history major at Penn State. That's not to say the topics covered at either one of those schools is superior to the topics covered at the other, merely that education does vary across schools.

But there's a deeper issue at play. College is not just about what you learn, but how you learn it (along with a lot of other things, of course, but I'm sticking to academic concerns for now). A case in point. I'm taking a history course at UPenn this semester whose first class session was yesterday. A few quotations from Penn students on why they're taking the course (during the inevitable going around the circle and saying a bit about yourself):

"I want to move beyond a textbook history."

"I'm looking forward to discussions rather than just listening to lectures."

"My other history classes here have been really fact-based and I'm interested in doing more analysis."

None of these statements even come close to any experience I've had in history courses at Swat. None of my classes has had a textbook. Discussion is a hallmark of a Swarthmore education (granted, the discussions aren't uniformly great, but I find it well-nigh impossible to be involved in a class discussion and not intellectually engaged, often more so than while listening to a lecture). Facts versus analysis? Swarthmore history courses invariably emphasize the latter more than the first. I've learned dates because dates stick in my head, not because professors (with one exception) have displayed a large concern with transmitting a set of facts to their students.

Perhaps it's a bit of Swarthmore snobbery (of which there is a great deal at Swat, I assure you), but Swarthmore seems to have provided me a better education in history than typical Penn history majors receive.

Where you go to school matters. Personal initiative and responsibility probably matter more, but good schools give you the opportunities for higher level learning.