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Scientific Elites vs. Illiterates
Rackemup writes "An article at Technology Review examines how it's possible for the same education system to produce both scientific elites and illiterates. While the article is kind of hard on current Elementary school teachers (whom the author says are hostile towards the scientific studies because becoming an Elementary teacher is the only way to graduate from college without needing to take a single science course), he does raise the issue that if we gave these teaching positions the pay-level and respect they deserve it would be much easier to attract Doctoral-level people to fill them."
So what has changed in the last few thousand years?
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
You can try to keep genius down, but you wont.
Improve public education all you want- the bell curve will always be there with a few at both ends. And the big middle has never been that smart, never will be.
Don't fight it, count on it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
"He does raise the issue that if we gave these teaching positions the pay-level and respect they deserve it would be much easier to attract Doctoral-level people to fill them."
My city of Cincinnati is far too busy building stadiums.
In the past (>20 years ago), most high-paying fields were difficult for women to get into. So lots of really smart women ended up teaching elementary school, even though the pay was pathetic.
Nowadays, teachers get paid a bit better, but still not nearly enough compared to other fields like law, medicine, or software. Some smart people go into teaching anyway because they're really dedicated, but they're a minority.
I don't agree with the article that teaching high school is a job for PhDs. You don't get one of those unless you've made an original contribution to the science. These people are qualified researchers, and their time ought to be spent on adding to our body of knowledge. For this they require spare time and facilities that high schools simply can't provide. But there's absolutely no reason why people with master's (or even bachelor's) degrees can't do the job of passing on the knowledge that's already been acquired. Nothing on the high school level is beyond their abilities.
And the brethren went away edified.
Making science mandatory will not solve the problem. Even when science has been 'brought to the masses' the 'masses' (whomever) ignored it. Most people are uninterested in science. Remember ol' Arthur C Clarke's quote about sufficiently advanced science being magic? Well this is true NOW for more and more US citizens, which is why, I think, we're seeing more and more 'mysticism' cropping up (think New Agers). Scientist's have managed to garner the position of 'wizard' in our society, and as such must learn to respect, use and hopefully not abuse it!
Unfortunately, more money isn't the answer to our educational problems. In Washington DC, the schools spend about $9000 per student per year (figures from memory, but they're close). That's a lot of jack, and Washington DC public schools are horrible.
There are many problems; money isn't one of them.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Give the teachers more money, but gimme my rebate check.
Am I the only one that can see the inherit contradiction there?
All children love to learn, its in their make-up, its who we as a race do extremely well. The problem is we all don't learn the same way. we need to find a way to teach children individually.
You should see the look on peoples face when I tell them I would support a 50 cent gas tax, if 49 cents went to education, and 1 cent went into overhead to suport the implimentation of the tax.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The last forty years have show that money is NOT the problem.
I don't think you understand something about bell curves and similarly guassian distributions...
Yah, there's gonna be the big pile of average in the middle... but we can also ensure that the average distribution is centered on a higher value than the present system allows!
By increasing education, you raise the low, middle *and* high. We can't change the shape of the distribution, but we can certainly recenter it!
GPL Deconstructed
would be nice if the average person had a greater exposure to science.
And I repeat the original question: What's the point?
To what end? Why does anyone have to know anything about science?
I don't know how an electric/gas hybrid car works. I just press the gas and it goes, I press the brakes and it stops.
I put bread in the toaster, press a button and out pops toast.
The TV turns on when I press a button. It doesn't when I cover the little plastic thingy in the front.
What common technology is so complex that I would need to learn science to interact with it?
I agree - In my opinion, by the time someone reaches high school, they either are interested in science & maths, or they aren't.
For me though, my love of math's and science came about because my father got me interested in it from an early age, and I do wonder whether or not I would have discovered it to the same extent if I had been left to my own devices. I somehow get a feeling that I wouldn't have...
Now on to your other point, there is no reason for everyone to know everything about physics, but they should know the basics of how the universe works and what science is about. The people making public policy decisions about science do not typically come from a scientific background. Shouldn't they at least know how progress is made in science, what the purpose of science is, and be able to distinguish between popular "scientific" fads and real science? I remember when the SSC was killed, one senator was pleased that no more money would be spent on "an esoteric toy for a small group of scientific ellites." Had she actually taken a modern physics class, she would have known how much our current economy (and entire society) depends on the discoveries made from earlier "esoteric toys." That's why people who claim to be educated should be educated in science.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The problem is that Education is a soft science, and actually does not have a practical scientific base. Which education systems produce the best results and why? Ask that question, and you get a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
You could ask the question of Linux distributions, and eventually you would get answers depending on the user experience and the intended application, and the operational enviroment. You could determine what the best practices are. You could get expert answers that work every time.
You cannot do that in education. For example you could try to teach writing. But even today, the writers on the best seller lists do not study writing for four years of college, etc. They just sit down and write, and they figure out on their own how other writers did what they did. The teach themselves. The best way to ruin a writing career is to have a college education in it.
There are many other fields which are similar to this. Even in the Tech Review article, it sounds like what happens is that the teachers spark the kids interest, and then the kids really teach themselves at a rate that far outstrips the books.
Part of this problem is the very education system that produced these teachers. How many people here said "To heck with that subject! I will never use that!"? Plenty.
The problem is that if you have a data vacuum in something, it is very easy to fill it in with junk. Does anyone here know what happens when you process with junk data? Garbage in = garbage out. (and then you get folks like GWB)
Also, if you have a data vacuum, it is very easy to try to excuse this away, to try to justify this ignorance. "It was just a stupid subject anyhow. It was not cool." and then you have greased skids to a hostile attitude.
Real expertise in education would have a fix for this type of thing. A teacher would know how to get themselves effectively educated in science, or any other subject of choice. And could do this for the students as well. The you wouldn't have parents and administrators trying to fix and cheat the scores
Don't hold you breath waiting.
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I read the article.
I then laughed.
I then cried, as I realized that the misguided views show there are by far the majority opinion of the "elites" in the University system.
Goldstein has no clue as to what it means to be an Elementary teacher, nor even a clue as to what we should be trying to aim for in our Elementary system. He's looking at it from the Ivory Tower, where all 1st graders are simply younger versions of the grad students he sees; they don't know as much, but you should obviously be able to teach them the same way.
Bullshit.
And to all the people above who post that anyone with "field" experience in a discipline should be able to go right into a teaching position without finishing a teaching certificate: knowing the subject material has very little to do with knowning how to teach the subject material.
I don't know what schools Goldstein looks at, but the vast majority of schools providing teaching certificates require several basic-level science courses to get a degree. In PA where I grew up near one of the big "teacher's colleges", a typical Elementary Education teacher would take a Biology and Physics class (about at the same level as advanced AP Physics), which should impart a really good understanding of what science is about, if not a real breadth or depth of scientific knowledge.
In reality, the type of people who have long industry experience, or many advanced degrees you would NEVER want in an Elementary teaching position. The job requirements are completely different. Being smart isn't enough: you need the proper training.
Being a Elementary teacher is primarily socio-psychological: you're attempting to impart some basic knowledge of how things work, and how to function in a society. Without a foundation of solid skills and (rather rote) knowledge to build on, there isn't any hope of producing a free-thinking, creative, explorative mind. Middle-school and high-school is where we need to focus on taking the student on new paths and move away from rote-learning. Elementary school is for making you a basically-functional citizen.
Final lesson: never let the PhDs run primary or secondary education. They have their own agenda, and have no clue as to what they're really dealing with.
If you want my opinion, the vast majority of primary and secondary school teachers are doing a good job. Sure, there are a minority of bad teachers, but the major problems don't lie with the teachers: they lie with the school boards, the administrators, and ultimately, the parents. Fix the things wrong there first, then worry about the teachers.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Well, goody for it. Home schooling moves the bell curve up 30 percentile points, and I'm sure even that can be readily improved upon.
What's wrong with making the next generation's ``dummies'' better than today's ``average'' student, and the average drudge better then most of today's ``advanced'' students?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Or people of his caliber would be of no benefit to the Educational System in the US. He would be forced to use poorly written books. Teaching will be focused on just what will be on the skills assessment test. He will work for a system that is a complete bureaucracy and would have no say. The problem is the system. We need open competition in schools competing for your child. Why do we allow this huge monopoly? Why do they not teach things such as money management? Stock market? Business finance? How to write and carry out a business plan?
Get a free ipod.
If you use a derogatory term like "fuzzy" to refer to someone who majored in a non-scientific discipline, it sounds like you've made a decision that you'll never change, no matter how many scientifically adept "fuzzies" you run into.
That has some really interesting points and it raises some interesting questions, but the guy is a troll. He questions the education system and the need for an education system but his idea that we should all piss off back to the Stone Age is moronic. He is questioning his own ideas about the meaning of life as much as he is the education but I am afraid that I found his argument to be a big wank. Aboriginal societies do not have schools because children learn what their elders do. In today's society, people do far too many diverse things for children to simply learn by watching. Get real. He has the right to question the education system, it needs to be looked at seriously, but this self righteous shit is the best he can come up with, then he might as well piss off into the Borneo jungles and see what he can learn.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
1. Teachers get little money.
2. Teachers get little respect.
3. Management is overbearing.
4. Too few good teachers. (See #1, #2, and #3)
5. Tasks such as photocopying, grading, seting up outings, etc. take far too much time from teachers.
6. Students are grouped by age; not grades, intelligence(s), or interests.
7. Teaching to the middle, or teaching to the bottom. (See #5)
8. Skipping or failing a grade is nearly impossible. (Solved by #5)
9. Curriculum relies on massive amounts of memorization, repetition, and redundancy between successive classes.
10. Limited classic curriculum; informal logic and foreign languages are supposed to be very good in k-4, or so. (High School Philosophy or Economics wouldn't be so bad...)
11. A hostile student environment; the reverse-social-Darwinism of "jocks" and "nerds."
It tells you no such thing. Parents of public school kids run the gamut from "cares a lot about the child's education" to "doesn't care about the child's education." The set of all parents who homeschool their kids filters out the "doesn't care" end of that scale. The filter that selects your "experiment group" (homeschool families) out of the general population also selects for other factors that tend to influence a child's rate of learning. You are comparing apples to oranges.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The world needs simple people. There are those on earth who ENJOY being loggers. They are very good at it, and have no desire to learn physics, history, or computer science. And although their occupation does not require book smarts, it does involve a very different but equally high level of skill. Everyone has their own place, and thank God for it! (I certainly wouldn't want their job!) We all pursue those things that fascinate us, just understand that those things can and will be vastly different from person to person . . . and that is a Good Thing!