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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."
"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 just don't get how our system is supposed to work. We are cutting funding to education (or at least not expanding it to meet demand), we are cutting back on wellfare, and we are doing everything we can to automate low skill tasks.
So basically you have to have a job to live. But the low skill jobs are being automated because it's cheaper than paying you. So you can either go on wellfare or you can try to get an education to get a better job up the food chain. In order to get the eduation, you apparently have to have money (or at the least live in an area where there is money so that the schools have decent funding). And I'm guessing that if this is a situation you find yourself in you probably don't live in a rich suburb.
I'm sorry that all the rich people aren't filthy rich enough yet, but for god's sake, why don't we fund a decent education system. I think it's reasonable to set standards that insure the school system doesn't waste its time on people who don't care. But at the same time, people who want to learn should not have to pay a dime for it.
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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.
-- Shamus
"Bleah!" -- overheard at a press conference
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
because science is boring to non-scientists. Most of us couldn't give a ripe shit about science.
Honestly, it's a little disingenuous to whine about the state of science education in America -- the same complaint can be made about literature.
Get over it -- science nerds are just like any other type of nerd. Nerds live in a Nerd Ghetto, surrounded by AOL Barbarians. Quit your whining, pick up a stick and make a few rounds around the walls unhooking grappling hooks and pushing seige ladders away from the wall and into the moat.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
"Let me see if I've got this right. You want me to go into that room with all those kids and fill their every waking moment with a love for learning."
"Not only that, I'm to instill a sense of pride in their ethnicity, behaviorally modify disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse and T-shirt messages."
"I am to fight the war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, check their backpacks for guns and raise their self-esteem. I'm to teach them patriotism, good citizenship, sportsmanship, and fair play, how and where to register to vote, how to balance checkbook and how to apply for a job."
"I am to check their heads occasionally for lice, maintain a safe environment, recognize signs of potential anti-social behavior, offer advice, write letters of recommendation for student employment and scholarships, encourage respect for the cultural diversity of others and, oh yeah, always make sure that I give the girls in my class 50 percent of my attention."
"I'm required by my contract to be working on my own time summer and evenings at my own expense toward advance certification and a master's degree; and after school, I am to attend committee and faculty meetings and participate in staff development training to maintain my employment status."
"I am to be a paragon of virtue larger than life, such that my very presence will awe my students into being obedient and respectful of authority. I am to pledge allegiance to supporting family values, a return to the basics, and to my current administration. I am to incorporate technology into the learning, and monitor all Web sites while providing a personal relationship with each student."
"I am to decide who might be potentially dangerous and/or liable to commit crimes in school or who is possibly being abused, and I can be sent to jail for not mentioning these suspicions."
"I am to make sure all students pass the state and federally mandated testing and all classes, whether or not they attend school on a regular basis or complete any of the work assigned. Plus, I am expected to make sure that all of the students with handicaps are guaranteed a free and equal education, regardless of their mental or physical handicap."
"I am to communicate frequently with each student's parent by letter, phone, newsletter and grade card. I'm to do all of this with just a piece of chalk, a computer, a few books, a bulletin board, a 45 minute more-or-less plan time and a big smile, all on a starting salary that qualifies my family for food stamps in many states."
"And you want me to do all of this and expect me not to pray?"
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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.
One simple example; in this city as part of the treatment process the tap water passes through six feet of sand. Many people won't drink this water until they've passed it through a filter of a couple of inches of small stones, then somehow it is safer. For some reason "they" (technical or qualifed medical people of any type) can't be trusted to provide safe water (or medicine or whatever) "for the children". A survey of bottled water in Australia a few years ago found surprising amounts of biological material, far more than you would find in any town with an adequate water supply.
A more divisive example; the debate over genetic modification of crops - it is assumed by many that they can be geneticly modified by eating these crops. Any technical argument for or against is ignored in favour of the emotive argument, fed by moralistic disater movies that tell us "Don't mess with mother nature." The ironic thing is that the people who will rush out to trample a crop that may be a secretly modified test crop eat "natural" vegetables, grown indoors to keep the insects off, and grown hydroponically in a cocktail of chemical fertilizers, because somehow that is trendier than growing them in the ground and using less fertilizer. This perception has scuttled projects like one to produce vaccines from geneticly engineered bananas. Somehow, growing your medicine is less desirable than the enormous number of pharmacuetical plants that would be required to match what you do with such a crop. Being able to breed food crops have a high yeild and require less nutrients is also a good thing. Many will argue that these crops will never get to the nations that need them, but that's a way to feel better about opposing something that could help millions.
A lot of the "folklore" that people believe is of very recent origin. My grandmother was in her thirties before the term "Ley Line" was thought of, and that was used to describe the sites of old road. The zinc=virility thing comes from the story of Cassanova (not the most reliable of info!) eating lots of oysters. Oysters are filter feeders and pick up a lot of heavy metals such as zinc in areas where mining and industry puts it in the water. Therfore, with a dab of fiction and a stroke of sympathetic magic, zinc=virility. Zinc is important for other reasons, but it comes in every green plant.
Herbs: Many are useful and have been known about for some time, but a lot of people believe (by the magical law of sympathy perhaps?) that all herbs are good, and many are superior to medical technology. I suppose that I'm lucky that I know that there is a lot of flora that will kill things that try to eat it, or sting and scratch things that get close to it. Natural != good. Strychnine is natural.
This is only a general rule and of course varies tremendously in individuals, but I have seen it borne out well during the fifteen years I've been thinking about it. Science and engineering types are well aware of literature, art, music. Many work consciously to improve their appreciation of same. But very few of my English Lit friends read Scientific American, much less Q.E.D.. Their eyes glaze over at even the most elementary science or technical discussion.
Look at it this way: When I was in college, as a physics major, I had to take
Note that the school differentiate among philosophy, social science, and humanities. But for non-tech majors, all of physics, chemistry, biology, mech engineering, chem engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering, computer science, continuous mathematics, and discrete mathematics were lumped together as the undifferentiated blob "math/sci". And fuzzies only had to take a total of two math/sci courses.
Techies are more well-rounded because the current system forces them to be. And I like it. Don't compromise the techies; force the fuzzies to the same depth and breadth in the sciences as we were expected to have in the humanities.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Fifth, This whole separation of church and state thing. NEVER was today's situation meant to happen and our founding fathers are rolling over in thier graves. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for letting it come to this point. If you dig around, and find statistics, You will find that most of the bad features of America started right when God was removed from schools. Crime rate, Abortion, Murder, Premarital sex, The inability of the average person to keep their promises on anything. Think about it. The reason is so simple. Nobody feels like they are responsible to anyone, not even God.
Which leads us to Six. What is being taught in schools is so terribly inacurate. The driving force for most of early American history is the belief in God. Telling the American story without mentioning God is like trying to explain how a nuclear reactor works without explaining what fission is. "Oh well these rod thingies get hot and- Why? Well they just do. Trust me, I work for the govornment."
Speaking as someone who is rather fond of "This whole separation of church and state thing", I disagree. First, some of us are not Christians. Does this mean our children should be forced to learn your religion? Or perhaps "special shcools" are in order? Maybe they should just shuffle their feet and look vaguely uncomfortable everytime someone mentions religion. Heh, I was a teacher for a year. Do Wiccan teachers get to lead the children in Sabbats and Esabbats, or do only Christian teachers get to provide religous guidence to children? Public schools get paid for out of public money, and if they expouse your religious views over mine, they are creating a sitution of favoritism. Certainly you have the right (which you excercised) to teach your children your own views in your own way, but critisising the public system for trying to be as fair as possible is un reasonable. Imagine you lived in Salt Lake City where the majority of the population is Mormon. Would you want "God" to be in the schools there? Someone else's God? (I'm not knocking Mormons here, just using that as an example, since there are relativly few places in this country where "standard" Protesant Christian views are not dominant.)
As to your statement about about the the relationship of relgion to history, and the founding fathers.. I have to both agree and disagree with you. First, you are right that the history of this nation cannot be taught without mentioning God. Yes, here I am talking about the Christian God, his preceived will has been a dominatin force in outr nation's history. One point I disagree on is your implication that this has always, or even often, been a good thing. Christian sentiment in this country has been responsible for amonst other things in our history: Prohibition, the Red Scare, the Salem Witch Trials (No, I am not a rabid Wiccan who thinks that Witch trial were either common or even successful in US History, but Salem was a stand out), Slavery (Yes it was also important in abolitionist circles, I'll get to that), the near eradication of the native population of this contient, and more than one war. On the other hand it has also been responsible for the progressive movement (Which had its good and bad points, but was generally positive), abolitionism, recent movements toward Civil Rights for various respressed people, and various antiwar movements. Hardly a perfect record. I might also add that this country is far less violent than it typically has been in it's history, and you are attempting to compare today's modern "degeneration" to the imagined perfections of the late forties and the fifties. Even if they had been as beautiful as pop culture portrays them, they were an aberation in American history. And I rather doubt that too many black southerners who were alive then would pain the picture that Ozy and Harriet did.
As to the founding fathers, some 25% of the them were probably Deists, who really didn't have much to sasy on the subject of religion in the first place. As a rule, whenever people bring up the "intent" of the founding fathers, early Americanists kinda laugh. The truth is that only a small fraction of them left enough info about themselves to really get an idea what their "intent" was, and the of those that did, much of it is contradictory. The famous Jeffersonian "All men are created equal" from a slave owner is just one example. Most writings of his indicate that Jefferson KNEW slavery was wrong, but could not see a reasonable way out. The founding fathers were men of great courage certainly, but still, alas, human, and full of contradiction. While some may be turning over in their graves from the removal of Christianity from public schools, most are probably resting as well as their own deeds will allow them.
Why yes, I do have a BA in history that I hardly ever get to drag out.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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.