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SAS CEO Blasts Old-School Schooling
theodp writes "What does SAS CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight have in common with 47% of high school dropouts? A belief that school is boring. Marking the 50th anniversary of Sputnik with a call for renewed emphasis on science and technology in America's schools, Goodnight finds today's kids ill-served by old-school schooling: 'Today's generation of kids is the most technology savvy group that this country has ever produced. They are born with an iPod in one hand and a cell phone in another. They're text messaging, e-mailing, instant messaging. They're on MySpace, YouTube & Google. They've got Nintendo Wiis, Game Boys, PlayStations. Their world is one of total interactivity. They're in constant communication with each other, but when they go to school, they are told to leave those 'toys' at home. They're not to be used in school. Instead, the system continues teaching as if these kids belong to the last century, by standing in front of a blackboard.'"
Just because some kid has an ipod and a cellphone doesn't mean they're a genius when it comes to technology. An ipod is easy enough for an idiot to use, it's not a badge of honor to be able to use one.
Standing in front of a blackboard and addressing the students orally is an excellent method of education.
And interactive, for that matter.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In the olden days, would you have let them bring cribbage boards and cards into the classroom? Get a grip. They're fancier toys, but still toys.
we will end no whine before its time
The people who engineered the Sputnik and the other later entries into the "space race" were all probably educated by these so called "old school" methods.
I work with a lot of university students who are extremely conversant with the tech-goodies referenced here. I find that a high level of comfort with finely-tuned consumer devices does not translate at all to things that require some effort, ranging from FTP programs to even similar items, like a DV cam.
To show them how to use these things, I use a procedure remarkably similar to the one being derided. It generally works.
No surprise school is boring; the rise of social conservatives have ensured that everything that made any subject interesting have been scrubbed from the curriculum. Can't teach about sex; have to force a religious minority's views that sexual knowledge leads to lunchroom orgies. Can't teach evolution; churches might write angry letters! Can't teach history from any kind of personal viewpoint, and we certainly can't dwell on stories of heroism and conflict; we might offend the other side or give the impression that violence is ok.
Given how little of a student's time is actually engaged in any learning of any subject, I'm hard-pressed to even remember what I spent 6 years (7th-12th) doing, exactly. (Of course, it was somewhat rich when, after my Knowledge Bowl team came from behind to win our school's first state championship in anything in a decade, the teachers lined up to pat themselves on the back, as though we had used anything they had taught us.)
I'm not sure that school's mission has ever been to teach. I think the purpose is to act as a warehouse for children, lest they learn about the world around them too soon for the grown-ups to handle. It's abundantly obvious that the thick-necked goons that run those places see them, fundamentally, as prisons, and themselves as wardens.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Part --- not all, but part --- of the reason for more kids sucking in school is that when they go home, they've got all these gadgets that put them on a continuous reinforcement schedule. They get IMMEDIATE reinforcement on every click of the mouse, every push of a button, every touch of the stylus.
It's been a while since I took Ed Psych, so I can't use too many more big behavior-analysis words, but when you saturate children with immediate reinforcement and then drop them into a classroom, it's pretty obvious that a good percentage of them will become zombie children. Human teachers just can't provide the reinforcement schedule that they've become accustomed to.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
I have a six-year-old in second grade and a four-year-old in kindergarten. The teachers are using the same boring techniques that didn't work when I was in school and are boring the crap out of my second grader. He's already turned off by learning every monday through friday and I have to reinvigorate him on the weekend with at-home projects.
It is unfortunate that the teaching system (of which my wife is a part) is stuck in a 19th century methodology of teaching the masses to act in unison. It is as if they're preparing these kids for the rote factory jobs of yesterday instead of the knowledge-critical jobs of today.
I've yet to find one instance in my work (IT manager over about 60 people in a large government agency with roughly 60 servers, 1,500 staff members and 18TB of data online) where I had to fill out a scantron form or decide which option was best - a, b, c, d, or all of the above.
As it is, I'm on the school site council, PTA and am constantly talking to the administration in my sons' school district. They just don't seem to want to 'get it.'
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
The problem with schooling is that it's not "old-school" schooling. We just cater to the lowest common denominators who aren't interested in schooling which just makes it boring for those who are interested. I count myself lucky that my father instilled a great sense of curiosity in me at a young age. Yes I have an Xbox 360, gaming PC, iPod, cell phone, and all of that stuff, but as much as I like being entertained I also love learning. I have a deep interest in astrophysics, math, electrical engineering, computer science, and organic chemistry just to name a few.
Kids aren't interested these days because no one is showing them why they should be interested. All the kids see is their parents consuming mass amounts of entertainment, no wonder they choose their Playstation 3 over their algebra homework.
OK, it's a generalization, just like his generalization. I hate the notion that "technology savvy" means "knows how to operate a user interface designed to be easy to operate". Yes, I'm an old fart (38), and grumpy. Regardless, my 4-year-old is proficient with a web browser. He is by no means tech savvy, and he learns more about real technology by interacting with a tricycle or bionicles than he does by playing some Flash game.
That said, I agree school sucks. It sucked when I was in school ("good" public schools in the 70's & 80's) and I hear it sucks worse now. I don't particularly see what text messaging can do to improve on the suckiness.
It's not to educate you, it's to keep you in line.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
And? Does anyone really think the lack of cell-phones in the classroom is the problem holding American education back?
I used to teach in Japan (by standing in front of a blackboard, an actual blackboard, with chalk and everything). We told our students to leave their cell-phones at home, too.
Clearly, Japan's education system should be as bad as America's, given these criteria.
Don't put advice in your sig.
I certainly didn't like high school, but I don't remember being inflicted by boredom as much as frustration and annoyance. I never really understood why so many people called school "boring" until I started my first ever job teaching last year. I taught Arabic at a popular university in California, mostly to freshman and sophomores. Even in that rarefied atmosphere of over-achievers volunteering for a tough course, the difference between the top students and the bottom students (we were supposed to say they had "less capacity", as though they were hard drives) was vast indeed. So the problem wasn't teaching in and of itself, although that is a hard job and my hat goes off to people who actually make a career of it. No, the trouble for me was trying to teach to a bell curve of ability.
If I left no student behind and pitched to the slower students, then I would have completely alienated the average and gifted ones. If I pitched to the gifted ones, then 80% of the class would have felt left out. If I drove down the middle of the fairway, then both ends of the curve would be, well, bored.
So when I read this SAS guy's comment about how advanced these students are these days, with their MySpace and iPods and cell phones, I don't buy into the connection between their "cyber-lifestyle" and their educational ennui. I think a typical classroom with typical chalk and a typical board can be plenty stimulating in whatever topic, provided it's tuned to the students' ability levels. But if you are going to insist that everyone in the class is equally able to absorb the material just because they all somehow ended up in the same room together, then you are probably going to have a chunk of students tune out because they're too far behind, and a chunk tune out because they're too far ahead. It would not surprise me if those two groups together would add up to about 47%.
Think about what you know, and how much of it you got in school.
One of the biggest problems with schools in the USA is that they do not reward learning, they reward docility.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
... though not what he thinks.
He outlined the problem with the *kids*, NOT the problem with schools. Perhaps if the kids didn't have access to all those toys they'd have an attention span beyond that of a chronically depressed lemming and actually be able to learn something while in class.
I wonder if he has ever taught a class.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Education is not just intellectual, it's social too (some would say spiritual also).
Okay, I learned Math and English and Chemistry and even Home Economics, but I also learned teamwork, leadership, negotiation, how to surf, a bunch of good jokes, how to make out with a girl, etc. Those are skills you can't easily pursue on your own...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I'm an freshman at MIT, taking a physics course (8.01 classical mechanics) that is supposed to use technology to the fullest: radio frequency response cards, computer for every third person, full integration with experiments, video feeds from the professor's desk to screens all around the room, online extra homework assignments, etc, but undergrads pretty much all agree that IT SUCKS. Interaction is far lower, the professors are tempted to stuff absurd numbers of meaningless assignments into the syllabus since they no longer need to grade them by hand, and the end result is that learning physics has become a lot harder than it needs to be. A lot of my friends have moved up to 8.012, not because it is a harder class, but because they have -normal- lecture and recitation sessions, which makes all the difference. We may like flashy technology a lot, but right now it isn't an improvement over what we have. The 'blackboard' style of teaching goes back 2000+ years for a reason.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
It's not exactly PC to point it out but the average person from South Eastern country like Vietnam is light years ahead intellectually compared to the average Pakistani. Or for that matter the average American or English person.
And it's not racial at all - I think Indians are quite similar ethnically to Pakistanis, it's just that they have a culture which is capable of teaching maths and the Pakistanis don't. Americans are somewhere in between Vietnam and Pakistan.
And before people start to get all nationalistic and defensive about it, I said average as in Johnny Sixpack jock types in America and Madrassah fodder in Pakistan, not the 0.5% of the population who likes math and posts on slashdot. The thing SE Asian countries do well is to get average people to learn maths, mostly by old fashioned blackboard lessons a punishing curriculum and exams you can actually fail. America and Britain have dumbed things down to increase the pass rate and because telling people they're failures is a bit fascist, and Pakistan education is patchy and dominated by a poisonous religion.
In fact if you were looking at things from a cynical point of view, the War on Terror is a handy way to keep the people too stupid to pass Calculus 101 busy from both Pakistan and America.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Let'em use punch cards and only one hour of computer time each week (Saturday night, 2 am to 3 am) for a month. That'll teach'em.
And now get off my lawn.
=BAD
Students should have the leading role on their own learning process. Instead people still spend most of their university time taking notes as there were no computers, no photocopiers.
Put all the information online, let students make questions, update and repeat until any normal student can understand everything on their own. Let students learn at their own pace, dont drag them to class as listeners. Teachers should be just helpers, an accessory on our education.
I can still remember the moment that may have destroyed my aspiration to become a programmer.
I was in 3rd grade and lucky enough to go to a private school where they actually had a computer. Sure, it wasn't much, but that little Texas Instruments TI-99 was a powerful tool in its day. My family had a TI at home and I was always fiddling with it. I would endlessly type lines of code that I couldn't even save because we didn't have a floppy drive.
Anyways, one day during our designated free time, a classmate and I were using the computer. I was showing him some of the basic commands I had learned, PRINT, CALL COLOR, CALL SOUND, etc. I accidentally typed too many zeros or something and a CALL SOUND command resulted in an angry-sounding low pitched noise from the console.
The teacher immediately came over and scolded me for "breaking the computer." I remember how guilty she made me feel for making use of an skill I had learned. She didn't even bother asking me what I was doing or what had happened. She just turned the computer off and made me feel ashamed.
OK, 20 years ago many teachers didn't understand technology. I would hope that this ignorance has subsided, but I'm doubtful that even today, a student wouldn't still be discouraged from demonstrating any advanced knowledge or programming skills. A stigma still exists regarding technology in the classroom.
Technology can be a great learning tool. But just as the article says, students are ill-served by the same old-fashioned mindset that once discouraged me from typing code into a TI-99.
I certainly agree that school can be quite uninteresting at times; this was the case when I was young, and I'm sure that it's still the case now. It was always great to have a teacher that brought a subject to life and got us enthusiastic about learning, but that wasn't particularly common, at least in my case.
One valuable skill, however, that I feel that I learned from my more boring teachers was the ability to pay attention and stay focused, even in the face of serious tedium. I think that, due to the hyperactivity inherent in our technology and society these days, this is a skill that will be sorely lacking in the current young generation. Hell, I can see a deterioration of this in myself; I'm certainly not as good at concentrating at dull tasks as I was back in the 80s and 90s, and I think it's partially because I'm surrounded by highly rewarding outlets that provide instantaneous positive stimuli. Back in the day, if I wanted to play a game on my C64, I had to wait approximately one second per block for a program to load; thus, a game took in the ballpark of a minute in order to get from disk into memory. Now, if my web browser takes more than two seconds to start, I'm wondering what's wrong and feeling slightly antsy.
Look to entertainment for an even better example. Go ahead and download or rent some of your favourite, more exciting shows or movies from the 80s. They don't seem so exciting and stimulating in retrospect, do they? Things have changed and entertainment and technology are much, much more engrossing and instantaneously satisfying than they used to be. This is good on some levels, and bad on others. I have friends in their early 20s who are clearly very affected by this: if anyone attempts to, say, engage them in conversation and tell them a story that lasts more than a minute, you can see that they're really struggling to pay attention. Some of them will even pull out their cell phones and start "multi-tasking".
I'm of the opinion that this high need for stimulation is almost like an addiction and probably not healthy. Again, a lot of these same early 20 year olds that I know struggle with things like ADD and anxiety disorders: they always seem keyed up and twitchy, for lack of a better word.
So, at least in school these kids are forced to learn to pay attention, which is a highly undervalued life skill, IMO. Your boss, later on in life, is not going to go out of his way to make sure that every aspect of your job is delightfully interesting and engrossing, nor should he or she be expected to. You're going to have to sit through duller than dishwater meetings and put up with a lot of really boring grunt work on occasion; someone has to do it and I'm sure most people here can attest to the fact that it's unavoidable at times (and in many cases, quite frequently). Why should schools be any different and struggle to make every aspect of education stimulating?
Prior to iPods, mobile phones, Facebook, etc. etc., were the youth of the day just standing around bored with their hands in their pockets any more than they do today?
When I was a teenager 25-30 years ago, I read a lot, built models, did a lot of home electronics, a bit of woodwork and started programming on some of the first home computer systems - and I'd argue that I'm more technically savvy than most of the youngsters today because I learnt to build stuff from scratch so much, whether software, some wooden shelves or an electronic gizmo.
An iPod is a portable music player like a Walkman was 15 years ago, Facebook is just an extension of writing and meeting pen-friends 20 or more years ago.
If anything the modern "have it all now" youngsters have lost such qualities as patience and long attention spans.
I did well at school because I DAMN WELL GOT SOME COMMON SENSE AND BUCKLED DOWN TO DOING SOME BLOODY WORK!!!!
Remind me - HOW MANY KIDS WITH DYSLEXIA AND ADHD WERE THERE 25 YEARS AGO???
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Actually I think it would be better to have an emphasis on expressive art with science and technology complimenting it. S&T is great for the mind, but it doesn't feed the soul.
A lesson is a lesson regardless of whether it's in front of a blackboard or on a netmeeting whiteboard. When will these people realize that it's the MESSAGE that counts more than the medium. Not every fucking kid needs a laptop, or their own personal PDA/etc. We got along just fine in the 80s/90s with a paper agenda book, blackboards, and textbooks.
Maybe if we expected our kids to take an interest in their own education, we wouldn't worry so much if precious wittle Johny is bored in class or not. The incentive should be to learn and explore knowledge. If the kids aren't fundamentally interested in learning, no amount of toys, gizmos, trickery, or whatnot will get them through a proper education.
I was hardly an ideal student. I was into my own things by time I was 14, I taught myself comp.sci and cryptography usually at the expense of regular high school subjects. Yet despite all that, i still managed to graduate from high school, go to college, grad from that, and then land a career in my field of choice.
High school dropouts are nothing more than anti-social lazy people who want instant gratification and think the world owes them everything. Oh school is boring. Well you know what, not every subject in life is going to be the most exciting thing in the world. But you go through it just the same because the more rounded your education the more versatile and interesting you become. I sure as fuck wasn't that into english lit, but I still took the courses just the same, and participated as best as I could.
In short, stop crying and whining, nobody owes you jack squat, and if you stop making excuses like "we need laptops and powerpoint!" you'd actually realize that the problems are mostly with the students, not the system.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Just to clarify, but the "tests" that so many people like to refer to didn't actually happen in the way that many people think they did. People are referring to a letter that was published in New Scientist making reference to the phenomenon. Some of the claims made in the portion of text that circulated around the Internet are clearly false; see this page for more information (he has some examples of sentences that are "scrambled" according to that rule, but are mostly unreadable).
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Dr. Goodnight was a statistics professor at NCSU before he started SAS. Yeah, he's taught a class.
Correction...
One of the biggest problems with public schools in the USA is that they do not reward learning, they reward docility.
Private schools are different.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Back in the day when only one parent worked out of the home, the other parent generally spent an equal amount of hours working in the home. (Cooking, cleaning, etc...) They had no, or very little, time for 'quality time'."
But that comment is just silly.
There is nothing about cooking, cleaning, housework in general that excludes it from ALSO being quality time.
Your assertion that it was one or the other shows that you really have no clue what you're talking about.
You don't think learning to bake with mom was quality time for little Susie?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
There are far too many problems to list with general education systems in the United States (many of them mentioned):
1) The insistance that everyone should be good at everything at a level (what they call General Education). I entered highschool, went through a year of cake bread and butter classes, then got transferred (because my parents moved) and the new school wanted me to be a freshman because I didn't have any of their bread and butter classes. They wanted to basically void out my entire first year of highschool because their general education requirements didn't match my old school's general education requirements. It was ridiculous - only after fighting the school board for the entire summer was I allowed to take Sophmore classes.
2) Lowest-Common-Denominator Issues: If you're a smart kid - school is boring. Not because you're smart, but because you have to sit through the same boring bullshit 6 times because some idiot didn't understand it. Again I use the example of highschool. In algebra we were working with variables and fractions and what not, and someone did not understand for the life of them how (4/5)*x=1, x therefore (5/4). I had to listen to it for 15 minutes before he and the teacher gave up. By then I was already hazily asleep - and get sent to the office for it. For what? Being bored by stupidity? Guilty as charged.
3) Non-choice of classes: In highschool (and now I realize college - almost graduated!) that there is practically no choice when it comes to classes. In highschool it becomes: you have to take x, y, and z - even if you don't want to. Then you can put other classes in there to fill out your schedule and do what you want. In the course of 4 years of highschool there were only 4 classes I wanted to take (Photography, AP Biology, Computer Programming, and AP Government). AP Bio and AP Gov are full year (2 semester) classes, but Computer Programming and Photography were 1 semester classes. In a semester there are 9 periods - 1 set aside for lunch. That means in a year there are 16 periods, and in a highschool period of 4 years there are 64 possible classes to take. I got to chose 6 out of 64 of my classes. Does that sound right? In college, you are required to take even MORE general education - classes that aren't your major but are designed to let you "spread your wings" so to speak. I don't want to spread, I want to focus on the things I know I can do - Mathematics and Computer Science namely. Arg!
4) Teachers. Some (most?) teachers do not want to be there teaching little brats all day long. Believe it or not, it shows. We notice, and if you don't want to be there then I don't want to be there. The best teachers are the ones who work in that field and have a zeal for the topic. Some of the most boring sounding classes I've had, Conservation of Natural Resources, Linear Algebra, and Graph Theory to name a few, have had awesome professors that brough the topic to life and made me WANT to learn it. That makes all the difference.
5) Restrictive policies: Remember the fun stuff from highschool? Sex Ed? History (the good history, where they tell you about specific fights/conflicts in a war and gave you real down-to-earth, person-to-person point of view)... Even *gasp* Phys Ed. All the fun things in these classes are gone because we're worried about offending a group, or pissing off the god-freaks, or making the out-of-shape people work out. The most disappointing part of highschool was finding out that the history course I wanted to take was removed and that they assigned me to a Foreign Language class instead of another history class. Not even related in the least.
6) Mandatory teaching of foreign languages: I don't believe these are necessary. I don't plan on going to France or Spain, or any other foreign country. Except maybe Canada or the Caribbean, but those don't count. Making me take 2 years of a foreign language because "it's a changing trend" in US culture just pisses me off. Instead of making ME learn Spanish, why don't we make THEM learn ENGLISH. Not a difficult concept there.
Ugh.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
We should force the Federal Government OUT of our public school system entirely. Get rid of ALL Federal mandates, gut the Department of Education, and distribute previously allocated funds(and money saved by removal of worthless bureaucrats) equitably among the states.
Washington DC is a fantasy land where people far removed from the trenches of the public education system dream up idiotic(if well-intentioned) laws like NCLB and then force it on our schools without adequate funding. They are, in effect, controlling even more of our education dollars by forcing schools to waste resources to comply with their ridiculous mandates(under threat of removing ALL funding of course).
The teachers, parents, and interested people from the LOCAL community(e.g. school board members) should be the ones in control of the funding and policies of the public school system(perhaps with some limited participation from the states). The parents(most of them) and teachers have the strongest interest in the quality of education the kids are receiving, AND they are in the best position to implement meaningful and beneficial change because they are completely in touch with the day to day realities of their school system. They can certainly do better than a "one size fits all" Federal education law.
Go read the historical reasons why school really sucks
That book explains everything you need to know about the education system, why it is so fucked and yes, why it is boring, what it really is supposed to do and how it is doing Just That Real Well.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
COmplaining aboutmodern education hasnt changed in 2400 years. Reminds of the passage from Plato's Phadreus dialog condemning the invention of writing. The speaker claimed people would use their memory less and it would become much weaker. Homer's epics are pre-writing. Lore-masters would memorize them - tens of thousands of lines. In the original greek they have a beat and rhyme fairly similar to modern rap, to assist memorization.
Reading that quote about the kids and their fancy gadgets all I could think about was my grandparents being frustrated with their cable remote and asking me to show them how to use their cell phones. It also reminded me of a class I had in elementary school with the somewhat vague title "Computer Class". I'm not totally sure what this class was meant to teach, but two days a week we'd march our butts down to the computer room (which, mind you, had one computer in it) and play "educational" games on an Apple IIe, or watch our teacher do something with Logo involving a "turtle". The most I got out of that class was a tremendous ability to find Carmen Sandiego.
Around middle school an uncle of mine who works in IT gave me his old 286, some manuals, and some software, and turned me loose. I learned more about computers by repeatedly breaking and fixing that thing than I ever did in elementary school.
What's my point? I guess I've got two, really. The first point is that a computer is just a tool. School administrators seem to think along the same lines as hillbillys, luddites, or the old and uninformed; to be "good at computers" in some vague and shadowy way means that one is technologically savvy, possesses sharp analytical skills, and is a good problem-solver. By putting computers in schools they hope to make kids technologically skilled through some sort of sympathetic magic, much in the same way shamanic belief systems might make amulets of bear teeth to confer that strength to the wearer. The idea that because kids can play video games and text message each other they can propel the nation in to technological advancement is like saying that anyone who can drive a car should be equally good a designing and building one.
The second point I would make is that, while I wasn't thrilled with school when I was a student and I would like to see a more free-form system of education, the point of school is not primarily academic learning. School teaches you to work within an institution. Anyone can crack a book open or mess around with an engine. Formal education teaches you how to interact with a social structure similar to what one would find in most workplaces. (Similar, mind you, not identical.) That's not a worthless skill. Our society is structure, there is authority, there are rules. Whether you want to change that or not, that's the game as it stands and you need to know how to work within it.
The third and final point I would make, although probably better made by other posts, is that this guy is pointing out the problem with students, not schools. Speaking as a knee-jerk hedonist who acts to satisfy my every whim as they occur, it's not necessarily a good thing that an 8 year old can whip out a phone and text his friends in the middle of class, or that he can pull out a PSP and watch a movie or play a video game because geometry is boring. And, seriously, as intellectually curious as I am, if I got to choose my classes in school I would be utterly incapable of even the most basic arithmetic today. Sometimes, just sometimes, it's a good thing that someone who's priorities including eating as much cookies and cream ice cream as possible and watching Duck Tales is not calling the shots with his academic future. And before anyone starts in I know that there are 6 year olds who are super focused and mature for their age who might very well be able to make responsible decisions as to their education, I'm just making the point that, when you've lived fewer years than the lifespan of some pets you may not have the perspective to make good decisions. So maybe having someone who is trained in their academic field and in the skill of education in charge might not be a bad thing? Maybe, in this case, tradition is tradition for a reason?
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Dr. Goodnight is also the de-facto CEO of Cary, NC, a well-to-do suburb of Raleigh. He attempts to rule the place with a velvet-clad iron fist, much like David Packard tries to dictate terms to Palo Alto, CA. As a result, all the new development in Cary (and there is a lot of it) tends to resemble the set of either "The Stepford Wives" or "The Truman Show". (I know, I lived there for 13 years.) Thus Dr. Jim has the occasional delusion of God-like powers within the town limits.
To his credit, he also started Cary Academy, a boarding school with a very intense math and science curriculum. (I think it's K-12, not sure, but I do know that SAS employees get a break on the tuition.) But I'm convinced his insights are marred by the bias of the student population he's observed there: motivated, intelligent kids with affluent parents.
He only needs to venture a few miles west to Granville County, NC to see what the rest of the student population looks like: neglectful parents who have never known the value of an education, and who are barely scraping by in construction or crappy service jobs. (I know someone who taught there. If you ever want to know where the left-hand side of the bell curve lives, go to Granville.) I don't think any upgrade of classroom tech will transform the young lives there.
So Jim, if you read Slashdot, please heed my advice, and pull your head out of your academy.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
However, as most seasoned IT people have figured out, 90% of the public user realm will never know the real stuff you do to make their world better. However they will think you an IT genius if you can show them how to color code their excel spreadsheet. Which is, I think how many IT people got their jobs in the first place...."Woah, a pie chart???!? You must be able to secure our webserver, manage our devs, and negotiate 6 figure budgets, thats the same!"
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
"My space users are also building websites."
Sure they are, just like interior decorators are building houses.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Are, um, checkered, to say the least...
Let's remember, that there were at least three competing philosophies/schools of thought on the purpose of universal compulsory education.
First, there's the "Jeffersonian" idea that a well educated citizenry is essential to the proper functioning of a democracy.
Then there's the school of thought that feels education should be quite deliberately used for social control, that is, to keep the masses in line.
And then there's the idea that schools ought to produce people with marketable job skills that will keep them employed.
The problem is, these are kind of in opposition to each other. The 2nd and 3rd ones might work well together, but they're diametrically opposed to the Jeffersonian ideal. I mean, which is it? Either you want happy obedient worker-bees or you want critical thinkers who will challenge the status quo.
So, if education policy seems to be direction-less, it's because there is no clear consensus on the purpose of compulsory public education.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".