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How Do You Fix Education?
TaeKwonDood writes "Carl Wieman is the 2001 Nobel Prize winner in Physics but what he cares most about is fixing science education. The real issue is, can someone who went through 20 years of science education as a student, lived his life in academia since then and even got a Nobel prize get a fair shake from bureaucrats who like education the way it is — flawed and therefore always needing more money?"
Get the parents more involved. For kids, school should be akin to their 9-5 job. In order to excel they need to put the time in at home, and the only people that can help instill that discipline are the parents.
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How can education be fixed when their is a war on critical thinking? Its better for those in power to rule by sound bites, innuendos, and accusations that appear credible enough to be believed.
Ron Paul 2008
Education was fixed with the no child left behind act.
Becuase to fix education is to admit that some kids are either smarter or work harder than others. Some are going to be left behind, and others will go on and learn to their full potential, but law makers can't tell that to parents. My mother has taught for about 30 years, and in her words, the problem is almost never the students, it's the parents.
A US$3,000.00 per student/per year federal voucher will fix education very quickly.
ever truly fix education?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
The standardized testing needs to go.
And the school need more funding as well as Health care for all kids some don't have any and then they get to sick to go to school.
in a capitalist society. The allure of grant money will always overcome any other extrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivation cannot simply be fixed, it is a symptom of society at large.
Simply put, policy change won't fix the issue.
"from bureaucrats who like education the way it is ".. really? do they? I have yet to meet one that does. However there seems to be a lot of argueing going on about what paperwork needs to be filed to get it changed, how that will documented, judged and administrated. Seriously one of the first things that needs to be done is to pay teachers a living wage so we can attract better talent to change the way the teaching is done. Don't get me wrong there are some GREAT teachers out there, who god bless them manage to hang in there despite everything. But take a look at the budget someday and ask yourself if schools are really getting a fair shake. You can change anything you want but unless teachers can be paid competative wages with other avenues they could take their talents to are our kids getting the best?
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
Look it up if you have to. Failing that, how about some sort of cost-benefit analysis of the time spent in yr average public school (hint: most ppl I know agree that over 2/3 of school time is wasted.)
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Unfortunately, the only real answer is home schooling and DIY.
I have real chemistry sets, physics toys, bio lab instructables, legos for prototype construction, Linux for software devel, PIC set for embedded work, and much more.
SciAm back in the day had a build-yourself bubble chamber and linear accelerator, and it worked. Boys Life, the boy scouting magazine, back in the day had instructions how to build your own fireworks including colors and shaping of charge.
When it comes down to it, we have gotten afraid to do anything because of "DANGER". That includes teaching. Anyways, what real criterion are required to really teach someone? If we look at the ancient Greeks, it was the motivation of the learner and not of a forced teaching.
John Taylor Gatto has a book about this very topic. Go look it up on Google.
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FIRST physics,
THEN chemistry,
THEN biology
Not the other way around just because it's in alphabetical order.
Technoli
get a fair shake from bureaucrats who like education the way it is -- flawed and therefore always needing more money?
I know I'll be in the minority here on slashdot for saying this, but society isn't divided into us (virtuous, intelligent, benevolent, and wise) and them (stupid, malicious, dishonest, and greedy). I think there are very few bureaucrats twirling their moustaches and gleefully chortling over the failures of the modern educational system. One of the symptoms of the failure of education is lack of critical thinking and objective reasoning, and one of the hallmarks of that is the kneejerk reaction that every bureaucrat is by nature evil and dishonest.
The Department of Education, back in 1964, released a mission statement which I quote of theirs is "to limit knowledge to prepare the student for factory labor."
Thereby, it is conclusive that any derivation from this mission statement, even though it's draconian perjorative is for a country to be independent of the foreign industries of neighboring states, would lead to a failed Education.
I see that the leading career paths in the institutions FORMERLY known for EDUCATION purposes are not Productive in terms of factory labor: the leading careers are in-fact oriented to a service without any material production.
I rest this case, that education does replace knowledge. High School never was a traditional school in that sense; as knowledge degraded, the last nationality of people once known as Amish; next to the native Indians on the continent have succumbed to ignorance to pledge their children to a debt of entry to the commercially-sanctioned corporations that have the illusion of "School" in their legal name yet provide no function of a school for knowledge other than that which was allowed by their hosting franchise to sponser the monopolised curriculum.
Maybe until education is removed from the public to be returned to the elective Statutes they are originally allowed, then we can work on Slashdot implementing a proper
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Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
> bureaucrats who like education the way it is â" flawed and
> therefore always needing more money?
It's even worse. To the bureaucrats, liberals and other enemies of civilization the government schools aren't broken, they are working exactly as they designed them.
Like socialism, our government schools are relics of the Industrial Revolution and the assumptions and thinking of that era. All 'right thinking people' of the period believed Socialism was the future. And the other major thing they believed was that the purpose of mandatory public education was social engineering, to remake the unruly free peoples of the civilizations engendered by the Enlightenment into docile worker bees fit to work long mind numbing hours in factories. Leader types (the ones making these policies) would, of course, continue sending their own children to elite academies to be taught how to be doers, thinkers, leaders.
Democrat delenda est
The easy answer is get rid of teachers' unions and make education for-profit.
The best and brightest don't teach for a number of reasons, but I say the primary reason is the shitty base pay (though the healthcare and pension should make up the difference).
Administrations are unable to cull the heard of weak teachers and are unable to reward the strongest because of the ridiculous power of the unions.
But for-profit education leads down the same path as for-profit health care in the US. No one wants that. Well, doctors and teachers do, bit patients and students don't.
Beauracracies have a terrible track record of treating their employees with dignity and respect such that unions become a practica
As is typical, our current reality is the result of a long, human history full of compromises and mistakes.
But don't let me stop the ivory tower, arm-chair analysis we all come to slashdot for.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
As badly as teachers are treated, you can't even get rid of the bad teachers until you can override the teacher's union. They don't want merit-based pay or any of that kind of thing because it means that teachers have to perform, rather than just stay in their job and get tenure. One of the downsides of unions, sadly. I'm not anti-union, but there ARE downsides to be aware of.
I think the best option would be to fund all schools first (rather than other things), rather like the investment people say, "pay yourself first" - fully fund the schools first, then worry about new parks, etc. When you have the schools properly funded, then you can go after the other problems. Otherwise, it'd like worry about the aerodynamics of the bad paint job on your car when the larger problem of a leaking fueltank goes unchecked.
And as the poster above mentioned, there is a war on critical thinking. This doesn't apply to the current education system because critical thinking isn't being taught in schools except in certain college courses (Intro to Logic should be a required course for all humans. In your first year of high school!). The memorization of facts and certain base reading and math ability are all that seems to found in modern education (in the U.S., anyway; I have no experience in the education systems of other countries). But without critical thinking, you're certainly not going to be able to fix the education system here, either.
The bureaucrats like things the way they are because it leaves things in a crisis mode that they benefit from. The solution is to break apart the government's de facto monopoly on education K-12 so that there is a competitive marketplace for education.
Academic surveys have shown time and again that the majority of the people who are drawn to education are the bottom of the barrel of college students. Most of them are education majors, and they consistently tend to score in the bottom 5 of all majors with SAT and GPA scores from their high schools. If you want to fix that, and get higher quality educators, you are going to have to allow the market to create the incentives needed to make people of that level of intellect and talent desired to go into this profession.
The problem is easily solvable; it's just the NEA in California bought an election to kill it. Break the monopoly of the public school system and give parents real choice in education and values.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
How Do You Fix Education?
Simple - Let people drop out after learning the absolute basic literacy and math skills required to use a cash register at McDonalds (sixth grade, perhaps), and allocate the "real" educational resources to those who will actually benefit from it.
And don't come crying about NCLB, the biggest line of "cripple the strong to make the weak feel better" bullshit to come along since FDR (yeah, nice touch of irony there, eh?)
I did fairly well in school - At least, as far as getting a real education goes. My grades sucked for the most part because I loathed school until the wonderful world of college. I can't help wondering, though, how much more I could have done if schools functioned more as a supportive healthy learning environment rather than as a form of institutionalized baby-sitting complete with a daily gauntlet of physical and emotional torment by our "peers".
(And no, I don't feel particularly bitter about it - But I will call a spade a spade, and our current education system quite simply sucks).
Then work our way down to G W Bush.
The world might have hope if idiots don't reach power.
Science might even have a chance too.
The fucking article is about college level education.
As long as the NEA and Dept of Education have power, education will never be fixed. They're happy with the status quo, and many parents are as well. We've been talking about educational reform since the 1980's, but it hasn't happened. The teachers' unions aren't willing to give up anything, and many parents are all for standards in the abstract, but not so much when their precious little Johnny gets a C.
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Education should blend with practice and profitability instead of being separated from them. Learning should merge into doing, sooner rather than later. What we do now is like keeping potentially brilliant workers who could be leading the way in at least some respects in a kind of prison. Bringing education into work can also help pay the way.
The question is not about a political slant concerning a broken education system. More money or less money is not going to solve the problem.
I don't see the problem with parents getting involved in schooling nor do I see the problem with course material. There is an issue with involved teachers and getting schools adequately staffed and class sizes more manageable. However, overall, I see the problem for sciences and maths and physics being application.
Students do not have the opportunities available to them to apply skills. We rarely hear of schooling problems in trade schools and uninvolved parents or lack of money for slow students,not picking up the material quickly enough. Why? Apprenticeships. The students often get jobs before they are even out of school and even then they are on a tiered level where they start out with little responsibility and are tied to a senior person. That senior person is a guide and mentor and helps the apprentice hone his/her skills and apply knowledge to form wisdom for the job they are doing.
Why are other disciplines any different? OK, we have a money problem. You know what? Start incentive programs with corporations looking for such people in their workforce. Give the company students on the cheap in return for sizable donations to keep the program afloat. Not only does the school get the needed money but the students get to apply the knowledge they spent hours, sometimes day, memorizing in class. When they apply it, they show much more retention than just reading a book, taking notes and memorizing vocabulary.
The biggest problem is uninterested students. Mainly because you get a guy with the personality of a wet pillow standing in front of class droning on and on about polynomials and complex circuit designs and they never even turn around from the chalkboard to see half the class walked out 15 minutes in to the lecture! Give a student a reason to bee interested. Show the student how what they are learning applies and how they will use it every day if they stick with it and go for a job in the market when they graduate. Best yet, give them a paycheck for it. Show them the value that good work has and give them the resources and opportunity to make a difference.
Don't tell me that politicians like it broken. Don't tell me that parents aren't involved. Don't tell me that the school is short on money. If anything those problems are caused by lazy people not willing to go the extra mile to make the needed difference. None of that controls what a kid lets sink into his/her head. Sure those things help with the program to better interest students and such but, if the student is fundamentally uninterested and is holding on to pie-in-the-sky ideals for their future in engineering then give them a glimpse of what their hard work will get them.
And before any old fart gets on here and spouts off about how they never worried about being interested, they just buckled down and did the work they knew they had to do, no matter how bored they were. Honestly, ask yourself a question. Did that REALLY benefit you learning like that? Did you REALLY get everything you needed or wanted to get out of lessons like that? Just because it was broken then doesn't mean it should stay broken now. If we can do better, damn it, we should be doing everything we can to make it better! The only way life gets better is if everybody works positive change instead of saying things like "My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the ways I likes it!".
Higher education is much more of an efficient, free market than other businesses: there is a lot of information about educational outcomes, and students and universities have a lot of information about each other, and there are a lot of different approaches being tried. If something improves education, it's already being tried, and if it works, other universities will adopt it.
Besides, there is no single way of "fixing" higher education: people, institutions, and fields are much too diverse.
Optimizing return on investment may be enough to do the job.
Very nicely constructed post to show how no one reads the articles.
"The real issue is, can someone who went through 20 years of science education as a student, lived his life in academia since then and even got a Nobel prize get a fair shake from bureaucrats who like education the way it is -- flawed and therefore always needing more money?"
No the real issue is could someone who went through 20 years of science education as a student, lived his life in academia since then and even got a Nobel prize pass an
1895 eighth grade test?
http://www.rense.com/general68/8th.htm
While we're at it.. read John Gatto's book: The Underground History of American Education
http://johntaylorgatto.com/
The people behind educatoin
For starters abolish/disband or otherwise un-empower the NEA that makes it next to impossible to fire bad teachers and reward and retain the good ones. No amount of curricular advancement/improvement/modernization or money dumped into school districts' coffers will ever have a significant impact on the quality of education if the teachers are poor quality and/or uncaring. The NEA, IMO, has done more to hinder education than any other cause.
And before anyone starts with "But teachers are underpaid and *need* the unions!" I'd like to point out that the NEA has been around for a few decades now, and teachers are still underpaid.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Leave children behind.
Problem solved.
1:Smaller class sizes!
2:Less memorization, more critical thinking and analysis.
3:Less passive listening and watching, more discussion and experiment (think Socarates).
None of these need tons of computers or facilities or whatever. What they do need are more teachers, and less burnout.
I believe it's spelled edumacation.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
Learning, of any kind, needs to be a life long passion or it won't be successful. That won't happen if kids are forced to learn stuff when they don't want to. Forcing kids to learn to read too early and you teach them that reading is a drag. My one son was self motivated to learn to read at age 5 and the other at age 9. Both are now avid readers, reading far more than the average school kid.
Science is all about hypothesizing and critical thinking: something that is severely lacking in society in general and is definitely missing in schools. Instead the kids are encouraged to just "get with the program", be politically correct and make the least work for the teachers.
My kids love to experiment with stuff. Experiments often don't work which triggers thinking and learning. School "science" experiments on the other hand are canned activities which are generally guaranteed to work with no thinking required. Where's the science in that?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I had the privilege of taking a quantum mechanics course from Carl Weiman 2 years ago while he was teaching at the University of Colorado. It was by far the best college course I've taken, he had the perfect mix of well versed lecturing with "clicker" quizzes throughout the class, homework that was appropriate for the material, and tests which rewarded understanding of the material and not memorization.
The best part really was that by the end of the course, he gave his lecture on Bose Einstein Condensate which he won the Nobel prize for, and all the students could understand what he was talking about from learning things throughout the semester, it was incredibly rewarding.
Compare that to my next physics courses which were basically applied calculus, except they left out the important part of what the **** any of it meant and how it applied to... anything really. His course overshadowed the rest of my physics courses and in the end, because of the huge disparity in teaching styles, made the rest of my studies quite grating and rather uninteresting.
I don't think it's ignorance necessarily, but I would say that we are a culture that celebrates mediocrity than anything else.
You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
1. Evaluation
Teachers have as much impact on the learning of their students as almost anything else, and we have never figured out how to evaluate and reward the great ones and fire the poor ones. Until we can do this, everything else is doomed.
2. Honesty.
The hardest thing in science is to teach the method, and not the dogma. A career scientist gets excited about a new discovery that upends everything they have believed true up to this point; it's an intellectually challenging and exciting time. The scientific method triumphs when a General Relativity or a Quantum Mechanics can completely change the basic beliefs of science in less than a generation. An honest recognition that much of (at least higher physical classes) is "According to current theory..." or "This is what we currently believe to be the truth" rather than "this is the way it is, has always been, and will always be..." would dispel much of the mystery and fear around the sciences. Physicists are human beings, struggling with frailties, foibles, superstitions, and much smaller brains than we believe to understand the workings of the universe.
3. Openness. The global warming debate is an example of the worst of science. Is the earth warming? Sure is.
Why is it warming? Answering this question has gotten so wrapped around the axle of political and religious pseudo-science that it's not clear when honest scholarship can begin again. Hands with hidden agendas have silenced scientists, have falsified basic data, and warped basic theory to try to get it to match observations, on both sides of the fence. When a scientist is afraid to stand and say "That's bullshit, and here's why", we have momentarily lost the method that has lead to the extraordinary scientific knowledge that we have today.
And the worms ate into his brain.
one of the hallmarks of that is the kneejerk reaction that every bureaucrat is by nature evil and dishonest.
I had a conversation with an insurance lobbyist on a flight to Boston a couple years ago. She has a lot of dealings with state and federal senators and congresscritters, so I asked her what were the things she discovered in her interactions with them that came as a surprise. Three of them were:
The first one is relevant here, but the last one has been on my mind since then. Slashpac, anyone?
1. Get rid of standardized tests. In an age where information is only a few clicks away we no longer need to focus on pure memorization.
2. Focus more on critical thinking and analysis. Again in an age with so much information it's important to be able to analyze and filter signal from noise.
3. No more grade levels. Allow students to learn and achieve at their own rate. In essence get rid of assembly line education and create individually driven education. No one is left behind or slowed down.
4. Add curriculum that focuses on financial literacy and responsibility.
As someone who came from a uneducated household, it is all about the parents.
If the parents aren't involved, the students will not work as hard as they could unless the parents are pushing and encouraging.
Me, I'm 10 years behind where I should be if my parents sat down and answered a few of my questions as a kid or directed me in a positive way.
There's obviously no short answer to this question, but this article from the Wall Street Journal presents a really interesting alternative to the American educational system, which is a mess that's I've written about extensively. Essentially, hours upon hours of homework followed by regular tests are not the answer. Allowing kids to have enough time to think for themselves would be a start.
The beauty of teaching math is that the results are very easy to measure. If all your students do much better than anyone else's students on standard tests and in competitions, you must be doing something right.
Unfortunately, when the bureaucracy finds someone doing an excellent job of teaching math, they bend over backward to make sure it doesn't spread. I have three examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante Jaime Escalante was so good they made a movie about him.
Closer to my home:
http://www.spiritofmath.com/about3a.html Charles Ledger was amazing. He was willing to share his method/strategy with anybody. The bureaucrats ignored him and pushed him out of the system.
http://jumpmath.org/about/mighton John Mighton has proved that any student can learn math. He's fighting an up-hill battle to get his materials and methods into the school system. Fortunately, he has lots of volunteers and many teachers and administrators have seen how well his method works. His program looks like it has legs.
IMHO, the problem is the system. The bureaucrats aren't rewarded when they nurture good teaching. Good teaching is a nuisance to them. They squish it whenever they find it.
As long as parents refuse any responsibility for the education, upbringing and actions of their child there's nothing that can be done. We're entering a brief educational dark ages where for the next couple of decades our schools will be putting out irresponsible "lawsuit babies" who will be unable to deal with anything that does not go as they expect. Parents, churches and the government want to strip education down to the most elementary, non-controversial topics possible so no one has to think, there will be no conflict and no need to learn how to deal with friction.
Within another ten years or so we will start to see the effects of this as the U.S. falls behind in every measurable standard of education and knowledge. Then perhaps there will be a change of heart as we head down to our inevitable second-world status.
From TFA: "The full use of the research on teaching and learning, particularly as implemented via modern IT [italics mine], can transform higher education, and allow it to do a far better job of meeting the higher education needs of a modern society."
Here comes the Carl Wiernan On-Line University!
I find Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education to contain the answers to a lot of what's wrong with kids. Teaching kids to rationalize their decision making so that they will grow up to make good choices is severely lacking in today's youth. Instead, they are turning into sensualists. Increasing the rational thinking in students will help increase their ability to learn science as well.
I think the biggest thing that can be done to "fix" education would be to make it the primary focus of schools! I'm all for extra curricular activities, but it seems that in many places in the US, those are treated as far, far, more important that actual learning. Sports is a great example of how the focus in schools has been taken off of education.
Another thing would be to stop trying to make everyone equal, and allow faster students to excel instead of teaching to the lowest common denominator.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
I hope that's not the kind of Socratic experimentation you were suggesting.
There is a base level of science education that is good for everyone. But above & beyond that, too much time & money is spent on education (science in particular) for children who would prefer to do other things, such as vocational work. If we separate the class offerings to give science to the kids who want & need it, it reduces the amount of money spent on trying to give a one-size fits all education to everyone.
I don't know much about fixing education but I DO know this...
I have a friend, she is a 9th grade English teacher in a public school in Tampa. She says the kids regularly curse at her, etc, etc... and she can't do squat to enforce civility in her class or else she'll be labeled a racist or some other nonsense term.
Then she goes on to complain about how her school is under-funded, etc...
The problem ISN'T funding, it's maintaining an environment that promotes learning, something that we as Americans, are too PC to do let we step on some poor asshole's toes. Our schools need to be tougher & to hell with the kids who's parents can't/won't teach their children to respect the rules of the classroom. Sure, it's a shame, sure these "ruffians" don't/never had a chance, oh fucking well, because of a few self-destructive twats you're going to sacrifice the willing few by lowering the bar?
Those who would are selling out our species by pandering to the lowest common denominator and are intensifying the problem.
I didn't have any hard time learning science in school, neither did my schoolmates, it was your typical public school and our teachers weren't afraid to discipline or throw a kid out if he/she was disrupting the class.
Set the smart students free to learn at their own paces. Even in an environment like math camp, where every student is among the best at the school he came from, the fastest students learn five times faster (or more) and with better comprehension than the slowest students. (I know, I was there, and I was not among the fastest students.) So in a school situation it should be common for some students to be progressing through the course material at least five times faster than other students. Grouping kids by age is a mistake.
Let students spend a lot more time on the subjects that interest them. If a student is very excited about math, let him learn a lot of math at the expense of learning history. He will learn the history later, once he realizes how interesting it is. For the time being, be very happy that he is excited about learning anything. (The same applies for a student who is interested in history but not math, or writing but not history or math, etc.)
Unleash the motivating power of competition in education. At math camp, everyone knew what problem set everyone was on, and that provided a lot of motivation to keep up with everyone else, or try to get ahead. If a student is free to progress twice as fast as his classmates, a sense of competition will motivate him to do so.
Privatize education. Unleash market forces in education. What if we saw the same kind of intense innovation in the field of education that we see in the field of, say, tennis shoes? Perhaps the most heartbreaking failure of socialism is the public school system--heartbreaking when you imagine what could have been accomplished with the innovative ingenuity of private enterprise.
Rely heavily on video lectures. Most teachers are average. Let students learn from the best. Teachers will then have more time to answer questions, provide feedback on work, and mentor, their most important contributions.
It's that kids don't care. The vast majority of kids don't really care about science, it's neither fun nor interesting to them.
And to make it worse, even if they're interested in science, once they realize that it involves that oh-so-dreaded subject, MATH, then you're sure to run off most of the rest.
In fact, one of the largest criticisms of math courses (which is, in some respects, quite true) is that the majority of people who learn it will never use 99% of what they learn in there.
Hmm... maybe they should teach math and science together. Get the kids excited about a thing, then teach them the math behind it. Hmmm....
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
There is this silly competition mentality in higher ed--competing for being bigger and badder. Everything is becoming so "corporate" in culture.
There is an unhealthy arena of competition for grants and research funding that puts the focus on the research track instead of education. The competition manifests itself by the universities pushing a "brand name" and trying to become larger.
In the end, the university becomes an entity who doesn't care about the student but rather its reputation and rankings in magazines.
This is kind of a problem that stems from the new breed of philanthropy that really isn't philanthropy--it's advertising and marketing for the donors. The development departments are getting suckered into making these silly deals with donors (especially corporate donors) that places the focus on promotional consideration for the donor rather than the spirit of the cause.
Small schools with low ratios from teacher to student are probably the best way to go to maximize your exposure in the apprentice model.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
1. blah blah blah
2. blah blah blah
3. blah blah blah
4. blah blah blah
I used to work at blah blah blah blah blah
Kids today don't blah blah blah blah blah
get off my lawn blah blah blah blah blah
answered the question.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
So, just because he's smart, he's more suited to planning educational reform than other people?
You want to fix the education system? Create a panel of fully nationally credentialed teachers (certified and educated to masters or above), let them create a plan, and then fund it.
Education is the only profession in which the certified professionals are not in charge of their own system.
hmmmm?
I went to public schools with kids who had marginal skills at reading and math. Rather than passing them along and bogging down the education of kids doing well, don't pass them until they're actually meeting standards. Note, I am NOT talking about burning time on standardized testing. I'm talking about teachers being given more leverage to hold slow kids back. I think this is a big motivator for a kid to do better (as well as a confidence builder the second time around). This is based on my anecdotal knowledge, not science so I could be very wrong here.
If kids can't cut it after say 2 or 3 grades being held back, give them some some early out like a GED program say after the 10th grade. It's sad to see high school kids who can barely read because our education system isn't strict enough about standards.
I think by enforcing performance for passing, you'll also be able to increase the level of work being done at higher grades.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Get the government out of it. We need free market competition. Let failing schools fail. Let failing teachers get fired. Let failing students get expelled. Let schools compete to provide the best education for the lowest cost. Let voluntary charities choose who is most in need and able to benefit from education charity. Education is too important to let government continue to completely cluster f*** it. Won't somebody please think of the children?
You must be mad!
Obviously, I'm being sarcastic. I think that's an excellent post.
I went to junior high school in a converted prison building. Complete with the courtyards and guard towers! My little town didn't need a new building for school.
I'd love to see the budgets split like that. I went to high school at a place where athletics ran the show. We had a "stadium" that rivaled many colleges. Yet a 2.5 (out of 4.0) GPA was something only brainiacs had.
My mom says I'm cool.
>Do things right at school, and perhaps there won't be any need to get the parents involved.
This simply is not possible.
I used to be a huge proponent of "teacher accountability" until I shared a 7 hour plane ride with a teacher friend of mine.
She explained the obvious to me.
All students require motivation to learn. Most students are not self-motivated. Teachers lack the authority to instill motivation in their students through punitive means, and there are very few inspirational teachers. Thus for most students, their primary motivator is their parents.
You can have the most intelligent teacher on the planet combined with the most patient, compassionate teacher on the planet - Albert Einstein crossed with Mother Theresa - and it won't matter a whit if the student is not motivated to learn.
Some very few students are self-motivated. But by and large students require external motivation, and the only people with the authority to do that are parents. The days of teachers beating students into their studies are long gone. But not so for Mom and Dad.
The single-most important thing to "Fix Education" is to increase parental involvement and stop the mentality that school is a place where you "send" your kids "to be educated". Too many people have come to view the educational system as a "service" - a place where you pay your taxes and then send your kids to be educated, with the whole burden of the process on the system. In fact, the system is merely the water - they can't force the kids to drink it. Only Mom and Dad have that power.
Unless you are extremely lucky and find the rare self-motivated student you simply cannot remove parents from a successful edcuation.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I've found that there's a fundamental conflict in place. The improve something you generally need some way to measure the improvement. Without measurement, either slack and/or bad processes will creep into the picture.
However, the easier it is to objectively measure a skill, the more likely that skill is to be offshored or automated. Repetitious and well-documented (commodity) skills drift away from the US work-force to machines or 3rd-world labor.
If we use subjective approaches in order to stay ahead of the automation/offshore curve, then bias sneaks in, resulting in inconsistencies and political squabbles.
These two contradictory forces push and pull against each other: measurement against flexibility. I don't think there's any easy fix. Staying on the cutting edge requires risk and experimentation. Education is no different. Do we want measurable cookie-cutter skills that are likely to become obsolete, adaptability that is slippery to measure and manage, or something in-between?
Table-ized A.I.
How about stop passing failing students? When was the last time you heard of a kid being held back to repeat a grade?
People say that further funding public education is "throwing money at the problem". But schools with bigger budgets consistently produce better results than schools with limitted budgets, for the simple reason that with more money they attract better teachers. People's real concern is not that their extra tax dollars won't help improve the nation's educational equity, but rather that they'd rather have more money to waste for themselves. And they are too short-sighted to realize that having a nation of McDonald's workers is not going to help cure them of the cancer they will surely get 20 years down the road.
Attach the tax money to the student, and let them go where ever they want with it - private, public, home, secular, creationist, where ever.
The free market will fix the problems quickly. If the school sucks there will be no money, and they will close. If the school kicks ass they will have money and stay open.
Unlike regular school (where kids are just downloaded with info), homeschooling tends to be more about downloading an attitude to education.
Almost all cities will have some sort of homeschooling support groups where parents can access information/people that will be able to help their kids learn.
But I don't think that parent was pushing homeschooling as an all or nothing proposition. I know I don't. Homeschooling does not work for all families and many are better off in a regular school.
The unfortunate thing about regular school is that it is designed to achieve minimal levels. It does not provide an environment that supports creative and critical thought or enable many to flourish.
We don't need everyone to be critical thinkers and scientists, only enough to make society work.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I didn't know we were at war with the country Critical Thinking. Are we winning?
If the surge fails, but the byproduct of the effort includes or coincides with fixing the shortage of textbooks, school supplies and clean bathrooms for the grade school and high school kids, and along the way the parents get involved, demanding their kids to be accountable (like learning what's expected of them), we can say "The surge worked!"
All we need is someone to be The Decider.
(See subject)
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
The Initiative is already being rolled out. I'm at one of the first-round target schools in a department that won CWSEI funding, and have been involved in several of the curriculum-revision committees.
...kinda lame so far, but if you've got good ideas that fit within our ridiculous budget, I promise I'll try 'em out!
CWSEI is focused on undergraduate science education, both for science students and non-science students. The general plans is:
1. Articulate what we want students to learn
2. Figure out what they're actually learning
3. Fix things
4. Share everything that works with other department/schools
Step 1 has been pretty easy for the courses I've been involved with revising, although it can get pretty funny to see different schools of thought battling it out over what matters most (facts? ability to apply in novel situations? general "science" mindset? problem-solving?)
Step 2 is a bit of a nightmare, but is necessary to figure out if you're actually being effective or not (Step 2 & 3 are iterative until satisfactory, then progress to Step 4). How do you effectively test comprehension vs test taking-ability vs fact retention? It's a bit easier to fix the "Did we teach them or did they already know?" by doing before-and-after tests, but that still doesn't eliminate the keeners going out and self-teaching (no bad prof has ever defeated my desire to learn!)
Step 3 is also a challenge -- in big classes (Natural Disasters can have up to 400 students) it's almost impossible to have one-on-one interactions, they're undergrads so presumably parental-involvement isn't key for learning, the TA-hours to do good grading of neat projects is prohibitive, etc. This is where tech solutions come in: if everyone takes immediate multiple-choice quizzes throughout via clickers, or has to talk with their neighbours to decide on an answer, then we've got them interacting/thinking/talking inside class hours.
For Step 4, what works? U Colorado's physics department was where Carl started this idea, so they've got some pretty cool toys that help students practice concepts they heard in lecture even outside of lab sections. As for my department, no solutions yet...
And spend on education. ( he he ) This is Obama's position.
yeah, talking about COLLEGE science education...
First, I think the midset that says "It's ok for an intro. class to be horrible b/c it weeds out the underachievers" is the first thing that should go.
Second, from what my college engineering friends told me, my own limited experience, and tons of comments on /., it seems a look at funding for research projects and how that relates to our undergrads needs a look. I've seen descriptions of what it's like to be an undergrad helping out with research in a lab that are stultifying. Probably has something to do with the pressure put on the prof's and grad students.
Third, (and this relates to #1), kids majoring in the hard sciences need more liberal arts requirements, and vice versa. All majors need to have requirements that will challenge and broaden the student's minds. Look at the creator of xkcd, or the novelist Cormac McCarthy. Both have sort of bridged the gap between liberal arts and the hard sciences in their own way. Note: this suggestion will require Physics people to acquire social skills, and Liberal Arts people to actually be logical.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Lecture model is a bit outdated in today's world, although it still has some use. Structures of the past don't scale up very well to the modern phenomenon of third-level education for the masses. Research brings money into the school, improves its ties with the outside world, keeps faculty staff up to date with the latest developments in the real world, but it also places new demands on staff that academics of old didn't have to deal with. There's now better understanding of how people learn science, so we need methods that emphasize participation and experimentation and assessment of such, as opposed to just testing memorization of facts and problem-solving recipes as traditional exams do. Opportunities to tap into IT to improve learning processes remain largely untapped except for a relatively small number of spectacular examples.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Let the poor get even poorer education, let the poorest be locked out of education entirely, let the rich monopolize the best resources, let the wealth gap grow even more obscenely.
Sorry, "the free market", which never really existed in the first place, is not a panacea for social ills, and in the case of services labelled "public necessity" will exacerbate them.
For a real world example of what privatization of schools will do, see: the current US broadband market.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
From the article:
This assumes that "complex problem solving skills" are something that can be effectively "taught". My anecdotal experience is that by the time students arrive at university, their possession (or lack) of "complex problem solving skills" is already largely fixed, and isn't likely to change significantly.
We are not being educated for content, but for a degree. ,more correctly, hope for motivated students.
We've lost sight of the purpose.
Teachers are motivated by income and purpose.
Without (or with unclear) purpose one cannot hope to motivate students,
or
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I need a Surge, but I can't find it anymore. I guess I need to stick to Vault. Consumerism is awesome! ...what were we talking about?
Ooh, Look! A shiny new nickel!
What is lacking more than anything is a real goal. People are always saying that everyone has the right to an education. Great. WTF does that mean exactly?
First discussion: Either go back to local control over education or centralize.
Personally, I'm all for local. This means, you live in a rural farm community that whats your to take 20hours of AG each week, so be it. Live in El Paso? Your probably gonna have Spanish.
For the Federally minded: Exactly what do you want from an "education"? Specifically, what are the goals? Once that has been discussed and decided, THEN start talking about how to best reach that goal. How the hell can we say 12(ish) years of school is needed when we really (as a collective) do not know what we are trying to accomplish.
*R*eading/*R*iting/*R*ithmatic? Productive Adult Citizen? Babysitting until 18? Ability to wipe ones own ass?
We have to set out to accomplish something and define the reasons for accomplishing it. I would surmise that it is more important for a student to learn to read basic legalese (e.g. Rental Lease and Car Purchase) than it is to know on whatever day, which general, invaded what fjord. 'course, maybe I'm just an asshole, but setting about importance's would also be nice.
It has to start here. Otherwise, what exactly are you fixing?
I think that the simplest fix would be to increase how healthy the students are. The less disruptive the average student is, the more able students are to absorb information. Likewise, there's a ton of research linking physical health to mental health. So mandate an hour of phys. ed. every day right up through grade 12 (some in the classroom, some outside), serve healthy school lunches and get rid of pop and candy vending machines in the schools. That's not to say that there aren't flaws with the actual system, but I think that the effects of just making students healthier would be remarkable and noticeable almost immediately.
The main problem with education today, is that no-one wants to accept failure. I say this as a parent of boys aged 18 and 14 and a girl who will enter school next year. Look around you, everywhere in society we have built systems to cushion failure. Try going to a sporting event for your child. Everyone on the team gets trophies. My 14 year old got a "participation ribbon" for coming in fourth in the 220 at a track meet. Children don't get held back in the same grade anymore because it affects their self esteem and makes them more likely to drop out.
No one wants to fail, but it is the most educational thing that can happen to you, if you allow yourself to learn from the experience. Just ask the New York Giants. They "failed" to beat the Patriots in the final regular season game, but learned how the had to play to beat them in the Super Bowl.
Until we accept and embrace failure as a learning experience AND dole out sufficeintly negative consequences for un-needed failure by our children, nothing will change. We will continue to turn-out lazy, dependent, stupid high school graduates and wonder why we always rank so low when compared to the rest of the world.
We have the education system we deserve today. The answer is not money. The answer is you and me. Are we willing to make the changes necessary to ourselves and our society to also force the educational system to change?
ITT wee hav da bess sisstem n da unyvers, I do ok.
Ave Molech Setting
Clearly the problem is under-funding and too little involvement of the federal government in schools, leading to under-performing students.
We need to create a full cabinet-level Department of Education, give it control of school curriculum, and load it up with money to fund endless studies of how to improve American education.
Oh, wait...
Bust the monopoly and give out per child vouchers. Also streamline the process for expelling disruptive students and exiling them to vocational schools.
It tends to pool around the wounds in society.
Admittedly, it looks off-topic under this article, but think about it:
Prime example, Microsoft -- made a lot of money with an inferior product because
(this important, guys:)
it needed lots of other people to fix its problems,
and that gave lots of people a temporary chance to make a lot of money.
(I know, there are a lot of pre-conditions there, but part of the reason for the popularity of Microsoft software was the prevalence of issues and the apparent ease with semi-skilled tech types could apparently solve them. Illusion of education. No, this is not an anti-Microsoft rant, guys. Look closer.)
Okay, do you think the reason for the lack of motivation to "fix" problems is clear now?
Riddle:
What is education?
Answer:
The process of solving problems.
Is it society's responsibility to solve all the problems? If so, where do the chances for real education go?
There are some ways in which society can help. One important way for society to help is to get out of the way at appropriate times so that the learner can get his hands on and into the subject for real. But it is much easier to propose easy "solutions".
Besides, the hard (==real) solutions never look "cool".
Rote is one of the easy solutions. Rote is like exercise for the mind. Exercise is good. We need a little regular exercise every day. But if you waste the whole day exercising, you don't have any time left for solving problems. If you're always focusing on the execution, on technique, on appearance, solving the problems that you have already solved many times over, you are not solving the problems that are needing solutions.
But it looks cool to watch kids produce a batch of 10 of 10s in some quiz, or to hear them work over the pronunciation and intonation of "Nice to meet you," in perfect chorus.
Lecture also looks cool. Lecturers get to sound important and funders get to hear and see the product. And watching 400 students take notes at once is just impressive somehow.
This Wieman guy seems to have some good ideas, and he seems to be a lot more clever than I about how he's packaging them. I'd be busy trying to hit people over the head with the fact that it makes no sense to arbitrarily separate the school from the real world. That, and encouraging people to take things into their own hands. He's engaging the people who think they are in control with rhetoric that they think they can argue with.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Systems always need "bureaucrats". They run the stuff *you* don't want to be bothered with.
America isn't being hamstrung by government. The "bureaucrats", after all, just implement what the people want. America is ruining itself, educationwise, by:
1. Spending the last two hundred years making sure the slave and their descendants cannot obtain a proper education. This has led to gerrymandering school districts and the creation of the property-tax based funding system that guarantees that the majority of funds and talent go to the "right" places.
2. Substitute "poor" for "slaves" and the same obtains. Americans in general are obsessed with making sure the poor don't steal their money. They make the children of such stay in their own districts and they complain endlessly about the "waste" supposedly engendered by the "bureaucrats". Ignoring the fact that wealthy districts outspend poor ones 5-1, and no one there complains about the "waste". The further fact that yes, indeed, spending more makes for better students. They just don't want their money spent on the wrong people.
3. Americans will not support birth control programs for the very young, and neither will they support education (other than "NO!") that will lower the birthrate by explaining from the age of eight on up exactly how not to get pregnant. The high birthrate among the poor destroys the school systems by insuring the stupid will constantly flood the system with ever-more stupid kids who have ever-more than that kids. Kept up for a few generations, as it has been, and we have Kingdoms of the Fabulously Idiotic gumming up the cities and countryside, further inflaming the rhetoric against funding public schools. To stop this, we start with: this is a vagina, this is a condom, use them together. And oh yeah: easy abortions if necessary. They are now effectively impossible to obtain.
4. Religion. See number 3. We are one of the most intensly religious countries on earth, and it is gumming up the need to control the birthrate of those who shouldn't be having kids so young and so indiscriminately, and ALSO infects our (back to thread point here) knowledge of science by creating an enormous number of reactionaries who just don't like science on principle.
5. Americans don't know science. Let's let this hang on for a bit: Americans, even geeks and SFers, don't understand the method, history, and knowledge of the sciences. They can't teach their kids what they don't understand, and can't instill a love of it for the same reason. We love magic, of all sorts, because we can understand it. Science is alien to our culture. Please understand that technology is just applied science, not science itself, so love of tech does not equal love of science. We like gadgets, but despise evolutionary theory.
With all this, it is all but impossible to stop the slide.
I am absolutely amazed at the number of posters that have said something along the lines of "All we have to do to fix education is vouchers/charter schools/for-profit/abolish unions/vo-tech/more science/more pay/more accountability/less testing/enforced basics/more independent study etc." It goes without saying that many of these suggestions are contradictory.
You folks have been listening to politicians too much. Complex problems like "improving education" almost never have simple sound-bite answers.
Let's take vouchers, for starters. Sure, they can help some, but:
1) They almost never cover complete private school costs. (Cost > Tuition)
2) We already have a voucher system for higher education: it's called Subsidized loans and Pell grants. These programs have shown that fraud is quite common and difficult to prevent.
3) Delegating a function off of the govt. does not magically make incompetence, bureaucracy, and inefficiency disappear. Anybody that has ever worked for a large military contractor can tell you this.
Let's look at some base problems vs. many other countries that make our test scores look bad:
1) ESL students. Face it, when they can't read the test, they bring down the average test score, no matter how bright they are, or how well or quickly they are progressing in their English studies.
2) Disparate income levels. News Flash! Rich kids in the U.S. do better than poor ones. Poverty introduces all sorts of problems that are hard to fix in a school.
3) A resistance to teaching towards the test. A sure-fire way to improve test scores is to teach to the test completely through rote memorization (like many Eastern countries), but that produces morons with a good memory.
My own personal answer? Keep debating about it and trying new things. Realize that sound-bite solutions would probably make things worse.
Given what it has to work with, the U.S. public school system does a damn fine job. Is it perfect? No.
SirWired
Rewards work also, no doubt.
But there is only one thing that kept me in line academically as a kid, and that was fear of my father's foot in my ass.
See for me, I could blow off rewards. Oh yes, it would be nice to get $5 for A's on my report card, but I don't really /need/ the $5 for anything. Oh it might be nice to watch a movie, but I could just as easily watch it on the internet. Leaving class might be nice, but where would I go? The only consistent motivator for me was FEAR of PUNISHMENT.
But that is merely a personal anecdote. I readily admit that motivation can be both positive and negative. But either way, I still beleive the most motivating influence on students is usually their parents. In my experience, teachers are usually either non-empowered or un-inspired to motivate.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The article was about how large lecture classes in college do not teach the essential problem solving skills needed to develop a thorough understanding of science. They then said to tune in next time for some solutions.
It's easy to write about how schools aren't good. But I have two kids age 17 and 10. When I go to there schools and talk to the people that work there I am quite impressed. They know a lot more abut education then I do. The have meeting hwere the teachers get together and see what works and what doesn't.
I Challenge everyone who says the "schools are bad" to point to a specific school by name and say one specific thing you would change.
But you look at the numbers and it's easy to see who does well and who does not. The number one predictor of which students will do well is how well their parents did in school. Kids grow up to be like their parents. (Yes there are many exceptions.)
My wife is a Choral teacher and she was burned by this. In order to work closer to home, she took a job in the middle of a school year to cover for a teacher on maternity leave. EVERYONE loved the mother to be, in part because she let EVERYONE walk all over her (Band teacher, drama director, students, parents, etc.)
When the original teacher decided not to come back at the end of her leave, the position became open again, but now for the permanent position. The administration interviewed half a dozen candidates and decided that my wife had impressed them and deserved to keep the job. They even told her that the job was hers, but it turns out that a bunch of the middle school students that were expecting choir to be a cakewalk were pissed and told their parents that my wife was a horrible teacher. Their parents vetoed the administration and they were forced to hire someone else.
I recently found out that they were forced to fire the man they hired to replace my wife in the middle of the year. He was showing up +1hr late occasionally, and would at least once every 2 weeks pull a no show. That makes 4 teachers in this class in less than 2 years. How's that for stability (and karma IMO)!
The program their had been awesome under the original conductor, my wife had maintained that momentum, and because the parents decided that the students should get the final word on school system hiring they ended up with a program that's half the size it used to be.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Well, if you equate "most people I know agree..." with "analysis", I'd be willing to concede that at least 2/3 of your time in school was wasted; probably closer to 1.5 times that amount, really.
Fair competition and a lasifair government. If public education were excellent, why are all the public schools not creating college prepared students? What is it that private schools have over public schools? Can public schools copy the success of private schools? Is there a good way to help competition? The keys are:
Gradual change is needed; nothing quick
The government shouldnâ(TM)t show any preference except towards the outcome.
Income of the parents shouldnâ(TM)t prevent students from going to another school, provided a commitment from the parents for the education exists. That commitment includes the parents providing transportation.
Parents should be able to choose what is studied. Recommendations provided, but the parents get the final say. That doesnâ(TM)t alter which standardized tests are given to the students, however.
Competition is needed â" the money follows the student. If a student leaves, then so does their money. Competition is good.
Parents should be able to select the school â" within seating limits â" that their children attend. How would you feel if the government told you which grocery store you were allowed to shop at? Why do they get to tell you were you must send your child?
Failure (low scores) should force a school out of business, not have more money thrown at it.
Learning is the primary purpose for a school, not playing sports. Being on a sports team is a privilege once acceptable grades have been achieved. Teamwork can be learned by group exercises in all subjects, including PE.
My fairly large district (30,000+ students) has a 15% Special Needs population. Approximately 42% of my district population qualify for either free or reduced lunch. Over 1,000 students are counted as "homeless" by federal standards. The kid who wakes up with his brother or sister to a single mom working a low-paying wage for 8 hours a day, to come home- keep the home up, and then sit down and do an hour worth of homework with each student is not reasonable. Good luck. The countries you mention have a strong socialized system that provides childcare and healthcare- reducing the financial (and time) burden on the single working parent. Reform those systems- and you may have a fighting chance of bringing real change to public education in our cities.
FTA:"Until a few decades ago, college education was considered necessary and useful for only a select few. Now college has become a basic educational requirement for most occupations in the modern economy. This means that a larger and more diverse segment of the population is seeking post-secondary education than in previous times, and thus a system is needed that can deliver a high quality education to that large diverse population."
I would venture to say that in bygone days, the "requirement" was basically a thinly disguised selection criteria on social class, since only members of upper classes could afford the education.
I would surmise that for the vast majority of jobs where the requisition says "4-year degree", there actually isn't any content of the job that actually requires something one would get exclusively in the acquisition of that degree. It has become a "ticket punching" exercise..
The science teachers at the middle school where I taught noticed a couple of problems: First, they're required to cover an enormous amount of material according to a timeline (due to standardized testing and NCLB requirements.) This means if a class gets really interested in something like Astronomy, that's just tough, because you only get three weeks and then you have to move on to the next unit. Alternatively, if you have a class that hates Astronomy, you can't modify the curriculum to recapture their interest or move on because the material "has to be covered." The other problem is that very little science is actually done. Lab experiments are heavily scripted and lack any of the mystery associated with figuring things out, and an disproportionate amount of time is spent on safety procedure and lab write-ups. I realize that safety is important and that writing papers is what real scientists have to do to get tenure and grants, but when you spend 10 minutes looking through the microscope and 110 minutes on microscope safety and drawing pictures of plant cells that you've already seen on page 94 of the textbook, the exercise feels pointless, whether you're 8, 15, or 40.
Yes, some parents will screw it up. But you can't save everyone. But for those who care, they will shift their kids to better schools & teachers.
The schools that don't make the grade will have to close down.
Fire everyone who makes more than $110,000/year, adjusted to a cost of living index.
Eliminate the requirement for a master's degree in education, and replace it with a three year apprenticeship for prospective teachers.
Put a ten year moratorium on school construction, and mandate a reasonable maintenance budget for all school buildings.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
All parents should be required to spend 2 hours a week in a classroom--preferably their children's classrooms. All employers should be required to treat it like the national guard, arranging every employee's schedule to have 2 hours (+ travel time) available for school attendance each week.
If you commute away from your children's school, attend one closer to work.
A classroom of 30 children would suddenly get 20+ hours a week of "volunteer" manhours. That's a lot of extra attention for each student. Struggling students could get one-on-one help with math or alphabet flash cards. Some parents could grade papers, effectively giving teachers a raise (same $/less hours). Some parents could work personally with a disruptive child (perhaps their own) and free up the teacher to continue instruction.
I have seen a handful of mothers work in the poorest perfoming school in the state. They were able to produce the highest performing students in the state. They coordinated their help within a classroom to maximize the benefit to the teacher and the students. They refused to allow their children to be disadvantaged by the school they attended.
To those that think that vouchers are the answer for failing schools:
Take a look at your ENTIRE tax bill. My municipal tax bill is about $5000/year and about 3/4 of it goes to the local Board of Education.
Let's assume that I get a voucher for my ENTIRE tax bill - (an unrealistic assumption since trash collectors, road crews, police, and fire departments all need to be paid) - where can I get an education for my child for $5000 per year?
I don't know of a single private school that is that cheap. I work in a school for disabled kids and our tuition is almost $40,000 per year, per student. Small class sizes, special facilities, and instruction aren't cheap.
Most of the "regular" private schools in my area hover around $20,000 per year. Is Uncle Sam going to give me a voucher to cover that tuition bill?
The bottom line is public education, generally, is a moderate quality, low cost education. Most public school systems turn out both well-educated, college-bound students, and dumb, unmotivated, sloths. The most important variables seem to be, not the school system, but the home life surrounding the student and the involvement of the parents.
Fix the parents, and you'll fix the schools.
-ted
Well, the best part of free markets is the ability to choose your school out of at least two or three. While we don't necessarily need free markets or vouchers, the good part that is common with those approaches is the availability of more than one school choice, versus a single "monopoly" school choice that is hard to change without moving to a new school district.
/., whenever there is only a single choice, as in Comcast for cable... ("it's the worst cable company ever!"), or one Internet provider being available, you get terrible service, product, and value. But there is no alternative! So service stays miserable, until an alternate choice appears... then all the choices improve! It's a miracle of having independent choices.
As we all know on
The main thing is to allow parents a choice between at least two schools for their children. They can even all be public schools.
MIT had a study which examined the quality of public education when parent's had more or less choice of the school that their children went to. This was determined by measuring what a parent needed to do to change schools (moving, changing residence, alternate schooling, etc.) They found that school quality correlated very closely to the ability of the parents to switch schools. This was for *all* schools with parental choice and was true despite the poverty or affluence of the school districts.
What it shows is that when schools have to compete with each other for students, all the competing schools improve.
Well, as someone who graduated from high school two years ago, I feel that I can perhaps enlighten some of the older slashdotters about what a modern "classroom" (no offense to real places of learning) is like. So, let's visit the hallowed ground on which our future rests, shall we?
Welcome to high school. First, let's make some general critiques. Many classes in all disciplines assign busywork, designed simply to annoy the hell out of students, provide no real learning, and make up the bulk of all school work. Homework, for me at least, was ridiculous. I've had math classes (math!) where instead of say, learning the wonders of the Pythagorean theorem, differentials, etc., we baked cakes. Yes, cakes. And cupcakes, pies, and other sugary delights. Other math classes had drawing assignments. None of this inspired confidence in the educational system.
As for the rest of science, I had only one science teacher in all my years of high school that knew what the hell he was talking about. He wasn't the usual retard who got the job due to seniority or some act of a malicious god, but a real science teacher. However, he still made homework a large percentage of the grade, like most other teachers. I would get As on tests in every class, but end up with Cs or worse because I would never do homework. I felt it was unnecessary. I had mastered the material. Wasn't that the purpose of education?
I guess this rant from a (pissed off) young punk all boils down to this: Assign less busywork. Grade us on our factual knowledge. Even AP classes do not do so, in my experience, though the tests do. If this were actually in place, I would probably have had a 4.0 GPA, been top of my class, and many, many, people would have been demoted. But, I guess having all those who are obedient pass is more important than holding them back when they are not ready to advance. We are breading our future politicians with the inflated grades, telling them now they are so important and intelligent when they are really average, or worse.
SSC
I had this idea a while ago, while contemplating what I was going to do with my 2 year old when it was time for school.
Forced Apprenticeships.
Go to your standardized state schools until your are 10-12 years old. Be taught about a lot of different occupations, get tested for a few of the ones that interest you.
Then be put into an apprenticeship in whatever job feild you choose.
This creates jobs (mentors), gives the student 1on1 time with the mentor and pulls kids out of the BS that is the current school system.
(Yes it is BS, your robbed of your individuality while your dreams and aspirations are thrown to the wayside.)
forced apprenticeship. FTW.
As such at college level there needs to be a way to separate the cream of the crop from the rest of the class.
The simple fact is, we are not created equal nor do we apply ourselves equally regardless of our ability.
Yet education is beset with claims of racism should one group do poorly compared to another regardless of the subject. As such schools have to dumb it down because if they did separate someone would take offense, even if they were not directly affected. Too many people are of the belief that they have the right to not be offended and that means not being called sub par compared to their fellows.
So how do you fix it? Take politics out of education. Take favoritism other than by demonstrated ability out of college. This might mean having two types of degrees for the same course. You could award a minor bonus to gpa for taking and succeeding at the harder level or grant more hours or even shorten the length of the classes.
One last area, reduce the effect of tenure even it means getting rid of it. It allows some real idiots to persist simply because they "have done their time". Professors who pontificate about politics instead of the subject at hand, provided they even bother to show for the course.
Still to fix college your going to have to fix public schools too.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I'm a graduate student at a major university. I work with a professor (master craftsman) who teaches me how effectively design research projects, pursue funding, analyze the results, write them up, and ultimately publish my findings in peer reviewed journals (the Trade). I've spent the last 6 years leaning my trade and have a least another 18mo before I'm ready to have my master work (Ph.D thesis) judged.
Most people didn't have apprenticeships, even in the heyday of the master craftsman. Most jobs don't need that kind of long-term training. I agree that the education system tries to hard to fit everyone into a cookie cutter mold and that it could benefit from a some revision, but I don't believe it's as broken as those on this board are making it out to be.
The town I grew up in had something on the order of 16 elementary schools, and the one I attended was ranked dead last every year. The student body consisted of 2/3 english as a second language (1/3 Puerto Rican, 1/3 Russian/Ukrainian/etc., 1/3 blue collar) and because of rapid changes in districting, money, and educational plan, I switched schools 5 times in 5 years. For many of the same reasons our HS lost it's accreditation the year before I started there and didn't get it back until the year before I graduated.
I still received my Asoc, BS, and MS with 3.9, 3.7, and 3.6, respectively and was eligible to get my BS a whole year early. I'm no genius (I've taken the tests and always come up short). I just benefited from a combination of greater than average intelligence (like 50% of the population), parents that wouldn't accept C's unless they were satisfied that it was truly the best I could do, and a desire to be able to put "Dr." in front of my name.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Obviously spending MORE money isn't working, how about we try spending LESS money. Better yet, school choice. Make it where schools compete for students, and watch the QUALITY go up.
An important question that the article does not address is why science education is important (the article is about science education in college, but it's an important question in general). Despite periodic complaints about how there aren't enough engineers, chemists, or what ever the flavor of the moment is, that's not really a problem. Many of us believe that some science training makes better citizens (better ability to reason, better knowledge of why things happen, etc.). Another reason is laid out by David Goodstein, a physicist at CalTech, in an article titled The Big Crunch (which focuses on a different issue for science -- how the number of researchers, amount of funding, etc. is no longer growing exponentially).
I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ...(skipping a lot)
the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus [that basic research should be funded by the government]. ...(skipping a fair amount again)
The frontiers of science have moved far from the experience of ordinary persons. Unfortunately, we have never developed a way to bring people along as informed tourists of the vast terrain we have conquered, without training them to become professional explorers. If it turns out to be impossible to do that, the people may decide that the technological trinkets we send back from the frontier are not enough to justify supporting the cost of the expedition. If that happens, science will not merely stop expanding, it will die.
Sorry for butchering his article so much -- the whole thing is a good read.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
Offer each kid $10000 per "A". Then make the curriculum tough enough so most of them won't earn it, but most of them will learn something trying to earn it.
Think I'm kidding? My Mom taught in public schools for 24 years, my Dad was a Professor for 30. When I graduated High School (1974) every teacher had a degree in what they taught and a minor in "Education". The NEA lobby got every state to require an "Education" degree to be allowed to teach. Now we have big "Education" Departments at Universities turning out people that might (and I do mean might) know how to teach but the students are lucky if the teacher has a minor in what they teach. See the problem? It applies to every subject, not just the Sciences.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
All students should be instructed in basic logic and reason at the earliest age possible. Truth tables, syllogisms, reasoned argument, boolean operators, the works. These concepts are not particularly challenging if taught early, and are the foundation of critical thought that would greatly aid the pursuit of other knowledge. I am constantly amazed by the inability of the average person to make a coherent, internally consistent argument (cf. any Internet forum). A student armed with a command of logic and reason is prepared to get the most out of his formal education, to effectively self-educate, and to make better decisions (buying, voting, etc.) in life. You fix this, you fix everything, for a comparably small investment. Other solutions offered here require a large overhaul of educational systems or a sea change in familial responsibility, neither of which is practical.
This is a triviality. Things always change. Wieman does not give concrete examples what change he means.
Everyone is aware of the enormous increases in the capabilities of information technology (IT) over the past few decades, years, and even months. These offer many fairly obvious opportunities for dramatically changing how teaching is done in colleges and universities, and in the process, making higher education far more effective and more efficient.
Again, there are no concrete pointers, how these changes should be done and what is wrong in higher education. Enormous changes have been done already: examples are web resources, collaborative group work using wikis, internet based labs, online testing, personal response systems, computers in classrooms, demonstrations, blogs, online discussions, polls, lectures on youtube etc. Some technology based changes have already peaked 10 years ago. I had to give lectures were given in computer labs because it had been considered cool that every student has a computer at hand. An other example from math: Computer algebra systems had been forced into every lecture without realizing that many teachers were not able to use them. Please, Mr Wieman be more concrete and provide concrete suggestions what changes should be done and if, how it will be achieved.
Actually, I will keep this article as a prototype of how not to write an essay. Want to write an article about parentning? Just take Wieman's template and change a few words. It sounds good but is as empty as the article itself. Here we go:
New parenting Model Needed There are currently great needs and great opportunities for improvement in human beings. As world population increases, we need to provide more childen with complex understanding and daily problem solving skills in all subjects to allow them to be responsible and successful citizens in modern society. Emerging research indicates that the inhabitants of our planet are not achieving this. However, there are great opportunities to improve this situation using advances in the understanding of how people learn to live and to tackle daily challenges. The current model of humans grew in a haphazard fashion that has left us with traditional practices and modes of organization that in some aspects are poorly matched to modern needs. It seems likely that the world grew out of the parenting model of an expert working closely with a kid, assigning them challenging tasks and then providing guidance as needed to carry out those tasks, as well as offering ongoing feedback on their work. This model, or its modern day embodiment of "the expert individual parent," remains the most effective demonstrated approach to life.
There are a lot of bad things about science education - like thermodynamics (see below) but the problems are mainly not in the classroom.
problem #1: people in marketing make more money for less work. Which is the same thing in computers and engineering. So the problem is not science education, but our screwed up values. while my wife and i were getting our phds, and making around 15K a year for 70 hour weeks, our siblings were making 3 and 4X that; if you go thru the compound interest math it is really hard if you loose 5 or 6 or even 8 years (including postdoc) at the start of your career.
It might be worth it if congress made a committment to ensure careeer stability, but that is not there: not only do you not get paid, but you could be out on the street at any time; anyone with the ability to be a scientist is gonna look at this and say, no way jose
There are also not a lot of people who are going to be good at science; we don't expect every kid in K12 to be a star basketball athlete, why on earth do we expect more then a small fraction of students to be interested in and good at calculus or Genomics or condensed matter physics ?
There is no career path in science - I have a phd and a lot of experience with companies who hire interns and the interns see that the career path in science is , to use a technical term, crappy.
Other countrys do better cause there are fewer career options; or, to put it another way, doing a PhD in china is , on average, higher up in lifetime income probability - in the US a PhD in physcis might put you, on average, in the top 20% of income; in china it might be the top 5% (substituting for income some measure that also takes into account prestige, and other factors that people value)
(in one of the books about Feynman, someone asks a female MIT grad student why she lets Feynman treat her like a servant, and she replies that he is the only person who has ever been able to explain thermodynamics; one assumes that an mit grad student, in physics, is not to stupid)
Most of the people I know who got through college thermo got through it - they had enough math to get the answer, and were happy never to think about it ever again. if the science establishment can't teach thermo, it definetly has a problem.
I read the article. I thought post secondary education meant college.
But, as long as the subject of K-12 effectiveness is up for debate, I'd say decenteralize it. With modern computers, there's absolutely no need to have kids go to a building to be taught. The way it is now is just government daycare. More kids need to be computer literate before they reach 18. Computer literacy can't be taught in a school computer lab. It can only be taught with everyday experience, a reason to learn about computers, and a source of information (obviously the net, but how many people can find answers with no idea where to begin). I have no doubt most people could learn all the same material simply from reading and doing written exercises. If you think kids can't handle this because they're immature - does anyone believe that changes overnight when they turn 18? You can't teach maturity by not teaching maturity; the problem just gets passed along.
In general, easy answers and short attention spans are the problem. Being walked through every exercise in their life makes people intellectually weak; they don't learn how to get from A to Z without help. I'm talking about a subject the person isn't already familiar with. Giving someone who knows trigonometry a complex arithmetic problem isn't going to make them go out and learn anything on their own (as an analogy, this is how I've always seen it done wrong).
For college, I'd say the establishment is hurting people by clinging to proprietary and competitive behavior. If the equivalent to a lecture is available to anyone interested, the institutions think they'll shrivel up and die. (and some probably would, in their current state) If the material being covered by an instructor could be replaced with a book or video, which 90% of the time it could be, then it should be replaced. Use the teachers for better tasks then regurgitating information. There should be course material that requires critical thinking beyond that of following a procedure. Tasks the old fashioned apprenticeships would've involved, is what half the grade should depend on. An instructor could have plenty of time to speak with each person, if they weren't so busy pretenting to be a book.
I'd also say completely and utterly destroy "group projects". I've never learned more in a group, but I've learned a lot less. How to work in a group is not what people major in. There's no such thing as critical group thinking.
In my experience there's far more to be learned from a from an articulate (or even semi-articulate) and knowledgeable lecturer than listening to a bunch of fellow students - most of whom haven't prepared for the session - waffle and ramble in a so-called 'problem based learning' group session.
Not to long ago I had the pleasure of hearing Wieman speak at my school. The main thing I got out of this was 'Why not use the scientific method to improve education.' Anyway here are some streaming links (not sure why they only had these two crappy formats):
http://media-srv1.its.vanderbilt.edu/asxgen/public_affairs/forman_wieman_080407.wmv http://media-srv1.its.vanderbilt.edu/ramgen/public_affairs/forman_wieman_080407.rm
My apologies to anyone working in the IT Department if you're reading this.
I take offense to the assertion in the summary that the system is "flawed and therefore always needing more money." Last I checked, no one anywhere in the chain of command of any school district I've ever seen was exactly rolling in the dough. People do it for the love of it, not the money.
And that, my friends, is one of the problems.
There are a lot of dumb teachers in it to "make a difference," rather than, say, "teach algebra." Nice people. But they are unqualified. I spent most of my early education years thinking I was bad at math, when actually, I'm just not naturally good at it. The people who really rose to the top were the people who didn't really have to study to get it. Me, I benefit from teaching. Actual teaching, like, with a teacher who teaches. Not "do the 120 similar problems on pages 115 to 120; I'm gonna take a nap." When I got into college and begrudgingly took a required math course, it was actually a step down from trig, which was the last math course I'd taken in high school, but the content was actually a lot more in-depth than I'd done before. The teacher was wonderful--an old math PhD in semi-retirement--and opened the class with "I keep hearing this nonsense about 'math phobia.' People aren't afraid of math; they've just had bad math classes." And he was right. The class was fun and engaging and I honestly enjoyed it. For the first time ever I wasn't just regurgitating and getting a so-so grade; I was really getting it and getting an A.
Now, 13 years later, I am one of the guys the other researchers pay to do their stats for them.
That guy had both the love and the skills. They aren't mutually exclusive. But they also don't come for free.
In the US education system, it's entirely possible not to get any really good teachers until you get to university. That is also where the jobs start to really pay (that's the level I work at--I've also worked in K-12, but that's a lot of work for very little money--more on that later). Coincidence? I don't think so.
Before I go into K-12, let me preface this by saying that despite the fact that we in the US were told all through the 80s that our schools were bad because we didn't have the standardized test scores of Japan, and despite the fact that I write standardized tests, test scores are a terrible way to judge an entire program. I suspect that Bush's No Child Left Behind nonsense has taken the good parts of the US education system and replaced them with the terrible parts of the Japanese education system. Seriously, walk around Japan (I live here) and just ask people really simple science questions like, for example, how does an internal combustion engine work? They will have no idea. How may planets? No idea. It's worse, I think, than the US. They just passed tests. They don't have any active knowledge at all. So what I'm saying is that I think that my education really wasn't that bad. My friends who are in K-12 now (and may or may not be dumb, let's be honest) know this, but have to lead cramming sessions for tests instead of teaching.
The K-12 system has many problems, but here's a biggie: know-it-all parents. Now, if I had kids, I know I'd be one of them. But we are in a state now where teachers are not allowed to be human--despite the fact that that is their entire job, really--people can get information from a book. They aren't allowed to get angry. They aren't allowed to hug a child. Children cannot be disciplined. When I was a kid, if you were really out of line, you got a paddling from the principal. This is a lot more like real life. But when we put the kids in this weird system where adults exist to serve the kids and mommy can have teacher fired, the teachers just kind of switch off and keep their heads down.
Teaching is an inherently social act. A classroom is a social construct. If we don't let it operate in an organic, realistic manner, we lose the benefits of having it at all. We could get the same
How to fix education in 4 easy steps
1. Make going to school non-compulsory
Kids that don't want to be in school, who have parents that don't care if they are in school, do not need to go to school. They are nothing but a distraction for the kids who want to learn. Any teacher will tell you one disruptive student will ruin the class for everyone. Public schools in the U.S. force kids who have no discipline go to school, then they are surprised when they don't listen to the teachers. The kids know the teachers can nothing to discipline them, the kids know their parents will do nothing to discipline them. I fail to see the disincentive to goof off in class here, and so do the kids, so they will goof off. Schools do not need these children and in public schools, not only do they have to go, but the public schools want them to go so that make that ever important buck from the federal and state government, education be damned. I personally know more than one teacher who cannot kick a particular kid out of their class because the school administrators tell them they can't.
2. Privatize
There is a ratio of teachers to administrators in all schools, public or private. An administrator would be like a vice principal, guidance councilor, text book researcher, sensitivity director. In a private school, the ratio is about 1:7 in public schools it's almost 1:1. Meaning for every teacher there is an administrator. And every time someone says "there's something wrong with our schools" they just tac on more administrators in a blind attempt to "fix" the problem. Administrators fix nothing, ever. Which leads me to..
3. Do away with tenure and teachers unions
The idea that teachers unions somehow are for kids has got to be the biggest lie I've ever heard. Teachers unions are for, teachers. Some people didn't know this, but if you've worked in the LAUSD for more than 3 years you cannot be fired for anything short of molesting a child, it's called tenure. Tenure is for, teachers. There is no way you can argue that keeping poor teachers (tenure) or keeping teachers that have broken the rules (teachers unions) somehow helps the kids. With these two "protective" organization are in place it takes an act of god to get rid of poor teachers. There are no teacher's unions in private schools and the level of education you get in a private school by far exceeds that in a public school. Without tenure, without teacher's unions. So at the very least it's proof that excellence does not require tenure or unions. And there is a strong argument that they do more harm than good.
4. Allow parents to take their kids out of failing schools.
I think it's a travesty that the government is going to force parents to place kids into school that they know are going to be a bad influence on the child. Parents should be able to send their child to whatever school that is reasonably in their area. It's so bad that people actually buy houses in order to get their kids sent to a particular school, and I guess for those who can't afford to move or afford a private school... to bad? That's just wrong. If we are going to be forced to pay for schools we should at least be able to select which one we're going to send our kids too, or at least let us get our money back so we can send them to a private school. The only obstacle that stops this 'voucher' system is the teachers unions. I would love to hear how the lack of a voucher system helps kids, because I'm pretty sure it only helps teachers at failing schools.
I have no belief that any of these things will change, teachers unions are far to powerful. It a huge union with almost limitless money, but it's a self perpetuating bureaucracy with the honest belief that teachers should be paid more than any other profession in the world. More than doctors, lawyers etc.. no matter how much anyone else thinks teachers deserve.
The usage of the word education has evolved to mean a mechanical process whereby an institution can add knowledge and wisdom to an individual, like QuickLube changing your oil.
Teachers are taught that they can "motivate" students, that is, make them want something the institution wants them to want.
It is all part of the scientific pretensions of the academic "Education departments".
Let us replace this false belief in institutional "education" with the original concept of "learning".
It used to be that a person with knowledge and wisdom was called "learned".
Teachers should be thought of as helpers who assist those who want to learn, rather that god like knowledge creators who apply some "educational" algorithm.
Teachers should stop trying to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig. Instead, they should assist those with the desire and ability to learn.
Perhaps the best example of this is mathematics. Many (perhaps most) people lack the ability to do mathematics beyond what can be done by a calculator. Instead of egalitarian, futile attempts to turn these people into Eulers, teachers should focus on those with actual math ability. Civilization only needs a few people with the ability to do mathematics, the rest are incapable of it.
Teach reading using a combination of phonics and whole language.
Take computers out of elementary schools. Elementary by definition means THE BASICS. Teach the basics of math, science, reading, writing, penmanship, etc..
Take calculators out of elementary schools. Make 'em learn their damned times tables!
End zero tolerance. Make administrators use common sense on a case by case basis.
End political correctness. We have no use or time for such foolishness.
Pass the freaking school vouchers laws. Make government schools compete for students. competition = good; monopoly = bad
Speech class for everybody. I'm getting tired of needing a translator!
Allow teachers who have concealed carry permits to pack heat on campus. The students don't need to know which teachers have guns; they just need to know that some might have guns.
Get the parents involved. Do whatever it takes.
The mess education is in these days has largely been created by academia and new-age, feel-good educational approaches replacing tried and true methods of actual learning. Therefore, he's quite possibly part of the problem, not the solution.
-- Will program for bandwidth
We're fucked, give up on it.
I would study what we were doing in the early 1900s when we trained the generations that took us to the moon (with slide rules!) and designed the bridges and dams we still use today.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The wealth gap in the US is small enough that the richest quintile only outspend the poorest quintile by about 2.1 to 1. That's not really an obscene difference. Link.
.....aren't qualified enough. You also need to understand education. Those who can, do, but those who teach, do and do more.
As a long-time teacher in public schools, I actually find very little to disagree with in the article. I do think that another added factor should be that we need public schools to graduate kids who love science and feel that they can understand it and perform scientific tasks.
Though I agree with the general thrust of the original article, I take exception to this comment in the introduction:
The science education system already works for such people whose history is described in this comment. No change is needed. Furthermore, such a history is in no way a qualification for figuring out how to change a system and reach the kids that have so far not been reached. And believe me, it's not by doing the same old same old and expecting to get a different result (there's a name for that sort of thinking...)
That said, the particular set of ideas presented in the article seems worth exploring. And in fact, we in the public schools have been working along similar lines (and also other, even more "radical" lines) for decades that are proven to work. And by "we" I also include those bureaucratic teachers unions and other such people continually treated as scapegoats to avoid facing up to the actual obstructionists in the system.
In California, for example, teachers and educators, working through the university system, but including K12 teachers, developed some extremely effective ideas in the seventies and eighties (sometimes it takes ten or twenty years to fully flesh out new ideas and get them tested, by the way), not only for science but for other curricular areas as well.
In 1990, California published a fabulous set of science standards based on the educational research that had been done in the previous two decades, and for a few years, kids were not only getting good at thinking scientifically, but consistently loved science and going to science class. Then the obstructionists set in.
These obstructionists were not the educational bureaucrats alluded to above, nor the teachers with their bureaucratic unions. They were (first of all) the politicians, who raised the spectre of fear in the public that school subjects were no longer being taught the same way, and that therefore their kids will be worse off, despite the fact that for eighty years or longer, science education really only worked for a select few.
The politician's motivation was, of course, to whip up fear in order to become elected. However, the real power behind them were the textbook companies, in whose pockets those politicians lay.
Textbook companies, after all, have no incentive to reform education, particularly because many of the most effective reforms have to do with less reliance on textbooks. And there are probably many people at Slashdot who can appreciate how much money those textbook companies can make on even a single textbook.
Anyway, by the mid nineties, the corporate backlash was in full swing, and though one could see tentative progress, you need more than just a few years to see real change. They succeeded in blocking progress before the results were irrefutable.
In the area of science, the 1990 standards were withdrawn, and replaced with standards that were drawn up with little or no input from teachers or university departments of education, but a lot of input from Nobel prize winners (at least, that was what was trumpeted at the time)
So instead of kids learning to think scientifically, they spend most of their time learning disparate factoids, like the composition of the sun (and knowing it is not a quasar), memor
"Get the parents more involved".
Assuming you can get over that mountain, how do you deal with kids that don't give a damn? Kids tend to hate school for a good reason... for kids, sitting in front of a blackboard all day sucks. There's simply no way to get around that. And what is the standard answer of reformers? Let's keep 'em in class even longer, and start them in school earlier, and keep them there later. Better yet, lets send everyone to college, whether they're fit to go or not, whether they really want to or not.
I look at Finland's school system... kids spend less hours per day in class than we do, start at a later age, and graduate earlier... they spend much less time in classrooms than American students do... and yet they beat the piss out of American kids in test scores. Not only is "more money" not the answer, I've come to believe that "more school" isn't either.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The idea that parents can help might be valid, but to say that parents are the solution is a huge pitfall. It will not happen. You are abandoning everyone that doesn't have qualified parents. And that is a lot of students.
Parents already care and love their children. Who doesn't? Then why do so many children end up thinking otherwise? They don't know what they are doing. Their best isn't good enough. Tell them to do better, and they will try, but that doesn't make them any more capable.
There is one thing that many many many uninspired under-performing students have in common. They either have a broken family, or their parents are not very inspiring education-wise. Children mimic their parents. If mom and dad don't have a high school education, then there is nothing they can do to inspire their child to have one. They may be good people, but how could they inspire their child in a way that helps them excel in a society that they failed to excel in? Even worse, parents could be in jail, addicts, or dead.
To tell a child school can't help them but their parents can, when the child has no parents, is not a solution.
Some good teachers exist, and will try to give you information that you need rather than simply what is in the standardized test.
Those are bad teachers, unless you are suggesting that the standardized test does not cover everything needed. (in which case, that would be the problem you need to fix)
We don't need teachers like the one some parents nicknamed the Crayola Queen, who decided that most subjects could be replaced by art. We don't need teachers wasting class time on their own personal agenda. We need teachers who get the job done, teaching all the things that they are supposed to be teaching. Anything else just takes time away from doing the job.
"The days of teachers beating students into their studies are long gone. But not so for Mom and Dad."
Try taking a paddle to Junior in some states... it's an instant trip to jail for Dad, and a legal nightmare with "children's advocate groups" and the state's department of social services bringing down lawyers on the parents. You don't even need real proof to arrest a parent for abuse anymore, just an accusation. It's getting to the point that corporal punishment of any kind, no matter how appropriate, is being banned "for the children".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
First I would like to say that this is not a fully developed theory of mine, so I will freely admit that there is almost certainly a glaring problem in what I will propose, but I don't think there is anything which is unconquerable. The notion behind standardized tests is actually a pretty good one. They are supposed to give the teacher an idea of what it is that a student does and doesn't understand, thus allowing the teacher to address the deficiencies. That intention has, of course been subsumed by a secondary purpose where they are used to determine the effectiveness of the education, thus determining funding, whether the school gets taken over by the state, etc. The problem with standardized tests is, of course, that they don't work worth a damn. There are a number of reasons why, first and foremost is that kids aren't standard, and it would be impossible to write a paper test which can adequetly assess complete understanding (As an extreme example, I went to school with a kid who was borderline retarded, except he was a lightning calculator, with an intuitive grasp of math that leaves me breathless today, he was successfully differentiating and integrating in 7th grade.). The second problem with them is language, where I went to school, I was one of relatively few native English speakers, some of the kids had only been in the country for a couple of years, unsurprisingly, I always did better on the tests than the school average, not because the other kids were dumb or didn't understand the concepts, but because the wording of the questions would trip them up. The last big problem with them is that the tests are frequently administered in January/Feburary, and yet the teachers don't get the results until August...it's a little hard to use the results to adapt the education when you don't get them until after the school year is over. I think the answer lies in Computerizeed Adaptive Testing. Now I never saw so much as a single CAT anywhere from elementary school through the end of college (And I'm a relativgely recent grad.) However they are widely (perhaps almost universally) used for licensure exams in healthcare, the theory being that question 2 is based on whether you get question 1 right or wrong. To give a grossly simplified example, if you got sqrt(x+2)=4 wrong the next questions determine whether it is because you don't understand square roots, addition, the two of them used in tandem or if you really do understand the concepts but you just "forgot to carry the two". The benefit of these in primary education being that: a) they give a much more specific picture of a kid's understanding. 2) They can isolate when it's just an unfamiliar word which threw the kid off track. (Although I still think that until a certain threshold of skill is attained in the local language, the tests (though not the instruction) should be given in the student's native language.) iii) The results are instant, thus premitting them to be relevant to a child's education. Perhaps even being used not just once a year, but once a week. Now, there are of course drawbacks, the biggest being that it would be a huge effort to write these tests, and perhaps an even bigger one to develop guidelines for the correct interpretations and applications of the results. Also, I can see this all going horribly wrong and worsening the situation, especially if it is believed to be a panacea, which it's not, but I think it might be a huge tool.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
Nicely put. Kids can tell the difference between a science teacher who's into science, and a football coach who's teaching science just to pick up a few extra bucks during the off season. Same with math.
"Meanwhile, we can still do a better job of teaching science (mostly in making kids interested in science). Perhaps the only way to get the parents involved is to teach this generation that science isn't jsut a waste of time, so that they encourage thier kids in turn."
While I'm all for improving science and math education, I have a problem with a push to get more kids on a math and science track by fiat. I've come to the opinion that in any population, only X number of kids are going to be interested in those fields. People act as if we just improved the classes, science and math interest would suddenly take off among kids, and especially among minorities and girls. And I just don't think that's true. I think kids that are are naturally interested pretty much know it, even if their curriculum isn't first class. I just don't think that if we put a Jaime Escalante in every class, suddenly everyone would be interested in calculus. I think that's a fantasy, a pipe dream. Some kids are interested in math and science as a career, and some kids aren't... most kids, actually. I think we could get some more involved, but not the numbers that education reformers claim.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
In terms of primary education, there have probably been few policies as harmful as "no child left behind".
Excuse me? Did you hear that from some teacher's union?
NCLB pretty much does what it says. It prevents schools from writing off the low-performers as being hopeless. It ensures that the majority of these students will meet some bare-minimum measurable standard.
We need this. If these people can't even read, what are they going to do with their lives? They can mug you. Uh... yuck!
Sure, NCLB does little for the gifted. Well maybe the gifted are less likely to be mugged, which is damn good.
Future laws could extend NCLB in two useful ways. One way would be to prevent states from setting ridiculously low standards. (we need a nationwide standard) Another way would be to do something about the gifted. NCLB is a start though, long overdue.
tl;dr
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Segregation. No more dumming down required.
Why spend all that time, money, and effort, just to be replaced by a cheaper off-shore worker. If you are smart enough to be a scientist, you are probably also smart enough to be a lawyer. A lawyer makes much more money, and has a much more secure job. Small wonder that so many Americans would rather study business, or law, than to waste their time studying science and technology.
As long as corporate America keeps aggressively offshoring STEM jobs, I expect less people to be interested in science and technology.
J, I have to disagree with something... I think that for many jobs, you don't need more than a high school education. I know people that worked their way through college at a Starbucks or a department store, or a big box retailer... after they graduated, they were right back working in the same place. Sometimes they stay there, and it's apparent that the degree had little to no bearing on their advancement chances. I think we're pressing too many kids to go to college when they don't need to, simply because we've developed this mantra that you're a failure if you don't go to college. And that the only reason that so many go in the first place... parental/societal pressure, when they'd be better off (and making a lot more money) getting that apprenticeship with a plumber or a bricklayer.
I'm not knocking the value of a liberal arts education... I think it's still very important. But too many kids major in English or History or Social Work simply because they're not really interested in anything. They'd be better off joining the military or finding a trade, because all they want to do is make money, and college is supposed to be about so much more than that. And they're just biding their time before they go back to the stockroom or latte counter.
This sounds mean, but not everyone grows up to be an astronaut, and not everyone can grow up to be an astronaut. The world needs ditch diggers too... and stockboys, coffee makers, and retail clerks.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"There's the big misconception. Understanding art, literature, design, history, communications and yes interpretive dance IS in itself a core skill set."
More than that, even if you're a mathematician/scientist/engineer, if you don't have a strong, broad understanding of literature, history, and philosophy, I don't see how you can call yourself educated.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Because people are afraid to touch the math which is vital to understanding science, primary and secondary science education hasn't progressed beyond the Aristotelian emphasis on classification to the emphasis on mathematical models of reality which typifies modern science. Others on this thread have mentioned that the order in high schools is generally backwards (biology, chemistry, then maybe physics if you're lucky); I think this is the reason why.
To some extent this can be changed directly. A lot of important models and equations which don't get taught early enough involve no math more complicated than linear, quadratic, inverse linear, or inverse-square relationships; any seventh-grader should be able to do that kind of math even under the current education system.
But to a large extent you can't fix science education without fixing math education.
Nobody should graduate from high school without a basic understanding of calculus, vectors and matrices, and the other basic math required for success in any kind of science or engineering field. Really, average students should get all of this by their sophomore year in high school. Instead students are stuck learning things they don't understand the purposes behind and will have to learn all over again when they come to the point where they will actually have use for them: trig identities (most of which first become really useful after you learn to integrate), polar coordinates, complex numbers (not too useful until linear algebra or differential equations), etc.
This idea makes no sense. If you want a man to bolt a wheel onto a Model T, you sure don't need education. He doesn't need to read. He doesn't need to add or subtract, or even count. He just puts in bolts until all the holes are filled up.
The whole idea smells of a myth that somebody concocted to encourage hatred of our educational system. There are certainly reasons to hate our educational system, but let's not drag out reasons that make almost no sense at all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am amazed at how every single one of you has miserably failed to understand the intended subject of the article at hand LOL. It's alright let me help you out. First of all the article is not about the worthless public school system. It is about secondary education. Got it? Good. Now we can move on... The author was proposing a solution to the lacking teaching methods in science classes. Currently the college classroom consists of a professor lecturing to a large student population consisting of hundreds of pupils. Basically, the teacher has diarrhea coming out of their mouth and the students are forced to regurgitate the information and commit it to memory. The method is a complete failure in a science classroom. The students must learn critical thinking skills and learn to apply these skills on exams. Instead of understanding the fundamentals of a concept, the students are forced to answer the questions from memory. What the author was hinting at is a teaching method that is much more interactive for the students. For instance, in my chemistry class, at least half of the lectures consist of a group learning activity known as P.O.G.I.L. (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning). The activity (usually a worksheet) enables the students to interact with one another in groups of 4. Each member of the group has a responsiblity during the activity (Manager, Facilitator, Recorded, Reflector). During the activity, the students are engaged in understanding the concepts of the worksheet and working together to answer critical thinking questions. Instead of sitting in a classroom for an hour listening to the same teacher talk everyday, the students are effectively developing critical thinking skills and learning the fundementals of the subject at hand. Hopefully I have cleared up the confusion for you.
faggots are the great let down of all society. rip them out of society and fix a great disparity.
"In the 1960s, we used to have parades that celebrated astronauts. Let me say this again - we had PARADES... for... ROCKET SCIENTISTS... To become one was something that was considered the height of a child's aspirations. No wonder we were sending people to the moon with a pocket calculator and a roll of duct tape."
We never had parades for "rocket scientists".
We had parades for astronauts, people that "rocket scientists" claimed weren't even neccessary for the space program. Werner Von Braun and his team initially wanted an unmanned program, and when we decided to send men up, the rocket scientists didn't want to give them any control at all... they wanted all operations to be done remotely from the ground. They viewed the men in the capsules as less than worthless.
The public saw it differently. The astronauts were really war heroes... Cold War heroes. So quit pretending there was ever a time when scientists were envied and lauded above all others. From the 30's onward, scientists were portrayed as Mad scientists more often than not. This era of respect for science you paint never existed. People have always been awed by scientific achievements, but were deeply suspicious of scientists themselves.
This Utopian era of love for scientists you describe never existed. America has always had a love/hate relationship with science.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
>Forcing kids to learn to read too early and you teach them that reading is a drag
perhaps. my experience indicates otherwise. and there is such a thing as critical mass to a knowledge-base.
1 the very first thing to teach kids is that learning is possible
2 teach them how to learn
3 teach them logic (if you have A follow B Floow C Follow D ect then given ABD they should be able to guess that C is missing) and how to handle things when logic goes south
4 teach them respect for others
then continue with the rest of Kindergarten and beyond
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I've always objected to the sterilization and sissification of our society, and nowhere is this more evident than in the science classroom. Hell, they don't even sell chemistry sets anymore because someone might hurt themselves. When I was a kid, I used to check out awesome chemistry books from the county library that showed how to make your own fireworks, how to distill perfume essences from flowers, how to produce biogas from sawdust, how to make dyes, and many more potentially dangerous things. Go back another generation, and you have Mr. Wizard teaching kids how to build thermobaric bombs out of a paint can and a garden hose... and setting the thing off with the kid standing by in absolutely no PPE, not even goggles.
So yeah, quit being such fucking pussies and go back to teaching kids really cool shit.
The biggest problem is that the government is in charge of our children. Remember, this is the same government that can't define "is", can't find WMDs, can't balance the budget, and can't even bother to follow the same laws it created. Why do we give them our children? We say it's because it guarantees that the poor will get educated, but considering the state of many inner city schools, I think fewer poor get educated with state run schools than without. Sure there's not a lot of cheap private schools out there, but the biggest reason for that is the government schools that crowd them out. Some say it's just because we don't have the "right people" in charge. That's nonsense. I'm not the biggest fan of school vouchers, but they're a better solution than one-size-fits-all brand we have now.
Of course, abolishing government schools isn't going to happen. When you add Federal and state expenditures together, education is the single biggest teat on government, and parents aren't going to stop sucking at it. So what do you do instead? Figure out what makes today's state schools so much crappier than those of last century.
The biggest change I see between the state schools of yesterday and today, is the centralization of the bureacracy. Back when our schools were considered the best in the world, they were controlled at the local county level. Now they're controlled by the Federal government through state government proxies. Getting control back to the local level can happen, and it can improve things. That's the direction we should be heading. It may mean a few counties get lousy schools because of their demographics, but it's better than all the schools being dragged down to their level just to make things "fair".
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The fundamental problem, obviously, is the difference between Learning ( hunger/pull-paradigm ) and Education ( force-feeding/push-paradigm ).
Learning, we want to grow as much as possible.
Therefore, Homeschooling, Learning-centres, schooling based on the individual's hunger/intrinsic-potential...
all increase Learning, and therefore are a Good Thing(tm)
Education, however, is for Certifications, & the like:
Grade-school, High-school, Vocational-school, Univarsity-skool.
Simply configuring it so that people are in Learning/hunger-paradigm for 75% or so of the time they're in training, and only 25% of the time is spent in push-paradigm filling-in-the-holes for Certification, would result in MUCH more continued-learning going-on among our population,
and THAT would make more difference than more pushing ( of dumbed-down "knowledge"! ).
"flawed and therefore always needing more money?"
Somewhat like most IT departments and most software projects? People in glass houses and all.
Right, kick ass. Well, don't want to sound like a dick or nothin', but, ah... it says on your chart that you're fucked up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded. What I'd do, is just like... like... you know, like, you know what I mean, like...
But also sorta wrong. Such people exist - Myra Hindley was a notorious example. The James Bulger case shows it needn't only be adults. However, the total number of such people probably averages out to one in a hundred million. In comparison, current estimates place the number of domestic sexual child abuse cases at one in every thousand. On the whole, the former - whilst it exists - simply isn't worth putting much time and effort into. Maybe some, but look at the relative payoff. For the same effort, you will prevent and/or solve a lot more actual crime dealing with the latter. Maybe not a hundred thousand times a much, but even if it was ten times as much, that would be an infinitely better use of resources.
According to the UN, slavery in America is still a major plague, and with American attitudes of treating the victims far worse than the abusers, this isn't a problem that's going to go away. Reports that, in some States, police collude with organized crime gangs to facilitate such an evil trade do not bode well. Even if the reports exaggerate, America has had that problem before. That's the sole reason the sole-called "Untouchables" were considered exceptional. Depressing, isn't it, when you have to celebrate when police are doing their job rather than polluting society?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
From my personal experience, you are right on point with combining math and science. I personally learned a lot more math in my physics class than I ever did in the official "math class".
Math that is disconnected from any link to the "real world" or "practical application" is just a pointless exercise in flipping symbols around.
Math isn't a "thing" it is a language used to express the relationships between quantities. Just like any language, learning the "words and rules" isn't enough, it needs to be linked to some sort of actual meaning.
And for the love of God, stop ever grading on homework and "effort". All that should ever count is how much the kid learned in a semester. If they learned extremely well, give them an A. If they are still clueless, a F is appropriate.
If you want to really motivate students, tie their future "social benefits" to a diploma. No diploma, no benefits. None. Zero. Until they earn a diploma, that is.
http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~david/david/educphilosophy.htm
http://hermitslantern.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1062477%3ATopic%3A2741
There was a book on this topic, but I forgot what it is called.
If you think I need a teacher, go to hell.
The information is all I need.
I am the teacher.
I teach myself.
I've been doing this my whole life.
I'm satisfied. I take FULL responsibility for
my learning.
I give NO power to anyone else for my education.
Oh, your going to teach me? Do you see this? ..|.
I don't need you. I will buy my own books, and study on my own.
Screw you.
The ONLY real reason people want a diploma,
or certificate is for "recognition", and official
"government" supported education.
That and they are too dumb to teach themselves.
Or they have no motivation. Or they see no
point in learning anything.
I've met quite a few excellent teachers, and some brilliant students. Even some of the most "disadvantaged" kids can be brilliant learners - if they want to.
In most of the USA, education is of really good quality and quantity, but we still have pockets where it is a social stigma to actually learn. Peer pressure stupididty, if you will.
And yet, can you name ANY big Finnish company? Can you name any big Finnish guy or gal in any other country in the world (presuming Finland is too small to make a difference) who has contributed in a rich way to our lives?
How delightful a "system" ends up being is sadly a direct byproduct of the methodology used to study the systems. WSJ piece was stupid in the kind of things it brought up. (Teachers as entrepreneurs? Great. What's the system?)
America is sucking rocks because of its society and mores. You cannot have teen movies talking about underage sex and kissing and then expect the same kids to go to peer environments such as a school and be focused on their studies. Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, those annoying twin sisters in movies and perfumes..look at the icons of American kids.
Asian countries contribute high quality students because there's stringent discipline, which is exactly what is needed at school age. Not a discussion of all the bleeding "freedoms" of a kid.
As I said, I don't repeat myself.
Most children eventually grow up to be voters.
:).
Why would politicians want to make things harder for themselves by actually fixing the education system?
They probably think the education system doesn't need fixing - it's working just fine - after all they got voted in
Best to just look like you're fixing it. Keep it long enough and the voters won't have the brains to figure out the difference.
Where do most politicians in power send their children to for education?
Let me clarify to the person who gave me a bad mod. One problem with tutoring is that many kids don't want to pay attention. Their mind wanders and one spends most of his/her time getting them to pay attention. This is a difficult and tedious job that I have not perfected in the least. Good listeners can be a pleasure to teach. Bad listeners are not. If I use heavy-handed discipline, then it becomes a power struggle and cry-fest. I want to instill knowledge, not herd cats on crack. If they really need an hour or so of tutoring at home, then I'd need to hire a professional tutor that knows how to keep their attention.
Table-ized A.I.
The valid point in the previous posts is that education must be about applicability. In the apprenticeship model, the work accomplished has actual, not theoretical, value. The greatest weakness of my bachelor's work was that I accomplished very little that has real value (I'm not in the business of selling 'Hello World' apps). If we're to 'fix' post-secondary education, it has to be about delivering real-world skills. The first step there may be in reducing the impact of permanent faculty in lieu of practicing professionals for courses beyond the basics (calculus, physics, etc) for bachelor's-level work. As far as that goes, a course need not be driven by only one instructor; it might be divided into segments calling on the skills of several practicing professionals with some transitional material lead by the professor or TA (ignoring obvious logistics challenges). Just $.02.
The problem is that education does not test in a way that people will be forced to act in real life. Standardized test do not reflect reality NOR do they test in the way that teachers are required to teach (standard based projects). When we start to look at students as more than test scores and judge them by a portfolio of works done throughout the year (much as we are judged at work - by what results we produce daily and yearly) - will education begin to be fixed. When "rigorous standards" becomes more than a punch line, will education be fixed. Having taught for 2 years in D.C public school systems, I can tell you that at least in Washington, D.C the system is fucked.
"Victory can be anticipated, but not assured" - Sun Tzu
Needs more money?! How about fixing the debacle, known as public education, before we blindly throw more money away at the expense of the tax payers.
Here are a few facts:
Education funding increases typically out pace inflation by a huge margin. Sometimes by double digits.
Typical public school districts do not have to spend tax levy dollars on what they tell voters they intend to spend it on.
There is very little financial accountability in typical public school districts.
Public schools pass students who should not pass for fear of losing funding. What's the point?!
If families and business operated their budgets as public schools do then the we would all be financially ruined within a year. The ONLY reason public schools stay operational is because they have almost unlimited resources. (pockets of the tax payers)
The constitution says we have to educate our population and that's a great thing. However, there is nothing in the constitution saying we can't keep citizens from going to private schools with tax money.
Give the choice back to the individual! Give us vouchers to go to public school if we so choose!!!
Science education is a subset of science. It is science itself that is under attack. The government WILL NOT trust its own citizens to own, possess, and use chemicals, powerful electrical devices, stills, and a wide variety of the fodder that is the raw material for science.
Each of many Federal and State regulators grossly over-control, and outright ban, or make permit requirements so onerous only large enterprises can conform to rules.
Remember chemistry sets? If you ship one to a hobby store today (remember hobby stores?) the sheer number of hazmat labels required is astounding.
Like declaring uber small quantities of chemicals as "hazmat" will in any way improve shipping safety. Marking it in no way impacts whether or not the shipment is damaged, but it DOES greatly limit who can ship it, sell it, distribute or resell it, or worst of all, adding something to it and then selling it as a value added good!
Until the fodder of science itself is deregulated we will continue to become an increasingly nannystate population and become ever more distanced from knowing how the important building blocks of chemistry, ballistics, biological processes, physics, electricity, and other basic building blocks of science work.
Why is there no way to simply go to some face of the "police state", issue a letter of intention to make a "firework" or "still" or "tesla coil" or whatever, and have that local person who has talked with me issue that permission. Have that permission encompass the entire process of buying goods, storing them, using them, publishing the results, shipping stuff around as needed, and where the experiment involves some sort of dynamic act, permission to activate it.
Don't even get me started on the constitutional or BOR claim of "public access" vs. the reality of "governmental mandate, ownership, control and management" of education.
Not quite anon Jerry
The grandparent wrote:
To which you replied:
The grandparent wasn't "sorta right," he was right, and you said as much in the rest of the paragraph. The whole point of saying "to a first approximation" is when you want to address the 99.999999% of the cases and neglect the 0.000001% that are exceptions. To a very good first approximation, kidnapping child molesters do not exist. If you went around introducing yourself to random people at breakneck speed, say one person every three seconds, ten hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for the rest of your life you still probably would never meet one.
To a first approximation they do not exist.
--MarkusQ
How do you fix education? Very easy; get children and young people to make their own educational movies. It has been shown in studies that children learn best from each other, next from self-learning, next from parents, and lastly from schools. I have run many such proejcts with children, and in particular Special Needs children, some who were regarded as unteachable, yet had good results. My government sponsored (Millenium Award) site is the outcome of this at www.makemovies.co.uk.
This whole "engaging the kids" meme avoids the fact that there is only one acceptable outcome--study, learn, don't take the easy way out, etc. We are trying to SELL them on the idea, not involve them in the process of decision-making. That's inherently dishonest, because we're only pretending to give their preferences (which consist of sleeping, video games, and manga) equal weight in deciding what their priorities should be.
Basically I think we're too nice to our kids. I'm not saying we should beat them (much), but I remember a conversation I had with a doctor I worked with (parents were Chinese) whose siblings also all had professional degrees. On a basic level, the kids all had the feeling that if they didn't do well in school their parents wouldn't love them anymore. It was never stated, but the feeling was there. Could I do that? No. But that inability translates into, if not academic mediocrity, then definitely a mentality that makes excellence a hypothetical option for my kids. They do well enough to get by, but there is no drive. I basically feel that I've let them down by being too nice.
The article makes some interesting points about changes in education, but doesn't say anything about the students' responsibilities in the education process.
For and increasing number people, attending college is something they take for granted. I don't have statistics, and I don't know where I would get them from, but I think the proportion of college students for whom getting into a college and finding some way to pay for it was considered a fantastic achievement is fairly small. Perhaps getting into a particular college was notable, but there are a lot of people for whom it is just expected that they will go to college. And once there, the goal is usually to graduate, not to learn things.
Students at colleges with good reputations and challenging curricula can fall into the trap of thinking that they will be prepared for life because they have a diploma from a fancy school. Those people put forth little effort. If they don't work hard and they get Cs, they excuse it by saying that the coursework is exceptionally difficult, although they could have done better if they tried. Students at schools with less challenging curricula may be fooled into thinking they are learning something because they are making straight As. Both are doomed in the long run if they don't develop an appreciation for what they can achieve when they have discipline. Getting As or a diploma, by themselves are meaningless. The best student is the one who works his ass off. Even if his best effort only earns him a C, that person works to their full potential. They know how to work hard and can continue to improve throughout their life. The one who's natural abilities get them As in college, but does not pursue challenges, will never reach their full potential, so it doesn't matter that it may be higher than that C student's.
People who are motivated to learn, be it for the sake of learning or because they think it will help them get ahead in the world, are going to be the greatest contributors to society, regardless of the quality of what the education system puts on a platter for them.
It has been said that no matter how stony the path, some forge to the front, and no matter how easy the going, some lag behind. I'm not saying efforts shouldn't be made to make the path easier. But if people were made to appreciate how lucky they are that a path exists at all, and that they are on it, there might be more forging to the front.
Didn't your mother teach you not to do things you would be ashamed to see on the evening news?
to be one of the central points of his argument.
Excuse me while I actually discuss a topic related to the article it self, yes shame on me.
He essentially claims that students, based on cognitive research , fail to gain "expert" status over material and the ability to self analyze one's thought process concerning a matter of average complexity.
I learned this first hand when i was in the second grade trying to get a hold on division and multiplication. It turns out that study and practice makes you better.
This principle applies to college courses as well. The preview for my engineering undergrad stressed that practice and thoughtful study was the key to success. 2 hours devoted for every hour in class was the rule of thumb.
Now, maybe this is simply because I attend a Tier 1 university (I can say with certainty, from experience, that my friends at lesser schools rarely even buy their textbooks or bother to study while passing) but studying is where you develop this "expert" status.
The only part of this article that has any bearing on the university as I see it is that professors have increasingly demanding positions as the grant getters. The increasing demands on the professors to take part in time consuming research can certainly degrade the quality of teaching to a degree. How far this goes is mostly dependent on the professor himself and is hard to gauge.
Reforming junior high and grade school is a whole different beast. I couldnt imagine even trying to go into the horror that the system is.
And the usually unstated observation is that Finnish and most other European school systems have a much stronger tracking mechanism than U.S. schools--not in the sense of "knowing where the kids are," but in the sense of putting them into classes oriented towards universities or not, trade school or not, and such.
Speaking as a Finn, I call this utter bullshit.
The Finnish school system has similar classes for everyone for the first 9 years. The tests referred here are taken during these. After these, the kids have to choose between high school and vocational school. It not possible to have extra math classes for those who plan to go to high school and take so-called long mathematics.
The test results are as good as they are mainly because all the teaching effort goes to those who do most poorly. The fact that brighter kids don't do much better does not show up because the test is too easy.
For late bloomers, it is still possible take so-called 'evening high school' after vocational school while working or go to 'vocational university' which is where many go after high school anyway. For those unfortunate enough to take 'short maths' at high school, the science and engineering programs have quotas for them and special programs to teach the missing maths courses during the first year.
School isn't supposed to be publicly-funded daycare (although that's what it effectively *is* nowadays).
The only requirements for a child to be properly educated are responsible, involved parents. A child home-schooled by disinterested, irresponsible parents wouldn't be any better off (and probably *worse* off) than a child educated in the worst public school.
The failure of public schools to provide proper education is not the fault of the Teachers. The failure of the public school system is that it tries to do too much. It tries to absolve parents of the responsibility of raising their children while they're "in school." The message parents currently get from the Public School System is, "Oh, don't worry about your kids when they're with us - they'll be fine, and they're learning a whole, whole bunch of stuff. They'll be *smarter* when they come back home."
If you think about it, this is an impossible situation. Teachers and their political action groups oppose every sort of objective standard by which teachers, or their students, could possibly be judged. It's not because they're afraid of objective standards - it's because their students are individuals, with individual needs of attention, and individual rates of progress. Teachers think of their students very much how parents think of their children.
The problem isn't Teachers, and it isn't Parents. It's the fact that our current system of Public Education overreaches the abilities of both parents and teachers. It promises parents that their children will be in, essentially, "Daycare Plus Education," which allows irresponsible parents to dump their undisciplined kids into the System and then also complain about the shortcomings of Teachers when their kids don't come back home as well-disciplined, well-spoken, well-educated men and women. It requires Teachers to deal with both behavioral issues - things that they should not have to deal with.
The bottom line is that our current system of public education has failed both parents and teachers by promising too much - it has taken too much of the inherent responsibilities of parents, and placed them on teachers. It, in essence, encourages bad parenting.
The problem with the US broadband market is that competition isn't free enough - especially because you seem to have pathetic DSL offerings, due to poor legislation on copper access.
Here in Sweden (although we still have access problems due to the state-owned Telia still dominating copper access) we have seen much healthier DSL competition, due to freer competition in copper-access to homes.
This in turn helps keep cable and fiber offerings honest. In the last few years, the addition of fast 3G connections has also intensified the competition.
Interestingly, Sweden also has a rather innovative system for increasing competition and choice in education. However, it is important not to overestimate the gains that can be had from more choice in education. Indeed - people seriously overestimate the effectiveness of virtually all possible educational reforms in rich countries. But that's a topic for another day.
Imagine if the government created a 'food administration' to ensure that the people in a city had adequate food to eat, and that this organization centrally controlled the distribution of food into the city. This would turn all supermarkets and restaurants into points of service for them. The result would be horrendous. Restaurants would start serving the same menus, and the quality would lower to the 'minimal acceptable standard'. So, why do we try to do the same thing for schools and expect that it will work? Why is it that parents have to move to a new house to send their kids to a good school? Why is it that parents have so little say about how the school operates? Perhaps this explains why so many parents aren't as involved - because their involvement doesn't matter? (From personal experience, my mother, who was a school teacher at a different school, was completely unable to change things at my brother's school, despite a very determined effort.) If the government sent someone to your house M-F, and you were expected to hand over your TV for 7 hours so that they could mess around with it, would you be as accepting of the situation? Aren't our children more valuable than our TVs?
There is a very interesting video of Sir Ken Robinson speaking at the TED conference on this topic. He has a curious opinion and more of it is someone who tries to change the existing status quo. I highly recommend spending 20 minutes watching the video. You can watch it on: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html and the same video subtitled on: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5557136080634912581&q=tedtranslate&ei=TPKOSJSvOp6ijQKBtf3-Cw
We Don't Need No Education
We Don't Need No Thought Control
Teachers, Leave them Kids alone.
Education is already fixed. The fix is called internet.
'someone who went through 20 years of science education as a student, lived his life in academia since then and even got a Nobel prize', might just be the wrong person to talk to about education.
Education is completely overrated, the system works in the way that it keeps children of the streets and as a state subsidized system to offload parents. But in all other aspects it is a complete failure.
People (children) who want to learn can do that with internet, without the hindrance of the educational system. Freedom at last.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Pass a parent/student bill of rights guaranteeing the legal guardian or student (in the event of emancipation) to make better decisions about schooling:
1. Noone should be able to compel you to send your child to a school you believe has failed.
2. Noone should be able to prevent you from sending your child to a public school due to some man made drawn boundry (see county and district lines)
3. Each student should be given a fixed amount of money as determined by the cost per student for normal public school to apply to attendance of any school, whether public, private, charter, or home school.
4. Schools accepting such money should be accountable to the consumers, that being the parents and students of these schools.
5. The Traditional bureaucracy should be abolished or prohibited from interfering in the educational desires of the parents and students.
6. Schools should be run by an oversight board comprised of all able parents who wish to serve on a governance board to help set the school's curriculum and goals. This way Parents will be able to steer schools in the direction they need to go.
A generation ago, a paper route was the responsibility of the carrier (the 12 year old kid).
Then the newspapers finally realized that depending on the reliability of 12 year old children to deliver their product was a recipe for unreliable delivery, poor customer service and disappointed advertisers. Turnover was extremely high and productivity very low. Not to mention the liability involved in hiring children who can't even drive yet. I don't know about your paperboys but ours frequently failed to deliver, screwed up the billing, damaged the paper, overslept, etc. I'm fine with young people getting opportunities for responsibility but only if they can actually handle said responsibility.
From what I've heard it's very unusual for someone to get a bachelor's in 3 years in Italy.
But let me get this right - you're doing a bachelor's on top of a PhD and another bachelor's? From what I've heard it's not unusual for Italians to still be living with their parents when they're well over thirty years old. I wonder if those things are in some way connected?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I served on a school board & budget committee here in NH several years ago, for two years.
The priorities for funding, every time, were for activities which involved non-intellectual persuits and coursework rather then anything that involved thought.
Join the football team: School buys you $800 in pads and gear, each year.
Join the chess club: Bring your own chess set.
Take a guess where the funding went when the choice was between textbooks for Earth Sciences, and a new set of bansaws for the woodshop ...
People looked at me funny when I suggested "Er, uh ... maybe we should fund stuff that teaches the students new stuff rather then just expands trade skills they probably already have..." I might as well have been speaking Japanese.
A few companies are doing it right:
Innovation Teaching
Rubristar
And use web 2.0 t make the job easier not to teach: share lesson plans, assessment techniques, ideas, and materials.
You'll be amazed how a few changes can go a long way.
Some of the stories and experiences that I have heard are cultural and societal. One of my wife's friends was a 3rd or 4th teacher in Chicago. She was required to pass 90% of her class at the end of the year no matter how well they were doing. She said that over half of them could barely read and under 5% should have gone on to the next grade.
Parents are the key to a basic foundation. I worked with 5th and 6th graders in college and almost all of them had developmental issues because their mothers had drank or had done drugs while they were pregnant. These kids were 3-4 years behind but after spending time with them working on just basic math and english skills they improved dramatically. The only way the school system can help these kids is by becoming their parents. I personally don't want the government trying to become someones parent anymore than they already are.
I think one thing people discount is how diverse of a country we(US) are compared to European counties. Sweden only has 9M people in the whole country and the culture is basically homogeneous. I don't think it is as easy as saying look how they did it, lets do it that way.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
The author is talking about UNIVERSITY education not k-12!
Can people and the poster read anymore!!
The author was talking about fixing the UNIVERSITY system, saying that is failing to properly educate COLLEGE students.
...No more than 30 homes.
As an industrial engineer (which I am) I would tell you that there is a lot of expense involved in parceling out territories that small and managing the large number of employees. There are insurance expenses to consider as well which are very significant. It is a solvable problem but that doesn't make it the most economic solution available.
Now forward that about 30 years, I happen to work with some pretty successful and wealthy people that came from nothing and got their start on a responsible paper route.
I would suggest to you that those people probably would have been quite successful regardless of whether they had a paper route or not. I've met a LOT of former paperboys in my time and while they mostly look back on their time delivering papers fondly not a one of them would claim that they would not have been successful without the paper route.
You never know what people are made of until you ask them to do something.
I'm not debating that. The problem from the standpoint of the business is that they do not know which children will be the reliable ones and there are extra costs to managing an unreliable workforce. Newspapers are not charities whose mission is to provide employment to children. There is simply a cost/benefit analysis that has determined that the cost of letting children be your interface with your customers outweighs the benefit of the cheap labor.
Times and circumstances have changed and young folks who want employment will have to look elsewhere. There is nothing wrong asking young folks to prove themselves but expecting a for-profit business to have some obligation to provide those opportunities is rather naive.
Education is based in a Victorian era copy of a flawed greco-roman model. Easy to say but what does that mean?
Our education models are not about learning, but creating students with a homogeneous comparative experience. If you really want them to learn you simply provide them with resources and incentives.
That's it.
A good analysis is from this former NY teacher, John Taylor Gatto. He put his book online. It's a good read to find out how *DEEP* these hierarchical ideas go. Underground History of American Education.
There was a recent TED presentation I remember where the speaker stated flatly that higher education was specifically tuned at making academic administrators, but perhaps not much good at other things.
Having just achieved my bachelors and even considering a master's (not in science granted but) I find the education wasn't so much about the knowledge but also about the opportunity to interact with the knowledgeable. What they have given is of dubious value at best but what you tease from them with your own questions is invaluable. How they went about becoming a "professional" was of interest as well. Using your time in any program as a launching point for what you want to do seems to me the true way to use this education system.
As to what should replace it. You need to decide on the principles of what you want to achieve. The rest will flow.
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
1. Your supposedly insightful comment is useless blame-shifting. This article is about "fixing" Science education.
2. Until we start laying out our communities sensibly You mean the community that you were lucky enough to buy into? Get out of your damn car, get to know your neighbors and get involved in local politics so YOU can "fix" the fucking neighborhood. Oh wait, maybe that's not the point after all? Maybe the point is to be afraid, do nothing, and bitch about everything else EXCEPT taking some responsibility for yourself, the schools, probably your children, and your neighborhood.
Will someone please explain to me where the **countless** fears manifested in this not-really-insightful-at-all comment come from?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Parental influence is a joke compared to peer pressure. You've been in high school, right? As long as the big men on campus are athletes and not academic superstars, and as long as hours in the malls and hair salons trump hours logged in the labs and libraries, all the boys and girls will try to ape the popular kids. If you don't believe me, you need to get out more. After you do, take a look at the most popular kids at Chinese high schools. Who are they? The Beijing- and Fudan-bound bookworms, that's who. There is, however, one thing in favor of high school and university athletics. When we become the low-wage manufacturing center for Japan, China, and the EU, at least we'll have some young college graduates with strong backs to tote the boxes.
>I remember studying history and politics in high school, and none of it made any sense.
Speaking specifically to this point, I have found that the study of history and politics makes much more sense as an adult, simply because you can talk about and understand adult motivations.
Most history and politics, indeed probably most of human behavior, is dictated by greed and lust for money, power, and sex.
It would be taboo to discuss these motivations frankly with school-age kids, so it is then no surprise that studying history and politics in this light makes no sense.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This article doesn't even begin to address the social inequities that students and their families face. There are students whose families suffer from food insecurity (not knowing where their next meal is coming from), no employment for their parents or the students if they graduate, unsafe neighborhoods, inadequate access to health care and other resources.
Is it really any wonder that students in these situations don't do well in school? Sometimes people like to pretend that "it's the parents, stupid" or "the kid is just not that smart" It's a lot more than that.
Get rid of public schools.
This has all been very interesting, but I'm not sure about all these comments from teachers. I remember when we grew up and went to school there were certain teachers who would hurt the children any way they could -- by pouring their derision upon everything we did, exposing every weakness however carefully hidden by the kids.
The funny part? In the town it was well known when they got home at night their fat and psychopathic wives would beat them within inches of their lives!
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
i'm glad that slashdot asked this question. truly, thank you.
to fix, first, stop the mantra that more govt/muni spending is needed. stop, we are broke from education spending. let's wrestle the politics of vouchers being evil from the political parties and get back to growing private education. i'm not saying stop the govt/muni education systems but let's add a few more systems.
second, how about applying some context to science students. some people are so far out of the loop and on the fringe they may not even know the scientific method let alone how to start a bunsen(sp?) burner. for instance, how about twice/three/four times a month the student from middle or high school goes and actually works in a college or commercial lab. by work I mean let them clean glass or do xeroxing but get paid. maybe not pay in the pocket but pay that can pay for the fees of their science education. also, the US system does a good job of finding the best/brightest and moving them through the system with the right resources. what i would suggest is to apply this type system with people who are the most at risk, never ever had a chance, and who would have the lowest expectations of work such that they would not expect anything and be costly employees.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
Abolish Tenure and the Teacher's union. At the same time make teaching a financially viable option for those with the skill to do it..
Those who can do. Those who can't teach. Those who can't teach govern.
Also quit coddling the kids, they need to be responsible for their own education at some level.
Get their parents involved, as they also need to be responsible for their kids education.
We have built a system where there are virtually no risks and no rewards for doing poorly/well for anybody (teachers/parents/students), and until that changes there will be motivation for any sizable improvement in the US schools.
Often times, when people (esp poliitcos) are talking about fixing education, they are talking about fixing some social ills by MEANS of the school. Look at the school lunch program.
I'm all for the school lunch program, but we need to be realistic on what can be accomplished by teachers alone. An untrained teacher is not likely to be able to help students who are, say, emotionally disturbed. There USED to be some fundings for Social Workers in the schools, but much of that have been stripped away.
So when some one says "Parents need to be involved", my antennae twitters. Consider your example, if a kid is not motivated, clearly the parent has the best chance to persuade them. However, that is not absolute and we certainly cannot beat our kids unless we want to land in jail. Some times the parents ARE part of the problem, esp. where psychological problems are involved.
I understand that teachers would like more support from the parents, that is sometimes not possible if they are overwhlemed with their own problems or are working 2 jobs to make ends meet. Parental involvement will not solve all the problems either.
In north america, unless you live in a small town, there is little reality to a 'school community.' IOW, a small minority of the parents might be involved, but most family will be busy with other activities. If there are extra-educational issues that arise, it may make the most sense for other professionals such as psychologist, social workers to be called in.
So I don't think that there's anything wrong about thinking of the school as services. We just need to be honest about what services we want and be willing to actually pay for them.
seems to be what you're saying. In most cases, I would agree.
But, there IS no government monopoly in k_12 education. There are plenty of private schools available. They compete rather well, thank you very much. Interestingly, the Catholic private schools tend to pay their teachers very little? How about that?
Perhaps your issue is wanting your taxes to go toward vouchers?
>My kids are smart and motivated and we (mom AND dad) are involved parents.
Sounds to me like you proved my point.
You have a sucky school, but your kids are still smart and motivated. Why? innate talent, sure, but also probably because you ARE involved parents.
Involved parents can overcome great flaws in the educational system. But the post I responded to said that if the schools are good enough, you don't need parental involvement. My claim is that even with an AWESOME educational environment, without parental involvement most kids won't be motivated to make use of it, because most kids are lazy.
This is also why I believe kids tend to do better at private schools, in spite of the fact that private school teachers typically get paid less than their public school counterparts. When Mom and Dad are paying out of their own pocket for an education, they are naturally more likely to be more involved in monitoring the progress of their investment - they are not just involved to their kids' education they are committed financially.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Here is a very insightful discussion of this topic. To sum up: schools get more money to help with the failing kids. Unfortunately, good teachers and bad teachers both like money, and too often, both get the money equally. So there really isn't much incentive to do better at teaching. In fact, in this scenario there is more reward for kids doing badly than there is for kids doing better.
Support the FairTax
Your true choice comes in 7th or 8th grade.
The choice comes when it comes to 7th grade Pre-Algebra.
or 8th grade Alegbra. If you pass on 8th Grade Algebra, you are officially behind the curve. The odds of catching up are small.
I will not even mention the issues of languages.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
Your experience is also my experience when I was a student, and it's exactly what I'm talking about. Parents have largely become disconnected from the educational process. Parent-Teacher Associations have dwindled, in no small part because of busing kids an hour or more from their homes. Parents aren't going to tack an extra 4 hours onto the end of the work day to make PTA that is an hour away from home. Parents have come to view the educational system as a service that they are paying for (via taxes) for their kids to be sent and educated. They have abdicated all responsibility for the education of their child to the State. The flaw here is that the State has no power to force your child to perform academically - if they try they will get sued. The only people with any shot at forcing their children to perform academically are parents.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This is only half joking. I have noticed that attractive teachers get students to actually want to pay attention. My participation in government class was hugely popular because all of the girls had a crush on the professor. Then, when the teacher encouraged discussion, the students were eager to 'show off' for him (and the boys didnt like to be shown up by the girls, so they participated too).
I always tried to do well because I knew that if I maintained straight As and was well behaved in the first two weeks of class I could get away with skipping, chatting, sleeping, doodling, reading, anything short of murder in the classroom. This allowed me to get through the mundane education requirements and fuel my artistic ability.
Basically portray education as a means of getting what you want, rather than a job to plod through. It won't be long before the kids learn that As on tests let you skip homework assigments.
Well some of the comments are interesting and some are close, some are constructive and some not so much⦠But most miss the basic problem⦠Education is simply another tool used by those who control our lives and attitudes through their control of global economies, media and politicians. Conspiracy! OMG! As has been commented already public education has its roots in the industrial revolution where factories needed workers with a certain skill set and attitudes to make the machines run and profits flow. North American economies are shifting from a dependence on industrial revolution economics so these trained workers are no longer needed. What is needed are trained consumers, created by the millions each year in our current schools, to buy the crap manufactured by the well educated new industrial giants in Asia. Can you say "global transfer of wealth"? Can you hear the promise of an empty future it leaves behind? An educated consumer is the worst possible consumer because they easily see through the bullshit of advertising and manipulation. They plan for purchases. They evaluate value. They price check. They remember what they bought and for how much. Basically, they were our grandparents and their grandparents. You can probably think of someone who saved everything of value, valued everything they spent money on, knew the value of their money, and maybe even actually owned (most) everything they had (vs. the bank owning it). Well these are the people that modern education is trying to eliminate⦠they are the threat to profits (politicians and the truly wealthy and powerful). These are the people who look at that new product everyone else is flocking too like sheep and ask "what the hell is the value in this? I donâ(TM)t need this crap! What a waste." These consumers are not the sheep of our society. Example of the steady decline⦠take the time to look at the statistics of a simple things like literacy⦠on a steady decline in the US since the Civil War⦠Public education, the number of laws governing attendance and laws mandating curriculum on a steady increase since the civil war. Curriculum that is abstract and often useless. No child left behind! Progress of a class held to the pace of the slowest student. Political correctness taken to extremes. Realities denied. Practical skills lost. Moronic consumers created! The end result of this? Where are we heading so hard and fast for? Well as we see today in North America, we are heading for the dumpster. Do you recall that tragic day in September of 2001? Do recall all the lies, misdirection, and downright bullshit fed to the world by "W" and his handlers? Can you identify the difference between the world before that day and the world today? If you can answer an honest and accurate "yes" to these last two questions you may very well be one of the remaining endangered educated citizens. However, if you are getting your blood up and talking out loud to your computer asking who the "F" is this "Fing" prick who questions Americans " 'cause we saved their ungrateful asses from the Hun, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Ho!" If you are this person⦠well grab a beer, turn on your 54inch plasma to SPIKE, take out your favorite weapon to play with, and fill out those credit card applications you are pre-approved for. Enjoy the afternoon. When the sheriff comes knocking at your door with the guy from the bank, do not get too upset because it can not be your fault.
Sell public schools to the highest bidder (returning the proceeds to the local residents), and drastically cut local taxes so parents keep more of their money. The market would provide incredibly innovative and inexpensive education, just like any unregulated market. For example, if you had told people 3, 10, 20 years ago that with a few clicks of a mouse you could have a complete dual core computer delivered to your door in a few days for $350, they'd think it was a miracle. Just imagine what entrepenurial innovators would deliver for education.
There is no sense on teaching math before any kind of science, neither after. Math should be always toghether with some science that uses it.
Rethinking email
To fix education you need to do a couple things:
1) Increase the wage to a family-supportable level. The lack of good teachers is because very few people who are good at something, especially science and math, can't afford to teach instead of work a corporate gig.
2) Give those going into education a way to pay off their student loans in exchange for 10 years of teaching. Why would someone go to college, get $40k+ of student loans and have all that debt until they are 60, just because they are teachers? Once again, why not just go work elsewhere and actually pay off your debt before you die?
3) Get rid of 'No Child Left Behind'. Yes, let's punish schools for testing poorly, when those schools need MORE help, not less. It's like starving a hungry person, it just doesn't make sense.
4) We need more teachers and smaller class sizes. You can't expect any student to get good grades when the student-teacher ratio is 30+ to 1. The good get worse and the bad don't get the attention they need.
5) REQUIRE better degrees from teachers, but be smart about it. In the State of Washington (and Oregon, I think) teachers are required to get a Masters or equivalent. Why a masters? That seems like overkill. However, they have some of the best schools in the nation and have the top SAT scores year after year. On the other hand, Alabama, Arkansas, etc., don't require a teaching degree at all to be a teacher. They are really dragging down the curve and are a major part of the problem.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
What is the point of science education in America when all companies want is H1-B workers??? Intel doesn't want Americans, they want guys from China and Eastern Europe.
Universities don't want American's either. I'm a math student. I got a 30 on the Putnam Exam and got top few percent on the Math GRE subject test. I was told by my undergraduate institution that I would not get any assistantships to study math in graduate school there. Meanwhile they give assistantships to foreigners who don't have a track record even half as good as mine.
"A hard head makes for a soft ass"
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_n6_v27/ai_17040690
"The teachers unions also play pivotal roles in state legislative races, local school district races, and ballot questions on education. The battle over California's 1993 Voucher Initiative (Proposition 174), for example, may have been the most intensive campaign over a state educational initiative in U.S. history," the authors report. The measure would have provided families vouchers worth $2,600 to enroll each child in any public or private school of their choice. Fearing that the vouchers would drain children from public school systems, the California Teachers Association, the state affiliate of the NEA, spent an astounding $12.3 million to defeat the proposition."
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
We should we fix education??? Just get rid of it and replace it with sports. Sports teach teamwork and all the other skills that are needed in real life.
Let's make a distinction: there are tech. school graduates with something approximating an 'engineering' Associates degree and a person with a BS in some specialization of engineering (electrical, mechanical, aerospace, etc.)
Now, for the Associates degree at the tech school, no, I would not require Liberal Arts. For the BS in engineering however, I would definitely require Liberal Arts classes (and vice versa...don't forget that).
Horribly lopsided analogy. I'm advocating that engineers should take intro. or 200 level Liberal Arts classes, but you're making it seem like the reverse of that would be for an Art major to take a upper level elec. engineering class. Wrong.
Here's how to fix your analogy: Engineer takes 200 level interpersonal communications, 20th century Russian History, or architecture survey. A Literature major would take intro. Astrophysics, Chemistry, Anatomy/physiology, or mathematics. That's balanced.
Exactly my point! That's why I think Liberal Arts people need more hard sciences!
On the flip side: How many engineers don't even understand the basic principles of human interaction that their world is built on like, say, group dynamics?
An professional engineer (maybe not the Tech school grad. w/ the Assoc. degree) needs to know how to (for example) work in a group with people of different specialities to design a UAV. They need the skills to understand the needs of the people who would be operating or repairing the UAV.
And you, my friend, seem like you could have benefited from a survey Argumentation and Debate course. That would clean up your faulty analogies.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Look, you backed off your main points, and I've covered all the random criticisms you bring up (should've learned it in grade school...I don't need the Liberal Arts...blah blah) in other comments on this thread, so if you're still following this discussion refer to those (just look at my comment history).
Here's the crux:
There is more to being a professional than just the basic physical work you do. Especially at an advanced level, a person needs to very well rounded and able to draw upon several areas of knowledge.
If all you want to be is a monkey cranking out work in a cubicle for 30 years, fine...learn how to use CAD and have fun, but besides yourself, very few people would *want* that kind of shit job. The Liberal Arts gives you the skills to go to the next level.
And for the record, I'm not advocating using FORCE to make someone study something. If you don't have what it takes, you can always go get your Associates degree at Ivy tech. Enjoy that cubicle.
Thank you Dave Raggett