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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?"
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.
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?
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"Get the parents involved" is nice, but it's also passing the buck. Plenty of parents saw no value in education in their own lives, and discourage their kids from wasting their time. That's going to take generations to fix.
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.
The simple fact is, our school system was designed originally to produce good manufacturing workers, but there's no future in manufacturing. While people have long been whining about manufacturing jobs going overseas, the truth is more jobs are lost to automation than to cheap labor pools.
We need to be training designers and engineers with the talent to compete in the world market, but our pre-college (and increasingly our undergraduate) school system still de-emphasises critical thinking and abstract problem solving. We need to recognize that these abstract skills are quite practical: they are the jobs that will exist when everything else is automated!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
Replace science with english/history/math/social studies/foreign languages/etc etc etc and you still have the same problem.
If you don't take a holistic approach to 'fixing' education, you're just going to end up with more failure all around. To make a car analogy: you can upgrade a part (science) but when the whole car (the public education system) is beat up, you're just going to have some other part fail you.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
>Finish kids are not treated like babies as to why they can do so
>well. Most have to get to school themselves
Letting kids walk to school in the US would be cruel. Most US communities are so badly laid out that it simply is not possible to walk anywhere. It is not unusual for schools to be isolated on the wrong side of major highways, with no means for people to cross them. Until we start laying out our communities sensibly kids are going to need to be bussed (or driven) to school. It simple would not be safe to let them walk. The really scary thing is that a lot of people here think that this is a good thing
>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.
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This system has drawbacks for late-bloomers and others who are mis-tracked, but it makes schools look a hell of a lot better than the U.S. approach. The problem with comparing educational systems is that one first has to establish what you're comparing. If there were a panacea like your post implies ("Finish kids are not treated like babies"), it would've already been implemented, and the battles would be over.
We discuss some of the issues around education in Grant Writing Confidential, though the top posts are about other things at the moment.
To a first approximation, kidnapping child molesters don't exist. To a second approximation, every single person who might kidnap your child is a friend or family member - you and your child trust them, they won't need a net.
Remember: News is "something that almost never happens". Otherwise it wouldn't be news. If you see it on TV, you don't need to worry about it.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The world would be a better place if people grokked this.
They worry about terrorists -- but ignore the risk of diabetes. (the latter is 1000 times more likely to hurt or kill you)
They worry about abduction by unknown pedos -- but ignore traffic. (the latter is 1000 times more likely to hurt or kill your child)
They worry about the "radiation" from a cellphone-tower 50 meters from their house -- but pay good money to lie down near-nude in the strongest uv-radiation they are able to find. (the former is very likely completely harmless, the latter is KNOWN to cause premature aging of skin and increase the risk of skin-cancer)
They protest that the LHC will produce black holes that swallow the earth, but don't care if their car uses 5l/100km or 12l/100km. (the former is unphysical plainly impossible, the latter contributes to increased global warming with a very high probability (i.e. basically a certanity))
Violent death, to a first aproximation, is equal to traffic-death plus suicide. To a first aproximation, if you are killed, it will be because you kill yourself.
To a first aproximation, if you live in the modern west, accidents don't kill; disease do. ELIMINATING *ALL* accidents and *all* murders would only reduce deaths by 5% or thereabouts.
In short, the most dangerous things you and your children do are:
1) Getting too little physical activity, 2) Having unhealthy eating-habits and 3) Participating in traffic. (for those who smoke or have a high drug-consumption (including alcohol) that is one too.