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Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort
In a speech at the White House today, President Obama launched a new campaign, "Educate to Innovate," designed to get American students fired up about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The full text of the speech is also available on whitehouse.gov. "The new campaign builds on the President's Inaugural Address, which included a vow to put science 'in its rightful place.' One of those rightful places, of course, is the classroom. Yet too often our schools lack support for teachers or the other resources needed to convey the practical utility and remarkable beauty of science and engineering. As a result, students become overwhelmed in their classes and ultimately disengaged. They lose, and our nation loses too. The partnerships launched today aim to change that. They respond to a challenge made by the President in April, when he spoke at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences and asked the nation's philanthropists, professional and educational societies, corporations, and individuals to collaborate and innovate with the goal of reinvigorating America's STEM educational enterprise. The partnerships announced today — dramatic commitments in the hundreds of millions of dollars, generated through novel collaborations and creative outreach activities — are just the first wave of commitments anticipated in response to his call."
America's artistic value continues to decline with each hollywood blockbuster to be released. No studies whatsoever have been made to test if it could possibly be correlated to poor schooling in the fields of Language Arts, Drama/Theatre, and Humanitarian studies.
Up Next, a story about how a 3 legged dog saved a baby.
still can't compete with PS, Xbox, Wii, DS, etc.
Which is why we're heading towards second-world country status.
I void warranties.
I wonder if the abbreviation if a jab at Bush's policy against stem research. Probably just coincidental.
Nasa's budget slashed once again....
Massive cash awards to US scientists. These kids choose not to go into science because it is not cool. Why is it not cool? Lots of hardwork and small incomes. If you give scientists boat loads of money, they become cool.
Instead we will waste another $huge_amount dollars on some lame education effort only to have the kids still want to be Kobe Bryant, or Dr. Dre.
Now we can give Obama the Nobel prize for Chemistry and Physics as well!
ws
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
...designed to get American students fired up about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
No offense, Mr. President, but you want to know what really gets us fired up about those things? Getting paid for it. There are a select few of us that are willing to work for peanuts making the world a better place, spending hours working intractable problems, and sacrificing our social and sex lives all for the sake of The Greater Good. The rest of us -- we want to be paid for our work. The work isn't glamorous -- it's demanding, thankless, and for most requires an expensive education that they aren't reimbursed for. This field in particular (information technology) was gutted about seven years ago under the last administration in the name of short term profits. There is no R&D budget left for innovation, and not much has happened that's revolutionary in this industry since the bubble burst.
If you want to showcase our science and technology, start by making this country the best place to be for it once again -- rather than watching as Europe turns on the LHC while ours sits half-finished in Texas. Send some money to the Department of Energy to fund some physics over here. Give some grant money out so we can deploy a successor to the internet that doesn't suck, controlled by private interests who only want to sell us viagra, cheap thrills, pay per view, and piss-poor last mile connections. Put us back in space, which was once a source of national pride and now languishes as an embarassment. And cancel Enterprise -- goddamn that show sucks!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
just graduated from high school in June, and i was just about the only one in my math and science class that actually cared about the class.
people these days just don't care about science. Most of the people i talked to wanted to go into the medical field, gaming field, or sports field, so while i didn't ask everyone in the school, i never met anyone who wanted to go to MIT or go work in a laboratory like in Los Alamos.
O.o
The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. - Albert Einstein As someone who played with their parent's chemistry set as a kid, and grew up fascinated by science and technology...I hope this works out
Y'know might make some people feel more appreciated.
Science positions in general pay pathetically.
Deleted
Adam Savage from Mythbusters was present, and twittered about the day's event, including being mentioned in Obama's speech and even posted a photo or two of meeting him and Dean Kamen.
I really think someone should bring back Public Service Announcement education (a la "Schoolhouse Rock") in a big way. Keep the lessons small and bite-sized, fit them into 30 second spots. Just keep banging away simple concepts that are aimed at middle-schoolers and adults who forgot all of that stuff. Using simple math to figure out gallons of paint required for a wall of a given size. Linking fuel purchased to pollution created in numbers. Explaining the difference between anecdotes versus statistical norms, like the recent breast-cancer-screening recommendations. Illustrating the kinds of technology Europe, Asia and the Americas had in 1400 AD or 1600 AD or 1800 AD. Heck, even just quoting and explaining each of the Constitutional Amendments during shows like "24 Hours" or "CSI" would have a profound impact in the long run.
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We should set up small groups around the country to independently engage in the study of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math... call them STEM Cells, and watch the right-wingers line up to ban funding them, on reflex.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Unless the proposal includes some tactics for getting the parents involvement, it'll be doomed before it starts. Education happens outside of the classroom just as much as in it and a child's mindset regarding education (no matter the field) is strongly influenced by their parents' mindset.
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
Parents, parents, parents.
They are in the best position (or should be!) to motivate their kids. If they can't, no billion dollar program will either.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Yet too often our schools lack support for teachers or the other resources needed to convey the practical utility and remarkable beauty of science and engineering.
This looks like a job for...Sagan-Man!
More top down central planning of the government schools isn't going to lead to more productive outcomes. Science isn't a rigid, unchanging system that can be taught as dogma. Instead of throwing another stifling straitjacket onto the failed government schools, he might emulate the diverse and decentralized environment of scientific achievement, and allow competition with government schools, and competing curricula that will over time lead to increasingly more beneficial outcomes.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
the solution is to make science, let alone education cool. As my girlfriend puts it, convincing her child that its not acting white, its about not having to rely on others, its about being proud of yourself, its about being able to take care of yourself and others.
Focusing on money is what gets us into the mess we are in. The problem with much of education today is that children don't see the investment being worth while because even they can see people getting something for nothing. They have this tv mentality that nothing should be hard. Pride in self. Many science oriented jobs pay well, the problem is that they may not pay well initially.
Its just like sports. The best get paid the big bucks. They focus on it, they have an affinity for it, they have the drive to keep pushing. You don't wake up one day and graduate one day and end up in wealth. You earn it through hard work.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
We are going to join the Warsaw Pact?
Republican pundits would say as much about Democratic proposals for U.S. universal health care.
The teacher unions complained loud and early about this plan. They pushed hard for (and eventually) got numerous changes to the original proposal.
Most of my kids' teachers have been good people generally interested in educating kids. The unions, on the other hand, are out of touch with the classroom and mostly interested in their own survival.
Sorry to be so cynical - and I only speak from personal experience - but I have yet to see the unions fight to get their way about something (tenure, testing methods, school hours, curriculum, etc.) and get a positive result in the end. And with this much money at stake...
As long as children are inundated with religion and fantasy crap from birth, throwing more money at science education programs doesn't accomplish anything at all. The only children who will emerge as scientists are the ones who were neurologically immune to all the delusional crap in the first place... meaning children who are "disordered" in some way like Asperger's Syndrome. Neurotypical children will get sucked down the Rabbit Hole of fantasy, religion, and self-delusion and never return to the physical world in which they were born.
Not going to happen.
A post-doc doing biomedical research (which is the highest-paid field) makes $40k at NYU. This is after spending 4 years in college, and then doing research for 6 years making a $25k/year stipend. With a conversion rate of under 1 percent for faculty positions (which don't pay that much more anyway), why in the world would anyone actually do that to themselves?! You'd have to be REALLY driven to want to work 60+ hour weeks, under the perpetual stress of having your grant pulled, for less than subway ticket clerks make.
Even better, in our new future we'll hamstring doctors and nurses pay, and make sure that nobody gives a damn about that kind of science too.
As for physics and chemistry (and I am not even talking about Mathematics), we've already driven them into the ground. No need to worry any further.
"Yet too often our schools lack support for teachers or the other resources needed to convey the practical utility and remarkable beauty of science and engineering."
"dramatic commitments in the hundreds of millions of dollars"
I've never understood why America's solution to every problem is to throw money at it. If money/funding is the most influential thing for a good education, America would have the best grade school system in the world.
...the friggin' video???
And required Congress and the White House staff to attend class. Maybe then they'd understand the enormity of what they're doing with our money.
Get rid of non-physical patents. Software, business models, etc, etc.
I was going to say stop paying executives and lawyers so much.
But then I realized an even more fundamental problem.
Science is hard. Degrees are expensive in the U.S.
Knowing science does not result in either good pay or security.
So smart people choose other fields which require boots on the ground, better security, and better social status.
Only suckers do science right now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
much more knowledgeable folks on unemployment.
No, but lots of kids do want to be doctors and lawyers. Look at how many TV shows are based around doctors or lawyers.
Yeah! Like "Doctor Who"!
Bow-ties are cool.
As for physics and chemistry (and I am not even talking about Mathematics), we've already driven them into the ground. No need to worry any further.
The problem is there just isn't a big market for science. I really can't advise anyone to take science at all. Not for money anyway.
There is however a big market for Quants.
Deleted
Where do Rethuglicans come from?
...during shows like "24 Hours"....
Hmm, that's a new one to me.
Oh, that's the one with Eddie Murphy, right? And they're doing a follow-up series called "Another 24 hours"...
Bow-ties are cool.
It's just another way to sew up left-handed votes from the teachers' unions.
The actual efficacy of science education is almost entirely driven by culture, and that's almost entirely driven by the way a kid is raised. He's going to be in a science classroom ready to thrive and learn and see the big picture, or not ready to - because of how his parents have armed him for a world view that takes it all rationally into account. Parents with no sense of wonder about science? Kids without one, too.
How this administration thinks it's going to change the culture which sends kids to school - in a way that will make them happy sponges for science - even as it seeks to establish an entitlement Nanny State funded by borrowing money from countries where science (pure and applied) is actually valued and cultivated... no idea. But then, Obama has no idea, either. This is Community Organizing, around a slogan, at its classic best. Empty, meaningless platitudes that don't actually call on parents to actually do the hard work of hatching out and maintaining a curious, intellectually honest child.
Why? Because the left's power comes from asserting that parents can't and shouldn't be responsible - that the state should be in charge of those young meat computers, instead. An administration that's all about lefty group-think and completely empty utterances about Hope and Change is not actually interested in a culture of innovative, self-sufficient thinkers operating in any sphere. The want a thin layer of academics calling the shots from the top, and lot of It-Took-A-Village kids raised to vote for a Nanny State to keep them employed and in power. This particular iniative is a joke, in the context of who's cheerleading for it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why would anyone go into science or IT in a North American school? The jobs are being offshored as fast as executives can find people who claim to be able to do them cheap (with pathetic CVs and fake certifications). Pretty much all science jobs are being offshored, engineering, programming, research...
It is not easy competing with people who make $5/hour no matter how little they know. Lots of execs prefer to fail projects cheap than to try to sell them at a reasonable price.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
The silver bullet for education is very simple: Fix society. There's nothing inherently wrong with our schools. The problem is that schools are nothing but a microcosm of our society. We think that because schools are full of kids we have some special control over them, but that's generally not true. Kids learn what to value first from their parents, second from their role models (which are usually popular media figures), third from their peers, and only then from teachers. It's even worse when you think you can control teenagers who are not children.
Parents that do not value education produce kids that do not value educations. Parents with no ambitions produce kids with no ambitions. A society that values fame and fortune over science and progress produces kids that value fame and fortune over science and progress.
Quite simply, sick schools are a symptom of the real disease, a sick society. Of course few want to admit our society is sick, and even fewer want to make an effort to fix it. They'd rather just pretend that there's a magic trick to turning blank children (who aren't really blank) into perfect adults. Well sorry adults, but a) kids will turn out fine without you trying to "fix" them, and b) YOU are the real problem. We have to do what we want kids to do: We have to take responsibility and try to fix things instead of pushing problems onto somebody else, i.e. another generation.
Fix society, and you fix schools. It's that simple. Fixing society isn't that simple? Tough. Either do it or stop complaining about schools.
To you and people who think like that (sibling post by techno-vampire going even further in this)... I'd like to note that there is a reason why we need standardized tests. If each school acts on it's own, some might become better than now, others worse. You could look at two people's papers and not know how good they are compared to each other unless you are well familiar of quality of every school in the country. We really need standardized tests to fix this, to give some guideline with which to compare students' knowledge to others.
Your argument is really not that much against standardized tests. It is against badly used standardized tests, which can be fixed if it is made into a priority. I can't comment on this one as I'm not from USA and have never gone through such. However, here in Finland there are pretty few standardized tests but they are important: At the end of highschool you are put to national tests about each subject (a group of good teachers evaluate all tests without knowing to whom they belong to or even what school are the exam takers from) and everyone gets a grade relative to others. On each year, 5% best get the best grade, those who aren't in 5% but are in 20% get the next best one... Of course there are some variations (a score that would have been just enough for the best grade on one year could be just below the limit on the next) but overall it gives a pretty good result.
If people from one highschool consistently get lower grades, the school get a bad reputation and nobody wants to go there. Publicly funded schools (=practically every single one) get funded based on how many students graduate so schools have some interest to compete with other schools when it comes to quality of education.
Obama is a member of the One World Order muslim kenyan atheist conspiracy and is only interested in promoting America-Last policies like Darwinism, heliocentrism, and rational thought.
YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
Hah. Your post got modded -1 Flamebait on a "nerd" site. Buddy, I think you were just talking way over their heads. At the end of the day I think all that's left here on slashdot are Microsoft shills, Apple fanboys, and creationist trolls. Well at least there's one other thinker here...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Get rid of non-physical patents. Software, business models, etc, etc.
This just in: It's possible to do two or more things at once. If I see this "fix $my_pet_peeve first before you fix $latest_initiative_to_secure_funding" fallacy again I swear I'll punch my monitor.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
What does it matter when children are non-lingual? Kids today can't read or even speak in English. They also can't speak or read in Spanish (the ones of Latin descent who are the worst offenders). I would love to see science, math, and other subjects receive more attention, but without structured language, how can they assimilate ideas, communicate effectively, or understand?
Corp america doesn't care how many millions of kids become engineers or scientists. It'll always be cheaper to hire an engineer in India/China than in the US. My company (large IT company), hasn't had any layoffs, but all the hiring that has been happening has been overseas. So when the CEO gets on the quarterly call and says that the company has continued to hire people; he leaves out the little footnote about how 90% of them are overseas.
You have a good point about the tedium pace and monotony of our day to day jobs. As a recent college grad I feel exactly where you are coming from. So I have a question for you, or anyone else on here who has some ideas. How do we fix that as well? How do reengineer the workplace structure, at any level, to make work less suck and more awesome? Honestly, I am not asking to troll, I am seriously curious. I don't have an answer...at least not a full one. I have some ideas, but I would be interested in other folks' ideas as well. How do we make work less crappy? Any takers?
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
The Quality Counts report, a publication from Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes the trade magazine Education Week, rated the 50 states and the District in six areas of education performance and policy.
The District was ranked 51st in the report
Maybe we should return control of local school systems back to local school boards. And let Congress and the DOE control only the DC school system. When the DC school system is ranked among the top 25 then perhaps we might want to pay attention to the example set by Washington. Pay attention to the example - not do as they say. Under local control, some schools would undoubtably do better, some might do worse, but DC is dead last right now - so even your religious nutjob nightmare districts are still likely to do a better job than the nations capital.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Building schools and educating people in developing countries (that vocally demand education) is a proven much more effective way to fight against fundamentalisms of all types.
Books instead of bombs.
https://www.ikat.org/
1 Word...
LEGO
But I want to be a jock or a rapper .. cuz they get all the whips (not the American made lemons) and all the hoes.
Seriously, as long as the leadership are not from a STEM background, the US will continue to spiral into irrelevancy.
The big problem is really obvious. It's the quality of teachers. And it's not that the teachers are bad per se, it's that they're unmotivated to do better. Teacher's unions make it so that you get paid on years on the job and tenure, not how well you teach. Decoupling rewards with results in this way has been the single worst decision in education in this country.
You're absolutely correct, but that's still only 50% of the problem.
The other 50% is the way school boards are run. Where you go to school is a product of where you live - this is wrong, as it creates a system where *schools* are unmotivated to do better. Allow students to go to any school they want, and have the funding follow the student. That will encourage schools to work to attract students, rather than just sitting around collecting money.
I just watched a biography of Condi Rice where her father said she had to be "twice as good" as white people to get ahead of them. When they visited the White House as a girl she got the idea maybe she could work there someday.
P.S. The documentary was favorable about her early years, but brutal about her Bush service.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Many things in education just won't happen, so I don't fight that. If you are a parent fighting for education, you will give up once your kids leave. Its the half-life of the eduma-fight, about 10 years....
Here is a picture I drew to explain the expense in the system
I taught for a year. That drawing is correct down to the name on the door in Memphis TN, The office reads "Certificated teachers".
Heres my solution and a little background. In Scuba their is NAUI and PADDI. In politics their is Red/Blue. In testing their is the SAT / ACT.
In teacher certification their needs competition, lets call them Scert [state] and Pcert [parent]. I just made that name up, Parent certification is my name.
Competition in certification would bring this lopsided system back in check.
-jim Save a life for free.
Conservatives declare war on science to spite "the liberal agenda" in ...
Nevermind, they declared war on science some time ago. As much as I love my job I hate the fact that my entire field is a political football, kicked around everytime the leadership in Washington changes. Why on earth supporting scientific research has become a partisan issue is beyond me; scientific research benefits people of all political persuasions.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Of course, if those were private schools, that would have been impossible...
I've been to different parts of the world where kids have much less to learn with and yet reach very high in education. They have a value in their home that causes them to strive for the most. Here in America, there is much less emphasis placed on how hard we must try, because ultimately, if you drop out and do nothing, the government will still give you a home, food, and soon all the health care you may need. In other places in the world, if you don't try hard the government will give you nothing and watch you starve.
Let be honest with ourselves, we're not going to be really striving hard until it is essential for survival...like it is in most of the rest of the world. We're our own worst enemy in making life easier and easier and requiring less and less effort. It seems that we ultimately desire to just sit back and let the world feed us while we just monitor the computer screen and get paid lots of money.
Throw all the money you want at school, but ultimately I'm for looking the parents straight in the eye and asking them what they're doing.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Why go though all the time, money, and effort, just to be replaced by an H1B?
If Obama wants Americans to study STEM, he should see to it that they will have remunerative employment when they graduate.
The other half of the story is that 30 million of those Americans are uninsured but covered by government programs like SCHIP and Medicare. The remaining ones are illegal intruders (non-citizens).
You left out lawful tax-paying immigrants not yet naturalized, and you also left out people whom all the available insurance companies have declined to cover due to a preexisting condition.
Not sure why you got modded flamebait, this idea makes a bit of sense (although I wouldn't have worded it in such a crypto-libertarian way).
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
Warning! Anecdotal evidence ahead, my own two cents, etc....
My wife is a teacher now for 6 years and from what I can make of it, teachers are there own worse enemy when it comes to any improvements in the schools. They regularly resist any change, argue over almost any point, and back stab each other the smallest perceived slight. I think, at least in part, its comes from just a lot of burn out and frustration with students, but as I said this comes to be second hand from my wife so I know I don't have the clearest view.
My wife was an accountant and got her MBA before deciding to get out of the corporate life and to take up teaching. She went through an accelerated course to get her teaching degree. Now teaching business at the high school level for several years, but continues to be look down on by many of the teachers at the school. She didn't get a normal degree in education, she one of the "transplants". Such narrow mindedness....
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
Funny you should propose that, it was proposed in the brilliant Yes Prime Minister series.
See below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP-9WzAh26Y
America's artistic value continues to decline with each hollywood blockbuster to be released. No studies whatsoever have been made to test if it could possibly be correlated to poor schooling in the fields of Language Arts, Drama/Theatre, and Humanitarian studies.
Up Next, a story about how a 3 legged dog saved a baby.
Dude, all the people with education in the Language Arts, Drama, and Humanitarian studies are the ones turning out the crap we have now.
They've just sold out.
Decades ago, media discovered this: Why make a really deep and interesting exploration and celebraton of American culture when you can make a simple film with a muddied down pan humanistic message and sell it to a billion people, rather than 100 million in the USA alone.
My friends on the right think all of this USA bashing in Hollywood comes because of some socialist bent, and who knows, some of it might, because that's the crowd, but really, its just cashing in. Its easier to sell a film that kinda bashes America to another country than it is to sell a film that says: "hey, isn't America great!". Every artist with half a brain knows that these days, and they are just making watered down meaningless consumer crap because if you put anything in it, it will piss off perhaps an entire country.
I mean, serious, imagine trying to make any artistic work that everyone in Cleveland, Dubai, Berlin, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Tokyo, Cairo, London, Ireland, Warsaw, etc, would actually ALL buy.
This is my sig.
Not to mention the fact that in Asia, "big name" degrees carry nearly automatic social status that opens doors there. This comes from a long tradition in Asia of elevating the status of formally learned individuals to almost deity levels. It is almost a social tenure.
US companies, on the other hand, view productivity, or at least what managers view as "productivity", more important than degree level. They'll happily toss out a Masters if they see a Bachelors producing more. The advantages of advanced knowledge may not be so readily visible to managers, or may not appear soon enough to make the bean-counters happy. Thus, they don't value it nearly as much as Asian companies.
Table-ized A.I.
It fucking infuriates me to see people complain about teachers, or police officers, or sanitation workers, or toll collectors, or any other normal person being paid too much. What the hell is wrong with you? Do you think the rich should keep even more of their ill-gotten spoils?
Instead of quixotically crying about others being paid a living wage, why aren't you asking for the same pay yourself? Why aren't you forming a union and demanding that your employer return to you a fair part of the value you produce? We should all be paid well, and the top 1% should be paid a whole lot fucking less.
You know why crabs won't escape when you have more than one in a barrel? Because when one tries to climb up the side, the others pull it back down.
not sit back and watch as my Obama-money comes pouring in while watching Oprah
Yep... and then distort it even further if you can get away with it?
not the land of hand-outs for not trying
Check. Now can the GOP continue on and show that they have no grasp on how the rest of the world funds education and operates their national budgets?
In most of the world, they are passing us up because their lives depend on them doing well and getting a job to earn money. Without it, they starve.
That is an excellent start. Can you drive home the distortion now by belittling people who didn't crawl out of the correct vagina and find themselves born into wealth?
With more and more fallback in America, we slowly reduce the incentive to do anything. Ultimately, the government (via taxing the rich) will give me everything I ever want whether I try or not.
Yeah, we see why the conservatives deserve to be in power now. They will ensure that only the rich and richer have money. If anyone else can't make enough money to improve their own situation, it must be only their own fault, period. Clearly the free market has solved all of our problems so brilliantly in the past 8 years, we want more of that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The US already spends more per capita on public education than any other country in the world. More money is generally not going to help, unless it goes to schools like Basis in Tuscon, AZ and towards hiring qualified teachers in these subjects.
Full disclosure: I attended public school in Miami, FL for 12 years and learned the humanistic curriculum that most Slashdot readers are familiar with. Since then, my wife and I have educated our kids at home. The first two, scored 2400 on the SAT, and the third is well on his way.
Now, if the public schools would teach real critical thinking, you know formal and informal logic, argumentation and rhetoric, they wouldn't last more than one generation without serious reform.
Like the church in the 16th century, this country needs the equivalent of a Martin Luther to expose this institution for the sham that it has become.
And Asia one day will be where we are.
Don't forget your history. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, scientists and technicians were practically revered in this country. We valued the idea(l) of progress, and were convinced that we could improve our lives through the application of knowledge. And we did. Learning was valued, and science was respected.
That's all changed now, of course. But respect for learning isn't a uniquely Asian cultural phenomenon: rather, it's what you see in a society after it's become prosperous, but before it's become decadent.
When Tony Blair came to power a decade ago he listed his three priorities as "Education, Education, Education". Since that time New Labour have lowered standards in education to the point where school leavers are now totally unemployable and near illiterate. The UK education system renders most children unemployable and 20% of youths between the age of 16 and 24 are currently out of work. I was interested in becoming a teacher at one point but after visting a secondary school and seeing what was being taught I was completely put off the idea. GCSE students were learning what I would expect to be taught in a primary school and the textbooks were filled more with New Labour propaganda than anything of value. With no skills it's little wonder none of them can get a job upon leaving education.
So, what does any of this have to do with President Obama? Like New Labour Obama is obsessed with "Equality for all" and where there is not equality he will create false equality. Instead of accepting that all men are not created equal and that students have widely differing levels of academic ability he will force a false equality. The only way you can force equality in education is to lower standards to the level of the least gifted student, and at that point everyone will attain the same incredibly low standard of education thus total equality.
Tony Blair did exactly what Obama is doing now, making s speeches about the importance of science with his usual sound bites like the future is “lit by the brilliant light of science”. Now there is absolutely no science being taught UK schools, at least nothing anyone here would call science. Science can be very complicated and if some students don't understand it then we won't have "Equality for all" so it has to be discarded from the curriculum. In order to achive his "Equality for all" Obama will have to do exactly what New Labour has done and I therefore expect that Obama will do for the US education system what Tony Blair and Gorden Brown have done for the UK.
While everyone likes to criticise the Chinese government they have undoubtedly got their education system bang on right, separating students into different schools by ability and pushing the most gifted students to achieve in education. With a solid foundation of knowledge these highly educated individuals will go on to make the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the future, and China will reap the economic benefits associated with these breakthroughs. Meanwhile in the west our children won't even be able to write their names and western civilisation will collapse into poverty.
"Equality for all" doesn't work and any attempts to force it, particularly in education, will destroy a nation.
With our modern obsession with applicability and utility, where nothing seems to mean anything unless it makes money, we need to remember what science really is. Science isn't just a collection of facts. It isn't just an engine of economic growth. Science is above all a method of exposing nonsense for what it is. Science provides a method for anyone to identify truth from nonsense. When a dispute arises over whose assertions about the physical world are correct, we all agree to look to the physical world as the ultimate arbiter of truth, not to a priest, nor a CEO, nor a minister. Science cannot prove truth. It can only disprove nonsense.
If we, as citizens of a democracy, lose the ability to tell nonsense from truth, then our civilization is in trouble.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I'll readily agree with you that we have some lousy teachers, but the problems go far beyond them. Unions sink any disruptive reform that threatens their status or wealth, for instance. But there are deep structural problems with our very method of education, starting with the education major itself in colleges. We should frankly chuck education degrees for junior high and high school teaching. And there's no getting around the fact that education majors in most colleges are almost always from the lowest tier of ACT/SAT scores. We could debate all day about the virtues and vices of government involvement in education.
But equally as big is the problem of students and their parents. Frankly, lots of people simply don't care about schooling. Many parents see school mainly as a place to get rid of their kids for 7 hours a day. Most kids see school as a chore to be endured, from one degree to another.
Look at countries like Finland, where they spend less per pupil and less on facilities than we do. Their kids spend fewer days in school per year and fewer hours in class per day, and fewer years in what we would call the K-12 system. And yet they outgain US kids in all phases of standardized testing. Why? Simply put, there's a culture of responsibility.
Until we find a way to change attitudes among parents and kids, all of the money and legislation in the world won't make a difference.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Mmm. What I'm hearing from President Political "Science" / International Relations / Lawyer is "do as I say, not as I did".
Good point, how many scientists ever 'grow up' to be President?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Nothing will work!!!! - Because the government is only giving lip service.
Reduce taxes, tax incentives, reduced student loans (1%), loan for forgiveness if you graduate with a science degree, no H1B1 etc. - The tech schools would be overcrowded.
"I can't wait for my $10 million glass of Coke and my $40 million steak"
When I get tired of waiting for food I simply light a cigarette. The food arrives shortly after.
"That's when it stopped being fun."
I think one problem with modern society, not just modern education, is that we've stopped teaching a basic truth to our kids: life is hard. That's why I put it in my sig. We too often forget that no matter how much technology increases or how good the economy is, life is essentially hard. That doesn't meant that life can't be good... it is what you make it... but life means work if you want to get anywhere, and work is usually boring, even if you're in a field that you enjoy. You're never going to completely eliminate drudgery and unpleasant work. That's just life. And too often our kids, and even our adults, don't know this, or choose to pretend it isn't true.
If you really want to improve education, include this lesson for kids: Life is hard, and it isn't fair. But it's better if you work hard.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
thanks, now we have proper funding for books and such.
Most jobs suck to some extent; they're either strenuous or boring. And really, that's why you get paid to do them. The fun stuff people do for free.
That applies even to activities that are in and of themselves fun. Plenty of people like to play music. Relatively few enjoy the sheer mindless repetition of playing the same old standards night after night.
I figure you're doing well if a quarter of your workday is fun or interesting.
Math comes first
The Aristocrats!
didn't include the equation on how the liberals calculate the number of uninsured.
If you listen to Fox News long enough, you'll be able to simultaneously believe that Obama is an Atheist, Muslim, Indonesian, Kenyan, a radical black Christian, and . . . have they gotten around to him being a reptoid yet?
Doublethink is a form of trained, willful intellectual blindness to contradictions in a belief system. Doublethink differs from ordinary hypocrisy in that the "doublethinking" person deliberately had to forget the contradiction between his two opposing beliefs — and then deliberately forget that he had forgotten the contradiction. He then had to forget the forgetting of the forgetting, and so on; this intentional forgetting, once begun, continues indefinitely. In the novel's notes, Orwell describes it as "controlled insanity".
-- Wikipedia on Doublethink.
While I concede that schools are generally underfunded, the program is a waste of time and money. Why? Because is leaves out the most important factor: motivation. You can have science programs, science fairs, etc., but without some guiding motivation, it all leads to nowhere. I like the old saying that "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." Our problem today is that we can't lead our kids to science. They just aren't interested. And you blame them? The text reads like: Phase 1: put money into schools and partner with corporations, Phase 2:???, Phase 3: We're #1 .
You can't just tell a kid you need to learn science because it's cool. You have to present a problem first. Not some pansy rhetoric about "moving our country from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math." A real problem. One that the government is ready to put money into to accomplish a concrete goal. Like how to detect incoming aircraft without seeing them, split an atom, or getting a man to the moon and safely returning him to the Earth [before the Soviets]. Frankly, WW2 and the Space Program of the 60s is what led the US to being first in math & science.
If we want to match that level of science, math and engineering, we need to figure out a national goal and put up the $50 billion to really solve problems that require new kinds of sciences. I don't know what those problems are, maybe fusion power (I've always been told it's fifty years away), or machines that remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere, or clean the oceans.
It comes down to this: If the government won't get serious and really invest in math & science, why should kids?
There's a conflict of interests, for lack of a better term. It's nice that the President is advocating more science education and science literacy for the general population (with which I personally agree). But there's also the state-mandated testing systems, some of which require science tests (thanks to NCLB, all states require math and language arts tests, but some states went above and beyond).
If a state requires science testing, chances are that many of its teachers will teach to that test in an attempt to keep the school afloat. Yes, there are some teachers who do amazing projects and truly inspire students, but many will not. Many teachers will feel (and are feeling) pressure to just get good scores. This atmosphere is not at all condusive to making science (or any other subject taught this way) cool.
As far as getting the public interested in science, the media has to start taking an active interest in science and making it accessible to the general public. Let's face it: a lot of new discoveries are not very simple (LHC, anyone?). Explaining why it's an amazing project and worth funding should be part of a science reporter's job. When I worked at a large public science museum, our job was to take material and bring it down to a 5th-8th grade level, which would help compensate for kids, non-native-English speakers, and non-science-literate parents. Even TV shows like CSI do not make science accessible: the fancy-schmancy machines and lab-coat-clad workers are the ones to determine identities of mysterious materials or vials of evidence.
Which is another reason that kids don't want to go into science... "dude, you'll be a NERD!"
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
I mean you say creationist you know it's a right wing kook. You hear about a person being anti-chemical or pro Naturopathy you just have to know they're a left wing idiot. Hell, both ends hate vaccines which is disturbing but true. Really both sides "use" science when they can and abuse it when it suits their purposes. (Ok, so I'm jaded. It's bad enough to have creationsts but then lefties saying how great evolution is and then basically quoting Lamarck.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
"You're a radical! How DARE you tear apart the DOE? Everything would go to hell if you did that! We live in a society and we must have government running that society. Duh." - pro-big-government citizen
Troll??? Obviously the moderators here don't understand irony.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Three people who talk about education:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/
From the first, Dr. David Goodstein:
"""
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that 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.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
From the article:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-education-innovate-campaign
"""
Now, the students from Oakton High School are going to be demonstrating the "Cougar Cannon," designed to scoop up and toss moon rocks. I am eager to see what they do -- for two reasons. As President, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots, in case they try anything. (Laughter.)
"""
Interesting, coming from someone who gave an order within three days of taking office to use killer robots in a way that allegedly killed three children.
From:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
"Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W Bush has not changed. Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven "foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said that three children lost their lives.'
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I like this part of the speech (will they be open source?):
"The MacArthur Foundation and industry leaders like Sony are launching a nationwide challenge to design compelling, freely available, science-related video games."
But, sadly, they are still promoting "competitions" even in that "challenge", plus another part: "Time Warner Cable is joining with the Coalition for Science After School and FIRST Robotics -- the program created by inventor Dean Kamen, which gave us the "Cougar Cannon" -- to connect one million students with fun after-school activities, like robotics competitions."
See:
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"""
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Serously these gifted programs suck dollars out of acutall learning and make all us abnormal (special ed) feel terriable
How about focusing on teaching programing and not on the Oddisesy of the mind plays?
Due to the end of the exponential growth of academia in the 1970s:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
...what exactly are the people who funded you going to do to force an issue? :)
Tweet, tweet.
As John Taylor Gatto put it:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Do you believe that you can't buy insurance after you wreck your car?
Disqualification for a preexisting condition is more like not being able to buy insurance after someone else wrecks my car. Not all ailments requiring medical attention are self-inflicted. For example, people with type 1 diabetes couldn't have done anything to prevent getting the disease.
Links with four different approaches:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Another approach: ...
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"""
[Jeff Schmidt] argues in Disciplined Minds that work is an inherently political activity and that hiring therefore involves political screening.
Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Then what is an appropriate model to pay for treatment of chronic conditions, such as testing supplies and insulin for a diabetic?
Related Links About Academia: ..."
http://novia.net/~pschleck/academia/
Sample link:
"Generation Debt; Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty"
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0417,kamenetz,53011,1.html
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air.
Sounds like it is getting worse. Here is part of why:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The Educate to Innovate Campaign sets up a "National Lab Day" beginning in May 2010. You can sign up to request support for your project, or offer yourself as an expert for projects in your area. I've signed up as a computer scientist to help out on projects in my locale. http://www.nationallabday.org/about This is an awesome opportunity to Geek out with kids as far as I'm concerned.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Now tell us how a higher education institution will be able to know if your grades are worth the paper they are written in once you dump standardized testing?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"[p2p-research] College Daze links..."
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
A mixed message:
"[p2p-research] Slashdot | Study Says US Needs Fewer Science Students"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005489.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In other countries that is not the case.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
John Taylor Gatto says it best:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
There are many chicks out there that can see more on males than mere manutention machines.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There is a long list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jobless_recovery&oldid=327497122
Women with good jobs tend to look for partners lower in the chain food. That way the relationship is not competitive.
Of course you need a man grown up enough to deal with that, but there are many out there, contrary to what most /.ers would think.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As outlined here: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still, homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not.
"http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
We will let know China and India, who are producing more Engineers and scientists than pretty much anywhere else (and Russia also, who has some serious geniuses out there).
I find particularly puzzling that people seriously think that it is better to entrust education to people at the local level while ignoring the best of the best that could be gathered around a country the size of the US.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Give money to the Unions, at least they have to pacify normal people like you and I, unlike the plutocrats in big enterprises.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't know what the schools were like in your neighborhood, but I can guarantee you that where I teach the discipline system is far from "arbitrary and inherently abusive."
But I do agree, zero tolerance and most standardized tests (for elementary anyway) should be scrapped. The standardized state-run tests used today in most locales do little to illustrate the amount of progress a student has made over the course of a semester or year, but are instead used to beat schools/teachers into submission. Also, the tests given to us by publishers are a joke; I end up writing my own tests because I can do a better job than the PhD's that have never taught third grade math and have no clue how kids think.
The commenter that suggested ditching the Department of Ed. was right on. The Feds exert far too much influence over the states, while contributing very little in the way of funding and giving little in return other than meaningless initiatives every four years. Most states receive less than 10% of their budgets from the Feds, yet the Feds exert far more control than that 10% is worth.
One final note: You would see an overnight improvement in the state of American education if both parents and teachers were held accountable for a child's progress. I am willing to do pretty much anything to help a struggling student succeed; but if you as a parent don't back it up at home I can almost guarantee your child will fail.
Absent from these various topics is why would we make every state the same. The purpose of the constitution is to allow the citizens of each state a high degree of control over the shape of their society while still leaving base line rights and liberties for all of the citizens, as defined in the constitution.
What becomes abundantly clear in these discussions is that not everyone wants to have their state be exactly like all of the other states, and that was the point of the constitution. This is supposed to be a republic, not a dictatorship, and that is why so many people get so angry when the Federal Government wants to mandate some ideology across all of the states. This swings both ways, as I am certain the people of Massachusetts would get very upset if the Federal Government decided that the state could not pay for or lay requirements on its educational system, just as people from Texas get very upset when the Federal Government decides to take over its educational system.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Teachers are an easy mark, for sure, but unless you work in the system you have no idea how de-motivating the entire education bureaucracy can be. Everyone I work with loves to teach, and would do practically anything to help every one of their students succeed. But more often than not, dealing with the whims of administrators (who often have their own issues to deal with), school boards and the like one finds that the system as a whole really is not set up to assure academic achievement, but seems designed to do nothing more than perpetuate more regulation.
This is one of the reasons charter schools work; as they are free of much of the regulation and dead structure that most districts are required to by law deal with. Plus they can fire teachers that can't teach, which I'm OK with.
In the state where I teach (CA), teachers do not have tenure or tenure for life; they can be laid off of let go for cause. It is not easy to do so, especially in places like LA or SF, but it does happen. Regardless, most of those unsuited to the profession end up leaving within two years.
Having been a union site rep for a few years, I can guarantee they have far less power than you might think.
There are a lot of people weighing in, saying, "Yeah, but that's not the whole problem," and they are right, but not as right as they'd like to be.
I'm an educator. I teach university. Why? A few reasons:
1) K-12 pays for shit. What this does is reduce the teaching pool at that level to people who are totally dedicated to the idea of education and don't mind the crappy pay and long hours (yes, long hours--teachers never really stop working, except for a couple weeks on the long breaks) and major stresses of dealing with kids and parents and bureaucrats if it means that kids are getting educated. Usually (but not always), these people are great.
2) Morons who can't find anything else to do and who actually don't do anything over the breaks. These people are universally terrible.
I live in Japan and have worked at every level of the system here, and while it's not as great as Americans seem to think, I will say that the quality of teachers is FAR above what I had growing up. If you want to be a public school teacher here, it is HARD. Public licenses are reserved for very smart, very capable people, and when those people hit the workforce, they are paid well. It's a job people want, not a job one thinks about as, "well, I guess I could always teach." It breeds competition, and that's what we don't have in the US (well, I take that back--it can be hard to find work as a teacher, but that is a demand problem).
The quality of the Japanese system itself, BTW, lies in elementary school. I honestly wasn't that impressed with the junior high and high school systems. There seemed to be a lot of wasted time. However, the elementary school I worked at blew me away. We kind of think of elementary teachers as exalted babysitters (good lord, don't tell my friends who are elementary school teachers in the US that--although of those people, two have MAs and the other has a PhD, so I'm not really including them), and that is a big, big mistake. The teachers I worked with at that Japanese elementary school really struck me as teachers. Like in high school. And yet they were supportive and gentle with the kids.
Do you know what they were studying in the 5th grade? Physics. They were studying stuff I didn't see until high school. It wasn't at the level I studied in high school, but it was physics nonetheless. They were calculating acceleration due to gravity, etc.
I don't really see why we go so slowly with math and science in the US. I would have killed to have been studying physics in 5th grade. Also, studying math-intensive science like physics or chemistry frames math in the real world--something that I didn't see until high school, either, and which was too late--I'd already decided that math was boring. This is a systemic problem, but I also think it goes back to the teachers. Science and math education are terrible in the US, so finding teachers--people usually from the education department of their universities, which is in the college of liberal arts--who are good at them is already difficult, and people who are good at them have better employment opportunities elsewhere. It's a systemic and cyclical problem.
Last, parents are to blame. In the education world, one of the best-known statistics is that socio-economic level, even when controlling for all other factors, is the best predictor of academic and financial success. Why? Simple. Middle-class people have a culture that values education, and it is just a given that the kid is going to do homework when he gets home, and the parents will understand that it's a given that they help out if the kid gets lost. There's no attitude of, "If you don't do your homework, what're they gonna do? Fire you?" or that kind of thing. It's "when you get home from school, you practice piano for an hour, and then you hit your homework, and then you eat, and then you finish your homework, and if there's any time before bed after that, you can watch TV or whatever." Once again, this is where Japan beats the US, with its vast middl
What a great idea! I love it... when it was called FIRST. Why start a new failure of a government program when a growing program already exists with corporations voluntarily sponsoring it?
Many teachers I know (I teach high school) are stuck in a fallback position. That is: it's too hard to get kids interested in thinking and even harder to get abstractions across to kids. Therefore, let's teach them a list of steps to complete specific problems. It's all very stimulus-response. Kids eat this up, which is part of the problem as well. The current frenzy over measurement and data collection in education also feeds this, as stimulus-response is what you need to do well on the types of tests I've seen at least in my state. I teach math but this is certainly not confined to math.
If you look at the state standards or the Principles and Standards generated by NCTM, they are not written to promote a view of mathematics as a bag of tricks (or tools if you prefer.) However, a poorly designed assessment can surely give the impression that students have a deep understanding when they really are just good at stimulus-response. One of my brightest students asked me today (in Calculus 1) if the radius and the radian were at all related. When I taught trig, that was the first thing we talked about in relation to radians, but this girl had no concept. How does that happen?
From the fallback position, it's very easy to produce this kind of student. This year I've introduced a new policy: unlimited retakes on in-class quizzes. Students keep the most recent grade (whether it's higher or lower) and can retake things multiple times if they want to. In the past I found that I designed assessments to be easier than I'd like, out of a desire to be "fair" to students. This year I've come to a different decision, which is that it's unfair to lead students to believe that they're doing well by dumbing things down. The quizzes this year are as difficult as I've ever made them, and some kids are still getting A's and B's. But the real success of this policy is the student who gets a D the first time or fails and then retakes and gets a B. It's more work but it does make the rest of the year easier (for them and consequently me) when kids don't have these lingering skill deficits.
The way to maintain high standards is to increase the number and quality of opportunities for students to meet them. Students who believe they can do well and that they will not be penalized for simply taking longer to meet the standard have that intrinsic motivation that we all want to see.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
He realizes that the states are laying off teachers in all disciplines hand over fist. This happens every time there is a money problem. Education is the first and deepest cut, and then cut again. So, declaring that science etc is a priority isn't going to be worth a hill of beans as there'll be nobody left to teach it all. That and even if people do get into science, it doesn't give them any kind of payback. And all this comes from pleasant platitudes as opposed to a developing a culture where learning is valued and resourced because it is good to have an educated society. The USA has been telling its citizens that it has no value for K12 education at all (considering how much it has suffered) since the days of the space race, so it's hardly surprising that no one cares, least of all the government, except in terms of "sounding good."
Send some money to the Department of Energy ... Give some grant money out so .... Put us back in space....
I've got an idea. Teach Americans math first. For instance, how much is $12,000,000,000,000? Yes, that's your national debt. You want to go back into space? Print enough $1 bills to pay your country's debt, then stack them before you pay your debtors. It will reach the moon three times. How's that for an education?
You are mixing up education and intelligence. Intelligent people have an advantage that is not counted by numbers of family members. Unfortunately, for the rest of us there is the Catholic church.
Many of those who criticize teachers have never taught a day in their lives. Its tough to teach a kid math, when their parents show no evidence that they take the subject seriously or appreciate how they need to encourage their children to study and excel in the subject. The job is made even tougher when the student only appreciates mathematics by what they assimilate on TV or through video games.
Lets face it America has been remade for the benefit of corporate elites. Parents need help too. You can't complain about the parents, when many of them only make minimum wage and have little education themselves. We need to start refocusing on how corporations need to take responsibility to put something back into America rather than taking it out. We bend over constantly, because they supposedly provide "jobs". Yes there are some jobs, but most of the money made is too unequally distributed for the entire corporate enterprise to be looked upon as a model vehicle for social good around which we must continue to redefine society at large. There is NOTHING particularly important or useful or just in having just a few people gain all the benefits, simply because they can stack the system against everyone else.
We need a merit and science based economy not one that is designed and operated chiefly to maintain the privileges and benefits for a few.
We need to return to truly PROGRESSIVE taxation, with VERY MUCH HIGHER TAXES for the very wealthy and see the fruits of everyone's labor more equitable distributed so that we can afford to educate both parents and teachers, not menton making sure no one is hungry, without a job, or without health care.
Sounds as if you are saying America should just abandon efforts to educate its citizens and leave progress in science and technology to those countries with highly developed governmental educational programs, such as the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Singaporeans, Europeans and Russians.
If Republicans get their way, it looks as if you will get your wish.
If the right-leaning among us actually believed that parents should be responsible, they would dispense with the bashing and actually start doing something that would actually make parents be responsible. Instead, they encourage them to teach creationism, leave children with minimal knowledge of sex education, and fill their head with silly notions like how lowering taxes for the rich will solve all the world's problems. The right also seems to forget that many students don't have the good fortune to actually have parents. So presumably they believe that society is better off by leaving them uneducated.
At least the unions have been consistent and supportive of science education in this country, over the strong objections of many on the right,
Did you say he's interested in promoting rational thought. Yikes!
Its so reassuring to learn that the GOP has taken it upon themselves to crusade for irrationality. What would we do without them?
The scandinavian system always struck me as the most common sense solution: allow a free market for education, while encouraging meritocracy by outlawing privately funded schools.
Quite simply:
-All schools must accept any pupils who apply.
-Each pupil is worth a specific amount of tax dollars, this can vary by student age and location (more in cities to allow for real estate, teacher's living costs, etc).
-Pupils can attend any school their parents choose, although transportation is only provided free of charge for a certain radius.
This would create an equal free-market system where the best schools would flourish, without being able to exclude problem students. Schools would specialise in science, arts, etc, allowing them economies of scale in their preferred subjects. Failing schools would simply be abandoned. As for religion, it can be taught in either voluntary classes or in the home / church where it belongs.
So this kicksoff a massive American campaign to teach everyone the science of Intelligent Design and Scientology. The world waits in awe.
This is one preposterous quote:
. This quote is rather contradicted by the next.
Here is another:
. Are you sure you mean "most"? Because the next sentence actually contradicts that.
Just exaggerating everything makes you look like an idiot.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The American culture is the antithesis of science. The American culture is materialistic and centers around accumulation of wealth. In this environment, parents, teachers and politicians are not interested very much in science.
The only way for America to get people to choose science over something else is to make science profitable enough so as that people choose it over other disciplines. Unfortunately, this is not really possible. Science doesn't pay much.
You're quite wrong, they did come about by equivalent means, using very similar processes. Both are generalizations of oft observed phenomena that were shown to have incredible explanatory power to the rest of the universe. In other words, good science.
Play Command HQ online
..on your heinie here, but Hitler actually outlawed home schooling. I think we can safely conclude that the Nazis were pretty big on centralized control of their school system.
Other than flirting with Godwin (purely in the interests of historical accuracy mind you), I am in agreement that No Child Gets Ahead was a massive mistake. So was Head Start - which seemed to give great results, but by the fifth grade or so, there was no discernable diffeence in academic performance between kids in Head Start and those who were not.
It will be interesting to see just how much of our population must be competently educated to maintain our civilization. I suspect we are dangerously close to the tipping point - if we have not passed it already. The question I am asking myself is would it be better to start stockpiling guns and gold, or looking into emmigration and learning Hindi or Mandarin?
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Because it's a lame rationalization for not even trying. And it ignores the fact that Southern states would be third world countries without Federal spending and leadership.
I was wondering if Obama could come to Brazil, after his mandate in the White House, and take the presidency to make the things in right way. OK, if he [Obama] couldn't came, can be Jack Bauer, it will be a good improvement in another area, sending to jail or killing the corrupt people.