Teaching Fifth Graders Engineering

Jamie noticed a NYT story saying "To compete in a global economy, some school districts are offering engineering lessons to students in kindergarten. " The story is about 5th graders working on a new experimental curriculum that is well beyond the egg drop of old.

Comments

21st century entrepreneurship

[dorpus]

No, don't tell kids to invent useless products, sell lemonade, or deliver newspapers. Teach kids to become health inspectors who demand $10,000 fines from lemonade stands. Teach them to go door to door asking to sign petitions to stop delivery of unwanted "free" newspapers, to save the trees. If they must sell something, teach them to sell bottles of "eco" tap water for $10 each that somehow saves a starving child in Africa. Put a pink ribbon on a $1 box of cookies and sell them for $10, because it will save cancer victims. Have your vacation paid for by asking $1 for every mile you ride on your bicycle, because this goes to a good cause.

Re:Parents are the Biggest Factor

[rtb61]

Competing in the global economy is all about price. Teaching children to more effectively compete in the global labour market place is more along the lines of psychological abuse. You are worthless, you should be thankful you have a job, shut up and do as you are told, your employer knows best, greedy labour unions are evil, a sick worker is a lazy worker, government labour regulations are all wrong, more people can work if they accept lower pay, the boss should physically abuse poor performing workers and, workers should dob in other workers who are slacking off as they are stealing from them.

Competing in the global labour market is bullshit. As people working together, as a human and humane society we sit down and decide what is the appropriate basis for global competition and what are the appropriate labour rules and working conditions and then we enforce those conditions by laws and criminal penalties and also by import penalties for other countries that do not adhere to what we would consider acceptable for ourselves.

Global competition, it is all about those that lose out personally in the global market place, those that the global market pays cents per hour, those that can't afford to buy much of anything, those that fail to compete and gain themselves and their children an acceptable future. Want you children to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, sleep in a factory dormitory, eat factory rations they have to pay for and have retirement as nothing but a death by starvation sentence, the fail to compete in the global labour market place under the rules that "YOU" define and that's what you will have. Don't think so, just as millions of Chinese, Indians, Mexicans etc. etc.