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TED Teams Up With PBS On Ideas For Education
First time accepted submitter edwardins writes "TED has teamed up with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the New York public broadcaster WNET to create an hour long special called, 'TED Talks Education.' From the article: 'The Corporation for Public Broadcasting paid for the show's $1 million costs under the auspices of an initiative that addresses the high school drop-out problem in the United States. "It was the perfect marriage of ideas that matter and our core value of education," said Patricia Harrison, the corporation's chief executive.'"
Please enlighten me, what do the Canadians have to do with it?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The popularity of TED shows that there is an unsatisfied hunger for genuinely stimulating intellectual stuff out there. PBS can be good but I am talking about people out there with a huge hunger to hear about cutting edge discoveries in various fields. This will always be a somewhat niche market but it seems that money and stupid always drown out intellect. Case in point: The Discovery Channel.
It seems the moment the MBA types start noodling with their spreadsheets they will say oh look a TED talk will pull in an audience of 2.3 million but a re-run of friends will pull in 2.31 million; my work is done here.
So we end up with a generation of kids who want to co-habit in a loft and drink coffee instead of a generation inspired to be the next Richard Feynman.
I am not saying their should be no Friends re-runs nor that all kids can become Richard Feynman; just that the ratio of Friends to TED type programming is in need of a little tweaking.
No idea, but we're sorry and apologize anyway!
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Can't help but think that if TED had done this on its own it would have cost a fraction of the $1M that PBS is spending. But maybe I'm naive about the costs involved.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Mind you, moose apologies can be pretty nasty...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baQBTWd49j4
There is no real "problem" with people dropping out of high school, nor is there a problem with people not going to college, nor is there a problem that some people don't get their masters, nor is there a problem that some people don't get their PhD. Instead, if we look at this as a "problem" we try to get people at all costs to graduate high school, mostly by dumbing down the coursework. When this happens (which it already has) a high school diploma means nothing, it has stopped being a qualification, more and more people need to go to college to get a degree as a qualification, when more and more people go to college, colleges are naturally forced to raise prices (and due to government subsidies such as Pell Grants and student loans actually have an incentive to raise prices since the price of college stops being a major barrier) due to having a finite amount of resources, and naturally college courses become dumbed down and so people need to get a post-grad degree and so on...
What needs to happen is that school councilors and teachers need to help the kids who aren't academically minded and help them find good careers doing something that they -want- to do and are good at, rather than trying to shoehorn them into a career path that they aren't good at and they don't like. Yes, education is a good thing but not everyone has the intellectual capacity to do well in high school and college, rather than looking at these people as failures, the system needs to help them not by mindlessly telling them to 'stay in school' and 'go to college'.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I bet the people who buy $6,000 tickets to see TED talks in person won't be sending their kids to the new model of schools they're proposing. The rich will still go to fancy prep schools, with small class sizes, highly qualified teachers, individual tutoring, beautiful facilities, broad-ranging curricula --- and where even the dumbest kids will be groomed to be multimillionaire managers (no one there being prepared for the "janitor" career track). Meanwhile, they want to tell the rest of us to stick our kids on the "obedient peon" track, herded and managed to be profitable slaves for the kids of the super-wealthy (and make them a nice return on investment from new for-profit schools).
Just a note, here in Ontario (Canada), we have solved the high school dropout problem. You cannot get a full drivers license unless you finish high school, all of the sudden, everyone is motivated to finish high school.
We need to have "tiers" of education, how they are implemented would depend on the size of the school (in larger school districts they could be broken up between buildings, in smaller ones by classes) where you'd have 3 different "tiers"
High - Students who are gifted at academics/art these are the people that are reading novels when their peers are reading picture books, students who can understand division when their peers are struggling with subtraction, etc.
Medium - Average, run of the mill students.
Low - Students who have difficulty with basic concepts and who struggle with academics.
By dividing classes up like this, you reduce bullying, encourage group/team work, you let all 3 groups achieve maximum potential by tailoring the classes towards their academic ability and letting those who struggle with academics have a chance to "catch up" and to learn useful skills without feeling pressured into a situation where they will most likely fail (college, advanced courses, etc.) but instead be able to gear them towards things in their strengths (we need both astrophysicists and plumbers). For those who are gifted with academic ability, you can let them truly thrive and be able to explore academic areas that they would otherwise have to wait years to experience.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
is more of a cult than an education vanguard these days. sheldrakes 'morphic resonance' bullshit for example. Taleb's account that TED has devolved into a three-ring circus in which educated scientists perform parlour trickery for the lay-person seems accurate. It should also be taken seriously that Nick Hanauer was shown the door after his talk pointed the audience to reconsider income inequality and taxation of the wealthiest; his talk was never published. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference)#Controversies_and_criticism
Good people go to bed earlier.
(1) Make schooling, from grades 10-12, voluntary. This is a two-fold solution:
(a) It gets rid of those that are disruptive and don't want to be there anyway, leaving:
(b) more time for those that are there to learn, and more resources from the teachers can be devoted to smaller classes.
(2) Those that drop out, are placed in a trade school, or join the military, their choice.
(3) Stop teaching to the test. I understand (at least where I live anyway) that school budgets are tied to SOL test scores, but it screws things up, and makes it worse, not better.
(4) Dump the teacher's union. Give teachers the authority to make the changes needed in education.
(5) Don't be afraid to fail students and/or hold them back if they need it, but that need will be reduced with the implementation of (1)
(6) Separation of school and private sector. By this I mean stop mucking about with textbooks (religious nuts and anti-science folks, I'm looking at you)
Publish fact, wingnut theories are left to churches and out of school time (or college, take your pick)
(7) There is no step (7)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
What a simple and yet powerful idea. Let's hope all provinces do the same.
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Maybe I'm getting a little older, but I think a major problem that any education reform can't solve is the lack of a diverse group of jobs for people of varying abilities. Previously, high school dropouts had a hard life, but they weren't sentenced to a lifetime of poverty like they are now. The reason is that there were jobs for them, and some of these jobs actually had stability and wage progression. High school graduates could go and work in a factory, and in some cases, they would have stable income and the ability to live a middle class life. Smarter high school grads and the low-to-middle achieving college graduates had their pick of millions of corporate paper-pushing jobs. The good college grads and post-graduate degree holders had even more choices open to them.
The current situation isn't sustainable:
- High school dropouts have nothing to look forward to in life - they will always be either unemployed or making minimum wage in a string of temporary jobs. Low skilled jobs used to be protected by strong unions, but public opinion has soured on them.
- Factory work is much less plentiful than it used to be. In fact, there are articles citing the lack of skills for current manufacturing jobs (which I genuinely don't understand, but apparently the only people left in a factory are CNC programmers -- does anyone know the real source of this skill shortage? Is everything done by robots now?)
- There's less corporate paper to push and entry level positions are increasingly being outsourced or eliminated. This leaves tons of people with college degrees, high student debt and no way to pay it back. Example: I used to work in the IT department of a huge insurance company and my older colleagues told me about a time where they had many thousands of people just processing claims, keeping the books, etc. That's mostly gone now.
- There's even pressure on professions like law and medicine -- apparently outsourcing has killed the market for a lot of legal jobs.
The problem is, anyone who advocates having enough employment for everyone at every level is branded a socialist or Luddite. I can't see it getting better until there really is a "1%" of people who have a good life and we have a repeat of the French Revolution.
Sure, we should fix problems with education. But we should also realize that not everyone benefits from more education and can't handle anything beyond a basic job. A janitor shouldn't make the same as a doctor or engineer, but that janitor should at least have some stability in their life. I grew up in the Rust Belt, and it wasn't uncommon for people to graduate high school, and spend the next 40 years at a steel mill or car plant. Those people weren't rich, but the stability of the work meant they could have a few nice things and be solidly middle class even without an expensive education.
All I'm saying is that producing millions of college graduates for a class of work that doesn't fit them or doesn't exist isn't the fix. The conservative ideal of entrepreneurship for all is also silly -- millions of failed business ventures can't be supported by the economy any more than millions of unemployed employees. I say the Rust Belt model is a good one.
I watched all TED talk when they first became available on their website, years ago. Back then 40-60% of the talks where really, really good. Fast forward to today: some 90% of the talks are garbage, banal, mundane, trite, boring, trivial... of course, it is an American operation, and like all ideas which are great in moderation, American business acumen milks everything until it's dry. Who cares about the ideas if you can build a boring but MUCH larger franchise system? Make it more "professional" = it was time to bring in the marketing people.
TED today is mostly worthless. Something similar happened with fora.tv. At first ~10-20% of the videos were really great, today maybe 1% - at most. Lots of repetition (by other speakers at new conferences, which have nothing new or exciting to say).
So long as it's not Bill Gates backing high tech in the classroom, entrepreneurs peddling MOOCs, or for-profit schools trying to help defund public schools, I'll be interested in watching. But I have to assume that at least one of those concepts will be highlighted simply because the TED community loves them SO MUCH!
"Hey! Lectures in the CLOUD!" - "OMG! We found the solution!"
"Private schools for everyone!" - "OMG! We're 2 years from Star Trek now!"
"Every student gets a Microsoft Slate!" - "OMG! They'll never be tempted to goof off, I know it!"
I really hope the show goes something like this:
(1) We've continually tried to find an answer to make the education of our youth easier, cheaper, and standardized... and have failed every time.
(2) We need more teachers. We need them to feel safe enough to commit to a life of education. We need to treat them well.
(3) Home life matters. Where the home life is bad, we need more genuine counselors, mentors, and role models.
(4) We need to separate research universities, general ed. colleges, and trade schools while keeping them all at the same level of importance.
The problem with a simple "tiered" model is that it assumes all kids are either uniformly brilliant, average, or dumb. While there are a few who simply fall into such categories, many more will be great at some things and poor at others. Should the kid who's a math whiz, but reads below grade level (or vice versa), be shuffled into the dumb kids school, or the medium (and in either case, suffer incredibly boring work in their area of skill)? I agree on separating subject-matter specific classes by ability level, but when you track whole humans into dumb/normal/smart (with corresponding buildings for each), you're going to badly screw the majority of people over (who might turn out to be brilliant at some class of endeavors, if they weren't locked in a soul-crushing prison to be taught that they are a dumb kid, whose only career prospects are janitorial work or fry chef).
I enjoyed the benefits of going to a public magnet school segregated for the smart kids --- but I very nearly ended up in the regular zoned school (because there weren't nearly enough magnet school spots, handed out by lottery, for all the qualified students). The short time I spent at the regular zoned school (geared towards "normal" students; even the "honors track" classes were dull) was mostly miserable --- and I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone who either "lost the lottery" for magnet-school placement, or wasn't up-to-snuff in one particular subject area. Ideally, you need a system where you can offer a variety of paces in different subject areas in one place, rather than lump everyone into "overall smartness" categories.
Mod parent up.
The fundamental problem is that we don't value education enough to invest in it. We are especially falling short at the beginning and the end of a child's education, i.e. early childhood, and university. The U.S. needs a massive push for universal preschool, which is highly labor-intensive and expensive, but pays tremendous social dividends. We need a similarly massive push to rejuvenate state university systems, which are rapidly becoming a semi-private system. Not everybody should go to college, but those that will benefit from it should have a high-quality and totally free public education available to them.
Don't tell me we can't afford it. This sort of investment in our national human capital will reap enormous benefits for the society and the economy.
Silly, we already have that system of education.
Elite private schools tend to use more progressive methods of eduction where children are allowed to "explore" their world through a boutique education suited to their individualized learning style, and students tend to excel academically even though some receive intensive individual hands-on tutoring
Middle-class students are herded into mediocre schools where moderately qualified teachers try to do the best they can and difficult students receive some special attention.
While lower-class or working class students are left to fend for themselves and indeed have difficulty with basic concepts and struggle with academics, while teachers try to keep kids from killing each other while punching the clock.
But from your post you assume that these qualities are innate and that a student's socio-economic background doesn't matter in how well students do academically. In other words, if kids truly had the support they needed to fully realize their abilities from an early age (read: $$$$) you wouldn't need to carve out some kind of "gifted" education for a select group of people.
This Sig does not Exist.
Don't drag the British into this. We're not a colony anymore!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The problem is there are too many ideas coupled with people who are incapable of implementing them. If teaching where a profitable and rewarding job there would be little problems. Class sizes need to be smaller - teachers need time to access and help kids with problems. Public schools have been saddled with the job of compensating for F'd up parents. A task which is not really education.
Yes, but when you do divide them, all the following also happen:
#1 You enrage parents: "How dare you classify my child as 'average'? You're monsters!"
#2 You enrage teachers: "You mean we have pay based on student performance and you assigned me a 'below average' group. You're monsters!"
#3 You enrage people interested in social justice "Oh, so it just so happens that all the [poor/minority/female] students get classified into a 'seperate but equal' below average class. You're monsters!"
#4 You really do dictate a child's future based on their present.
I know where you're coming from, but you hurt so many groups with this kind of change that it's politically and maybe ethically untenable.
Americans only value money; despite what they say. I know, I live here. Education = job = money. Most people don't care about education they care about the job it can get them. This corrupted modern value system is slowly corrupting the education system from the grassroots. Turning education into job training and where wrote learning is often good enough for most jobs... and heavy on testing / certifications which traditionally didn't mean that much but today it is thought of like some sort of quarterly business report.
You are not a dentist, making policy for the professional dentists because you'd had some fillings... But you all are education experts because you went to school? WTF?? Also, TED isn't as good as it was... off topic.
Idiotic plans like "no child left behind" where constant improvements were mandated regardless of the changing demographics. An influx of immigrants and a whole school's numbers could flat line and while they may have been #1 last year they are now put on probation and BS funding rules because they didn't return more "profit" than the previous year. I'm not kidding it happened here locally repeated times. Laying off teachers to higher part-timers months before the tests so they could teach to the standardized test-- just so they'd not lose more money the next year.
Education is NOT business even if you only think it's purpose is to program drones for business. Bill Gates is a business man 1st, far more ruthless businessman than computer nerd.
Some kids need to be left behind. sorry. some kids are fucked up-- especially in the USA where we have frequent shootings by kids. You can't FIX THE PARENTS - if we were serious, we'd look into getting child protection involved with a failing child. Not that moving kids around to foster homes is going to help their grades in the short term...
Interestingly, there was an old TED talk that fit this... where a brit talking about the tons of money the UK spent on the postal system because 1% of their mail wasn't delivered and they wanted 100%. Their costs and performance went DOWN trying to get perfection! They could have spent a fraction of that money advertizing how good the 99% was and people would have been better off.
Remember your history-- most people DID NOT NEED HIGHER EDUCATION, not even most of high school! A lot of those jobs still exist and modern forms exist. You don't need higher education for many jobs; in fact many certification level jobs don't need the certifications either. Some people just don't need to go to college; it is not a failure that they don't go, or even if they drop out of school. We see plenty of 4 year degree graduates working along side the drop outs... and plenty of drop outs are making a more stable living at possibly higher wages picking up your garbage. Small family businesses thrive without any college education (until one kid gets an MBA and takes over...)
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Having Bill Gates talk about education is like having Ted Bundy talk about women's rights, the prognosticators only revealing the core of their evil. Education for Bill Gates is like his company, not meant to empower creative individuals but to build monoliths of bureaucratic automatons. Curiously, the evidence to both of these malicious individuals arises from the same educational institution, the University of Washington, most notably its School of Law - where the politico Bundy was given free reign and the local lobbyist/bond underwriter firm of Gates Sr made, tellingly, one of its first pre-Foundation forays into 'public relations'. That's a subject I've written on, a story also picked up by the more mainstream Rick Anderson, in the Seattle Weekly. http://www.motleytools.com/blog/1997/02/leveraging_the_law_through_the.html In general the Microsoft Corporation has engaged in employment practices that make second class citizens of many, many individuals - illegal corporate immigrants, if you will. This can be seen from the beginning in the 1990's class action 'perma-temp' lawsuits against both Microsoft and the local County Government. http://www.bs-s.com/cases/c-microsoft-vizcaino.html http://www.bs-s.com/cases/c-kingcounty-clark.html Most recently, Chief Counsel Brad Smith - emerging as the visible civic leader for the Corporation on a number of topics - has generated press in his support for the single employer H1-B visa program - while, curiously doing so very little to actually support the training of IT engineers at local educational institutions. The fact is the company was not built by smart people, it was build by Lawyers stealing smart people away from other companies - just like they now want to steal away America from its owners for the benefit of their Enterprise level corporate 'clients'. The details, and FAILINGS of this 'legal' management style can be seen in a number of ways - here's one I've written up based on the comments of one Jack Abramoff - himself known for a bit of untoward influence on higher education: http://www.motleytools.com/blog/2012/09/microsoft_and_the_law_firm_pre.html
Our collective Infrastructure blind spot and a collective blind spot of the W3C Is that the HTML Scholarly Link is missing. An obvious web/learning infrastructure item is missing. Simply: A link that shows the original quoted material highlighted IN CONTEXT. Why can we not create HTML QUOTES that point to original quoted material? Books have had footnotes forever. Why not the web. Why not , goto page then search and hilight? We do this all the time by hand. This footnoting mechanism is how knowledge was built in books for hundreds of years. Why is something this historical and powerful still missing from our web? Why is something this important and easy to implement still missing? Out of sight, out of mind. Wakeup W3C - The HTML Scholarly Link is missing and you can fix it! Now is your chance peoples, make the W3C make it happen. The Scholarly Link an idea whose time has finally come, again?
The U.S. needs a massive push for universal preschool, which is highly labor-intensive and expensive, but pays tremendous social dividends.
Don't tell me we can't afford it. This sort of investment in our national human capital will reap enormous benefits for the society and the economy.
Citation needed.
The state of Iowa has offered free preschool the last few years. The cost of running these preschools has more than doubled during these years. I just love that government efficiency!
Also, I live in a blue collar town of about 26,000 with about 35-40% of the town receiving government assistance. Previous to the new state policy we had 96% of 4 year old kids attending preschool. Now with the "free" preschool option we still have 96% attending preschool.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Well I think it should be based and focused around what the student is good at, for example the math wiz would be placed in the top school and would take mostly math classes and very few English/reading classes if he so chose. Similarly, a kid who was really good at English and reading would take mostly English/reading classes and fewer math classes if he so chose.
Today, we've got a mixture of too many academic ability levels mixed into classrooms making it impossible for those who are better at certain subjects to continue improving and impossible for those who aren't as good in those subjects to succeed in what they are good at. You've got an English class with a kid who loves reading Elizabethan literature sitting next to a kid who doesn't understand what's going on at all in the story, because of this the class is likely to be miserable for both of them, one because he doesn't understand or enjoy it, the other because the pace of the class is likely to be far too slow.
As for the non-academic kids, they're already locked into a soul-crushing prison when they're stuck in classes they don't understand and don't enjoy. There are people who simply do not have the intellectual capacity to perform and enjoy certain classes. Why stick someone who struggles with reading in a class that's reading Shakespeare, something that he has no interest or any real ability to do. Doing so is setting him up for failure. Instead, focus on his strengths. If he's good at working with his hands why not train him to be a carpenter? If he's good at working with electricity why not give him instruction on how to be an electrician? Instead, we stick these people in classes that they have no ability and no desire for and act surprised and shocked when they fail.
Not everyone should go to college. Not everyone has the capacity to understand Shakespeare. Not everyone has the ability to do calculus. Instead of pressuring these students to go to college, to read Shakespeare and to take calculus we should be guiding them to do something that they love and something that they're good at. We need janitors. There are people who are good at being janitors and love being a janitor. We also need astrophysicists, there are people who are good at being astrophysicists and love being an astrophysicist. I know you and I probably think that manual labor is perhaps the most soul-crushing of jobs and we wouldn't wish it on anyone, but there are people who no doubt think that having to work with computers all day is soul-crushing or work with numbers all day. The education system needs to find out what students are good at doing and what they like to do and put them in classes that help them reach that goal, whether that goal is to be an astrophysicist or janitor and failure is not that everyone isn't an astrophysicist but failure is that the person with a mind to be an astrophysicist and the desire becomes a janitor and the person who wants to be a janitor gets forced into thinking that he must be an astrophysicist to be successful and ends up failing at reaching that goal.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.