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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.'"
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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I'm pretty sure I saw a TED talk about that.
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And here it is.
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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.
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.
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.
(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.
How is "dump the teacher's union" supposed to fit in with the rest of this? Despite failings, the teachers' unions are the *only* thing giving teachers any sway over the educational system. Without that, it'd be entirely up to management types --- who've been trained from birth to absolutely love making everything into shallow numerical metrics (teach to the test!) to prove how important management is. Yes, I had to suffer through some bad teachers kept around by the unions --- but all the *very best* teachers I had would have been first to go if management had their way, because sticking up for smart students puts you on the wrong side of management priorities.
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.
In every other market things get better and/or cheaper, or at the very worst, keep a constant value.
Actually, in just about every other market in this country, things get increasingly unequal (larger divide between the "haves" and "have nots,") with the vast majority being subjected to a race-to-the-bottom for crappy quality at low prices. As McDonalds is to quality nutritious food and Wal*Mart is to high-quality, durable goods, so too will privatized corporate education be for the masses. We'll get empty-calories education, all corn syrup and hydrogenated soybean oil, with the lasting durability of a made-in-China plastic widget --- and maybe somehow the quantity will make up for the quality? Well, at least it will make the owners very, very rich.
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.
Unfortunately, when you take away the unions, the lazy, self-serving, money-grubbing, too-useless-for-a-real-job, petty authoritarian teachers are probably the ones who will *stay* (and suck up to whatever teach-to-the-test nonsense that management makes pay raises ride on, or just outright cheat like the "incentivized" teachers in Michelle Rhee's DC schools). The great teachers, who have plenty of skills to get a much higher paying job elsewhere, but teach because they live for making a positive impact on their students' lives, will burn out and leave when management succeeds in sabotaging their ability to teach (I've seen this happen to a few of my best teachers).