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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.
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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.
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.
(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.
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).
Exactly! It still amazes me how the solution to our eduction "problem" seems to be to deprive the public of qualified teachers, by for instance, cutting their salaries, and "optimizing" class sizes. And who are the number one proponents of these solutions: people for whom their own children must have the best of the best, and can easily afford to pay for it. Isn't it amazing how the kids of rich people never seem to work in blue-collar professions, even if they're idiots. They still manage to make it into Ivy League schools.
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