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Bill Gates On Educating the World

Posted by samzenpus on from the learning-online dept.

theodp writes During February, Bill Gates is playing Perry White at The Verge, expounding on the big bets the Gates Foundation is making to improve the world over the next 15 years. One of those bets is that online classrooms can help the world catch up. Gates' vision of universal online education extends to those who struggle with basic literacy and currently lack online access, far beyond the reach of MOOCs like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity, which have enjoyed their greatest success with higher-level courses aimed at the middle class. "Gates' vision — a wave of smartphones that can act as ubiquitous, cheap computers — is central to solving this problem," explains The Verge's Adi Robertson. "And unfortunately, we're not there yet." But eventually, Gates is betting that a world-class education will only be a few taps away for anyone in the world. And that's when things get really interesting. "Before a child even starts primary school," Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in their Foundation's 2015 letter, "she will be able to use her mom's smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start. Software will be able to see when she's having trouble with the material and adjust for her pace. She will collaborate with teachers and other students in a much richer way. If she is learning a language, she'll be able to speak out loud and the software will give her feedback on her pronunciation."

26 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Let me guess by fred911 · · Score: 2

    Clippy is going mobile.

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  2. What's the evidence this will work? by nbauman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't think the people who come up with these schemes have ever sat a child in front of a computer, and watched while they tried to learn something from it.

    The kind of information children can get that way is not much different than what you can get from reading a book. (Yes, I know the computer has sound and animation.) And for younger children, it's less than they can get by reading a book with their parents.

    I would like to see published controlled studies that demonstrate that online classrooms can do as well as classrooms with a teacher.

    Or that classrooms with a teacher plus Internet connections are better than classrooms with a teacher alone.

    And they should be judged by the standard skills that good teachers are teaching students, not by their skills at answering computerized multiple-choice questions.

    One good skill is learning how to tell whether a new innovation will work.

    1. Re:What's the evidence this will work? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's particularly 'optimistic' given that we already have a fair amount of experience with what does (and doesn't) happen to children with access to books. With comparatively rare exceptions, mostly in slightly older children, not all that much.

      It's pretty obvious that networked computers are, sooner or later, going to beat out printed textbooks(if only because it's getting cheaper to transmit a few megabytes to the ass end of nowhere than it is to ship tens of kilograms there, not necessarily because they are better, especially with the hardware in the cheap seats).

      It is radically less obvious that our tiny monkey-spawn, with their few-hundred-million-years of experience in absorbing knowledge into their sponge-like brains by demanding interaction with nearby group members, are on the cusp of successfully being tutored by expert systems with some animated cartoon characters tossed on top.

      If the trouble with teaching were a matter of text scarcity, Gutenberg would have mostly kicked its ass. That's not exactly what happened.

    2. Re:What's the evidence this will work? by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because they're children. Children require guidance.

    3. Re:What's the evidence this will work? by gtall · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In my opinion is it much worse. It encourages an ADHD attitude. A book requires imagination. The idea of spending a few days getting to the bottom of a math problem is lost on kids because they expect to push a button and find the answer, or push many until they stumble into it. Bill Gates and his ilk are a plague on education, he should just STFU and go back to spending his billions on health care for the poor.

    4. Re:What's the evidence this will work? by Herkum01 · · Score: 3

      As a father of 2 young children they will chose to a) Just eat junk food b) play computer games all day

      Now it sounds like all children are just born to be nerds.

    5. Re:What's the evidence this will work? by blue+trane · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Oh, right, children are owned, so you get to force them to do what you want.

      But why not guide them to guide themselves. Let each kid learn in his idiosyncratic way, with a wide variety of tools to choose from?

    6. Re:What's the evidence this will work? by nbauman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Here's an example of what I consider science teaching:

      A kindergarten teacher was also a science teacher. She had taught her kids about birds. It was a nice day out, so she decided to take her kids out for a walk in the woods.

      A woodpecker flew in, and started pecking on a tree.

      Woodpeckers were uncommon in this area. The kids had never seen a woodpecker before, and she had never mentioned it in class.

      One of the kids said, oh, he's trying to get insects to eat in the tree!

      This is the kind of moment that makes life worth living for a science teacher.

      This 5-year-old girl had generalized from the feeding habits of the birds that she had learned about, to a bird she had never learned about. There was quite a bit of scientific insight that went into that observation. You wouldn't think that a 5-year-old was capable of that, but science teachers know that they are.

      And it was completely unexpected. You couldn't plan for that in a computer program, and it wold be unlikely to happen again.

      I would argue that this is real science teaching. And a computer could never replace that teacher. How could a computer decide that it's a nice day, and the kids have been cooped up in the classroom, so let's go out for a walk in the woods, and actually observe the science that we've been reading about?

      Computers can do a lot in education. Of course, books and magazines can do a lot in education. Of course, a lot of what computers do well is simply replacing books and magazines. A children's library needs a librarian. It's not a dumpster full of books. Librarians (like teachers) know what children will like and understand at different ages. They can recommend books, and buy books that are popular, so you can look at the spines of books on a bookshelf, pull out a book, and find something interesting. Google is basically a dumpster full of books. It's helpful if you know what you want, but it only has one trick (counting links), and otherwise it offers you no guidance. You need to already have a pretty good education before you can use Google effectively. Otherwise, you're going to wind up like Jenny McCarthy.

      Computers can supplement teachers, on the shelf along with the books. They can do calculations and manage data and create models. They're great for word processing.

      Computers can't give you a woods full of birds. They can't give you the chemicals and equipment that you could find in a science stockroom. My science teacher threw a piece of sodium into a pan of water, but no educational computer program is going to tell you to throw a piece of sodium into a pan of water. Most of all, educational computer programs can't really answer questions, especially the unexpected questions, and the most insightful questions, like, "Why doesn't this work like the book said it does?"

      A lot of these education "reforms" want to reduce teachers from unionized professionals with a lifetime commitment, to replaceable less-skilled contingent workers who follow standardized workbooks, and are basically computer tenders.

      I fear Bill Gates, even when he is bearing gifts. Up to now, he and his lobbyists have been trying to "disrupt" education, by forcing schools to adopt standardized testing, written by Pearson educational publishers, that have never been validated by any of the standard validation methods that every science-based psychologist uses. Teachers are being fired based on tests that literally have no more validity than random numbers. He's taking the MBA methods used by employers to evaluate assembly line workers and marketing managers, and applying them to teachers, as if you could judge the value of teachers by their success in the free market of test results.

      He's accepted the war on government, and he wants to replace public schools with private charter schools, even though private charter schools have repeatedly failed in their own terms -- their results on high-stakes standard tests, as evaluated by the NAEP

    7. Re:What's the evidence this will work? by rtb61 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wise person say, want to teach the students, then teach the teachers first. Thinking there is some magical mystical route to knowledge by giving children gadgets to play with is just plain silly. All the majority will do is learn to play with the gadgets, be endlessly distracted by those gadgets and basically never learn to do.

      Creativity and crafting must be taught by skilled caring professionals with low ratios of students to teacher. Things that are useful, like the simple stuff, care and maintenance of a home, cooking and diet, self care, functions of society, a desire as well as of course the ability to research and learn. It is important that children learn how to do things manually and then latter learn how to apply the knowledge digitally. Social norms and cooperative team work also need to be taught.

      Having a very narrow point of view computer nerd billionaire, totally disconnected from the realities of life, coming up with methods of education, all solely focused upon his personal preferences and extremely limited experiences is truly foolish.

      Education is meant to fulfil a role from an IQ of 60 to one of 160. As such the role of education needs to be hugely varied from a more physical point of view as expressed in trades, to a more cerebral point of view as expressed in higher education (teaching rather than learning). Those of lower capability should not be actively punished and disadvantaged by those of higher capability post formal education (often as revenge for the exact opposite occurring whilst in school).

      Not to forget, if we are not having fun and are just slaves to society and an exploitative abusive minority, then who is fooling who and what are we really trying to achieve. It is stupid for a few rich fools of extremely limited experience to decide to play games with billions of peoples lives because based upon their success with greed, somehow it makes them better than hundreds of thousands of skilled and qualified people whose focus was not greed and who instead had far higher motivations than grubbing about for the most money.

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    8. Re:What's the evidence this will work? by Chess_the_cat · · Score: 2

      One problem: woodpeckers also peck in order to communicate and claim territory. The kid made a guess and got lucky on part of it. He did not make further observations or improve on his theory. He blurted something out which was half correct and his teacher did nothing to improve his answer. Where is the guidance? I would have asked the child why he thought that and how could we be sure and why else might the woodpecker be pecking at the wood? There's no critical thinking there; no learning.

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  3. Re:Education....by computer by ganjadude · · Score: 3, Funny

    pfft. you didnt learn anything on a computer at school??? I learned that everyone in the 1800s died of dysentery in 2nd grade on an apple ][

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  4. she will be able to use her mom's smartphone by Nutria · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Naturally not "he" and "dad".

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    1. Re:she will be able to use her mom's smartphone by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      "they" should be officially added to the English language as a suitable replacement for "he" and "she" so people can stop using these words to push stereotypes or agendas.

      Instead of "added," how about restored, or perhaps simply "re-legitimized"?

      More details at the link, but " singular they" has been in common English usage since the 14th century, and until the mid-1800s it was standard even among famous authors and educated folks.

      Then, as with many supposed grammatical bugaboos, the Latin wackos got ahold of things and tried to claim that English should be more like some idealized version of Latin (which itself was largely a constructed artificially policed version of Latin espoused by Cicero et al.). So blame the grammar wackos of the late 1800s for imposing an artificial rule on English usage.

      Usually when you find some arbitrary grammatical rule, it's not that we need to "officially allow" other uses into English... Often we just need to stop grammar wackos from trying to enforce supposed "rules" that were simply made up by some up-tight dude in the late 1800s who was bored and decided to write a grammar book to impose all of his (yes, almost always "his"!) artificial restrictions on the world.

  5. Teach the evils of FOSS by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why thank you Rob Limo for that advertisement.

    The purpose of my program is to create FUD and demand for my products. You all can help me out with a story about SystemD. Make it real emotional with no facts at all and I will include it for my educational program to prevent these poor African children from using Raspery Pie. We have a competitor out anyway that will knock its socks out! For a mere $1249 more it will include a cell phone attached desktop too!

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  6. Re:Education....by computer by ganjadude · · Score: 4, Informative

    WOOOOOSHHHHHH

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  7. Experience shows by jmd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bill Gates and Microsoft have been around for a very long time. The only real metric we have about them is that Bill Gates is either the richest or second richest person in the world. Depending upon metrics used. That we know.

    From that we can surmise that what Bill Gates and Microsft do excedingly well is take money from people and put it in their own pockets.

    Since somewhere in the 90s Bill Gates has touted solving poverty with computers. All that has materialized is a transfer of wealth from many to one.

    Just remember: poverty is the fruit of wealth.

  8. Banana Republics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Somewhere around 20,000 children die every day from poverty. That's a 9/11 (3,000) every few hours and a holocaust (6 million) every year.

    But poverty isn't an impossible problem. Some countries have very little poverty: in such countries it's relatively easy to find a decent job that pays enough to live simply but comfortably. But then other countries have most of their population trapped in desperate poverty. In such countries, there's typically a a relatively small group of (extremely rich) people lording it over everyone else as a (mostly hereditary) dictatorship that is focused on government policies that keep itself in power and exploit everyone else.

    So what does this have to do with the USA? Well, these dictatorships that are exploiting their own people often have close ties to certain rich and influential families in the USA. And these families use their influence on the US government to have the US government support the dictatorships. Sometimes the support is fairly limited - allowing the dictatorship to purchase military equipment to oppress their population and stay in power. Other times the US government provides more direct financial and military assistance to keep the dictatorship in power. The general term for such situations in banana republics.

    In the USA, it is often said that freedom and democracy are fundamental human rights. And rights are supposed to be universal and irrevocable - not just for Americans. When Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, talked about the USA being founded on the principle of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, he meant ordinary people - not members of a small hereditary ruling class. Often you hear American politicians talk about promoting American interests in other countries when what they really mean is promoting the interests of a small number of rich and powerful Americans at the expense of ordinary people in other countries. This is a betrayal of one of the most fundamental American values: democracy.

    So, getting back on topic, yes, education is important and, yes, online education has tremendous potential. But what's also needed is for countries like the USA to stop doing the banana republic thing - stop helping hereditary dictatorships keep their populations trapped in desperate poverty.

  9. Here we go again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Gates is becoming (has already become?) the new Ross Perot -- crazy rich guy who thinks, along with many other people who should know better, that because he made a lot of money He Has All The Answers.

    If we're stupid enough to follow him down this absurd path, we deserve what we get.

  10. Seriously by fred911 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We all have fun poking at Mr. Gates, warranted or not. And, we can all believe that the 31.6 billion dollars his foundation has GRANTED since inception internationally is not much of a personal sacrifice in relative terms. But a least he's taking a shot. Surely, figuring out how to grant money effectively is more than a full time job. Regardless of one's opinion of the effectiveness of his benevolent ventures, there's more than just a financial commitment here.

      I find it honourable and surely it has majorly affected recipients in a positive manner. Undoubtedly, he has made life changing or saving differences in this world. If you had the ability to do anything, anywhere, anytime, had the ability to make multiple errors, sans ANY change (personal, financial, etc), how long would it be before you would just disappear from any public exposure?

      If you plant seeds in every place in the world, some of them will produce fruit and some will fail. I see the motivation as benevolent and don't believe condemnation here is deserved or warranted.

       

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    1. Re:Seriously by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Informative

      ...we can all believe that the 31.6 billion dollars his foundation has GRANTED since inception internationally is not much of a personal sacrifice in relative terms...

      You're a bit confused. That is somewhat close to the amount the foundation was _endowed_ with, but actual grants are not remotely close to that. Skeptics point out that the foundation smells like a gigantic tax dodge... the money remains under Bill Gates' control with not a cent of tax paid on it.

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    2. Re:Seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Its a big propaganda campaign that also serves as a giant tax dodge, "philanthropic leverage" comes to mind:
      http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics/
      http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/31/bill-gates-corporate-profit-vs-humanity.aspx

      This has been discussed before:
      http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/05/0332218/a-critical-examination-of-bill-gates-philanthropic-record

      controversial global health policies:
      http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-08-31/news/53413161_1_hpv-vaccine-cervarix-human-papilloma-virus

      this is also coupled with investments in GMO Monsanto
      http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto

      Many accuse Bill Gates foundation of destroying education:
      http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html
      http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/education/22gates.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

      Same dirty game playing old policies old Bill used to use at Microsoft but now in the public "philanthropy" arena.

  11. Re:How about clean drinking water while we are at by a.koepke · · Score: 2

    They have already been doing work on that, just have a look at Bill's blog.

    http://www.gatesnotes.com/Deve...

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  12. Re:Sesame Street already does this by ihtoit · · Score: 2

    fact: Internet access is a Human Right.
    fact: Access to clean, safe, FREE drinking water is not a Human right.

    Fucked up, yes. Sounds wrong, yes. But that does not diminish that both statements are 100% absolutely true.

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  13. Re:Price gouge Microsoft products by davester666 · · Score: 2

    Whatever you do, do NOT smell Bill Gate's "cloud".

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  14. Re:And then by sydsavage · · Score: 3, Informative

    Maybe you need to leave the comforting confines of mom's basement more often. Here's one from about six months ago. It affects Windows 7, 8.1 and Server 2008:

    http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

  15. Um, advantage? by holophrastic · · Score: 2

    "Before a child even starts primary school," -- so, that's kindergarten.

    "she will be able to use her mom's smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start." -- we call that parents talking to their children.

    "Software will be able to see when she's having trouble with the material and adjust for her pace." -- we call that parenting.

    "She will collaborate with teachers and other students in a much richer way." -- richer than the human teacher being right there in the room? Explain that one to me, then you can replace hookers with software too.

    "If she is learning a language, she'll be able to speak out loud and the software will give her feedback on her pronunciation." -- we call that conversing with humans.

    So this whole concept is not to bring education to the world. Instead it's to bring childhood development problems due to lack of parenting to the world. Excellent.