Great read...Interesting take on public education, and I am sure the lefty teachers who listen to PBS are not pleased.
Ping, for your consideration.
Actually, the article has some truth; but it's squarely in the PBS camp in a lot of regards. He and our educational establishment both believe that kids really don't have to know stuff. He buzzwords it as "moving from the knowledge based economy to the search based economy." That is just another excuse for not teaching stuff to our kids.
The reality is that you can have the biggest, most powerful search engine in the world and it doesn't mean a thing if you are searching for information about Brittany Spears. Being able to search is founded on a knowledge base that tells you that you need to search, that a search of a particular sort may be useful, and the whether the result are meaningful.
So instead of dumping all that silly "knowledge" stuff, the internet makes it MUCH more important. Ironically, the best education right now is a classical education. Very broad and designed to instill context. The internet is meaningless without that info being put in context.
I didn't see a distinction made between "medium" and "method" and how these affect "perception," something I would think would be front and center on an educator's radar...
Finally, if society's collective intelligence, after a generation so, is based on machinery and common databases, then I suppose the old saw "knowledge is power" takes on a whole new meaning - one that ought to put the fear of God into everyone. And what sorts of citizens will we be by then; and what sorts of citizens will we be when the foundations are manipulated or rendered useless?
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> They are ready to dump our schools.
Anyone who thinks this even possible, seriously
misunderstands the purpose of government schools.
They have nothing to do with topical education.
The goals of government schools are:
1. Perpetuation of the government school system.
2. Indoctrination of teacher union dogma.
3. [irrelevant - everything else is subordinate to 1&2]
Someone who thinks that is probably wrong about a lot of other things too.
If anything 'destroyed' the US manufacturing, and there is very little actual evidence that it's destroyed, it's the myraid of OSHA, EPA, ADA, and a scores of other Leftist regulations that punish employers for hiring people, using our God given natural resources (trees and oil come to mind), or for selling a product at a profit.
The Washington DC public schools spend over $13,000 per pupil per year. 12 x $13,000 = $156,000 to educate a single child.
But this school system reports that less than 10% of its graduates are proficient in math and science at graduation.
$156,000/0.10 = $1.56 MILLION! to graduate a single young adult who is proficient in math and science from this school district.
Let the excuse-making begin! When can we admit that the entire process of public schooling is a abject failure, one that wastes both enormous amounts of money, and wastes an enormous number of lives of the students who fail to achieve proficiency because of the very nature of the factory education the system insists on delivering?
These certain things that are learned is the "Body of Knowledge". What Body of Knowledge do you need to watch Jeopardy and what Body of Knowledge do you need to be a contestant. I may not be able to answer all the questions on Jeopardy fast enough, but I could go to the library and look them up, or could buy reference books for home use to look them up, or now use the internet to look them up.
But, there has to be a body of knowledge that is common to everyone and used by everyone in society, or sub-groups of society. And, the Body of Knowledge that a society uses defines the society.
I think this is a good article.
With college tuition and expenses increasing at a rate of at least 5% to 10% per year it is increasingly hard for parents to justify guaranteeing an additional, seemingly automatic $2,000 a year more for student loans.
One of my sons witnessed those increases of $2,000 a year over 4 years for what? And the problem is, the student loan people keep loaning more money as if it justifies the increases in education spending. And exactly WHAT was improved that cost $8,000 more the 4th year that it did the 1st year of College?
Same with public secondary and elementary education. The costs keep going up, supported by tax formulas that keep going up. But the quality keeps going down. At what point do people start saying enough is enough? Can they continue supporting an automatically higher costing status quo? Or even worse, a decline or reduction of quality standards of education when not justified by increased costs?
Technology could indeed render traditional group schooling obsolete. Obviously the teachers unions and school administrators are going to fight to maintain their controlling grip on the educational standards they deem necessary for students. But the overriding motive behind traditional educators maintaing their grip on schooling is to maintain their legitimacy as employable and not expendable.
Maybe I’m missing something here. The author states as fact that “K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind” without any context or exposition. Is this a generally accepted fact? Or is it so within the context of the article’s topic?
A delightful, wonderful paragraph! No time to go further on it though ...
My kids never went to school. My 3 entered community college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. All finished Calculus III by the age of 15, and all their college general courses.
My prediction:
Even the brink and mortar college can be dumped for much of the routine stuff ( and that includes Calculus III). There are on-line law schools now, and in my opinion even a lot of medical school could be done on-line.
Government school:
Government schools are NOT about educating children. They ARE about maintaining a government white-collar jobs program for collage grads with the lowest SAT and GRE scores on campus.
The availability of excellent curriculum through technology is **definitely “Another Reason(s) to Homeschool!
Public Education Ping!
Those interested in Public Education would enjoy this thought provoking article.
This guy is a savant and actually understands the dynamic of technology as a container of society. Media analyst Marshall McLuhan said 50 years ago that technology is assimilitated when it becomes invisible, part of the gestalt background rather than an object of the attention of learning. but I think sodiety’s learning curve is faster than 30 years. The death of TV and the birth of the computer as both entertainment and information center is a smooth transition, much like the advent of the remote control tuner was a smooth transition. Anything that increases the efficiency of extant technology is a smooth transition.
Yep, schools are dead. All we need is for governments to close their physical plant schools, issue every newborn a laptop and wifi, and unleash the battalions of game programmers to create the new game- “Grades 1- 16”. Burn your textbook digests, they are cartoon programming. The online Library of Alexandria has all the original source materials. For the first time in history any human can teach himself anything.
Fantastic article.
I told my kids they only needed to learn 3 things in school: Math, Reading, Research skills. They can teach themselves everything else they need from those 3 building blocks.
Math; learn as much as you possibly can.
Reading; as fast as possible, as much comprehension as possible.
Research skills; finding what you want to know, even when you don’t exactly know what you want to know. You might call it flexibility.
If you can do that, you have the world in the palm of your hand.
I can’t comment on the ISO aspects of the article - it’s outside my purview, however, every other aspect of the article is spot on. I’ve actually been considering the amazing shift that’s occurred in the last 20 years and how it is slowly leaving me behind. I’m a software developer and have been on a computer almost full time since I was 11 yet I feel out of touch now.
What's going on between the publishing industry and colleges? A CD/DVD format would be a lot less costly (and profitable).
The greatest sin perpetuated by an educational system is to waste a student’s time.
That is, “Either teach or get off the pot.”
Before, when students were confronted by torpor and inefficiency in the educational system, caused by innumerable and almost insurmountable reasons, they had to grin and bear it, precisely because there was no other *way* of getting information.
That has changed. Now, with technology, information exchange is accelerated to an incredible degree. Instead of a student having to go to a library, locate a book, and locate a *single* fact within that book, in the same amount of time they can discover dozens or even hundreds of facts on the Internet.
But raw data and memorization are just the lowest level of education. The next *technological* evolution up the pyramid of education is ordering and correlating information. From there, analyzing and discrimination of information, interpolation and extrapolation, criticism and argument, and finally synthesis of new concepts derived from existing knowledge.
But how to achieve this?
There are some commonalities with modern education, obviously. At first, in early education, students must learn the abstracts of knowledge, such as the alphabet and grammar and arithmetic. But from there, as is already somewhat the case, they must learn to interface with the technology they will need.
It used to be that typing was learned in high school. Now it is taught, it *must* be taught, in kindergarten or 1st grade, for the student to be at a contemporary level of achievement with their peers, and to be able to progress further.
In the future, it will be just as essential to teach one or more of the several known techniques of memorization. This will *have* to be done for the student to be able to digest the vast amount of data they will need for their advancement.
But it goes beyond that. Students must not only be taught to memorize for recall, but to memorize in a *structured* way. The way information is taught today is an almost random jumble in a vaguely linear manner. This is too consumptive of intellectual resources. Instead it must, from the very start, be replaced with a minimum of a “two dimensional” ordering of information.
An easy way to conceptualize this is with a multiplication table. If students are taught multiplication in a random, but vaguely linear way, such as “six times seven is forty-two, and eight times five is forty”, students will have to use a huge amount of mental resources to consume and integrate that knowledge.
They will be forced to count with their fingers, or use individual mnemonic devices to remember particular things. And even then, the knowledge will be so linear, that while they might know that “eight times five is forty”, they will be puzzled if asked “What is five times eight?”
However, if their knowledge has even a two-dimensional organization, they not only understand the *progression* of the “eight multipliers”, but the *progression* of the “five multipliers”. To themselves, they will say either “8-16-24-32-40” *or* “5-10-15-20-25-30-35-40”, and get the correct answer. “Five times eight is forty. Eight times five is forty.”
Importantly, just a two-dimensional ordering system not only gives them the right answer, faster, but it also gives them a *check* on their answer. Verification that they are correct.
Now imagine the power if children are taught a THREE-dimensional organization of knowledge?
Taught right on top of memorization techniques, students at very low levels will have at their command knowledge and confidence in their knowledge.
Beyond this, the entire curriculum of even elementary school or its equivalent changes, because students will be *able* to absorb so much more information, order it, and use it *faster*. Subjects long ignored will re-emerge precisely because there is the *time* for them to be taught.
But even that can be multi-dimensional. For example, say a student is studying biology on their personal computer multimedia system. They are watching and listening to a recorded but interactive multimedia presentation, like a documentary, that is regarded as top notch. His teacher downloaded it from a national educational intranet, after selecting it from perhaps a dozen equivalent program blocks on the same subject. Each have a standard and similar organization, but very different content.
The student is both continually interacting with the program by typing in words, or speaking them into a microphone where they are interpreted. They are asking and answering questions, reviewing and being evaluated at the same time.
But they are also learning the lesson in both English and German *at the same time*. So they are learning *both* biology and the German language. Their typing is evaluated for accuracy and spelling and grammar. Three subjects. They might have to write an essay on what they are learning just after they have learned it. Etc.
In essence, the student is taking several classes at the same time! No human teacher can match that.
But the very best part is that his computer that is running the educational block is attuned to him as an individual. It tracks their personal efficiency, giving extra emphasis on slow areas, but also permitting digressions to more advanced information when the student is very interested and “on a roll”.
Optimally, if a student is fascinated by a subject, they might be able to track it up to college level, if they are interested and can keep up. This lets the brilliant student, even momentary brilliance, take the student wherever they can go, totally apart from what other students are doing.
Conversely, all students will eventually have a slump in one or more subjects. Because theirs is an individually tailored progression, the computer can take its time until it is certain that the student knows the subject, before advancing, and without holding everybody else back. Thus there are no huge “missing pieces” to their learning that will haunt them.
Student time is never wasted, in fact, it is optimized.
And be assured, this will not mean less need for teachers, but far more challenge for them, as they spend far less time on disjointed, vaguely linear memorization, and far more on the higher levels of learning.