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Education!
geckahn
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've been thinking quite a bit about the subject of education lately. Quite a bit about how, post elementary school at least, the majority of my education hasn't come from school, but from my own experiences and efforts. And this led me into realizing just how utterly useless my college education would have been if I had just followed the path of least resistance in my chosen field. That hasn't been the case, and I pushed myself into taking harder courses than I needed to, and - more importantly - have done quite a bit of completely outside study.
All of this more or less got me thinking about the whole system, and how education works in most schools. They try to shove you in a box of their making, and in doing so they usually stifle quite a bit of our desire to learn and improve through knowledge and experience. Some of us get past that and learn to love learning again, but many of us don't. And in today's ever-changing world that is not a cost that we, as a society, can really bear.
Now, I just watched this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
Check it out, watch the whole thing. As well as having a great point, he's also hilarious, so the time flies.
And what I guess I'd really like to do is open this up to talking about the inherent problems built into our system of education, and what we could possibly do to get around it and better prepare our children for the modern post-industrial world that awaits them.
All of this more or less got me thinking about the whole system, and how education works in most schools. They try to shove you in a box of their making, and in doing so they usually stifle quite a bit of our desire to learn and improve through knowledge and experience. Some of us get past that and learn to love learning again, but many of us don't. And in today's ever-changing world that is not a cost that we, as a society, can really bear.
Now, I just watched this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
Check it out, watch the whole thing. As well as having a great point, he's also hilarious, so the time flies.
And what I guess I'd really like to do is open this up to talking about the inherent problems built into our system of education, and what we could possibly do to get around it and better prepare our children for the modern post-industrial world that awaits them.
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I also suspect that accounts for a lot of 'fact-based' education, and the inherent popularity of that kind of trivia, pub quiz, game-show accumulation of items of knowledge, as opposed to reasoned argument about complex issues, which inevitably comes down in a large degree to opinion.
But there are still plenty of wise fools (like myself) who have an entirely unreasonable optimism that if you learn enough about a thing, you will find some kind of demonstrable truth in the end.
I think at this point the best we can do is be mindful as individuals and do our best to expand the way we learn and more importantly create, perhaps sometimes straying from what our society would deem acceptable.
Also when the lecturer is talking to about 5% of the class, also makes me sad.
The rest of the class just reads the book and learns only what is told to them.
If it were possible I would almost advocate getting more jobs back to the apprenticeship model, where you have a certified / credited person in the chosen field teaching their knowledge to the apprentice in a hands on environment.
Though that really doesnt work for some of the more philosophical pursuits espcially in fields where its not repetitive tasks you need to learn, but how to respond to different situations etc.
MWO: Adamski
Are you finding that they have any benefits whatsoever? And do they seem like things that could be harnessed for good, or are they just fundamentally unworkable.
I've looked into them myself somewhat superficially, and they always seemed to have at least kernels of benefit lurking inside.
They benefit inner city black populations because their public schools are generally so bad that almost any change improves performance. My research has not found that they yield noticably higher scholastic achievement in most situations and I think it is for two reasons.
First of all, you need a lot of choices available for the force of competition to strongly take hold. Two, three, four, even five schools isn't enough. You need in the neighborhood of ten possible schools before results really start to jump out at you - so choice really only helps in highly populated urban environments that can support that number of schools. Second, in situations where there is a lot of choice, schools aren't always really competing directly against eachother. Rather, they specialize. Each school will have a focus or a philosophy that fills a niche market. So because the service in question is not homogenous that also disrupts the advantages of competition.
I think they do have some secondary benefits. Where charter schools are available, the enrollment in private schools shrinks. Because parents can choose one of those specialized niche options, they are happier with the school their child attends. I think both of those might increase the willingness of the taxpayers of the district to spend more on education.
Bascially, I think the situations where school choice has the best possibility to really change a situation is when you throw out the large scale voucher programs and the attempt to make education a business. If you take some of the really huge municiple school campuses and break them up into a lot of smaller charters and individual schools - kind of like a university with different colleges - and give students the option of attending any school on campus, I think that would help. It's cheaper too, because all the separate schools can share common services, like busing, nurses, cafeteria, administration bureaucracy etc. The Gates Foundation is experimenting with that kind of thing.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
I like experimentation too, but you don't just go blowing all kinds of taxpayer dollars on any proposal that walks through the door. There are a lot of monorail salesmen out there.
With any luck, the taxpayers are sufficiently involved, but yeah, I see your point. I think vouchers are a decent risk, but then again I think decriminalizing drugs is a decent risk so I might be way out of the mainstream.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
My problem with large scale voucher programs is that they have been tried. Hell, 10% of school kids in Arizona go to charter schools paid for by vouchers. Yet Arizona hasn't done better than the national average in terms of education - it was in the bottom third of the country before and it is in the bottom third now. Same story with Michigan which has somewhere around 5% of its students in charters.
Abroad you have Argentina who transformed their entire education system into a voucher system. Achievement rose very very slightly in cities and fell in the countryside.
The engine which school choice relies on to have benefits is simply not a very powerful one except in some narrowly tailored circumstances.
This is what I've deduced:
Elementary schools are fucked up because of Sputnick. It signified Russia pulling ahead in math and science. This is when we threw out anything progress we were making and went back to the basics. We have yet to recover.
Elementary Education programs are inherently flawed in the sense that they only require facetime with children at the very last portion of the degree. By that time, if you find out you hate kids, you're not going to pull the plug and get another degree, you'll just spend the rest of your life being bitter and fat. Probably.
Montessori is a step in the right direction, but it is not 'the answer' by any means. It's usually elective via a lottery, so you can teach shit like evolution and get no complaints because they signed up for it. That doesn't mean people don't complain, they just have no right to.
Education isn't heading the wrong direction, I would say we have more progressive teachers now than we've ever had, it's just that we're simply getting more poor people. Poor children tend to test lower than rich kids. It's sad but true. Compare kids who qualify for free lunch (read: poor) to kids who don't, it's directly correlated. It's not because they're inherently stupider, it's just that their home environment isn't conducive to learning. Go teach in a rich community sometime, that shit is EZ MODE.
but man, the faculty sure as hell hates em
also this:
bleah. yeah, this happens, but every situation is different. without getting too far into it, it's really unfair to make a sweeping generalization about how schools operate and impart education. every classroom is unique.
And that teaching by authority is one of the worst creations ever.
[EDIT]: I happen to feel this way, with the word of my philosophy's teacher on this. A man who actually wrote his big thesis paper (What's the term for it?) on that exact subject, and got his doctore or something like that in the specific field of the philosophy of education.
IT's like... It starts with a... Dissertation!
wait, teaching by authority or teaching from authority?
I blame the opportunity cost of homework and studying (they don't have to pay to study, but they aren't payed either, unlike the part time job the could devote their time to).
I don't disagree except to the extent that I feel for those poor souls that get forced to go to horrible schools. The solution is to have good teachers and administrators who give a damn. Hell there may be no solution. It might be that it sucks to be poor and, yes, Andover is always going to be a better place to go to school than Sunnydale High.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
You're essentially arguing that NCLB is the exact opposite of where we need to go, correct?
I don't know. I mean, I'm sort of partial to math because thats just what I'm good at but isn't there something to be said about focusing on what would eventually lead to more technological fields. In the TED talk the guy points out that the people who are the most successful at the school system are university professors. While I admit that being a university professor shouldn't be the societal ideal, whatever said ideal should be, but I don't see whats wrong with having more professors then dancers.
And I also need to move in order to really think, which is why I developed pacing as a habit.
His point was that it's a system which tries to turn everyone into university professors, and no one into dancers.
We sure do. If you want to see exactly what this is doing to us, check out A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. It basically speaks to the fact that all the ways we've been teaching and pushing our kids to go in the last few decades is exactly what we won't really need much longer.
Of course, education starts at the home.... maybe we should examine the parenting that's going on.
And in our desperation to improve the educational system here we're just making it worse. More of a focus on test scores, math, etc. and - going back a few democratic debates - the notion that our kids need to spend more time in school.
I feel like what this is all stemming from our changing economy in addition to our lackluster rankings in math and science as compared to say India and Japan. But what we're apparently forgetting is well, a couple things. First and foremost I would say that we're ignoring that we don't want to be like them - we are Americans - entrepreneurial and creative, and it's that gift of creation that we need to make sure we don't crush. Secondly, and this just screams to me - so loudly - but I just know that it's because I think of economics in everything, what we're forgetting is specialization. We all need the basics, but the way we teach those basics, and more importantly the way we are taught once all the basics are established (like, once we hit High School), basically work to constrain - for some of us - what we are passionate about. It does so by saying - you're not good at what we consider of utmost importance - so those kids become, in their minds, failures. And they take this and make it reality by never following what they really were good at in the first place, by killing their potential passion and following that life we pushed them into in elementary and high school.
I know that's sort of like, woah abstract, but to me it makes so much sense. And going on with what we're doing now to "fix" education, it's just like any other failed business model or tactic - you keep trying to fix it by fighting all the way to the bitter end. In reality what you needed all along was to stand back, take a look at what the future is actually going to look like and require of us, and adjust accordingly. Instead we're just strengthening that model that we adopted post-sputnik. And it just will not work.
MCAS seems to work pretty well in Mass, considering that it's first in the country in math, so I think there should be a national test, simply to stop what some states are doing to their state tests to get No Child funding: watering them down for better scores. That was the problem in Mass before MCAS: under performing schools giving easy grades.
I do hate No Child, though.
I'm opposed to NCLB because it leaves almost no room for teaching things that I want to teach (art, science experiments, history), and the stuff that you do get to teach is nearly 100% scripted.. Go be a fly on the wall in a 5th grade class and use a stopwatch to record how often the teacher gets to teach. Then decrease it by about 15 minutes for each grade you go down. I work with kindergarteners. It's amazing how much we don't get to teach.
All is not lost though.
I believe it was . . . North Carolina? Back in the 90s they started issuing public grades to schools. Schools that got a D or F really did show improvement.
Additionally, it's been shown that if an incentive, a motivation is there, reducing class size can raise achievement. It gives teachers an opportunity to expend more resources on each student - but unless some kind of motivation is there the teacher will more often not exploit the opportunity.
What does exploiting the opportunity mean in this case? Working less hard or something?
They don't shift their teaching style to one that would give more attention to individual students. They keep teaching as though there are 30 kids in the room even when there are maybe 16.
The Socratic method doesn't work for all grades, in fact it works for very few grades. The emphasis of late has been placed on Social Constructivism and Experiential Methodology. Simply put, involve the community and make your teaching relevant to their surroundings through lots of hands on projects. Socratic method places a lot of emphasis on self discovery, which is great, but try and teach fractions to third graders through self discovery.
It's all about making the learning seem important to the student so they're likely to retain it.
While smaller classrooms are a wonderful idea, it's not always viable. It's not that the teachers are teaching to 30 when their are really 16 because they're dumb or stubborn, it's because they (usually older teachers) have never had to teach another way. They came from a very formulaic school of thought. To them, it gets the job done, so whatever. Retirement is 15 years away, and they simply can't get fired, so why go to the trouble of learning a new way to teach? It's not right, but that's how it is.
Another reason that they're not getting the results they expect out of smaller classrooms is the increase of troubled kids through that ideal that 'everybody deserves a spot in your room'. I did 5th grade for a while, and their was a kid who would crumple other kid's papers, steal shit, whatever. It was a relatively small classroom, but I was spending 15 minutes every hour trying to get this kid to not do awful shit. In the era of huge classrooms, he would have probably been with a really small focus group or been worked with one on one, but because we have a small class, I should be able to handle any crazy desk-throwing motherfucker they put in their.
This is why their isn't one solution to fixing education.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck