The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Education Education
Goumindong
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Discussion split from the Occupy Wall Street thread;
Primarily the talk has consisted of the relative value of the various types of college degrees after moving from a discussion of unemployment and the reasons for it relating to education. The conversation is more about what education actually does in an individual and societal frame than it is an argument about how its perceived.
It would be nice to direct this towards a formal ideal of education. I.E. setting up a framework that can tell us what benefits individuals and societies ought to (or do) get. From there we can think about what specifically in those benefits we as a society value and from there discuss how it ought to be implemented. Feel free to talk about specific aspects of curriculum you think is important or not and justify it.
The following continues the thread of discussion from before:
Might I ask what your degree is in?
I ask this because as an econ major with a focus in teaching Econ it looks to me like you're seriously misinformed as to what colleges teach and what can or cannot be pushed back to secondary education. College, even in the "humanities" is not being used for general education. Now, while there are a handful of classes designed to get people to be proficient in writing and research these classes will largely exist regardless of whether or not High Schools teach those subjects (let us for a second ignore whether or not high schools can teach those subjects). This situation will continue for two reasons, the first is that the school has a responsibility when assigning its credentials to you that you are capable of such activities. The second is that the school cannot verify what was taught at the High School you came from, and as such needs to ensure that you receive the same information that will be required as you continue in your discipline and work at the school.
Let me explain with a few anecdotes. Where I went to school i had to write a total of 4(my total was i think 8 but that was due to electives) papers of the course of my education. Were I not in Econ but in business in general that would have been 3 papers. Were I strictly in Math that would have been 2. This includes the paper that I had to write as part of the introductory research and writing course that is required of everyone in the university. For a large number of disciplines there simply is a dearth of classes that require writing. This is not surprising since they focus on concepts which do not require writing to cover. At the moment I am starting graduate work. The entirety of the freshmen class has had high level mathematical training in analysis and econometrics as a part of their undergraduate or masters training. We all still have to take the introductory courses not because there is an expectation that we cannot do it, but because it is a matter of pedagogy to ensure that everyone is doing it the right way.
Let me continue by saying that the notion that K-12 has fallen behind relative to what it once was is bull. Schools have not fallen behind, the required curriculum has increased in both size and scope. This can be exemplified by looking at the state of advanced mathematics in 1950 compared to 2000. If you studied strictly mathematics for your entire undergraduate career in a linear fashion based on when the math was discovered then you would by the time you finished be about as up to date as someone who did the same in 1950. Why? Because you would not have time to learn what had transpired after 1950.
We, as a society, like to talk a lot about how schools aren't teaching people as well. What is actually happening is that schools are trying to cram more and more complicated material into the curriculum. In addition we are educating a far larger part of the populace. Thirty years ago roughly zero high schools taught calculus, let alone actual theory classes. History as an analytical structure? Ha, good luck. And graduation rates? They make ours look amazing.
Part of what makes this problem so obvious is college professors. Professors teaching students love to say "man i wish my students knew this before they get into my class". Well, every college professor in every discipline in every college is saying the same thing except that each one of them has a different set of requirements and different set of what they view as important. Econ professors tend to love it when kids can understand the theoretical conditions of differential calculus (and I personally would love it if everyone i was going to teach understood the philosophy of science with respect to formal systems and empirics) or how to write things in functional form. Why? Because knowing these things makes teaching the course easier for them, they won't get bogged down in making sure students know what a notation means when its the idea the example is expressing is more important but can't be understood without knowing the notation.
History teachers that i have had have tended to wish that students knew more about either specific times in history, or about the overarching ideas and worldviews that defined the particular age. I.E. they went about a course with a specific set of analytical tools and wished that students understood their set of analytical tools before they came into the course.
But we simply don't have the time to teach students the analytical tools of physics, chemistry, biology, calculus, algebra, programming, logic, arithmetic, history, English, writing, communications, art, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, etc. in high school. There simply isn't enough time. And while we do what we can, each school does it a bit differently.
Thus we have to teach these things to people even though they might think that they know them already. Anthropology 101 might seem like a bullshit course, and it is if you know what Anthropology is and that you want to study it. But it is simply impossible to get students to that point of knowing what all the disciplines are and preparing them to study it before they get there. There are too many disciplines and too much information.
______________________
The above has kinda been a non-sequitor to an other important point. There are no majors in college that are "socialization". Not even communications (probably considered one of the more bullshit degrees). There is a lot of important information that is being presented and a lot of very valuable coursework being done in all these fields. Students are being taught to think and evaluate problems in specific ways that have real value. Communications for instance is a full fledged science devoted to figuring out how people view our actions(or in-actions). Philosophy, another much maligned field, is literally devoted to the process of thought; English, the construction and evolution of language.
The training is valuable, even if it does not seem that way to you.
This is more likely because they have a haven't done a serious evaluation of their skills before and after school. If they still had copies of their old writings i would be very surprised if they had not improved in noticeable ways and could not identify problems in their writing that they have corrected.
If you want to ignore that(you don't have to), I will begin with a simple idealized purpose of education which we can debate and move onto more complicated questions that knowing the purpose of education will allow us to formulate and hopefully answer.
"The purpose of education is to produce productive citizens for the nation."
Please do not think that the statement is simple or obvious, I believe it is neither.
Primarily the talk has consisted of the relative value of the various types of college degrees after moving from a discussion of unemployment and the reasons for it relating to education. The conversation is more about what education actually does in an individual and societal frame than it is an argument about how its perceived.
It would be nice to direct this towards a formal ideal of education. I.E. setting up a framework that can tell us what benefits individuals and societies ought to (or do) get. From there we can think about what specifically in those benefits we as a society value and from there discuss how it ought to be implemented. Feel free to talk about specific aspects of curriculum you think is important or not and justify it.
The following continues the thread of discussion from before:
centraldogma wrote:I've been seeing comments asking for college to be publicly funded and free to everyone. This is really symptomatic of the same problem. College is being used for general education. K-12 has fallen so far behind, that college is being used to supplement it. General knowledge skill should be moved back to high school. People with only a high school diploma should be able to compete in the market.
Might I ask what your degree is in?
I ask this because as an econ major with a focus in teaching Econ it looks to me like you're seriously misinformed as to what colleges teach and what can or cannot be pushed back to secondary education. College, even in the "humanities" is not being used for general education. Now, while there are a handful of classes designed to get people to be proficient in writing and research these classes will largely exist regardless of whether or not High Schools teach those subjects (let us for a second ignore whether or not high schools can teach those subjects). This situation will continue for two reasons, the first is that the school has a responsibility when assigning its credentials to you that you are capable of such activities. The second is that the school cannot verify what was taught at the High School you came from, and as such needs to ensure that you receive the same information that will be required as you continue in your discipline and work at the school.
Let me explain with a few anecdotes. Where I went to school i had to write a total of 4(my total was i think 8 but that was due to electives) papers of the course of my education. Were I not in Econ but in business in general that would have been 3 papers. Were I strictly in Math that would have been 2. This includes the paper that I had to write as part of the introductory research and writing course that is required of everyone in the university. For a large number of disciplines there simply is a dearth of classes that require writing. This is not surprising since they focus on concepts which do not require writing to cover. At the moment I am starting graduate work. The entirety of the freshmen class has had high level mathematical training in analysis and econometrics as a part of their undergraduate or masters training. We all still have to take the introductory courses not because there is an expectation that we cannot do it, but because it is a matter of pedagogy to ensure that everyone is doing it the right way.
Let me continue by saying that the notion that K-12 has fallen behind relative to what it once was is bull. Schools have not fallen behind, the required curriculum has increased in both size and scope. This can be exemplified by looking at the state of advanced mathematics in 1950 compared to 2000. If you studied strictly mathematics for your entire undergraduate career in a linear fashion based on when the math was discovered then you would by the time you finished be about as up to date as someone who did the same in 1950. Why? Because you would not have time to learn what had transpired after 1950.
We, as a society, like to talk a lot about how schools aren't teaching people as well. What is actually happening is that schools are trying to cram more and more complicated material into the curriculum. In addition we are educating a far larger part of the populace. Thirty years ago roughly zero high schools taught calculus, let alone actual theory classes. History as an analytical structure? Ha, good luck. And graduation rates? They make ours look amazing.
Part of what makes this problem so obvious is college professors. Professors teaching students love to say "man i wish my students knew this before they get into my class". Well, every college professor in every discipline in every college is saying the same thing except that each one of them has a different set of requirements and different set of what they view as important. Econ professors tend to love it when kids can understand the theoretical conditions of differential calculus (and I personally would love it if everyone i was going to teach understood the philosophy of science with respect to formal systems and empirics) or how to write things in functional form. Why? Because knowing these things makes teaching the course easier for them, they won't get bogged down in making sure students know what a notation means when its the idea the example is expressing is more important but can't be understood without knowing the notation.
History teachers that i have had have tended to wish that students knew more about either specific times in history, or about the overarching ideas and worldviews that defined the particular age. I.E. they went about a course with a specific set of analytical tools and wished that students understood their set of analytical tools before they came into the course.
But we simply don't have the time to teach students the analytical tools of physics, chemistry, biology, calculus, algebra, programming, logic, arithmetic, history, English, writing, communications, art, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, etc. in high school. There simply isn't enough time. And while we do what we can, each school does it a bit differently.
Thus we have to teach these things to people even though they might think that they know them already. Anthropology 101 might seem like a bullshit course, and it is if you know what Anthropology is and that you want to study it. But it is simply impossible to get students to that point of knowing what all the disciplines are and preparing them to study it before they get there. There are too many disciplines and too much information.
______________________
The above has kinda been a non-sequitor to an other important point. There are no majors in college that are "socialization". Not even communications (probably considered one of the more bullshit degrees). There is a lot of important information that is being presented and a lot of very valuable coursework being done in all these fields. Students are being taught to think and evaluate problems in specific ways that have real value. Communications for instance is a full fledged science devoted to figuring out how people view our actions(or in-actions). Philosophy, another much maligned field, is literally devoted to the process of thought; English, the construction and evolution of language.
The training is valuable, even if it does not seem that way to you.
kedinik wrote:
I don't disagree with any of this but I have several English major friends who love to make jokes about, "Hahah yeah, I didn't really learn useful information, gain new skills or improve old skills because my major was so easy and I've always been good at reading and writing."
Which, yeah, they're making jokes, but as far as I can tell they're doing so with a pretty hefty "I should have at least majored in business or something useful and read stuff on the side for fun" kernel of truth to it.
This is more likely because they have a haven't done a serious evaluation of their skills before and after school. If they still had copies of their old writings i would be very surprised if they had not improved in noticeable ways and could not identify problems in their writing that they have corrected.
If you want to ignore that(you don't have to), I will begin with a simple idealized purpose of education which we can debate and move onto more complicated questions that knowing the purpose of education will allow us to formulate and hopefully answer.
"The purpose of education is to produce productive citizens for the nation."
Please do not think that the statement is simple or obvious, I believe it is neither.
Goumindong on
0
Posts
I guess I could be reading this from a Chinese perspective, but the education here isn't to make China strong, although the rhetoric is in place for that idea. Instead, every individual actor is trying to get a piece of the pie and is encouraged to do everything in their power to succeed. This causes a degree of corruption right from the word 'go' and continues all the way to the top... if you don't get your hands dirty, you can't move up.
I don't think America was like this when I left a few years back, but I do very clearly remember wondering why I had to aggressively approach every opportunity. If we were really trying to help our nation out, and in turn help each other out, wouldn't cooperation be better primary goal than bitter competition?
All it takes is for one person to play cut throat and get ahead to upset the whole thing.
Pretty much.
It's like in PVP-based games where someone finds an exploit and starts abusing it and the community gets torn apart by all the other folks using the same exploit to compete, hedging out all the people who just want to play the game as-intended.
Eh?
My school trained me to work well into the night. Do you mean vocational schools...?
The core misconception in what? What I wrote in the spoiler or the idealized purpose of education?
Because I am not seeing how that is relevant to either.
I sometimes use 9-5 as an overarching term for most middle class white collar work.
But yes, I think a great part of why I had such a hard time in high school was because I had to wake up at 6 AM even there are studies that have proven kids cannot learn that early in the morning.
I'd really like to see a couple generations of high school students that you really need to make an effort to mislead in some substantive fashion, and I think the best way to do that is through a very broad scoped, fairly demanding[2] education that leaves them with enough knowledge to at least catch the really obvious piles of bullshit.
1: But in order to do that you will likely need to argue that the singular of data is not anecdote, which is really fatal for my claims that this whole high/grade school set up needs a higher exit standard
2: That's mostly by necessity. If you have 12 years to cram math through basic statistics and probability, a reasonably rigorous science program, a serious attempt at history and a solid reading/writing/communicating background you're going to need everyone involved to do a lot of work.
edit: The whole timing of school schedules issue just seems to indicate that, from nearly every angle, school schedules need moved. The only angle that doesn't arrive there is that the rest of the world function on that same schedule (note: as someone who has worked nights recently, I'm not suggesting that's a good thing just that its needs dealt with if you move school). Hell, even the bus routing gets better if you move most school schedules.
"The purpose of education is to produce productive citizens for the nation."
I guess I may have misread, but I believe that the nation isn't a critical factor anymore than in that it can occasionally scoop out a few geniuses for it's own benefit. The brain drain that occurs robs of most nations of their best and brightest and they aren't coming to America solely out of love of America.
I think the purpose of education now is to produce productive citizens and then throw them into a global market where the winds of change are fickle and hard to read. If the nations actually cared (and some of them do) then the social structure of the US would be significantly different so as to optimally use every citizen and not just those that beat out the rest.
Not used to communicating in a forum, sorry if I was being obtuse.
I was in high school during clinton's administration. We had state administered standardized tests every few years, and other than that the teachers were allowed to teach. most of my teachers, starting from probably about 5th grade, had the aim of getting us educated so that we could get into any university we put our mind to.
I learned how to write college level papers in 8th grade, with my father supplementing my education at home by teaching me different citation formats. I learned study techniques in 10th grade that have stuck with me throughout my adult life.
In most areas I was prepared for University by my teachers. But that was their goal. They saw that as their primary objective. To take this group of young minds and get them ready for what was to come. Home Ec we learned balancing check books and budgeting, as well as cooking food that could help us survive life in the dorms. We learned languages to help us get by in the world (granted we had only two choices french or spanish), Our science education was geared towards helping us understand the world around us and to put things into perspective. Same with history/civics/geography/government. math education i couldn't really speak on because i was terrible and never got very far, but if you were good at math and enjoyed it, our high school would take you all the way up to Trig, if you played your cards right. English education taught deductive reasoning, inference and research, not just read this and write a paper about it.
By the time I got to University, I was so well trained and ready for the English 101 classes that I probably could have skipped them, and done better. I slacked in the 101 and 102 classes because they were so easy compared to what I had been through at high school.
My brother, who is 4 years younger than me and endured Bush for all of his high school experiences was not so lucky. He had most of the same teachers that I did, but they were hampered by the new rules, and the new standards, and most of them retired soon after. They couldn't be the teachers that they wanted to be anymore, they had standards to meet. It's almost shocking to see the difference between my education and what I got out of it, and what he got out of his.
there was a point to this somewhere, i'll remember it eventually... (i'm getting so old...)
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
I have to say, standardized tests really seem like the big double edged sword in education. You can't really get a handle on how one area compares to another without it and yet using it seems to just make everyone's experience worse. Actually, I think I'm being a little bit harsh on it there. You likely can make standardized testing thorough, comprehensive, not drag the entire class year off course and also not make it trivially exploitable by simply spending a lot more time on grading the test. By which I mean, if it looks like a scantron, you should probably just throw it and the person who suggested it into a shredder. Use a (relatively) large number of humans to grade the tests and you should be able to eliminate at least a lot of the issues with standardized testing (provided you're using the humans as more than manual scantron machines anyway).
The point of the spoiler is that I don't think that is true. It is much more likely something we come to believe because we both do not understand how far we have come in our education but also because everyone has a different understanding of what is "High Schools" should have covered. Case in point
In my school system you could do trig in middle school. I took calculus my freshmen(or sophomore) year of high school.
Different schools end up with different priorities. And each discipline in college has to both ensure that you can progress but also ensure that those who have math heavy secondary educations (or math light secondary education) aren't left in the cold
That is better. But could we just ignore "nation" and then say "world"? Does that make a difference?
I think that you might be confusing what education does with what the purpose of education is. We don't educate people to throw them to the wolves of the global economy, we educate them because we believe it has some value. That value is in productivity or ethics or plain enrichment from knowing more.
Maybe i should have phrased the question in a different way. What should the purpose of education be?
1: We could get into a discussion on why, but I don't see a set of answers that doesn't lead very quickly to bitching either about politics or people being people, so I'm going to do my best to avoid it.
The state tests that we had growing up were fine. And they were just that, state tests. Not national.
they were administered in 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 10th grade. There was about 2 weeks out of the school calendar. The first week was for preparation for the tests, teachers making sure that you really did understand everything. Not just making you memorize things, but making sure you understood it. practice tests were given and tips were provided on how to do better. Especially on the English ones. So many practice tests on writing essays and how to be better at them.
And then the second week was for the tests. 5 days, 5 tests. English, Math, Sciences, Social Studies, and Language Arts. And then, when the tests were finished, that was it, school was back in session. you got your scores a few weeks later, andthose who did well on the tests got recognition at an assembly.
We had geography bees, and spelling bees, and competitions. I remember one year, probably 6th grade i think, where we were all told to research a paper for the DAR writing contest. And then the english teacher 5-8 grade looked them over and chose the top 5 to be submitted to the DAR's national contest. 8th grade I won the school wide Geography bee, and went to state competition (please keep in mind i was in delaware, we're kinda small...) and there was a huge announcement in the morning after the competition about my attending.
Do schools do these things anymore? Are there classes just on reading and writing? or is it really all just teaching to the test? I'm asking honestly because I don't know. It's been so long since I was in school and i just don't know the answers.
We had memorization (vocabulary tests and quizzes. Spell the vocabulary word and use it in a sentence correctly, and that was in 4th grade! later on it was this is the definition, what is the word and vice versa) of course, but we were also taught application. deductive reasoning. One of the best exercises ever was when we read through Masque of the Red Death and using only the context in the story we were told to design the rooms of Prospero's castle.
rambling again..... i should get back to work on what i'm really meant to be doing...
Oh right, my point.
Standardized tests can be good, and they were good. When they were used as simply another tool for measuring. Not as the end all be all. They can be so good when used as a part of the equation, not the whole equation. There is so much more to education than just whether a kid can pass a test.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to give every student a basic understanding of how a very broad range of disciplines function and what their goals are by the time they graduate high school. There are plenty of reasons why we can't (and shouldn't) give them a basic understanding of the current state of any given discipline in any serious depth. But that doesn't excuse graduating people who can't manage to put together a coherent argument that flows logically from supporting statements to a conclusion in a fashion where another person can look at it and understand it (provided they understand any required background at least). Having 300 or 400 person classes freshman year for people who haven't learned that skill is indicative of systemic failure.
1: I'm going to assume that you mean the mindset and methodology that a discipline uses when approaching a problem, and not the specific procedures and knowledge used. Meaning: experiment in general and not the precise method for calculating the acceleration of a falling object or the dates for the Hundred Years war.
edit: on standardized testing, my biggest objection can be summed up as: if you're going to use your test for anything then it should not be possible for me to get a 50% without knowing anything about the subject simply by eliminating those answers that are not consistent with each other and then randomly guessing on the remaining answers. And yet, that's the usual design on standardized testing.
For me each step in my degree chain has resulted in a significant increase in pay. Partly because of experience and partly because of education. Before my 4 year degree I was making $11 an hour. After my degree and 2 career hops I was making $17 dollars an hour. Then I got my MBA and was unemployed for a month. Then I picked up another position which I'm at now paying 24.50 an hour. If I hadn't gotten my degree I would likely be making $12.50 an hour doing clerical work. Not bad and I liked the company but even with the %15 locality difference I make significantly more now and the $350 a month student loans were worth it. On the flip side if I were a plumber or electrician by now I would be a journeyman and I would make $30-$40 an hour.
There is no reason that we can't teach students analytical tools. The Scientific method works, in pretty much any application you use it on. Grammar is another analytical tool, and sadly one that I was not very well schooled in. I can tell you that a sentence is wrong, and for the most part I can tell you how to fix it, but I don't have the reasons why, or the names, i just know that it's wrong. And lord don't ask me to elaborate on parts of speech any further than the basics.
But we should be able to teach the idea of how to get to a conclusion and what to do with that conclusion once you've reached it. And make it broad and then teach how to apply it. You have an idea, alright, make a hypothesis. now take that hypothesis and prove it. back it up with facts and experiments. or research. that works in math, science, language arts, social studies, everything. And once you teach somebody that basic theory of how to ask a question and how to arrive at the answer and then what to do with the answer once it's gotten, then you can specialize.
Go into writing lab reports for science experiments. Have them write up a proof (ohgod nightmares) for a mathematical equation. Write a short paper on this thesis. Teach students the benefit of working through things, and it can be applied to everything, not just academics, but life in general.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
When I say analytical tools yes. But implied was that we do find that methods for calculating the acceleration of falling objects(we do not teach precise methods in High School) and important dates in Western history are important and such we are still faced with the conundrum whereby we do not have the time to teach things. We either have kids who understand fundamental measurement problems who don't understand the geometric acceleration of gravity or we have kids who understand the geometric acceleration of gravity but do not understand fundamental measurement problems.
We need to have kids who can put together logical arguments and balance a checkbook. We need to have kids who understand compounding interest but also understand momentum and what the civil rights movement meant within the greater context of American History. And if we are going to have kids who go to college then we also need them to be able to do all these things and be competent in research and methods for the various sciences and the underlying philosophy which supports them.
Of which there are so many that if you did teach that in high school you would not get anything else done. I do not doubt that there is a lot of overlap, but i do flatly reject the idea that it is as homogeneous, as simple, or something that we do not have to give up to achieve.
start younger. These are things, ideally, that should be taught in middle school.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
I'm going to have to stop you right there and ask how you are defining "success."
i'm definitely not going to disagree with that. but should there be something in place to at least try and get kids all on the same level? To not give up on the ones in the hard to reach places. Not all kids going to school in center city LA are necessarily lost causes. Just like not all kids going to school in Amherst, mass are guaranteed to care.
But getting to kids when they're young. kindergarten, elementary school, and teaching them some basics for how to survive, deduce, isn't that something that should be done? And yes, even the kids in the center city.
it's idealistic, and practically impossible with the way education funding is, and the opinions of educated people, but shouldn't part of our focus be on fixing that?
or have I been watching too much West Wing and day dreaming too much?
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
The short answer to this is that if you don't know why the scientific method works you don't know the scientific method. And why the scientific method works is a very long and complicated problem filled with caveats and assumptions that many people aren't going to like very much. An explanation that requires an understanding of math that is fairly complex. For instance while we do teach "the scientific method" to high school students but you still get ostensibly informed people who should have learned this both in high school and college saying "well Einstein can be wrong so Climate Science isn't settled"(see WSJ opinion page in the last week).
Grammar is another example. What you described is very common, because it is not possible to have what you would consider a convention in grammar. Grammar rather is an evolving system of understood definitions and axioms that are learned, constructed, and reconstructed as we communicate. The "names" are simply attempts to classify and develop more understood definitions such that the discussion of the frames of communication make sense*. Students largely don't enter into academia with writing skills similar to what academics want because they've literally been speaking a different language their entire life. How do we get them to speak the same language while also explaining to them just what grammar is and providing a framework that they can communicate errors in the language with people who are likely operating under different frameworks?
Lets use an example that you are likely familiar with. Current written language is evolving to be more similar to spoken language as well as incorporating short hand that is used in ubiquitous technologies. Yet there exists no clear indication for when to use italics, bold, and oftentimes no clear or universally accepted way to denote different ideas that we wish to convey. Lime is for the truth, salmon is lies and (fuchsia?) is for sarcasm? Should that sentence have used an "Oxford Comma"? And should the question mark gone inside or outside of the quotes? These are things that are changing in modern academic usage, grammar that you learn in high school might be wrong or incorrect by the time you're in college. And they're changing at different rates in different ways in different areas. We can't teach them all.
*O.K. iirc it was originally an attempt to codify the "proper" language but the people who actually study grammar have (again iirc) at least given up on those silly notions. But that is more a question to be answered by someone who knows more history than I do.
"how to get a conclusion and what to do with it" is something that I can't parse in terms of school. I just don't know what it is you're trying to talk about because the comment is so broad that it could mean anything. What to do with conclusions (and how to get there) is not simple in the slightest. I am not even sure it is something that you can teach. Are we talking deduction, methods of deduction, induction, ethics?
The last quoted part is there because not only is it wrong in the codification of the scientific method. But the scientific method does not apply to all stated disciplines. Formal systems like Math and Language(language as in the specific application of a language, not as in the theory behind language) cannot be tested, hypotheses are nonsensical. Hypotheses only make sense under uncertainty .
Can we really get all these things across?
Lets put it another way. A logical way.
Let us assume:
Time is limited and teachers do not spend time doing nothing.
If this is the case then the outcome "students do not have basic skills" comes down to one of four things
1. The curriculum does not teach basic skills
2. The teachers are unable to teach basic skills
3. The students are unable to learn basic skills
4. the expectations on basic skills is outside the scope of possibility
I think that we can rule out 1 and 2 fairly easily. If we assume 3 or 4 then we are suggesting that the time in school is necessarily too low. I.E. that we either need to extend high school or we need to teach these things in college. The third option (fewer people go to college) is something that negates the premise of the question. (The premise being how to get college students to be prepared for college)
What makes you think that this isn't being done? There are certainly discrepancies between budgets but its not like Kindergarten, Elementary School, et all simply don't exist in these areas or that the intended curriculum is significantly different than in others.
Basically, you can take a general solution and get to a specific one. You can't do the reverse. Therefore, we should teach general solutions and if we have to cut something due to time constraints then cut the one that can be derived when they need it.
As far as those areas where graduation rates are an issue, I think there are some important questions to be asked as to what is driving that. If its a money issue, there's an easy fix for that. If its a students don't care about school, then the fix for that is likely better teachers. If its some third thing then its still an issue that we can fix if, as a nation, we decide we actually care (which, really, brings us right back to the standardized testing is bad but cheap discussion I think).
edit: I'm going to have to disagree with this. The scientific method is nothing more than always holding that
1) The answer that is most likely to be correct is the simplest one that still explains all the facts
2) If your theory and reality disagree, then reality always wins
edit 2: Oh, and don't rule out 1 up there. My entire point is that the curriculum is skipping vast swathes of basic skills
edit 3: Also, the details of grammar are a straw man when the major point of that post was that people are unable to communicate effectively. Its ok if you don't know what the Oxford Comma is. Its not ok if you don't have any idea when to use a comma. Its ok if you can't be bothered to care if the punctuation goes inside the quotes or not. Its not ok to not use quotes or skip the punctuation. Similarly, if you want to communicate, the letter 'u' is not word. Teaching English and communication is not about teaching an entire ruleset. Its about teaching enough to get by when you have to write a cover letter for something, or when you have to make a written argument on some subject that you feel strongly about. In those cases, no one is going to care about your grammar so long as its approximately right.
to be honest my experience with current primary education is very narrow. I know one five year old and she is so far ahead of her kindergarten class because she can almost read and knows her letters that it's kind of depressing.
I've been out of the educational loop for a very long time, but I remember having spelling books in elementary school and having to know how to spell the words on a weekly basis. for me growing up a Scientific Hypothesis was translated into a Thesis for a paper/report, and the process of proving or disproving the hypothesis was then also translated into how to write a convincing paper. And this was stuff that we were doing in 6th grade.
The school year is probably too short, but that is a whole different animal.
Like Syrdon said. Teach the methods, the general overview, then get into a few specifics. And then, if the student is still sufficiently curious, they can explore even more specific applications.
Money, better teachers, parental cooperation and involvement, and an overall societal view change that education is worth it, and necessary. All of these factors matter.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
The Massachusetts school system's performance and the fact that schools aren't passing people who don't actually know enough to pass.
Says you. But to millions of people they understand perfectly what it means. "You" is no more valid than "u". Now its true that we have a number of conventions that we generally go by, but my point was that teaching them will always leave out some conventions that will be required or part of the lexicon and syntax. These are things you must teach locally.
No. The scientific method says nothing of 1. The scientific method does not differentiate between more and less complicated theories that still explain the facts. The scientific method is a method designed to get around the fundamental problem of discovering a function which may not be invertible (or which we cannot prove to be invertible).
Another way to say it is that it is a method to be less wrong. Knowing that science is less wrong (and understanding why we cannot simply take data and apply it as a result) is very important to the application of science.
Our assumptions rule out one. If one were not ruled out then we would not be using the entirety of our time with students. But we have as an assumption that we are actually taking the time to teach students and not wasting it.
This only works if they can and will derive it when they need it. Most people are simply not capable of that. Our minds tend to work on heuristics that we operate based on prior learned knowledge. But they won't understand that "twice as fast means four times more force" unless we make sure that they know it. Not just that they can derive it but that they have.
1) The set that can reason
2) The set that can not (and are therefore inferior)
If you want to make that claim, you had better provide a hell of a lot of evidence. You should be teaching them to to question and experiment to find out the truth when it matters. For the most part, physics doesn't matter for most people. Teaching them to memorize a formula is wasting their time. Teaching them that coming up with simple theories and then testing them to find their validity is the only way to figure out what is really going on in the universe will set the up with enough to work out the rest if they care.
In other words, memorizing is crap. Teaching people to memorize crap that they won't use makes them uninterested in school. If there's anything toxic to generating people that are capable of independent thought its teaching them to memorize a bunch of facts that they will never use again.
I think you would be hard pressed to show otherwise. Educators are not ignorant but for your special knowledge. They actually spend a significant amount of time studying how to best teach and we have entire committees whose purpose is to determine what ought to get taught.
You might disagree with what those committees decide, but your judgement has no more a rightful claim to the title of "basic education" than theirs. If you have an issue with it you have an issue with specific curricula, which is a different problem all together and goes right to the heart of the issue that I asked at the end of the first post that is not in the spoilers.
We don't have to assume educators are perfect in their knowledge of how to teach and we don't have to assume educators are perfect in their gumption. If we assume the opposite these are things that we still cannot change by changing the curriculum. So long as we assume that teachers are not actively malicious against the children they teach then we must conclude that we cannot just "make teachers better".
Capable probably wasn't the right word. "Able" or "willing" or "will" may have been better. The short answer is that no people, not even scientists, do what you claim they will do. Not in the course of their every day lives. They only do so when they expend extra effort to. When economists think about the economy in their every day lives they do not derive the system from first principles, they take a known heuristic and apply it. All of us, every day, use heuristics and rules because its faster and easier.
The question is if we know those rules and heuristics to use. If we are to have them we must either be informed or must derive them ahead of the time that the situation calls for them. Scientists can derive them ahead of time that the situation calls for them because its pretty much their job. The rest of the people will not and there is not generally enough time to derive things when you need them.
O.K. look. Scientists did a bunch of studies and found that that isn't true. The human brain does not work that way. Now we tend to memorize the things we use, but memorization is effectively how we operate on a day to day basis. For the vast majority of the population we need them to memorize a small set of basic systems that they will interact with on a daily basis.
Letting them derive them from first principles or asking them to test the world themselves doesn't help when people are time constrained. If you want an answer to go to someone who already has done the work and get it from them. Heck, considering the other issues with testing and statistics they are probably better off this way. It takes years worth of training to be able to understand the complexities of the testing process for complicated phenomena, high school graduates are simply not equipped to do it. Shit, college graduates are not equipped to do it. I graduated with a major in Econ, minor in math with graduate level econometrics top of my class and am starting a doctorate program at a well ranked institution and I do not feel that I am yet qualified to start testing and analyzing things. I have zero confidence that one tenth of one percent of college graduates have the proper training and knowledge to do that. The fields in which the theoretical knowledge is simple enough to analyze have pretty much already been analyzed. That or the equipment required is beyond the scope of the individual.
This is compounded by the problem of advancing knowledge. In short, since the tests they would have to do to generate a system by principles have already been done its more efficient to tell them the outcome than it is to make sure they're testing.
Yes, i want graduates to understand the logic behind testing, but teaching them to test does not achieve the goals of educating a society.
I want people to come into my class and know how to do differential calculus. I want them to understand the theory behind it. I do not care if they can derive calculus from first principles. I want people to know how to do linear algebra. I want them to understand the theory behind it. I do not care if they can derive linear algebra from first principles.
Memorization allows you to spot patterns and make quick decisions based on information your brain can access, essentially, instantly.
Further, memorization confers a base of knowledge that is essential for making rational decisions in normal life. You may never need to know the exact date the Civil Rights Act was signed after you finish History class, but the knowledge you gain of that movement helps you make decisions when voting. It confers a base of knowledge on the subject that does apply to everyday life.
If the purpose of education is to produce good/productive/etc citizens, then memorizing alot of shit in order to equip people to make better decisions is important.
The question is if we know those rules and heuristics to use. If we are to have them we must either be informed or must derive them ahead of the time that the situation calls for them. Scientists can derive them ahead of time that the situation calls for them because its pretty much their job. The rest of the people will not and there is not generally enough time to derive things when you need them.[/quote]Ok, I think I understand what you mean a bit more. Still calling bullshit though, but now with two flavors. The first is that scientists only bother to come up with a new theory when the old one is failing in some fashion, otherwise they follow a theory that's been around and seems to be correct for the application they're using it in (that is, they handle the general case just like everyone else). The second is that everyone else fits new ideas to new evidence in those arenas where they care about the change in the facts and not the result (that is, they handle the special case just like scientists). If it doesn't look like they're doing that, its because you've failed to identify the area in which they care about change. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using heuristics when they're not wrong. The trick is teaching people to question their heuristics on occasion to make sure they still fit the facts. Its not something they need to do every day, its just something that needs done when new facts are acquired. What we need to be covering in schools is how to do that rigorously and easily, how to do it quickly and why applying it to a large swath of things is important enough to justify the effort that takes. We need accountants to memorize that objects fall at 32 feet/second^2? Or 9.81 m/s^2 if you like metric? Really? Or that F=ma? Or that acceleration is the second derivative of position? We need physicists and chemists to memorize that the Hundred Years War went from 1337 to 1453? Our cashiers need to know that Helium has the chemical symbol He and has a pair of protons and neutrons? Our writers need to be able to integrate e^x (ok, this one they should be able to do, but only because its really kinda cool)? Don't be absurd. We'd like them to memorize things they'll use. Basic communication skills that can be applied across as large a swath of the population as possible, basic math (through, say, algebra. Enough to balance a check book), reading, a vague understanding of how science is done and the same for how their government functions. Maybe teach them how to do good research, since I don't think that's immediately obvious (and it means that, when they want or need to, they can teach themselves something new). Beyond that? Let them study for their preferred job on their own (by which I mean to include all education after high school as well as any trades they choose to pursue). We don't need to be training accountants in high school, nor do we need to be training engineers (speaking of which, dump calculus from high school curricula).
Do you need to do any of it on an annual (or more frequent basis)? If not, why does it matter if you can do it? I don't need to be able to prove that gravity will work tomorrow to assume that it does. Nor do I need to be able to tell you how my car turns gasoline into motive power to be able to drive perfectly. Teach them how to apply reason to the world and get a result and let them apply it in the places they feel warrant it. Teach them to perform to an acceptable minimum standard in all other things.
Unless we're using english or math differently, the theory behind differential calculus and first principles are the same thing. You appear said that you want people in your class who understand the theory, but you don't care if they understand the the theory.
edit: Are the students taking away something memorized from the discussion on the Civil Rights Act, or are they taking away an ethical decision that they have made on the issues surrounding it though? Basically, is the important bit the memorization, or the decision making process they had to go through?
Just so I'm being clear, I don't see a way to accomplish the goal of producing a citizen that you really need to make a serious effort to mislead in some substantive fashion without requiring a fair amount of memorization from them. I just think that memorizing facts needs to take a backseat to learning how, and more importantly why, to reason through an issue in a logical and comprehensive way. I also think that we should make sure to at least put a little bit of effort into making sure that the facts they memorize will actually be ones they have a reasonable chance of using.
1) What if teachers didn't teach what you want them to teach when we were not mandating what teachers had to teach?
2) Again this is you simply claiming that your definition of what is a "basic skill" is better than the committee. This may be true but the claim does not invalidate that there is curriculum there that must be abandoned if we are to teach other stuff. At which point we have a problem of basic skill definition and not a problem in that basic skills are not taught.
The physics, yes. The rest probably not those specific facts, but the information that surrounds them? Yes, yes and yes. Not only do we at the time of high school not know which people will be writers and which will be chemists (one reason why we require that everyone learn how to write and communicate!) but these things confer information that is imminently valuable in creating informed citizens.
This is exactly what you claimed did not need to be done. You said "students should just test the world to figure it out after we have given them to test things"! You said that high school graduates should be "deriving these aspects from first principles"!
We don't need to prove gravity (P.S. i don't think we can actually do that) but we should have an idea of how fast things fall that goes beyond the simple "look, that fast" and they should have this information absent taking multiple measurements and then deriving from the average velocities they found.(which i would note they would not be able to do if you removed calculus from the curriculum)
Do you need to know how your car turns gas into power to be able to drive perfectly? No, but you should be informed that flammable objects under pressure explode and the nature of combustion (what combusts and when) is pretty handy when you're doing anything that might possible involve fire.
Knowing that momentum doubles as velocity increases cannot be safely taught from the inside of a car. And knowing that it does and how friction works are pretty damned important to driving a car. Having that knowledge makes better drivers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_calculus
I want them to understand what is on that page in an intuitive way. I do not care if they can prove it(shit, i don't really care if they can calculate it though they should be able to). I do not care if they can prove that the theorem guarantees anti-derivatives for continuous functions but I do want them to be able to use it so they know what is happening when you compute a derivative and integral.
I do not expect them to be Isaac Newton. Which is basically what is required to derive that from first principles. Now it could be the case that i might come across people that can figure the proof from first principles. But for the most part that is going to happen after they have already been told how to prove it. And frankly i don't care if they can do it.
There is actually an interesting quote by Feynman if you follow the links around there to some of the more obscure methods of integration which highlights this particular issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_under_the_integral_sign#Popular_culture
I don't care if people can derive the answer from principals. Feynman and his contemporaries at Princeton graduate physics didn't were not (at a time when doing this by hand was even more so important than it is today). But Feynman had the tools because he had read a book and remembered the method.
I want people to remember the method and the intuition of what is happening but i don't expect them to be Feynman.
There are a lot of problems with this foundations-first approach.
1) There may be nothing very interesting or useful to say about the very most general levels of human problem solving. For instance: "collect evidence, and adjust your beliefs accordingly" may be true, but it's barely telling you anything. It may be the case that before we can say anything more concrete we have to settle the subject matter; it is a lot easier to say something informative about geometric problem-solving than it is to say something interesting about problem-solving period.
2) Often, the way we teach methods requires teaching concrete facts. I can't teach you how to reason geometrically without starting you off with some Euclidean axioms. Sure, I can show you how to prove that the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees--I can even, through doing so, show you how one goes about coming up with proofs of things one wants to prove--but I can only show you that method if you already know some facts about parallel lines. Similarly, I can show you how to use mathematized physics to solve some actual problems, but only if you already have memorized some of the mathematization and conceptual framework of forces, masses, and so on.
3) It is very difficult to prove things from first principles. For instance: 15 * 3 = 45. This statement is relatively easy for competent users of arithmetic to demonstrate using the multiplication rules they learned. It is significantly harder to demonstrate with a proof in first-order logic using the axioms of Peano Arithmetic. And only a vanishingly small portion of humans on the planet could carry out the general reduction of mathematics to logic and set theory. These are the sorts of things that took brilliant mathematicians a lifetime to show; we could not go around in our daily lives doing it whenever we needed to multiply. Very rarely do we actually prove anything from first principles--quite reasonably, we instead tend to look things up and rely on memorized facts we receive from credible sources. This division of cognitive labor is what has allowed us to discover so much in the first place. It's sometimes said that Gauss was the last mathematician to know all of the math that had been discovered up to his time. Now it is simply impossible, even for professional mathematicians.
I'm not so sure about extending the school day however. Kids need time to do extracurriculars, and also just have time outside of school. Unless the extended school day would be a designated block to do things like extracurriculars before going home. If the actual school day were to be longer, then there definitely needs to be a lighter homework load, or at least one that isn't comprised of a shitton of busywork that doesn't actually accomplish anything.
If the teachers can manage to produce high school graduates that I can't convince I'm right with 90 seconds of made up facts and statistics then I don't care what they teach. That goal will impose some limitations though. I'm afraid I don't follow how knowing physics or chemistry helps one become a better citizen, so I'm going to need you to elaborate on that point if you would. More exactly, what information are you referring to, and how does it help?
This is exactly what you claimed did not need to be done. You said "students should just test the world to figure it out after we have given them to test things"! You said that high school graduates should be "deriving these aspects from first principles"![/quote]No. That is not what I said. What I said was The key there is the phrase when it matters (or if they care, because there will be something they care about. If you did the teaching well, it will be a relatively broad set of things). For certain definitions of prove, it should be fairly straightforward. Yet, any proof, no matter how valid, will not directly change the functioning of more than a handful of people's lives. Nor would knowing that things accelerate. Oh, and if you can't work out a trivial experiment to disprove the average velocity theory (that is, an experiment that could be run to show that someone needs to learn calculus to advance in physics) then you've pretty much missed the entire point of what I've been suggesting be taught. I'd dispute that statement. I know too many phsyics majors who simply don't think to apply their physics knowledge to the road to believe it. What makes people better drivers is experience, preferably controlled experience in handling modes of failure (ie: you have successfully lost control of your vehicle, now recover it). Fair enough. Let them learn it in college, most people do not need it. If there's time in or before high school I'm all for teaching that, but working under the assumption its not then I don't see a strong reason to teach it over something else.
That quote does present an interesting case. Particularly, it presents the case where someone did what amounted to some learning on their own and ended up having some different options for solving problems than other people. I'm honestly not seeing how its not the application of what I've been suggesting (teach them a couple of basic tools and, if they care, they can sort the rest out). In this case the basic tools would be high level reading skills, a reasonable basis in math, and how to pick the right book (by asking someone who should know).
edit: We can probably get away with about a 1 hour extension to the school day, at least in high school if not grade school. That should take it to around 8 hours. Lopping off a month or two of vacation wouldn't hurt either. Actually, I'd need to double check, but since you'd probably need to increase teacher salaries to do it you'll likely see more benefits than just the extra time.
edit 2: meant to respond to this as well If that is all you have to say on that subject then you're doing your students a grave disservice. Your goal should be to convince them why its something that they should be doing on a moderately frequent basis. Particularly, it would be good if they were to leave school and apply some sort of evidence based reasoning to politicians, advertising and news reports. I'm going to suggest that the current state of public discourse in the US suggests that we have failed at least one generation in this respect. Its much, much harder to go from being able to do physics or geometry in a quantitative way to calling politicians on their crap than it is to go from convincing them that constructing rigorous arguments from evidence for explanations is the best way we've found to get to the truth to either of those two things. You will want to include how to do some basic research and use it to assist said rigorous argument in that bit of teaching specifically so that you leave them prepared to work out the things you didn't have time to cover.
See here's the thing: you say that we should apply "evidence based reasoning" to politicians, advertising, and news reports. But what does it mean to call reasoning "evidence based?" How is that separate from plain-old (or just "good") reasoning? You also exhort the practice of "rigorous argument from evidence." But what does it mean to exhort an argument for rigor, or basis in the evidence, other than calling it good? My point here is not that we should not use rigorous arguments from the evidence, or apply evidence based reasoning. My point is that these phrases and terms, "evidence based" and "rigorous," are generically uninformative when used at this level of abstraction--they do not tell us what makes any particular argument evidence based or rigorous. It is, as I see it, an open question whether there is very much that is interesting and informative to say about what makes a purely generic argument "evidence based."
Certainly, once we get into a particular discipline I can say something about whether arguments are rigorous or evidence based: if we take a particular argument in physics, say, then we can start talking about how well it conforms to certain evidence, whether it conforms to certain standards of elegance or simplicity, how it can be represented with advanced mathematical frameworks, and so on. These standards might be totally different, however, from what makes an argument in ethics rigorous or evidence-based, given that ethics very rarely relies on explicit mathematization, and almost never treats mathematical elegance as a deciding criterion for arguments.
If it's true that there isn't much to be said about good reasoning in general, such that it applies part in parcel to both ethics and math, then it may be the case that all we can do is teach people particular ways of reasoning well in, e.g., physics, chemistry, math, history, English, biology, and all the other standard subjects. And learning these patterns of good reasoning might in turn require that students also pick up a fair amount of rote memorization: one might need to know a good deal of physical equations before one can get a feel for the way that their application can constitute a sound case of physical reasoning. If this is so, then the way we teach high school is actually pretty reasonable, and, although we might fight over the particular patterns of reasoning which are most important to master (stats or econ?; civics or ethics?) we are nonetheless not going to depart too radically from the current model.
I'm a graduate student in philosophy, which comes as close as anything does to studying completely general facts about good reasoning. And it seems like no two philosophers agree about the proper methodology of philosophy as a whole, or, in other words, about what the very general standards are for what makes a generic argument good. I will note one important exception, though, which is that pretty much all philosophers agree that logic is somehow central to what makes arguments good. Although we rarely write explicit deductive proofs, we structure our arguments in the familiar deductively-valid forms (reductio; disjunctive syllogism; etc.), and think that being able to do so is a large part of what makes them worthwhile. So, on a more concessive note, I will say that I do actually agree there is at least some completely general standard of good reasoning, which applies in equal parts to math, ethics, and etc., and that's the standard of formal logic. And I do think that formal logic should be a required high school class. But formal logic is also pretty spare, and it's not going to, in an obvious way, help you reach substantive conclusions about, say, the truthfulness of some politician, nor can it serve as the foundation of a whole curriculum (where first you learn the logic, then you deduce the results of the various subdisciplines). So again: to the extent that I see it as possible to teach "good reasoning" in general, I see that as consisting in incorporating logic into the high school curriculum; and, in turn, I see that as a necessary, but rather modest, reform.