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How Do You Fix Education?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jul 28, 2008 05:48 PM
from the wtb-better-schooling-pst dept.
from the wtb-better-schooling-pst dept.
TaeKwonDood writes "Carl Wieman is the 2001 Nobel Prize winner in Physics but what he cares most about is fixing science education. The real issue is, can someone who went through 20 years of science education as a student, lived his life in academia since then and even got a Nobel prize get a fair shake from bureaucrats who like education the way it is — flawed and therefore always needing more money?"
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War on science (Score:5, Insightful)
How can education be fixed when their is a war on critical thinking? Its better for those in power to rule by sound bites, innuendos, and accusations that appear credible enough to be believed.
Re:War on science (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
No, you can't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, you can't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
And it begins with throwing out the blood sucking administrators and unions.
Not everyone will succeed in this paradigm, but at least the reasonably disciplined and intelligent will have a real learning environment to report to and foster, rather than the publicly funded babysitting operation they have to endure today.
Parent
Vouchers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vouchers (Score:5, Interesting)
On the flip side, I don't think it will help near as much in more rural communities. Also, many students don't work well in online/homeschool environments. I think having the option is a good thing overall though.
My son was home-schooled last year via an online charter school, and did very well, much better than the local school district (in a fairly rural community). However of my friends/family with children of school age, I don't think most of the children would respond nearly as well to that environment.
I think the biggest problem is too much funding is lost in bureaucracy instead of higher salaries for teachers... to be honest, I think a lot of teachers today probably don't deserve more pay, but more money needs to be offered to bring in those that may not have otherwise considered teaching. As a senior programmer, I make about 3-4x what the average the average teacher in my state makes. I honestly don't think that this is right. I feel that probably 1/5 of our teachers should be rotated out annually... have "teaching" programs for professionals, you spend 2 years as a T/A (all classes should have two instructors, one main, one TA, and a parent in daily, imho). After that year, the TA would take primary on a class, then after a couple years as the main instructor, go back into the private sector. There are some good instances of lifetime teachers... but imho these are too far and few between, and I'd rather see "fresh" teachers come in, and out in a relatively short period. And it should be an honor, to have served as an instructor for said 4 year engagement.
The problem seems to be, that the various educational systems seem to be dedicated to hiring trained "teachers" who don't have much, if any specialty, instead of people who are good at their professions who want to spend a few years teaching.
Parent
How can a culture that celebrates ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How can a culture that celebrates ignorance (Score:5, Interesting)
This is about as worthy of a "+5: Insightful" as a post can be.
In the 1960s, we used to have parades that celebrated astronauts. Let me say this again - we had PARADES... for... ROCKET SCIENTISTS... To become one was something that was considered the height of a child's aspirations. No wonder we were sending people to the moon with a pocket calculator and a roll of duct tape.
And what are we left with now - an utter disdain for anyone and anything that displays the traits of having even a shade of reason. Even more importantly, we've managed to "democratize" science. The "intelligent design", "vaccines and autism", and "global warming is a myth" campaigns are only the tip of the iceberg of targeted ignorance, that aims to teach the public, and especially the younger generation, that on one hand science is a mysterious black art, to be feared and distrusted, and on the other, it's little more than a game of weak, impotent men and women, that can be played by anyone... a medium where all voices are equal.
As a result, we have a number of situations, where people's beliefs are shaped not by scientific fact, but by whoever screams the loudest. Add to that an overall atmosphere of distrust of "the system", and you have a society where scientific "rogues" that spout senile and frequently openly fallacious concepts, are treated as heroes by much of the population.
How can we hope to fix education in such circumstances?!
Not to rant further, but the other major problem we've run into, that must be resolved if our educational system is to be salvaged, is one of unrealistic expectations. When kids dreamed of being "rocket scientists" in the 60s, it was understood that not everyone was going to achieve this dream. Which was more of a reason to pursue it! Instead, we now say that everyone must go to college, and everyone must achieve an X level of educations, which is... let's face it... unrealistic. But what these expectations HAVE done, is devalue higher learning, by trying to push everyone into the same bracket. And since you certainly can't raise the expectations for people who simply cannot meet them, we just lowered the bar for everyone, most likely leading many talented kids off the right path. In terms of primary education, there have probably been few policies as harmful as "no child left behind".
If we didn't acquire this dream of equality of mental condition, and didn't fight so hard to accomplish it, perhaps we would have less problems with education, and less 2 (and even 4-) year colleges with a level of education that does not even meet high school requirements.
Parent
hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I'll be in the minority here on slashdot for saying this, but society isn't divided into us (virtuous, intelligent, benevolent, and wise) and them (stupid, malicious, dishonest, and greedy). I think there are very few bureaucrats twirling their moustaches and gleefully chortling over the failures of the modern educational system. One of the symptoms of the failure of education is lack of critical thinking and objective reasoning, and one of the hallmarks of that is the kneejerk reaction that every bureaucrat is by nature evil and dishonest.
The honorable Snidely Whiplash (R-Montana) (Score:5, Interesting)
one of the hallmarks of that is the kneejerk reaction that every bureaucrat is by nature evil and dishonest.
I had a conversation with an insurance lobbyist on a flight to Boston a couple years ago. She has a lot of dealings with state and federal senators and congresscritters, so I asked her what were the things she discovered in her interactions with them that came as a surprise. Three of them were:
The first one is relevant here, but the last one has been on my mind since then. Slashpac, anyone?
Parent
3 things to fix education (Score:5, Insightful)
1:Smaller class sizes!
2:Less memorization, more critical thinking and analysis.
3:Less passive listening and watching, more discussion and experiment (think Socarates).
None of these need tons of computers or facilities or whatever. What they do need are more teachers, and less burnout.
My experience as a student of Prof. Weiman (Score:5, Interesting)
I had the privilege of taking a quantum mechanics course from Carl Weiman 2 years ago while he was teaching at the University of Colorado. It was by far the best college course I've taken, he had the perfect mix of well versed lecturing with "clicker" quizzes throughout the class, homework that was appropriate for the material, and tests which rewarded understanding of the material and not memorization.
The best part really was that by the end of the course, he gave his lecture on Bose Einstein Condensate which he won the Nobel prize for, and all the students could understand what he was talking about from learning things throughout the semester, it was incredibly rewarding.
Compare that to my next physics courses which were basically applied calculus, except they left out the important part of what the **** any of it meant and how it applied to... anything really. His course overshadowed the rest of my physics courses and in the end, because of the huge disparity in teaching styles, made the rest of my studies quite grating and rather uninteresting.
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's a 9 to 5 job, then why do they need to do anything at home? There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about how Finland's education system is remarkably efficient considering that kids have a much smaller homework burden than in the U.S. Do things right at school, and perhaps there won't be any need to get the parents involved.
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
>Finish kids are not treated like babies as to why they can do so
>well. Most have to get to school themselves
Letting kids walk to school in the US would be cruel. Most US communities are so badly laid out that it simply is not possible to walk anywhere. It is not unusual for schools to be isolated on the wrong side of major highways, with no means for people to cross them. Until we start laying out our communities sensibly kids are going to need to be bussed (or driven) to school. It simple would not be safe to let them walk. The really scary thing is that a lot of people here think that this is a good thing
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
A generation ago, a paper route was the responsibility of the carrier (the 12 year old kid).
You made sure your subscriptions were paid and you kept track of your own money.
It seems that responsibility isn't required for anything anymore.
Look at the recent mortgage fiasco.
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
This system has drawbacks for late-bloomers and others who are mis-tracked, but it makes schools look a hell of a lot better than the U.S. approach. The problem with comparing educational systems is that one first has to establish what you're comparing. If there were a panacea like your post implies ("Finish kids are not treated like babies"), it would've already been implemented, and the battles would be over.
We discuss some of the issues around education in Grant Writing Confidential [seliger.com], though the top posts are about other things at the moment.
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems to me that "parents need to take responsibility" is all to easy to use as an excuse for the flaws in the system. At least, easier than actually trying to fix the flaws. Further more it seems to me that the reforms the do try to push through are often based upon a perception of reality not fully bases in fact and research. There are brilliant people studying the ups and downs of various educational methods; but politicians and bureaucrats seem more interested in enforcing their party's, or their own, agenda.
Friend of mine is a teacher, 10-15ish age group; and he is very into reading up on the latest articles, papers, research, studies, etc, regarding all aspects of education. One of his greatest frustrations is the institutionalized stupidity of the system. Methods that have been proven to work are showed aside because they are in conflict with current dogma.
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me that "parents need to take responsibility" is all to easy to use as an excuse for the flaws in the system. At least, easier than actually trying to fix the flaws.
On the contrary, it seems to me that it's arguing that parents not being part of the system is itself a flaw of the system.
Parent
Impossible. (Score:5, Insightful)
>Do things right at school, and perhaps there won't be any need to get the parents involved.
This simply is not possible.
I used to be a huge proponent of "teacher accountability" until I shared a 7 hour plane ride with a teacher friend of mine.
She explained the obvious to me.
All students require motivation to learn. Most students are not self-motivated. Teachers lack the authority to instill motivation in their students through punitive means, and there are very few inspirational teachers. Thus for most students, their primary motivator is their parents.
You can have the most intelligent teacher on the planet combined with the most patient, compassionate teacher on the planet - Albert Einstein crossed with Mother Theresa - and it won't matter a whit if the student is not motivated to learn.
Some very few students are self-motivated. But by and large students require external motivation, and the only people with the authority to do that are parents. The days of teachers beating students into their studies are long gone. But not so for Mom and Dad.
The single-most important thing to "Fix Education" is to increase parental involvement and stop the mentality that school is a place where you "send" your kids "to be educated". Too many people have come to view the educational system as a "service" - a place where you pay your taxes and then send your kids to be educated, with the whole burden of the process on the system. In fact, the system is merely the water - they can't force the kids to drink it. Only Mom and Dad have that power.
Unless you are extremely lucky and find the rare self-motivated student you simply cannot remove parents from a successful edcuation.
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
"Get the parents involved" is nice, but it's also passing the buck. Plenty of parents saw no value in education in their own lives, and discourage their kids from wasting their time. That's going to take generations to fix.
Meanwhile, we can still do a better job of teaching science (mostly in making kids interested in science). Perhaps the only way to get the parents involved is to teach this generation that science isn't jsut a waste of time, so that they encourage thier kids in turn.
The simple fact is, our school system was designed originally to produce good manufacturing workers, but there's no future in manufacturing. While people have long been whining about manufacturing jobs going overseas, the truth is more jobs are lost to automation than to cheap labor pools.
We need to be training designers and engineers with the talent to compete in the world market, but our pre-college (and increasingly our undergraduate) school system still de-emphasises critical thinking and abstract problem solving. We need to recognize that these abstract skills are quite practical: they are the jobs that will exist when everything else is automated!
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, we can still do a better job of teaching science (mostly in making kids interested in science). Perhaps the only way to get the parents involved is to teach this generation that science isn't jsut a waste of time, so that they encourage thier kids in turn.
Replace science with english/history/math/social studies/foreign languages/etc etc etc and you still have the same problem.
If you don't take a holistic approach to 'fixing' education, you're just going to end up with more failure all around. To make a car analogy: you can upgrade a part (science) but when the whole car (the public education system) is beat up, you're just going to have some other part fail you.
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. IMHO, the biggest problem with schools is that students are assumed to be incapable of making decisions on their own, and thus, the schools treat everyone identically as though they were all of median intelligence, all had identical interests, etc. Among other things, this means that people below the median intelligence can't keep up, fall behind, and are unable to get the extra help they need, while people above the median get bored out of their minds as they have their time wasted with ten times as much homework as the other students (but always more of the same crap) just to keep them busy.
A real approach to education reform starts by recognizing that every child is different, every child has different needs, different motivating forces operating on him/her, different interests in different areas, etc., then tailoring the educational program in such a way that children of similar levels of ability and interests are grouped together. You then take it one step further and have teacher-student conferences with each student at the end of the year to find out what things the student liked and didn't like. By late elementary school, students should be helping plan their own curriculum, with core classes plus a range of optional classes that they can choose from. And so on.
It drove me nuts throughout school that I had to waste time learning the same things over and over again. I took a test and got out of U.S. history in college. It covered pretty much the same thing that we covered in U.S. history in high school, which in turn pretty much covered the same thing as U.S. history in junior high. Mindlessly repeating the same content over and over does not promote learning except for people who have trouble learning. For the rest of us, the high school class was a colossal waste of about 200 hours of my life that could have been spent learning something we hadn't already learned but for the fact that taking it was required to attend the universities.
As for choosing our curriculum, that really didn't happen until college. In high school, our choices were basically whether we took French or Spanish, whether we took an AP version of a couple of classes or not, and which science we took. To a large extent, the math curriculum was dictated by whether you took algebra in junior high or not, though there was the option of taking a year off. Not much choice, in any case---the sequence was pretty much planned out in strict order in spite of the fact that none of the higher level math courses really depended on each other beyond requiring an understanding of basic algebra. Everything else was pretty much nailed down ahead of time. You could choose which year you took the classes, but you still had a very fixed list of classes that very nearly added up to a full four years without giving you much choice in what you took. That just plain sucks.
Give students the option to be an active participant in the education process---from choosing the curriculum to leading discussions---and you will find that they are more involved, more attentive, more interested, and more capable of learning efficiently---far more so than the passive participants that today's students are forced to be.
Parent
Re:Fix it at home (Score:5, Insightful)
No, anything other than "get the parents involved" is passing the buck.
Parent
Insightfull, and besides the point ... (Score:5, Informative)
The fucking article is about college level education.
Parent