How Do You Fix Education? 949
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?"
You dont. (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately, the only real answer is home schooling and DIY.
I have real chemistry sets, physics toys, bio lab instructables, legos for prototype construction, Linux for software devel, PIC set for embedded work, and much more.
SciAm back in the day had a build-yourself bubble chamber and linear accelerator, and it worked. Boys Life, the boy scouting magazine, back in the day had instructions how to build your own fireworks including colors and shaping of charge.
When it comes down to it, we have gotten afraid to do anything because of "DANGER". That includes teaching. Anyways, what real criterion are required to really teach someone? If we look at the ancient Greeks, it was the motivation of the learner and not of a forced teaching.
John Taylor Gatto has a book about this very topic. Go look it up on Google.
It's Complicated; No, Really Complicated (Score:1, Informative)
The easy answer is get rid of teachers' unions and make education for-profit.
The best and brightest don't teach for a number of reasons, but I say the primary reason is the shitty base pay (though the healthcare and pension should make up the difference).
Administrations are unable to cull the heard of weak teachers and are unable to reward the strongest because of the ridiculous power of the unions.
But for-profit education leads down the same path as for-profit health care in the US. No one wants that. Well, doctors and teachers do, bit patients and students don't.
Beauracracies have a terrible track record of treating their employees with dignity and respect such that unions become a practica
As is typical, our current reality is the result of a long, human history full of compromises and mistakes.
But don't let me stop the ivory tower, arm-chair analysis we all come to slashdot for.
Insightfull, and besides the point ... (Score:5, Informative)
The fucking article is about college level education.
Re:War on science (Score:4, Informative)
The parent's reference is pretty funny. For those of you who didn't get the reference, check out Miss South Carolina's response [youtube.com] during the Miss USA pageant last year.
I can't decide if I want to fall over laughing or punch myself in the face from her response.
From a CWSEI department... (Score:3, Informative)
CWSEI is focused on undergraduate science education, both for science students and non-science students. The general plans is:
1. Articulate what we want students to learn
2. Figure out what they're actually learning
3. Fix things
4. Share everything that works with other department/schools
Step 1 has been pretty easy for the courses I've been involved with revising, although it can get pretty funny to see different schools of thought battling it out over what matters most (facts? ability to apply in novel situations? general "science" mindset? problem-solving?)
Step 2 is a bit of a nightmare, but is necessary to figure out if you're actually being effective or not (Step 2 & 3 are iterative until satisfactory, then progress to Step 4). How do you effectively test comprehension vs test taking-ability vs fact retention? It's a bit easier to fix the "Did we teach them or did they already know?" by doing before-and-after tests, but that still doesn't eliminate the keeners going out and self-teaching (no bad prof has ever defeated my desire to learn!)
Step 3 is also a challenge -- in big classes (Natural Disasters can have up to 400 students) it's almost impossible to have one-on-one interactions, they're undergrads so presumably parental-involvement isn't key for learning, the TA-hours to do good grading of neat projects is prohibitive, etc. This is where tech solutions come in: if everyone takes immediate multiple-choice quizzes throughout via clickers, or has to talk with their neighbours to decide on an answer, then we've got them interacting/thinking/talking inside class hours.
For Step 4, what works? U Colorado's physics department was where Carl started this idea, so they've got some pretty cool toys [colorado.edu] that help students practice concepts they heard in lecture even outside of lab sections. As for my department, no solutions yet...
Re:Fix it at home (Score:2, Informative)
You also have to deal with parents who think their 'little johny' never does anything wrong and them not getting an A on their exam is putting him down and preventing him from excelling...
Some Asian cultures are especially this way. In China education and test mastering used to be the only way out of poverty and so grew very important to the culture. I don't mean to be stereotyping, but in general it is a cultural tendency. Some Asian parents can be very anal about their kid's education to the point of annoyance.
Re:kolidge (Score:4, Informative)
There's the big misconception. Understanding art, literature, design, history, communications and yes interpretive dance IS in itself a core skill set. Unless you rigorously train all aspects of your mind, you will be deficient. Science and engineering start with ideas...hell the word Eureka was coined from a scientific discovery...ideas start in the creative center of your brain.
You cheat yourself and disrespect science when you treat the liberal arts as nothing more than a hobby.
Some of the most exciting science and math discoveries were made because people had trained themselves to think outside the box. That's what studying the liberal arts does for you.
Too late? Most people do not really form their identities until their mid-20s. University is the PERFECT time to hone social skills (or learn the basics...either way).
Bonus: Understanding liberal arts will help you get laid. That alone should be enough for the /. crowd to line up for art appreciation classes.
Need more than one school choice... (Score:2, Informative)
As we all know on
The main thing is to allow parents a choice between at least two schools for their children. They can even all be public schools.
MIT had a study which examined the quality of public education when parent's had more or less choice of the school that their children went to. This was determined by measuring what a parent needed to do to change schools (moving, changing residence, alternate schooling, etc.) They found that school quality correlated very closely to the ability of the parents to switch schools. This was for *all* schools with parental choice and was true despite the poverty or affluence of the school districts.
What it shows is that when schools have to compete with each other for students, all the competing schools improve.
Re:Free market competition? (Score:3, Informative)
Let the poor get even poorer education, let the poorest be locked out of education entirely, let the rich monopolize the best resources, let the wealth gap grow even more obscenely.
That's an extremely narrow-minded assumption of what competition in education would do. The government currently has a monopoly on education; how is this different than a corporation having a monopoly? Because the government can be "supervised" by "the public"? Puh-lease.
I suggest you read Chapter 10 of Healing Our World [ruwart.com].
Competition would breed various forms of education, creating niches where there currently are none. (If the government is giving away education--even if it's crappy--there's no incentive for profit-based solutions.) In the absence of government-provided education, free alternative methods such as television-based, commercial-financed education would be available to anyone with a TV. Who knows what else a free market in education would produce; information is increasingly getting cheaper due to the advances in technology and the growth of the Internet further driving down the costs of potential alternative education services and methods.
The worst thing about government-provided education is its one-size-fits-all approach. It's a pity that the government mandates what can be taught and how it can be taught; I and many others I know barely graduated because government schooling simply wasn't the best method for us.
Re:Impossible. (Score:3, Informative)
You are aware that you're posting on a board dominated by geeks, yes? We had this thing called a "sports week" in our school, where we drove off to some resort to do a week of tennis, sailing, riding or whatever sport you choose.
I was praying SO hard to be sick that week, you can't even imagine!
Re:Fin? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fix it at home (Score:1, Informative)
Well, being from Finland I can say that this does not apply here, you can change your mind and get compensated for the courses you have taken. Also it is possible to go to university even though you have chosen the "wrong" path at 16.
And no, Finnish kids aren't put into groups at an early age, up to the age of 16 everybody will get exactly the same education and same chances, and the less talented are holding back the more talented, but, shockingly, this does seem to work in the way that some are actually motivated and thus do not end up total losers.
Re:Fix it at home (Score:1, Informative)