TED Teams Up With PBS On Ideas For Education 78
First time accepted submitter edwardins writes "TED has teamed up with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the New York public broadcaster WNET to create an hour long special called, 'TED Talks Education.' From the article: 'The Corporation for Public Broadcasting paid for the show's $1 million costs under the auspices of an initiative that addresses the high school drop-out problem in the United States. "It was the perfect marriage of ideas that matter and our core value of education," said Patricia Harrison, the corporation's chief executive.'"
Re:An unsatisfied hunger (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe stimulating intellectual stuff can attract a fair number of viewers, but not the kind of people desired by advertisers.
Oligarchs on education! (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet the people who buy $6,000 tickets to see TED talks in person won't be sending their kids to the new model of schools they're proposing. The rich will still go to fancy prep schools, with small class sizes, highly qualified teachers, individual tutoring, beautiful facilities, broad-ranging curricula --- and where even the dumbest kids will be groomed to be multimillionaire managers (no one there being prepared for the "janitor" career track). Meanwhile, they want to tell the rest of us to stick our kids on the "obedient peon" track, herded and managed to be profitable slaves for the kids of the super-wealthy (and make them a nice return on investment from new for-profit schools).
Re:How to solve the education issue in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
(3) Stop teaching to the test. I understand (at least where I live anyway) that school budgets are tied to SOL test scores, but it screws things up, and makes it worse, not better.
(4) Dump the teacher's union. Give teachers the authority to make the changes needed in education.
How is "dump the teacher's union" supposed to fit in with the rest of this? Despite failings, the teachers' unions are the *only* thing giving teachers any sway over the educational system. Without that, it'd be entirely up to management types --- who've been trained from birth to absolutely love making everything into shallow numerical metrics (teach to the test!) to prove how important management is. Yes, I had to suffer through some bad teachers kept around by the unions --- but all the *very best* teachers I had would have been first to go if management had their way, because sticking up for smart students puts you on the wrong side of management priorities.
Re:An unsatisfied hunger (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is very true for all pop science (and TED is pretty much Popular Science in video form) -- just by looking at the Youtube comments, you can see a lot of TED's popularity lies in technophilia ("cool idea, NEXT!") and the stroking of pseudo-intellectual egos ("more aware than thou"). However, that's really a personal problem of individual viewers which no one but viewers themselves have the ability to fix. Maybe someone can create a TED Talk video about complacency in the intellectually curious and the enabling role that viral pop science videos can play (the Onion vid I posted above is the closest we have thus far). It'll be self-referencing so the viral meme folks will appreciate it too hehe.