Gov. Cuomo Taps Bill Gates To 'Reimagine Education' For New York (vox.com) 123
theodp shares a report from The Washington Post: New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) rocked the education world -- and drew strong criticism from teachers and others -- by questioning why school buildings still exist and announcing that he would work with Microsoft founder Bill Gates to 'reimagine education' (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), with technology at the forefront. Cuomo, who in the past has angered educators by supporting controversial Gates-funded school reforms, said Tuesday that the coronavirus pandemic offers an opportunity to change how students are educated, and he called Gates "a visionary" whose "thoughts on technology and education" should be advanced. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars on education reform projects it has conceded did not work as hoped. "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been chosen to 'revolutionize' online learning for the fall and was asked by Cuomo on Tuesday to develop a 'blueprint' for how to do so," adds Vox. Cuomo has also tapped Google CEO Eric Schmidt to help not only "reimagine" New York's school system, but the state's economy and health care system too.
While details are scarce about what exactly these groups have in mind, Schmidt said during Cuomo's daily news conference on Wednesday he would focus on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband access.
While details are scarce about what exactly these groups have in mind, Schmidt said during Cuomo's daily news conference on Wednesday he would focus on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband access.
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The trouble isn't bureaucrats (Score:2, Interesting)
Education is expensive and takes a long time to pay off. This is why by and large businesses left it to government. Now businesses have an unlimited supply of cheap labor overseas so they don't care anymore. Meanwhile there's a ton of money to be made by taking the difficult and expensive work of education and turning it into a McJob.
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Why schools exits. To train young human beings how to properly engage in social interaction whilst being productive, learning how to be an effective citizen. We are a social species but of course whilst psychopaths exploit that to their advantage, parasitising the rest of us, the fail to appreciate the worth of it, they see only themselves and the rest of us are furniture to be used and abused.
I think some people need a new governor and wee willie gates the turd, never recovered from being we willie gates
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Correlation is not causation. Common Core just specifies a list of things educators need to cover over their school year. It's all common-sense stuff that any good teacher is already doing. The main effect is it establishes a baseline for the shittiest schools: stuff like "Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence" (to cite a High School English standard).
There are valid arguments against it, I suppose, but
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You are forgetting basic psychology. Common Code specifies a minimum list of things to cover in the school year. The problem is that setting a minimum automatically transforms it into a maximum - an unachievable goal. Schools then teach to *exactly* the Common Code - regardless of the aptitude of the students.
That is the main argument against it - it teaches to mediocrity. Lowest common denominator (does Common Core even include what that means?). I'm so glad I was educated before that came out.
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I guess that we haven't learned our lesson about bureaucrats micro-managing education. [pioneerinstitute.org]
I guess you assume that because you found one example of a government education system gone wrong that somehow the lesson is about bureaucrats? If that's the case you learnt the wrong lesson. The world is full of bureaucrat led standard curriculums which aren't anywhere near as brain dead stupid as the "Common Core" curriculum.
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bill gates used to be a "bad guy" on /.
bill gates is -
- not an engineer
- not a doctor
- not a teacher
- not ethical
his qualifications? rich guy. you are seeing money buying power right before your eyes.
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Gates is a rich guy who has had a couple decades' worth of experience giving money to further his and his wife's philanthropic goals. Unlike you and me, who give our money to the USG so the government can do something with it, he and his wife have control of where it goes, and can watch what happens once somebody gets it--and learn from that experience. I'm certain they (and the Gates Foundation in general) are much better than I would be at judging whether someone who wants their money will succeed; in o
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Gates is a rich guy who has had a couple decades' worth of experience giving money to further his and his wife's philanthropic goals. Unlike you and me, who give our money to the USG so the government can do something with it, he and his wife have control of where it goes, and can watch what happens once somebody gets it--and learn from that experience. I'm certain they (and the Gates Foundation in general) are much better than I would be at judging whether someone who wants their money will succeed; in other words, they're much better gamblers in that arena than I would be--and I suspect better than you or the USG would be.
That of course doesn't mean that all the money they give out is put towards the goals you or I would choose; that's a different issue, although I'm not aware of goals they've given money to that are inherently bad--more likely different priorities. But it's his money, so he has the prerogative of spending it how he wants.
I think modern Gates does deserve the benefit of the doubt but it does set a worrying precedent about private influence over public education. Do you really want the next generation of voters being taught about copyright by Disney, science by Monsanto and maths by Wells Fargo? It's a recipe for disaster so I think any assistance being provided by Gates needs to be rejected on the basis of the precedent it sets.
remake of a 1981 film ? (Score:1)
A man whose announced goals include 90% depopulation ?
New Yorkers should (re)watch Escape from New York. I think that is perhaps close to their future under Cuomo/Bill Gates' vision.
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Don't forget to add "college dropout" to that list.
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Don't forget to add "college dropout" to that list.
Be sure to make the same point the next time Elon Musk is talked about here - after all, he quit his PhD program after only a couple days.
I tend to have a anti-Microsoft bias, but it's hard to argue Gates (or Musk, for that matter) made the wrong decision when they left college to start a company. Nor does it really say anything about their intelligence.
Re:remake of a 1981 film ? (Score:4)
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He bought QDOS fair and square, my former roommate worked with its principle author who said that he figured Gates paid about what the OS was worth (its name stood for Quick & Dirty Operating System). Yes, Windows was built on the pioneering work done by Xerox PARC, but so was Apple Mac, BeOS, Norton Commander, OS/2, and all the Linux GUIs.
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He introduced the notion of "buying" bits "fair and square." Fuck him, and also the mere notion of "intellectual property."
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IBM and Ford were buying innovative companies to acquire their IP around the time that Gate's **father** was being born. Your hatred is misdirected.
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Buying designs for physical objects is a far cry from the claim that one can "own" a particular line of bits in succession.
College dropout for the win. (Score:4, Informative)
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He's corrupt. He's a serial perjurer. He's a monopolist. Wait, he's smart and rich! Yep, sounds about right.
Re:College dropout for the win. (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry, money. Your money is all that moneys. -- Homer Simpson
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There is the problem of Academic inbreeding. Where the student who best handle the Academic System go into a career in Academia who then teach students the method of the system they had learned.
It is like a native speaker of a language teaching someone who had never came across that language. It is doable, however it may not be optimal, because the student didn't have exposures during their early years of the life, so many of the languages traits will not mesh well into their thinking.
Academics who loved
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I think this has something to do with it. I'm fortunate to live in a pretty nice area and our school district has a lot of academics and doctor/lawyer parents. There is a huge difference between a self-motivated student and one who has to be pushed. The academics' kids will almost always be "good at school" - if you have 2 Ph.D parents who don't have any work stress because they're professors, you're bound to be smart AND have a good home life. The majority of the doctor/lawyer parents' kids will also turn
Re:College dropout for the win. (Score:4, Informative)
if you have 2 Ph.D parents who don't have any work stress because they're professors,
You... um... don't know many professors, do you?
Academia is one of the most stressful jobs there is. It's absolutely brutal and I'm glad I'm no longer in that game.
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It's only stressful if you're not very good at it.
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Did you come here just to take a random swipe at someone for a laugh? I think twitter may be more your speed.
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Lol I'm banned from twitter you fucking snowflake.
Being part of the young generation is what's stressful. At universities now there are clearly 2 classes of people, those who came in at boomer times and had real, fulfilling jobs in their fields, and those who came up later, after market saturation hit every discipline like an MLM scheme. So now all the young academics are workaholic rat race fucks with type-A, and all the older ones are already ensconced in privileges that they are constantly protecting fro
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Lol I'm banned from twitter you fucking snowflake.
I cannot imagine how that happened. I am shocked I tell you.
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The system is broken for the vast majority of students, and so far the main response is to throw more money at it to do more of the same failing process. It's time to try something new. It probably won't fail worse than what we currently have, anyway.
Not everyone is Bill Gates (Score:3, Insightful)
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After they confiscate them for unpaid property tax, of course!
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After whatever the same thing they want to do with schools.
Hmmmm Bill Gates re-imagining eduation... (Score:5, Insightful)
let me see
Everything will be remote through M$ Teams check
All students will be using M$ surface tablets check
All students will be using Office 365 check
All Programming classes will be done on M$ Visual Studio check
Residents of NY write M$ a big check for above software check
Bill Gates Ego gets even bigger ( if thats possible) check
Re: Hmmmm Bill Gates re-imagining eduation... (Score:3)
And worse, theyâ(TM)ll force teachers to use $harePoint.
Re: Hmmmm Bill Gates re-imagining eduation... (Score:5, Funny)
Where's the "+1 Terrifying" mod when you need it?
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I was thinking this didn't sound too bad, until you mentioned SP.
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It is obvious that the owner of Microsoft would recommend Microsoft product. Such a statement is hardly insightful. So make it insightful by stating what is wrong with these choices, and what would you choose and why.
For meetings, everything has gone cloud so there a few good choices anymore. Maybe something like Riot [about.riot.im] and Matrix [matrix.org]? Surface tablets are pricey and unrepairable so that's not a good choice. Something like Dell or HP or ASUS laptops is a better choice here. Office 365 is really good if you d
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Everyone will have to access all education content through an @outlook.com account. It will be tied to your government ID.
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Well it's either that or Google, and at least this way kids get some hardware other than a crappy iPad or Chromebook. Actually they may get one of those Windows ARM devices (shudders). But honestly I struggle to find the downside. Students exposed to office applications they will use in their professional lives, using standard Windows hardware rather than toyOS, and Visual Studio ... I struggle to see how using a widely used tool in industry is a bad thing. As for residents writing a big check, this shit is
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I have some of the same fears as you do about this. That said, there have been a lot of Americans in the last several decades who home school their kids, and realize that their kids could miss out on a lot of socialization at the peer level. (Socializing with your parents...well, that's a different thing...) The home school community has therefore invested effort in getting the children together in the real world for field trips and so forth. I only have anecdotal evidence (and neither I nor my children
Excuse me, I meant "Reeducate Imagination" (Score:2)
I like anagram based humor you see.
Worship the mega rich and /. editors trolling (Score:4, Insightful)
How about we stop fucking around with halfway measures and just make Bill Gates our GodKing for life? After all, he's a billionaire so he must be better at everything than all of us.
I wish editors would stop trolling. If we could down vote stories this would be a better site.
Re:Worship the mega rich and /. editors trolling (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's an interesting observation, I've never read the book but his 1996 videotaped speech titled 'Windows At Work' was all about the impending impact of the Internet on the workplace.
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Which is fine, but in no way qualifies him to pontificate on education.
Why not? You and I can pontificate on education, so why can't a smart, driven, lucky, billionaire businessman philanthropist?
Crazy idea, maybe consult some actual experts instead?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that since the guy started a multi-billion-dollar school philanthropy organization, he might have actually consulted with some experts.
The bestseller he wrote in 1995 completely missed the impending explosion of the internet, which really should have been in his wheelhouse.
Why does his failure to predict the future of the internet in 1995 make him unqualified to talk about education in 2020? Since the discussion is about technology and education, and he started a company that sells sof
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I mean, Bill Gates has spent years devoting billions to fighting diseases (like malaria) as his full time job. So he's been building experience for a while. Dig up his TED talk on pandemic response from 4 years ago. And his wife has been pushing the education side of his charity. These are the two things he's been focusing about for a while.
He's not inherently better than us because he's both smart and a billionaire, but he has been getting tutored by experts that he was paying well. that's more effec
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Bill Gates is no different than JD Rockefeller. He too gave away his fortune towards the end
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I find your worship of capitalism and vilification of Gates to be an interesting concept. How are you squaring that circle??
And he's putting $40 billion into finding a cure, cause he wants to buy a good place in the history books. And I'm down for that. Seems like a win-win.
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I see. People can't change, is that right?
Not to mention that a lot of this concern in the Gates Foundation for education undoubtedly comes from--and is directed by--his wife, who doesn't share all his characteristics. You need to give her the credit she deserves, which I'm pretty sure is a lot.
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So, a guy with zero background or credentials in anything but violating anti-trust law
I take it you're jealous of the genius who scored nearly perfect SAT, went to Harvard, ran a highly successful multinational corporation, and has been playing with PDP-10s back before you were even a sperm in some dude's ballsack.
After all, he's a billionaire so he must be better at everything than all of us.
Not everything. But considering his former enterprise had a very large presence in the education sector and his current foundation has an even larger one in virology he's a pretty good resource to tap in those two fields.
If you're going to claim to be smarter then other people, don
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How about we stop fucking around with halfway measures and just make Bill Gates our GodKing for life? After all, he's a billionaire so he must be better at everything than all of us.
And who else has a better story than Bill Gates?
Re: Worship the mega rich and /. editors trolling (Score:3)
There is no problem having articles on real education. As you could have figured out if you weren't so completely intellectually dishonest as well as purely just a liar, my issue was with all the Bill Gates worship articles we've been getting.
Now for the first time in this thread I will use the word "fucking"; you are a fucking liar and a scumbag, too. Have a nice day.
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My text is right there.
Yes it is. And you are a fucking liar and your own post shows it. You posted hatred and vile and attacked the editors by pretending the article is about something it isn't.
my issue was with all the Bill Gates worship articles we've been getting.
Well this article isn't about that, so take your vile trolling posts somewhere else.
Maybe I'll make a bot that posts some random insult about Bill Gates to every Slashdot post that mentions his name, and I can get free Karma too!
The good old days (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, remember back when We the People set educational goals for our own children, instead of oligarchs doing it? These oligarchs just enjoy controlling things and changing them around. They could give a flip if our kids come out educated or not. They have experimented on live systems and caused disaster after disaster. Why don't they experiment on their own children? Oh, they don't want anything bad happening to them. Oligarchs' kids will be educated in traditional schools with excellent teachers. They won't graduate high school not being able to spell.
Remember when we used to ridicule Russia for being ruled by oligarchs?
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Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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You are clearly a product of the old system that did not work. The old system had a bunch of religious zealots keep science out of the school.
Oligarch do not CARE about education, so they do not do any of the crap you talk about. Your paranoia about oligarchs is worse than anything the Oligarchs do.
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The old system that did not work? You mean the system that built a railroad that spanned a continent? The system that mastered the mass production of automobiles? The system that provided the arsenal of democracy to win World War II? The system that created the transistor era of computing machines? The system that landed a man on the moon? The system that created the silicon era of personal computers that could fit on a desk? The system that created a system of interconnected computers that spanned t
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Hey, remember back when We the People set educational goals for our own children, instead of oligarchs doing it?
Yeah, back then people didn't even know what a computer was.
But more to the point, most of the world technically has education controlled by oligarchs, and it actually turned out okay. Not having every person learning something different has benefits. But you're more than welcome to homeschool little Timmy, but don't come crying back to the government when he fails because it turned out that (shock horror) you actually didn't know better than those people who actually pay for professional advice.
Or do you t
Re: The good old days (Score:2)
You forgot how to read. That just interact was said, silly.
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Personal pet peeve of mine, and admittedly not terribly relevant to this page.
"They won't graduate high school not being able to spell." IMNSHO (and with apologies to any spelling bee winners here), learning how to spell is at the very bottom of my list of Important Things We Learn in School. The English spelling system is an embarrassment, based on the spelling system of a language (Latin) with about a third as many distinct vowels (vowel phonemes) as English, held back by etymological spellings (why is
Is it tar and feather time yet? (Score:2)
Is it Tar and Feather time yet?
Literally, not figuratively.
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Not in NY. The sheeple of NY are entirely fine with establishment approved billionaires calling every shot.
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Only Microsoft and Google? (Score:3)
Why not Apple? Do they want children to fail?
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I would love to see the FSF propose a "teaching stack" or an "education server" and "education client" distribution. Maybe Linus Torvalds could retire from the Linux Kernel and do for education what Gates is doing, but with a GNU stack.
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I would love to see the FSF propose a "teaching stack" or an "education server" and "education client" distribution. Maybe Linus Torvalds could retire from the Linux Kernel and do for education what Gates is doing, but with a GNU stack.
Not quite sure if this is sarcasm or serious, but I'll assume serious for the sake of the reply.
At a client/server level (assuming 'client' can mean 'web browser', we already have some FOSS educational software. Moodle and Canvas are free and run on a LAMP stack. That's not the problem.
I hate Chromebooks and I hate the Google ecosystem, but when there's political pressure to have students have their own computing device, Chromebooks at $200 a pop and the ability to hand a kid a new Chromebook and have their
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META: It was indeed serious. So far, 4 out of 5 replies to this article are either "Bill Gates and Micro$oft are EVIL!!!!111" so I can see why perhaps you thought a serious post was sarcastic. It is a shame that when "Bill Gates" is in the summary Slashdot turns to slobbering idiots. In another thread I am modded Troll and called various vile names for daring to steer the topic onto the actual benefits/drawbacks of a Microsoft education stack. So I appreciate your sane reply.
ON-TOPIC: My local school di
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So education isn't expensive enough already? I can buy a Dell for half the price of a Mac, and get twice the hardware capability and the ability to run 90% of all the software out there, and be able to add the peripherals of my choice to it. Apple is good for people who like their options to be limited and controlled, but isn't that the opposite of what we want kids to learn?
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Never look at hardware costs alone. In the long run, your highest costs are from IT. Just ask IBM.
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Yes, you're right, the students should only be allowed to run software that is approved by a corporation in Cupertino, not sure what i was thinking.
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What the fuck are you talking about? If we're talking about iOS then Google is also a gatekeeper. If we're talking about Macs then Apple's App Store is not the only way to get software. Out of the 30+ applications I'm using, only six come from the App Store and four of those are from Apple themselves.
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Why not Apple? Do they want children to fail?
Because teaching people to use computers is more valuable than giving them an iToy. No seriously having seen multiple schools with multiple allegiances I actually think Google is probably the best shop for this, but holy crap is Apple a distinct last when it comes to actually having kids do anything productive on software or hardware they provide for the education sector.
2 seconds in-front of submitted assignments will instantly show who did it on an iPad. It usually comes with an excuse note to the teach a
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Let them use TeX!
(Disclosure: I became a LaTeX fan when I needed to typeset a grammar written in English about Urdu. Urdu is written in the Nasta'liq variety of the Arabic script, and is so painful to typeset that up until a decade or so ago, Urdu newspapers--at least the front page--were handwritten by calligraphers, then printed using photo offset. But you can do it without too much pain using Xe(La)TeX, in part because the original author of that program had worked in south Asia in SIL. Ok, that was w
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Yup. When I started at the University of Waterloo in 1996, all the CS labs were packed with Macs. Only engineering had a unix lab.
Thankfully, I wasn't in CS so I didn't have to use a Mac.
Healthcare? (Score:2)
I thought that, as par of the USA, they did not have healthcare at all. As far as can be seen from outside the USA, is that they just have a "health insurance" ponzi scheme.
Teach people to think for themselves, perhaps? (Score:1)
Teaching people to think for themselves from an early age would be ... groundbreaking.
It'll never happen - far too dangerous for the "elite" to contemplate - they want compliant citizens that can be easily swayed by tub thumping and simple bold headlines.
Lets face it, even putting the education curriculum in the hands of big tech is going to have an ideological bent, rather than one which focusses entirely on asking questions, on evaluating to obtain the closest to fact you can get.
The level of population t
Re: Teach people to think for themselves, perhaps? (Score:2)
If only the People would stop voting for populists and start voting for big government statists, then we'd finally have the socialist utopia we have all dreamed of since Marx first put pen to paper!
You were doing well until you revealed your sickening partisanship. You should have stopped a few sentences earlier.
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My bad, I didn't realise that these leaders were so very effective at leading a country and ensuring citizens are protected and get a fair deal.
You managed to cunningly add in a whole bunch of absolutely irrelevant garbage to make it look like I was into big state socialism - hurrah for you, agenda completed! /looks at OP. Hmm, I don't see anything about socialism there. In fact, I see pretty much the opposite - a cry to teach people to think for themselves and also a distrust and dislike of populist leader
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This can't be good. (Score:2)
I wonder if it will involve Windows? (Score:2)
After all, the so-called "philanthropist" still holds a lot of shares. We don't want the value of those being damaged by his generosity, do we?
Bill Gates: a jumped up entitled little shit for 65 years and counting.
Education should be reinvented (Score:5, Insightful)
Six years ago, Salman Khan of the Khan Academy did this great Ted Talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_... [ted.com]
In it he rightly pointed out that in the age of internet video, classes shouldn't be presentations. We could still use schools and teachers. But not for presentations. Students can watch those at home, at their own time. And rewind any time they like. "Homework" could be done at school. Independent work. With teachers who can assist and other students who can help.
Yet, six years later we still have teachers hold the same presentations thousands of times all over the world, instead of holding them once and filming them. So yea. Maybe this isn't about reinventing schools, but rather about taking an invention that has been around for almost a decade and giving it a big push.
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Yet, six years later we still have teachers hold the same presentations thousands of times all over the world, instead of holding them once and filming them.
If it's live, you most likely have some sort of feedback channel. You can ask questions. Clarifications. Weird tangents.
I've been doing some online courses lately, and they only come as videos of talking heads with a pdf of slides attached to the side. After the first few I noticed that there's an accessibility option for hard of hearing...meaning trans
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"I didn't hurt myself or anyone else in the process": I bet the tree disagreed.
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Independent work. With teachers who can assist and other students who can help.
It's a great idea, and works well when it can be implemented well, but the pool of people qualified to teach in this way is vanishingly small and most of them are too expensive for most public schools. It's a horrible problem, but until we can fix the issue of school funding it's not going to get fixed. Warehousing kids and rote memorization is cheaper, both to practice and to train teachers to do.
Much of the problem is that basing school funding in the US on local property taxes was deliberately designed
Lightning rod issue (Score:3)
Soon as this was mentioned, it triggered instant anger on the usual social media platforms here in NY. You have the conspiracy theory people saying "SEE? Gates and the Illuminati did it! I told you the pandemic was a ruse to get us all microchipped and usher in the One World Government!" You have the homeschool and libertarian crowd saying "Only Jesus and I know how to educate my children, hands off!" And then you have more measured responses (like mine) saying "Hey, what we have now for remote learning really sucks, we're trying to educate 2 kids in the middle of working harder than ever remotely at our jobs, and by the way we're the lucky ones in this mess and tons of kids are way worse off than us!"
Our school district already sold their souls to Google -- Chromebooks, Google Classroom, students who have no idea what files and directories are since their work lives in the cloud -- that whole thing. So if the objection to this is because they think it's all going to be Azure/Surface/Teams, it's all the same stuff. I think the major objection is "creepy tech companies" invading education...but that happened a long time ago. Textbook and e-learning companies produce absolute junk in terms of online material, so much so that I doubt even students actively working on stuff will really learn and retain much.
My complaint about the people who want to reimagine education, who often are "tech people," is that many have no idea what the real issues are. It's the same thing with the "disruptive" startup people that think adding a smartphone and an underpaid contractor labor force will instantly create a demand for their service. They live in a bubble compared to real people with real problems. As I said above, I'm lucky. My kids have 2 parents, a stable home life, and we're still working and earning money. A lot more kids have crappy home lives, broke parent(s), external stress, don't get enough food, don't have the time to devote to school that their luckier peers do, etc. etc. Moving lectures online isn't going to solve these serious problems.
Traditional school may not be like the old days with students being trained for factory or office work, but throwing out the model means throwing more stuff out too. You'd have to redesign society so that kids had childcare so their parents can continue working, and in the case of one-parent households I don't know how that would even be done. If only one parent could work, then consumerism would have to drop significantly. This would bring a huge period of economic stagnation/contraction similar to what we're seeing now. Plus, school allows kids to socialize. Not everyone has a great experience, but it sure beats staring at Google Classroom and postage-stamp sized images of your classmates.
Here's an idea (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft Education © (Score:2)
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Ross: "PIIIIIIVOT!"
What a load of garbage. (Score:2)
Online learning will never be as good as in-person. Another fail by people that have too much money.
Cuomo needs to go (Score:2)
Schools exist because... they give equal opportunity to learning.
Digital can not and will never be able to do that.
Why?
Cost.
Entry barrier.
Almost zero chance to engage with another person on any topic.
Add to that it is less than 15% of families that are financially secure and have the parenting skills to carry this off.
Note that the likes of Cuomo would likely never even contemplate this for their children, which reinforces the view that Cuomo is not fit for purpose.
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Schools are definitely NOT equal opportunity for learning. I went to public school in an all-white upper middle class neighborhood, and got a great education (then went off to college). Lots of people grow up in inner city schools, and do not get a good education. My suspicion--assuming you can get computers to all students, and internet access--is that the computers will be the great equalizers. (There's also a question about whether the home environment is conducive to learning, which may wreck my pre
There is hope for the old normal after all. (Score:3)
I was getting worried, with Cuomo looking like he had some leadership qualities, and Gates deciding his education plan didn't work and moving his attention to fighting nasty bugs like Malaria and Covid19 my world was shifting. But now I can get back to disliking and disagreeing with Cuomo, and Bill can get back to representing Big Evil. We may make it back to the old normal after all.
So we don't need Colleges or Universities... (Score:2)
So what stop at K-12. Why not ask the same question of Colleges and Universities. Why do they exist? Couldn't technology do a better job and save you a boat load of money. Maybe we can disband the SUNY system? I mean should Harvard's endowment be worried?
Re: (Score:2)
This--getting a college education remotely--has been at least a partial possibility for some years now, and of course is being actively implemented for the interim, and discussed for the longer term. I suspect college education will become something of a hybrid; you'll be expected in most cases to spend some time on campus (maybe your freshman year especially, or maybe your senior year), but more of the average college student's time will be done remotely than was the case before March.
Steve Jobs (Score:2)
People who understand eduaction have lost control (Score:2)
I did IT at an alt-ed school for 5 years. Most of the people I am about to speak about are good, well-meaning people. Schools and teachers and students all fail because parents think the "student" is the school's responsibility. Parents who understand their children's education is their responsibility usually have kids who do well. For example the wealthy in the US, or the dedicated anywhere, or parents of the 12YOs who learn calculus on a dirt floor in Asia with 100 other kids in the room. Staff break