I'm starting to think that the architecture of this blogspace is not actually ideal.
Why? The fact that comments remain to some extend hidden (i.e. just appearing as hyperlinks below a post rather than actually displayed) seems to work against the formation of dialogues that develop in depth.
Simple solution:
Any substantial responses to a posted post should probably be posted as a new post. The 'comments' functionality should be reserved for short, well, comments that the poster doesn't necessarily expect to in turn provoke a response.
Unless, of course, there is a way to make the comments always visible (blogministrator? can you check this out?).
Unfortunately this would mean that conversations would be read backwards from the top of the page, but I think we're all sharp enough to deal with that.
My second comment for today is this:
In addition to longer posts that analyse or argue for this or that, I would like to encourage shorter, more spontaneous posts containing interesting facts that have popped up, quotes, images, or well, whatever.
For example:
In an interesting lecture the other day, it was pointed out that the number of neurons in a human brain peaks at about 18 months of age. We then proceed to lose about 200,000 neurons per day ("neuronal death") for the rest of our lives.
So, if we start off with about 10^12 neurons (apparrently this is a good estimate), and we lose about a million neurons every five days (5*200,000 = 10^6), then we have about 5 million days to live before our last brain cell flickers out! (10^12/10^6 = 1 0^6, times 5 days gives 5*10^6) Luckily that's about 13 and a half thousand years...
The conclusion: old dogs really do have a bloody hard time learning new tricks - enjoy your neural plasticity to the full while you still have it!
C
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
This is not a response...
This is not a response to Aaron's response, but really the second part of the post I posted for Matt C yesterday.
I'm enjoying being an observer to the dialogue!
Matt Chudek said:
Here are a couple of extra thoughts about education, since I've already started.
One of the measures for improving the quality of education mentioned in the article, aside from a nationalised curriculum, is "improving teacher quality through merit pay".
This is an interesting idea. It seems to stem from the economic notion of letting the market optimise efficiency of service provision by competition for the best rewards. I'm sure we're all familiar with the economic version: there's money to be made selling bread, several bread-makers compete, the ones which can make the best bread for the least cost get the most customers because of their cheap price for a better product, the others go out of business and only the most efficient producers are left.
I could be getting it wrong, going on just the one brief quote above, but it sounds like they're trying to achieve something similar in education: post a big reward and let competition improve efficiency. I suspect though, and this is just my own humble opinion, that the two situations may be strongly disanalogous and this might not work out so well.
A key feature of free-markets that let them optimise production is selection pressure, poor producers are simply eliminated, good producers take their place. They expand their business to fill the void. This is not the case in education. There's a shortage of teachers, let alone good teachers. Even when you reward the best teachers, the worst are not eliminated from the market and replaced, they're still desperately needed and still teaching, but now having resources channeled away from them towards the best teachers.
Even the best teachers can only teach a few kids. In fact, trying to identify the best teachers and by rewarding them hoping that they'll somehow "replace" the worst is crazy, increase a teacher's class size over a certain threshold kills their ability to teach well, and in fact reducing the number of kids in their class increases the quality of education they can provide to each. Let this play out and you have the already good teachers with small classes getting extra money, and thus needing to teach fewer pupils to sustain their income and being able to reduce their class sizes further; while the worse teachers are left with ever increasing class sizes, and those students get ever worse education.
In short, rewards for good teachers necessarily entail a basic cost for other teachers, the opportunity to have invested that money in improving all teachers, but could also have greater costs for poor teachers: demotivation since rewards are seemingly unattainable and increased class sizes.
I doubt that's the motivation for "merit pay", I suspect it's more likely to be motivated by this sort of argument:
Every teacher wants more money. They can get more money by becoming a better teacher, so they'll work hard to become a better teacher.
Now if it were the case that every teacher could make a choice to magically work harder and become better, that could work. But teaching isn't like working on a production line, where all you have to do is sew faster and take shorter lunch breaks to increase your productivity. It's a complex art that deals with a very, very sensitive complex medium: human minds. Just like making a race out of building rocket ships tends to produce rocket ships that explode, good teaching is more likely to result from investment in on-going training and support than a scramble to win the prizes.
What's more, if the prizes are awarded the basis of student performance on national tests, teachers have a very strong incentive to teach students "for the test", rather than actually aiming to produce intelligent, well-rounded students. Anyone who's ever studied for an exam, passed it and forgotten everything a week later (but is still talking about the few arts lectures they went to without even being enrolled in), knows that teaching-for-assessment is the anathema of good education. Fostering an environment where students' test performance is a teachers' income, isn't likely to put students in a situation where the significant adult relationship in their daily lives is a very healthy one.
Still, there is a class of teachers for whom "merit pay" could produce a significant improvement, and they're worth mentioning. Imagine again a bell curve, this time describing quality of teachers: few awful teachers on the left, and few prodigious pedagogs on the right and most teachers somewhere in the middle. Those teachers just up from the middle, who could be excellent teachers but just lack the motivation, might get just kick they need from the promise of extra money and really fulfil their potential.
I wonder though if this would be more than compensated for by the already excellent teachers who really inspire their students and produce world-leaders and geniuses, but instead are forced to start teaching-for-tests in order to earn their money.
Rather than forcing the misplaced metaphor of market-competition on this rather disanalogous situation, I reckon we should try to figure out how best to improve a field where you can't "out-compete" the worst, but rather need to improve everyone's skills, given a whole spectrum of prior teaching-ability and potential. I reckon programs of constant and on-going teacher training and peer-support would be a much better idea.
I actually did a dip-ed at unimelb (withdrawn: term 3), and was astounded at how flimsy the training was. The uni-based lectures taught entirely detached theory (which I happen to love, but helped about butt-kiss when I actually got in a class room), and the practical placements involved watching one other teacher teach just a couple of classes and then jumping in the deep end and just making it up as I went (which I also enjoy, but is really a terrible way to induct new teachers, especially if you don't want every single teacher re-inventing the wheel). I made a point of going to see as many different teachers teach as I could during my placements. Most were happy to have me there, but mentioned that this was very unusual, and certainly not required. It was completely unheard of for established teachers to go to each other's classes and learn from each other, even though this would obviously be the cheapest, simplest and most effective way to drastically improve everyone's skills.
I've been reading a book recently on deep cultural differences in worldviews, especially between the "East" and "West", and their consequences for our everyday behaviour. It's called "The Geography of Thought" by Richard Nisbett. I recommend it. These two paragraphs on education caught my attention and I thought I'd quote them for you:
p.55 "Japanese schoolchildren are taught how to practice self-criticism both in order to improve their relations with others and to become more skilled in solving problems. This stance of perfectionism through self-criticism continues throughout life. Sushi chefs and math teachers are not regarded as coming into their own until they've been at their jobs for a decade. Throughout their careers, in fact, Japanese teachers are observed and helped by their peers to become better at their jobs. Contrast this with the American practice of putting teachers' college graduates into the classroom after a few months of training and then leaving them alone to succeed or not, to the good or ill fortune of a generation of students.
An experiment by Steven Heine and his colleagues captures the differences between the Western push to feel good about the self and the Asian drive for self-improvement. The experimenters asked Canadian and Japanese students to take a bogus "creativity" test and then gave the students "feedback" indicating that they had done very well or very badly. The experimenters then secretly observed how long the participants worked on a similar task. The Canadians worked longer on the task if they had succeeded; the Japanese worked longer if they failed. The Japanese weren't being masochistic. They simply saw an opportunity for self-improvement and took it. The study has intriguing implications for skill development in both East and West. Westerners are very likely to get good at a few things they start out dong well to begin with. Easterners seem more likely to become Jacks and Jills of all trades."
p.189 "Asian math education is better and Asian students work harder. Teacher training in the East continues throughout the teacher's career; teachers have to spend much less time teaching than their American counter-parts; and the techniques in common use are superior to those found in America...Both in America and in Asia, children of East Asian background work much harder on math and science than European Americans. The difference in how hard children work at math is likely due at least in part to the greater Western tendency to believe that behavior is the result of fixed traits. Americans are inclined to believe that skills are qualities you do or don't have, so there's not much point in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Asians tend to believe that everyone, under the right circumstances and with enough hard work, can learn to do math."
Afterthought:
Aside from competition not being able to eliminate bad teachers (and possibly worsening them), there's a second disanalogy between “merit pay” for teachers and market competition. Students often have little choice in who their teacher is, many parents have little choice about which school they send their kids to. Consumer choice is very limited in the education market, but is essential if market competition is going to be able to optimise teacher quality. Without it you're just channeling more resources to those who need them least.
I'm enjoying being an observer to the dialogue!
Matt Chudek said:
Here are a couple of extra thoughts about education, since I've already started.
One of the measures for improving the quality of education mentioned in the article, aside from a nationalised curriculum, is "improving teacher quality through merit pay".
This is an interesting idea. It seems to stem from the economic notion of letting the market optimise efficiency of service provision by competition for the best rewards. I'm sure we're all familiar with the economic version: there's money to be made selling bread, several bread-makers compete, the ones which can make the best bread for the least cost get the most customers because of their cheap price for a better product, the others go out of business and only the most efficient producers are left.
I could be getting it wrong, going on just the one brief quote above, but it sounds like they're trying to achieve something similar in education: post a big reward and let competition improve efficiency. I suspect though, and this is just my own humble opinion, that the two situations may be strongly disanalogous and this might not work out so well.
A key feature of free-markets that let them optimise production is selection pressure, poor producers are simply eliminated, good producers take their place. They expand their business to fill the void. This is not the case in education. There's a shortage of teachers, let alone good teachers. Even when you reward the best teachers, the worst are not eliminated from the market and replaced, they're still desperately needed and still teaching, but now having resources channeled away from them towards the best teachers.
Even the best teachers can only teach a few kids. In fact, trying to identify the best teachers and by rewarding them hoping that they'll somehow "replace" the worst is crazy, increase a teacher's class size over a certain threshold kills their ability to teach well, and in fact reducing the number of kids in their class increases the quality of education they can provide to each. Let this play out and you have the already good teachers with small classes getting extra money, and thus needing to teach fewer pupils to sustain their income and being able to reduce their class sizes further; while the worse teachers are left with ever increasing class sizes, and those students get ever worse education.
In short, rewards for good teachers necessarily entail a basic cost for other teachers, the opportunity to have invested that money in improving all teachers, but could also have greater costs for poor teachers: demotivation since rewards are seemingly unattainable and increased class sizes.
I doubt that's the motivation for "merit pay", I suspect it's more likely to be motivated by this sort of argument:
Every teacher wants more money. They can get more money by becoming a better teacher, so they'll work hard to become a better teacher.
Now if it were the case that every teacher could make a choice to magically work harder and become better, that could work. But teaching isn't like working on a production line, where all you have to do is sew faster and take shorter lunch breaks to increase your productivity. It's a complex art that deals with a very, very sensitive complex medium: human minds. Just like making a race out of building rocket ships tends to produce rocket ships that explode, good teaching is more likely to result from investment in on-going training and support than a scramble to win the prizes.
What's more, if the prizes are awarded the basis of student performance on national tests, teachers have a very strong incentive to teach students "for the test", rather than actually aiming to produce intelligent, well-rounded students. Anyone who's ever studied for an exam, passed it and forgotten everything a week later (but is still talking about the few arts lectures they went to without even being enrolled in), knows that teaching-for-assessment is the anathema of good education. Fostering an environment where students' test performance is a teachers' income, isn't likely to put students in a situation where the significant adult relationship in their daily lives is a very healthy one.
Still, there is a class of teachers for whom "merit pay" could produce a significant improvement, and they're worth mentioning. Imagine again a bell curve, this time describing quality of teachers: few awful teachers on the left, and few prodigious pedagogs on the right and most teachers somewhere in the middle. Those teachers just up from the middle, who could be excellent teachers but just lack the motivation, might get just kick they need from the promise of extra money and really fulfil their potential.
I wonder though if this would be more than compensated for by the already excellent teachers who really inspire their students and produce world-leaders and geniuses, but instead are forced to start teaching-for-tests in order to earn their money.
Rather than forcing the misplaced metaphor of market-competition on this rather disanalogous situation, I reckon we should try to figure out how best to improve a field where you can't "out-compete" the worst, but rather need to improve everyone's skills, given a whole spectrum of prior teaching-ability and potential. I reckon programs of constant and on-going teacher training and peer-support would be a much better idea.
I actually did a dip-ed at unimelb (withdrawn: term 3), and was astounded at how flimsy the training was. The uni-based lectures taught entirely detached theory (which I happen to love, but helped about butt-kiss when I actually got in a class room), and the practical placements involved watching one other teacher teach just a couple of classes and then jumping in the deep end and just making it up as I went (which I also enjoy, but is really a terrible way to induct new teachers, especially if you don't want every single teacher re-inventing the wheel). I made a point of going to see as many different teachers teach as I could during my placements. Most were happy to have me there, but mentioned that this was very unusual, and certainly not required. It was completely unheard of for established teachers to go to each other's classes and learn from each other, even though this would obviously be the cheapest, simplest and most effective way to drastically improve everyone's skills.
I've been reading a book recently on deep cultural differences in worldviews, especially between the "East" and "West", and their consequences for our everyday behaviour. It's called "The Geography of Thought" by Richard Nisbett. I recommend it. These two paragraphs on education caught my attention and I thought I'd quote them for you:
p.55 "Japanese schoolchildren are taught how to practice self-criticism both in order to improve their relations with others and to become more skilled in solving problems. This stance of perfectionism through self-criticism continues throughout life. Sushi chefs and math teachers are not regarded as coming into their own until they've been at their jobs for a decade. Throughout their careers, in fact, Japanese teachers are observed and helped by their peers to become better at their jobs. Contrast this with the American practice of putting teachers' college graduates into the classroom after a few months of training and then leaving them alone to succeed or not, to the good or ill fortune of a generation of students.
An experiment by Steven Heine and his colleagues captures the differences between the Western push to feel good about the self and the Asian drive for self-improvement. The experimenters asked Canadian and Japanese students to take a bogus "creativity" test and then gave the students "feedback" indicating that they had done very well or very badly. The experimenters then secretly observed how long the participants worked on a similar task. The Canadians worked longer on the task if they had succeeded; the Japanese worked longer if they failed. The Japanese weren't being masochistic. They simply saw an opportunity for self-improvement and took it. The study has intriguing implications for skill development in both East and West. Westerners are very likely to get good at a few things they start out dong well to begin with. Easterners seem more likely to become Jacks and Jills of all trades."
p.189 "Asian math education is better and Asian students work harder. Teacher training in the East continues throughout the teacher's career; teachers have to spend much less time teaching than their American counter-parts; and the techniques in common use are superior to those found in America...Both in America and in Asia, children of East Asian background work much harder on math and science than European Americans. The difference in how hard children work at math is likely due at least in part to the greater Western tendency to believe that behavior is the result of fixed traits. Americans are inclined to believe that skills are qualities you do or don't have, so there's not much point in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Asians tend to believe that everyone, under the right circumstances and with enough hard work, can learn to do math."
Afterthought:
Aside from competition not being able to eliminate bad teachers (and possibly worsening them), there's a second disanalogy between “merit pay” for teachers and market competition. Students often have little choice in who their teacher is, many parents have little choice about which school they send their kids to. Consumer choice is very limited in the education market, but is essential if market competition is going to be able to optimise teacher quality. Without it you're just channeling more resources to those who need them least.
Excuse me.
Hey guys.
I want to apologise. My responses and posts in this blog are very much "of the moment" I am not saying this to negate any of the content (which I will stand by-- be it stream of concious) but more so to recuse myself of the many grammatical and spelling errors, and perhaps logical jumps that litter them!
That is my apology, and my recognition of this issue.
That being said, it will likely continue.
A
I want to apologise. My responses and posts in this blog are very much "of the moment" I am not saying this to negate any of the content (which I will stand by-- be it stream of concious) but more so to recuse myself of the many grammatical and spelling errors, and perhaps logical jumps that litter them!
That is my apology, and my recognition of this issue.
That being said, it will likely continue.
A
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
This is not my post..It's (the other) Matt's post...
Sans-google account I'm posting this for Matt Chudek...read on!!
Hey guys,
It's my first post. My name's Matt, I'm a friend of Chris'. He introduced me to this forum a few months ago now, but I've been distracted with other things and it didn't really seem like anyone was discussing anything, so I'd forgotten about it till now.
I think ? made a good point a few posts back. Everyone here seems to just be posting interesting questions about what they themselves are interested in, but not replying to what others are interested in. It's understandable, but a shame because in the end, no discussion happens at all.
I reckon that one day I'll want to post some ideas and have them discussed by clever people one day, so here's my thoughts on some of the topics others have raised here.
In reverse chronological order.
Education:
1) National curriculum
Ok. Here are my initial thoughts on the reasons for or against a national curriculum. No actually, let me start by talking about the reasons for having centralised education at all, and get to that by framing the question in really broad terms.
Each generation children need to be educated. We have this tendency to keep dying and forgetting everything we know and being reborn knowing nothing. We also have a society which depends on people having tremendous amounts of specialised knowledge, and implementing it daily in really, really complex ways. That combined with the constant dying could spell disaster, if it weren't for a convenient overlap in people dying (thus forgetting everything) and being born(knowing nothing). We've got a narrow window of time, say 20-25 years while their brains are growing explosively and sucking up knowledge to train the generations that will succeed us.
The number of students in each generation is fixed (for the purposes of our discussion), so all we can tinker with is the number of people we devote to teaching them, and how we coordinate/organise them.
Now this raises some problems:
1.A) How many people should we invest in education?
Any people invested in educating successive generations aren't available to do work useful for this one, whatever that may be. So the more teachers you have, the fewer firemen, farmers, inventers and whatever else you'd like.
If education is completely decentralised, everyone educates their own child, or however many local children they manage to round up, class sizes would be a lot smaller, and so the relative proportion of your working population "lost" to education much higher.
Standardised, centralised education gives a society far more control over how many people are teaching and so improves efficiency. Ideally this will happen without a decrease, or even with an increase in the quality of education the students are receiving(discussed below). Going from complete decentralisation to some centralised schools gives a big jump in efficiency.
What about going from state-centralised schooling to national-centralised schooling? An argument could be made that having a centralised curriculum allows teachers to move between schools/states more easily, helping you achieve an optimum teacher distribution across the country. So if one state is teacher-rich(Note: consequence in simplistic economic model today's politicians like: high supply=low wages), and another student-rich (high demand=high wages), teachers can migrate across and resource distribution gets optimised. This is a very empirical claim, it depends on how compatible your curricula are without national centralisation, other barriers, relative socio-economic status of these areas, etc. It can't really be debated on the very general level I'm approaching this from, so I just mention it as a type of argument that could be raised.
This is all actually a periphery point, really what Bill Gates and everyone else is interested in is not the *efficiency* of teaching, in terms of students per teacher, but the quality. So...
1.B) How "standard" should our education be to optimise quality?
This is an even more difficult question.
The implicit claim of the “Ed' in 08” campaign seems to be that larger-scale standardisation increases quality of education. Does it, and how?
Now for simplicity lets assume that the quality of education a nation's students are receiving at any given time follows a roughly normal distribution, few students receive really bad education, few students receive really outstanding education, most receive somewhere in between. This may be very different in any given country, they could have a wealth of excellent schools, or the majority of the population could live in poverty and receive no schooling, or both at once. We can't account for everything, so lets look at the normally distributed case.
There are a few ways national standardisation could improve the quality of education.
1.B.i) Shifting the bottom of the bell curve up.
Standardisation, enforced by testing, could ensure that everyone, regardless of local peculiarities, receives a minimum level of education, though this may come at the cost of shifting the majority of the bell curve, especially the people at the top, down.
I think this is the strongest case to be made for centralised education. The key advantage of a national standardised curriculum is that it allows national standardised testing. It allows a central group of administrators to keep tabs on how everyone is doing relative to a single measure. Anyone who's dropping behind can have their resources re-jiggled (i.e. teachers fired, new teachers sent in, wages adjusted, etc) to ensure conformance. This greatly reduces the possibility of having local patches where students are receiving atrocious education and no-one notices (until someone writes "histery of irak" on the board and someone sends a photo of it to bill gates).
Of course all this testing and standardisation takes considerable teacher and student time to implement, and is often of very little benefit to either. The benefits are for the central administrators, and (hopefully) via them to the least well educated students. Classes that were already doing well actually suffer because of the time wasted on testing and the focus of education shifting to doing well on tests rather than learning interesting things. Gifted students, who could be turning into little geniuses with sufficient challenge, stimulation and advanced, individual, wandering-greek-pedagogue style teacher attention, are instead forced to endure year after year of training for spelling tests.
Outcome: Fewer geniuses, but a better minimum standard for everyone.
1.B.ii) Shifting the top of the bell curve up.
This is quite hard to argue, for the reasons just mentioned. Nominally it seems that innately better students, or classes already well taught would suffer under standardisation.
Perhaps a case could be made that standardisation would improve the likelihood of gifted students being identified, allowing them to be centrally picked out and connected with the best resources in the country for gifted students.
Without evidence that standardised testing actually picks out gifted students, or rather without tests designed to do this, it's unlikely to happen.
I guess it comes down to what you design your standardised curriculum (and the testing the accompanies it) to do: pick out gifted students, or ensure “no-one gets left behind”.
Standardised testing for “gifted” students, to whom resources would then be preferentially allocated, brings with it the chance of cheating. Everyone wants their child to be gifted, or at least go to the special school for gifted kids and have super-teachers and thus chance to become gifted. Some people have money, others are willing to investigate the testing system and figure out how to intensively train kids just to do well on the test. Money can buy even less scrupulous means of cheating too.
It's quite a mire. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that national standardisation is likely to benefit the children at the top of the bell curve.
1.B.iii) Shifting the whole bell curve up.
If you could show that *everyone*, on average, benefits from national standardisation it'd be a pretty good reason to adopt it. This is not an easy task, because there are quite a few additional costs to overcome
-Ground level costs: Teachers and students are going to have the their time and energy, which could have been invested in teaching and learning, consumed by administering the new national curriculum. This involves:
Teachers learning the new material
Testing
Paper-work
Students studying to pass national tests rather than genuine learning
-Hierarchical costs: You need a whole centralised bureaucracy to administer the new system, which means new “national curriculum” staff in every school, for every district, state and nation. As the number of people and levels of hierarchy to co-ordinate increases, efficiency drops and costs and mistakes increase.
So what sort of global benefits could counter these costs?
I'm not sure, perhaps you guys can think of some.
The only one that comes to mind for me is a kind of national “learning from each other's mistakes”. If some local area seems to be consistently worse of better than others, lessons can be observed there and the techniques pro/prescribed for the entire nation. Having observed the consequences of this, new, better national guidelines/requirements can be developed so that, rather than each little state constantly reinventing the wheel, and the quality of education dropping again once experienced teachers retire, the whole nation becomes one slowly learning collective. This could be quite costly at the start and even entail a drop in quality, but in the long, long (think generations) term, if well administered, holds the potential to achieve much, much higher standards that any alternatives.
This is a dodgy, wishful argument which relies of a tremendous amount of care and attention being given to the central administration over long periods of time. But an argument to consider none-the-less.
1C) Axuillary consequences of national standardisation
Call me cynical but:
The key change with national standardisation is that “requirements” can be centrally imposed on everyone, at an early age.
Bill Gates is really pushing for this.
Education gets centralised and the administrators, open to the wise advice of their new friend Bill, who lobbied so bravely for their very existence, agree that every student needs a computer.
Kind, education-loving Bill releases free (nationally compulsory) software for schools so that every student can receive cutting edge education. It only runs on Microsoft Windows. Kids get used to using Windows. Once people are used to using something it's not likely to change. QWERTY. err...i mean QED.
That's what I'd do if I was Bill :-)
So there are my thoughts about some of the costs and benefits of a national curriculum. They're far from complete, but I tried to define some of the concepts involved and broadly, basically and clearly as I could to help facilitate more clear, interesting discussion.
I was going to reply to more posts, put this reply turned out to be quite long already. So I'm going to leave it here for now. I'll post some more later, hopefully later today.
Coming up:
2)Educationalism
3)Being smart enough to realise you're not smart enough, and meditation.
Hey guys,
It's my first post. My name's Matt, I'm a friend of Chris'. He introduced me to this forum a few months ago now, but I've been distracted with other things and it didn't really seem like anyone was discussing anything, so I'd forgotten about it till now.
I think ? made a good point a few posts back. Everyone here seems to just be posting interesting questions about what they themselves are interested in, but not replying to what others are interested in. It's understandable, but a shame because in the end, no discussion happens at all.
I reckon that one day I'll want to post some ideas and have them discussed by clever people one day, so here's my thoughts on some of the topics others have raised here.
In reverse chronological order.
Education:
1) National curriculum
Ok. Here are my initial thoughts on the reasons for or against a national curriculum. No actually, let me start by talking about the reasons for having centralised education at all, and get to that by framing the question in really broad terms.
Each generation children need to be educated. We have this tendency to keep dying and forgetting everything we know and being reborn knowing nothing. We also have a society which depends on people having tremendous amounts of specialised knowledge, and implementing it daily in really, really complex ways. That combined with the constant dying could spell disaster, if it weren't for a convenient overlap in people dying (thus forgetting everything) and being born(knowing nothing). We've got a narrow window of time, say 20-25 years while their brains are growing explosively and sucking up knowledge to train the generations that will succeed us.
The number of students in each generation is fixed (for the purposes of our discussion), so all we can tinker with is the number of people we devote to teaching them, and how we coordinate/organise them.
Now this raises some problems:
1.A) How many people should we invest in education?
Any people invested in educating successive generations aren't available to do work useful for this one, whatever that may be. So the more teachers you have, the fewer firemen, farmers, inventers and whatever else you'd like.
If education is completely decentralised, everyone educates their own child, or however many local children they manage to round up, class sizes would be a lot smaller, and so the relative proportion of your working population "lost" to education much higher.
Standardised, centralised education gives a society far more control over how many people are teaching and so improves efficiency. Ideally this will happen without a decrease, or even with an increase in the quality of education the students are receiving(discussed below). Going from complete decentralisation to some centralised schools gives a big jump in efficiency.
What about going from state-centralised schooling to national-centralised schooling? An argument could be made that having a centralised curriculum allows teachers to move between schools/states more easily, helping you achieve an optimum teacher distribution across the country. So if one state is teacher-rich(Note: consequence in simplistic economic model today's politicians like: high supply=low wages), and another student-rich (high demand=high wages), teachers can migrate across and resource distribution gets optimised. This is a very empirical claim, it depends on how compatible your curricula are without national centralisation, other barriers, relative socio-economic status of these areas, etc. It can't really be debated on the very general level I'm approaching this from, so I just mention it as a type of argument that could be raised.
This is all actually a periphery point, really what Bill Gates and everyone else is interested in is not the *efficiency* of teaching, in terms of students per teacher, but the quality. So...
1.B) How "standard" should our education be to optimise quality?
This is an even more difficult question.
The implicit claim of the “Ed' in 08” campaign seems to be that larger-scale standardisation increases quality of education. Does it, and how?
Now for simplicity lets assume that the quality of education a nation's students are receiving at any given time follows a roughly normal distribution, few students receive really bad education, few students receive really outstanding education, most receive somewhere in between. This may be very different in any given country, they could have a wealth of excellent schools, or the majority of the population could live in poverty and receive no schooling, or both at once. We can't account for everything, so lets look at the normally distributed case.
There are a few ways national standardisation could improve the quality of education.
1.B.i) Shifting the bottom of the bell curve up.
Standardisation, enforced by testing, could ensure that everyone, regardless of local peculiarities, receives a minimum level of education, though this may come at the cost of shifting the majority of the bell curve, especially the people at the top, down.
I think this is the strongest case to be made for centralised education. The key advantage of a national standardised curriculum is that it allows national standardised testing. It allows a central group of administrators to keep tabs on how everyone is doing relative to a single measure. Anyone who's dropping behind can have their resources re-jiggled (i.e. teachers fired, new teachers sent in, wages adjusted, etc) to ensure conformance. This greatly reduces the possibility of having local patches where students are receiving atrocious education and no-one notices (until someone writes "histery of irak" on the board and someone sends a photo of it to bill gates).
Of course all this testing and standardisation takes considerable teacher and student time to implement, and is often of very little benefit to either. The benefits are for the central administrators, and (hopefully) via them to the least well educated students. Classes that were already doing well actually suffer because of the time wasted on testing and the focus of education shifting to doing well on tests rather than learning interesting things. Gifted students, who could be turning into little geniuses with sufficient challenge, stimulation and advanced, individual, wandering-greek-pedagogue style teacher attention, are instead forced to endure year after year of training for spelling tests.
Outcome: Fewer geniuses, but a better minimum standard for everyone.
1.B.ii) Shifting the top of the bell curve up.
This is quite hard to argue, for the reasons just mentioned. Nominally it seems that innately better students, or classes already well taught would suffer under standardisation.
Perhaps a case could be made that standardisation would improve the likelihood of gifted students being identified, allowing them to be centrally picked out and connected with the best resources in the country for gifted students.
Without evidence that standardised testing actually picks out gifted students, or rather without tests designed to do this, it's unlikely to happen.
I guess it comes down to what you design your standardised curriculum (and the testing the accompanies it) to do: pick out gifted students, or ensure “no-one gets left behind”.
Standardised testing for “gifted” students, to whom resources would then be preferentially allocated, brings with it the chance of cheating. Everyone wants their child to be gifted, or at least go to the special school for gifted kids and have super-teachers and thus chance to become gifted. Some people have money, others are willing to investigate the testing system and figure out how to intensively train kids just to do well on the test. Money can buy even less scrupulous means of cheating too.
It's quite a mire. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that national standardisation is likely to benefit the children at the top of the bell curve.
1.B.iii) Shifting the whole bell curve up.
If you could show that *everyone*, on average, benefits from national standardisation it'd be a pretty good reason to adopt it. This is not an easy task, because there are quite a few additional costs to overcome
-Ground level costs: Teachers and students are going to have the their time and energy, which could have been invested in teaching and learning, consumed by administering the new national curriculum. This involves:
Teachers learning the new material
Testing
Paper-work
Students studying to pass national tests rather than genuine learning
-Hierarchical costs: You need a whole centralised bureaucracy to administer the new system, which means new “national curriculum” staff in every school, for every district, state and nation. As the number of people and levels of hierarchy to co-ordinate increases, efficiency drops and costs and mistakes increase.
So what sort of global benefits could counter these costs?
I'm not sure, perhaps you guys can think of some.
The only one that comes to mind for me is a kind of national “learning from each other's mistakes”. If some local area seems to be consistently worse of better than others, lessons can be observed there and the techniques pro/prescribed for the entire nation. Having observed the consequences of this, new, better national guidelines/requirements can be developed so that, rather than each little state constantly reinventing the wheel, and the quality of education dropping again once experienced teachers retire, the whole nation becomes one slowly learning collective. This could be quite costly at the start and even entail a drop in quality, but in the long, long (think generations) term, if well administered, holds the potential to achieve much, much higher standards that any alternatives.
This is a dodgy, wishful argument which relies of a tremendous amount of care and attention being given to the central administration over long periods of time. But an argument to consider none-the-less.
1C) Axuillary consequences of national standardisation
Call me cynical but:
The key change with national standardisation is that “requirements” can be centrally imposed on everyone, at an early age.
Bill Gates is really pushing for this.
Education gets centralised and the administrators, open to the wise advice of their new friend Bill, who lobbied so bravely for their very existence, agree that every student needs a computer.
Kind, education-loving Bill releases free (nationally compulsory) software for schools so that every student can receive cutting edge education. It only runs on Microsoft Windows. Kids get used to using Windows. Once people are used to using something it's not likely to change. QWERTY. err...i mean QED.
That's what I'd do if I was Bill :-)
So there are my thoughts about some of the costs and benefits of a national curriculum. They're far from complete, but I tried to define some of the concepts involved and broadly, basically and clearly as I could to help facilitate more clear, interesting discussion.
I was going to reply to more posts, put this reply turned out to be quite long already. So I'm going to leave it here for now. I'll post some more later, hopefully later today.
Coming up:
2)Educationalism
3)Being smart enough to realise you're not smart enough, and meditation.
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