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.
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3 comments:
My first thought is that what is happenign on AO right now is still us figuring out how our different interests interact. For that reason, a lot of our comments thus far and posts are very much "I believe this" or "My interest is this". Chris and I decided this group of friends were people with interests that in some way intersect, this was right before I left however, so figuring out the intersection hasnt really happened. We are still coming into this, and I do think a real discussion will emerge, I just dont think our group has necessarily developed or matured to that point. But I dont think we need to rush it!
On the other hand,
I want to say that when I think about a national curriculum I think it misses the bigger picture of what is wrong with education.
I think youre idea of education is very much in line with what most of us have experienced and recognise as being education. It is very one sided. What can we bring to a child in a school. A lot of it does not recognise the community of a school and the amount to which children can educate each other, or for that matter the amount to which a community can educate the children in it. Lost knowledge is really not much of an issue, as I see it. Say a child wants to become a mechanic or an engineer. The way the process is supposed to work out now is that the kid learns math in school, is shown to be proficient and then gets to study engineering basics and then eventually gets a job at a lower level and then finally actually learns what it means to be an engineer. Wouldnt they benefit more from having been exposed to the profession from an early age, and slowly learning what engineers do, but also picking up the basics as they go along?
Kids arent empty. They have human instincts. Theyve grown up in the world, in a community, in a family for several years before they reach school. If we can maximize that experience, make THAT more of a level playing field, then that would make much more of a level playing field. A society in which people appreciate each other's talents and know where to find the "expertise" that exists in their community. As I see it a Nationalised curricullum mires us more in the issues that exist with education as it stands. Children dont learn to ask questions (which would lead them to that body of knowledge you refer to as being lost). They learn to answer them, which does not require them to ever look for an answer, just to make one up (or to feel out the answer the teacher/;test/country is looking for.) this is however not the only issue with a national curriculum I have, but Ill leave that for later.
Moving on. Most of the children at the high end of the bell curve (if you want to subscribe to a bell curve- my question is what is it measuring? test scores? being a teacher certain kids who would be at the bottom of the bell curve would be at the top of another (social/english/language/humor/technical), and vice versa. not as a rule, but close to it) Anyway, most children's position on the bell curve has nothing to do with schools, it has to do with their home life. A school can only do so much, and it isnt a lot, to deal with this. Even if they focused all of their time on the lowest "performing" students, they wouldnt make that much of a dent on either end. The best way I have experienced to effect what a child learns and to have them experience learning in a real sense, where what they learn, what they find out, is something that sticks, that means something, that has depth, is to ask a child what they want to learn. If children develop a love of learning, they will learn to acquire the knowledge they need to do what they love, or want to do, or be specialised in. You cant ask a child, or even a parent what they want the children to learn if you have a national curriculum. You want to watch people tune out, and depend on their families (not their communities) even more watch what happens when you implement a national curriculum.
I am not saying there does not have to be any kidn of federal influence, but not on the curriculum. It is important for state schooling to be mandated, but I dont know really if the federal government can do much, or expect to do much beyond that effectively.
No child left behind, where george bush has decided that schools that dont perform up to speed need to lose funding, has done nothing except close a lot of schools in a lot of poorer areas. That seems to me to be a default national curriculum. I dont see how doing that formally would be a solution.
If I were bill gates, with bill gates' money, I would put money into promoting localised community wide resource exchange networks and trainign of "navigational mentors" for the education of youth. This would open up those pathways through which information and knowledge can flow.
Think about what you learned in school and what you learned from your parents, community, church, music groups, friends, television, books (not assigned by school), whatever-- I would imagine most of the real salient knowledge, was outside of your school experience.
Again, I dont think "learning the basics" isnt important. It is, and it would have its place in any sort of educational experience, but I feel as though it has taken over and so the basics have no substance and no foundation to work...
Using the construction of a house as a metaphor, any persons educational experience depends on the basics as the mortar between the bricks, but without a foundation, without the bricks, the wood, the design, you cant really build much.
Okay, I guess Im going to be basing my PhD research on all of this and so expressing my ideas in a single blog response is impossible, but I hope I was at least somewhat clear in expressing myself!
Take Care,
A
Hey Aaron.
Nice comment!
I very strongly agree with these points, but with these qualifiers:
1) Peer/community based education is a huge untapped resource
1a) But it's going to be no mean feat to tap it and making sure it stays tapped in a market economy where the people with the skills and knowledge can get far more money if they don't waste their time with children (and have been encouraged to want that since their own childhood).
2)Bell curves are dumb, especially when they assume kids vary only along one dimension like "good-bad","IQ" or "smart-dumb".
2a) But I still think, even if kids vary in a thousand orthogonal ways, my comments still apply to any one of the them you're trying to teach. For instance, if you nationalise the music curriculum, and have everyone invest all their time in tests that ensure kids can play the scales, your going to have a very different effect on the music skills of young Beethovens than tone-death kids, even though they may have tremendous talents in other areas.
3) Inspiring someone to love learning is the only way to really produce great students and wise adults.
3a) No qualifiers. You're absolutely right.
4) A national curriculum only reinforces what is flawed about our current educational system and makes the real deep-change, the kind that could produce genuine long term drastic improvement, less likely.
4a) This is true, but I'm concerned that it's very hard to know what the real long-term consequences of deep-changes to the education system will be. The system is complex, stochastic. It's behaviour is very difficult to predict, except in retrospect. Marx couldn't imagine what could possibly go wrong with communism.
Even if we could be sure that our proposed changes were good ones, making them happen is very, very difficult. People don't like change, unless they're faced with a crisis or are imitating someone who's taken the risk already and proven the method successful, and even then not so much.
There's a young lady named Kathryn Barnard who's doing a History and Philosophy of Science thesis at the moment on tertiary Engineering eductation. There's heaps of empirical evidence that the current lecture/examination method is terrible at teaching engineers, and even physicists to understand the concepts they're using. They can do the maths but don't really get what it's about or why it works. An alternative peer-education model, where students teach each-other, has been shown empirically, in peer-reviewed publications, to be *much* more effective. But no-one wants to change.
She's doing some research on this at Melbourne Uni's Engineering department, and I think she may be trialing a new teaching system there next year. Still the resistance to change is apparently staggering, so she says. Very friendly young lady, if you're also writting a thesis on education reform you might be interested in looking her up.
You raised a lot of other points in your comment. I can't reply to each, but overwhelmingly I agree with you.
I reckon if there are better ways to educate, we need to prove it to the world by actually doing it.
Any ideas on how?
Matt
P.S. I hadn't realised AO had comments until just now (I'd beed getting it by RSS), so I've missed half the conversation. That's why it seemed to me people were just asking questions and not answering them. Duh! Just ignore me :-)
Hey Matt,
The only way I can see to "reform" education is to work away from it. There is plenty already happening in communities to create real and positive learning experiences to children, and people in the community. Co-ops teaching people how to plant their gardens, museums having art classes for kids, a program like 826 having writing workshops, different community groups which focus on art, radio and youth activism in any number of ways... I think the answer is to let the education system as it is implode and work on alternate systems which are already in place. Think about if all the people developing user interfaces, research and resource exchange networks worked together with all of the people interested in community development to create really deep networks. I think about how all of these community groups work so well individually what kind of force would they have if they were networked in a way that would allow them all to feed on each other. Eventually schools would want in or NEED in-- and they would at some point REQUIRE for schools to be a part of them.
I dont think anybody needs to do anything too drastic to convince anybody else. The changes will happen, it is just a question of when. Things like a National Curriculum (as much as I disagree with them) I also secretly wish for because while it will negatively affect a generation of children it will also turn the tide a lot quicker. When schools are closed and teachers are competing for pay schools are goign to be hemoraging students and people will want MORE say in whats happening (again this could take twenty years, but it will happen). I think about here in the states and how, before Bush, people were in a lot of ways politically apathetic. In the last six years, there are still a lot of apathetic people in this country but being CONCIOUS is in vogue, which is weird...
Anyway. The way I see as helping these changes is to look at solutions in networking communtiy development and education programs. I also think it is important to trojan horse the whole education issue, because of the resistance to change idea. People dont want to change their conception of school, institutions dont change, so you need to talk about other, "new" things like "networking communities" in order to affect change.
I was listening to this green architect on the radio the other day who was talking about how you arent going to get more people to create or be involved with "concious" or effective eco architecture by scaring them talking about running out of oil or global warming, that it only really happens if you can tap into a "mythology" that excites them.
You need to make a few jumps to get to what I am tlaking about, but I think it is a very similar pathway to change. I think people need to start being excited about the future again, like in the age of the jetsons and buckminster fuller.
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