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.