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Education reform
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Sat Aug 16, 2014 12:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

From the WSJ at http://tinyurl.com/khrku4k comes
"Has Anyone Seen Last Year's Promising Freshmen?"
Every fall, they arrive with open minds and eager to learn. Then comes the classroom indoctrination.

By
Philosophy professor James K.A. Smith
Aug. 15, 2014
Excerpt:
"Dear College Sophomore,

... you soon settled in and focused on why you were here: to learn.

Sometimes going to those first-year classes felt like drinking from a fire hose. But you couldn't get enough of the new worlds that your instructors invited you into: Homer's Greece, Augustine's Rome, John Locke's England, C.S. Lewis's Oxford, Toni Morrison's Kentucky."
---------

Is that for real? Is that what some freshmen actually study in college? What on earth good is that unless one plans on becoming another philosophy professor carrying forth the same useless tradition to the next generation? Who besides professors can earn a living with that knowledge, and what good is the money spent on college if it doesn't prepare us to make more money?

Nothing wrong with pursuing hobbies and interests in the arts, but isn't that what libraries, bookstores, windless days, and the internet are for ... learning and discussing what interests us, whether it's the arts or WSing or exercise physiology? What kind of hobby is it that one has to pay someone tens of thousands of borrowed dollars to cram it down their throats forcefully? Just THINK how much one could learn if he devoted that same year or four years to reading hundreds of carefully chosen books rather than a few textbooks dictated by a handful of teachers based on kickbacks from those books' publishers? Why would anyone want to be brainwashed by one professor's bias when the library offers a dozen different views on the same topic?

Do not say, "But we're doomed to repeat history if we don't study it". That's BS; we're already pursuing subprime loans, house-flipping, derivatives, etc. just 6 years after they bit every one of us in the fiscal ass, millions still smoke, we ignored ISIS just as we ignored the much more benign Al Qaeda, and the same arguments that got booze and cigarettes legal and accepted are now being used as an excuse to do the same for pot. And from (John) Keynes to (Ancel) Keys, the lessons of history are very often proven to be flat wrong anyway.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Sat Aug 16, 2014 1:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars provides a useless WSJ link that blocks any without a subscription from reading the article. That's pretty bogus, and a complete waste of our time. Add to that the worthless nonsense that isobars boldly interjects crapping on young folks that study subjects that he thinks are a waste of time.

One wonders what kind of artwork hangs on the walls of his home. Getting an education and living life is much more than just receiving a paycheck every week.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Sat Aug 16, 2014 4:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I raised a valid and reasonable query, hoping for a comparable response, so I looked at Chandler's response.

Silly me.

Let me put my post another way. I would not pour money into college for my hypothetical kids if it went primarily towards their fun, whether it was partying or taking courses for their entertainment rather than their livelihood. After high school, they, not I, are responsible for funding their hobbies (that goes 100-fold for "free college" or student loan bailouts at the taxpayers' expense) . Artistic enlightenment is nice, but spending one fourth of one's college education on it, then raising hell about its cost, makes no sense.

I also have no idea how valid is the author's implication that many college freshman study little more than "fuzzy studies"*. For that people go into deep debt doo doo? What does that (and pot promulgation) say about the future of the work ethic? Do you business owners want workers who expect to do whatever THEY want at work instead of what YOU want them to do? (I had to explain that to a government PhD physicist who worked for me.)

* Primarily, any courses not likely to contribute to one's livelihood. We all had to take some such courses, but not to the exclusion of or significant interference with career-oriented courses.

The rest of the article added little to the topic, and very few here have the attention span to read it anyway.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sat Aug 16, 2014 4:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm guessing that poor Mike Fick never read John Locke, or any of the philosophers, or was introduced to rigorous logical thinking and writing. Or any understanding of history so he would actually know what he was talking about about the rigor of good colleges.

Most of my fellow engineering students had no idea how to write, or how to structure an argument. No time--or patience--for liberal arts.

How sad.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Nov 14, 2014 11:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Fascinating essay in the New Yorker about continuous improvement by James Surowiecki. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time

Unlike most people, he gets education just right. In case you can't get to the article, I'll provide a brief synopsis. The essay starts by looking at athletic achievement, and the high value added by specific coaching. He then traces this in various sources of endeavor, including music, giving credit to the framework of continuous improvement popularized by Deming and Juran. These concepts made it into business before they made it into government, but are effective in management of all organizational efforts.

His insight into education is so spot on I will post it all:

Quote:
In one area above all, the failure to improve is especially egregious: education. Schools are, on the whole, little better than they were three decades ago; test scores have barely budged since the famous “A Nation at Risk” report came out, in the early nineteen-eighties. This isn’t for lack of trying, exactly. We now spend far more per pupil than we once did. We’ve shrunk class sizes, implemented national standards, and amped up testing. We’ve increased competition by allowing charter schools. And some schools have made it a little easier to remove ineffective teachers. None of these changes have made much of a difference.

All sorts of factors, of course, shape educational performance. For one thing, the United States has more poor kids relative to other developed countries, and poor kids do worse on tests, on average, all over the world. Schools can’t make up for that gap entirely. But there is one crucial factor in how kids fare that schools do control; namely, the quality of their teachers. Unfortunately, as two new books, Elizabeth Green’s “Building a Better Teacher” (Norton) and Dana Goldstein’s “The Teacher Wars” (Doubleday), point out, teacher training in most of the United States has usually been an afterthought. Most new teachers enter the classroom with a limited set of pedagogical skills, since they get little experience beforehand, and most education courses don’t say much about how you run a class. Then teachers get little ongoing, sustained training to help them improve. If American teachers—unlike athletes or manufacturing workers—haven’t got much better over the past three decades, it’s largely because their training hasn’t, either.


Some educational reformers in the United States insist that we don’t need to worry about training: firing all the bad teachers would be enough. Yet countries that perform exceptionally well in international comparisons—among them Finland, Japan, and Canada—all take teacher training extremely seriously. They train teachers rigorously before they get in the classroom, and they make sure that the training continues throughout their work lives. Green writes about how Japanese elementary-school math teachers rely on jugyokenkyu, “a bucket of practices that Japanese teachers use to hone their craft, from observing each other at work to discussing the lesson afterward to studying curriculum material with colleagues.” They’ve developed a vocabulary to describe successful teaching tactics. They spend hours talking about how to improve things such as bansho, the art of writing out a math problem (with possible solutions) on a chalkboard in a way that helps students learn. And they get constant feedback from other teachers and mentors.

The key, Green writes, “lay in the fact that no teacher worked alone.” This method—with its systematic approach to learning, its emphasis on preparation, and its relentless focus on small details and the need for constant feedback—sounds like the way athletes train today. The results have certainly been comparable. Finland had lacklustre schools until, in the nineteen-seventies, it revamped its educational system, including the way it recruited and trained teachers. Now its schools are among the highest performing in the world.

There are logistical hurdles to Finland-style reforms in the United States. Because we don’t have a national educational system, we have to rely on local governments to make the necessary changes. But the biggest problem is that we’re in thrall to what Green calls “the idea of the natural-born teacher,” the notion that either you can teach or you can’t. As a result, we do little to help ordinary teachers become good and good teachers become great. What we need to embrace instead is the idea of teaching as a set of skills that can be taught and learned and constantly improved on. As both Green and Goldstein detail, school districts in the United States that take teacher training seriously have seen student performance improve, often dramatically. More accountability and higher pay for teachers would help, too. But at the moment most American schools basically throw teachers in at the deep end of the pool and hope that they will be able not only to swim but also to keep all their students afloat, too. It’s a miracle that the system works as well as it does. To make gains, schools should take advantage of the training techniques that other countries have mastered: record classes so that teachers can study their own work and that of colleagues; let teachers observe each other; measure performance; and deploy a staff of full-time trainers.

These measures will cost money, although they may not cost more than constantly replacing struggling teachers (not to mention the long-term economic cost of churning out mediocre students). And there will be some teachers who will find all the feedback intrusive. But what’s happened in sports over the past forty years teaches that the way to improve the way you perform is to improve the way you train. High performance isn’t, ultimately, about running faster, throwing harder, or leaping farther. It’s about something much simpler: getting better at getting better. ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time


The part that I highlighted is exactly it. While I support reform to the tenure system, I still think that we need to protect teachers, once they reach proficiency, from being terminated for personality or political reasons. I have spent easily ten times as much time in the classrooms that I volunteer with than the principal. It is a myth that we can significantly improve education by firing bad teachers more quickly. Teachers that perform poorly enough to be fired represent 2-5% of 4 million teachers in all. We should hold principles accountable for finding and firing such teachers--but we should also hold principals accountable, and give them the tools, to continuously improve the performance of all of their teachers. This requires a cultural change in our approach to education, and an end to the cultural wars on education that are largely battles about corporate access to education funding.
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chrisatorain



Joined: 15 Nov 2014
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Sat Nov 15, 2014 6:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think it will help new generation people education and he is doing a right way for new children. I think this will make new generation student's studies in a better way. You can use this custom essay writing service for getting more writing kind of help.
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Sat Nov 15, 2014 9:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

chrisatorain wrote:
I think it will help new generation people education and he is doing a right way for new children. I think this will make new generation student's studies in a better way. You can use this custom essay writing service for getting more writing kind of help.

Great, just great.

Do the work for our kids so they never have to learn the skills of research, analysis, critical thinking, effective argument, or writing.

Why not teach them the finer points of plagiarism, too? You can start a new Web site called plagiarists-R-us.com.

If the kids are good at it, then they'll write just like you... at the third-grade level

.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Sat Nov 15, 2014 1:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

chrisatorain wrote:
You can use this custom essay writing service for getting more writing kind of help.

Our problem is not writing. It is your F-ing spam.
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techno900



Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161

PostPosted: Wed Nov 19, 2014 9:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Is this typical of our educational system? And some are pushing hard to get these kids to the polls - scary thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRZZpk_9k8E&feature=player_embedded
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Wed Nov 19, 2014 1:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

"Is this typical of our educational system? And some are pushing hard to get these kids to the polls - scary thought."



No doubt, it's worrisome that that college students where so clueless on such basic US history questions that virtually every person should know, especially since US History is a requirement of 8th and 11th graders. One has to ask whether such cluelessness is a product of Texas' educational systems. Maybe its a symptom of too much TV and entertainment these days. One wonders though, are those featured just a small percentage of those questioned. We'll never know, and that shows just how easy it is to selectively paint the picture you want to communicate.

As far as pushing hard to get young folks to vote, I think that it's a good idea to promote their involvement so that they are more aware and cognizant of the candidates and the issues we fact today both nationally and internationally. The thing that is missing from the assumption being made is whether older folks in the population are similarly clueless about important topics. From what I can gather from the views of many today, particularly concerning politics, I would bet that they are. Is that because far too many folks watch Fox News, listen to talk radio and spend too much time reading questionable websites?
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