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Is education done wrong?


AmethystKitty

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I'd agree with most of this. It's asinine to group people of different learning ability in the same class, someone is either held back or pushed beyond their capabilities to satisfy the class average. We've essentially acknowledged the discrepancy (EG AP classes), yet we aren't changing it on a broad scale.

I majored in engineering so I may be a bit bias here, but I disagree with the author's stance on STEM. The "uninteresting" argument is purely subjective. There are more (and better paying) jobs in STEM. Sure, 100 of those 400 may be employed, but unless he's willing to list a better alternative like say in liberal arts (which I'm skeptical of based on the job projections I've seen over the years), he doesn't make a compelling argument.

Tenure is bullshit and too easy to abuse.

Teacher's unions have a useful purpose, but they too can be abused.

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He makes some interesting points, but I think he presupposed a lot of things. Just a few come to mind. He said online learning was the way to go, and in some cases I think that would work, but I know not every student can learn just by watching a video and IM's questions about the subject. He totally discounted students that probably are not native English speakers, so because they can't keep up, it would be better if they went into some work program instead. He also didn't mention students that had learning disabilities. I'm not saying that our current system has done enough to help in that area, but he completely took them off the board. He talked about getting rid of teacher's, and again failed to mention specialized teacher's like the ones that work with special needs students, who for the most part I think are amazing. Especially those teacher's that work with students who have behavioral/psychological issues.

I think his argument works only if every teen that went to school knew exactly what they wanted to do, and were also perfect in the sense of no language barriers, no learning disabilities and no socioeconomic issues as well.

At least that's the way I interpreted what he was saying.

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SorryNotSorry

Nowhere did he suggest engaging in critical thinking.

Many people and indeed even entire cultures consider the idea of critical thinking to be an out-and-out path to societal chaos. But if you take a group of students who learned by rote and another group of students who were allowed to learn by engaging in critical thinking, and you assign them a problem and tell them to improvise their own solutions to it, the critical thinkers are going to be much more likely to succeed at it, while the rote students are going to be looking in vain for some rules to follow.

Rote students may indeed be better team players and excel at making slavishly exact copies of things others have created, but they lose BIG in the initiative department when compared to critical thinkers.

Critical thinkers OTOH have more of a tendency to be loose cannons, but give them an "unsolvable" problem, and it's not likely to remain that way for long.

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He's definitely a great self-promoter; his books are all how-to's, and he wasn't on the faculty at Cal Berkeley, he was a guest lecturer. That's dishonesty. There are plenty of more knowledgeable critics of education.

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  • 3 months later...
mywoundedknee

Nowhere did he suggest engaging in critical thinking.

Many people and indeed even entire cultures consider the idea of critical thinking to be an out-and-out path to societal chaos. But if you take a group of students who learned by rote and another group of students who were allowed to learn by engaging in critical thinking, and you assign them a problem and tell them to improvise their own solutions to it, the critical thinkers are going to be much more likely to succeed at it, while the rote students are going to be looking in vain for some rules to follow.

Rote students may indeed be better team players and excel at making slavishly exact copies of things others have created, but they lose BIG in the initiative department when compared to critical thinkers.

Critical thinkers OTOH have more of a tendency to be loose cannons, but give them an "unsolvable" problem, and it's not likely to remain that way for long.

I think this "rote" you speak of may not be such a bad idea for STEM fields since critical "thinking" might slow down productivity (as opposed to spitting things out automatically), although engineering would be an exception since this requires a lot of problem solving/troubleshooting.

I actually agree with many of the points stated. In society today (and for the past few decades), a university education has been pushed forward as if it were the solution to everything, which is becoming increasingly evident to be false. If there wasn't this influx of students enrolling into universities then there would probably be more jobs available for certain occupations for the graduates of the following years. The rate at which some of these job occupations are vacated can't keep up with the rate at which new qualified job seekers are being produced.

There is also a big problem with teachers and professors. Many of them are not really qualified to do their job - which is to teach. This in turn hurts students. Students are also hurt by these tenured professors through the ever increasing cost of university, which could be explained by overpaid instructors who often don't even show up and still get paid.

With these enormous price tags on higher education, I do believe the curriculum needs to shift towards a career/employment focused path that would help people make a living rather than waste their time and leave them in debt.

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Nowhere did he suggest engaging in critical thinking.

Many people and indeed even entire cultures consider the idea of critical thinking to be an out-and-out path to societal chaos. But if you take a group of students who learned by rote and another group of students who were allowed to learn by engaging in critical thinking, and you assign them a problem and tell them to improvise their own solutions to it, the critical thinkers are going to be much more likely to succeed at it, while the rote students are going to be looking in vain for some rules to follow.

More importantly, those "students who learned by rote" will be outdated and useless in a few years. Would have to find a way to "recycle"/"discard" them, with recycling getting increasingly hard as automation is taking over more and more of those jobs.

In terms of education, we indeed need to support critical thinking, but also acknowledge that not everyone has the ambition/brains for it. Now there are different ways to deal with it in the long term: Either we reduce those people to the lowest possible living standard up to starvation, or we stop determining a human's right to live a decent life by how useful a tool they are for the powerful. Unfortunately, the latter will probably not happen.

By the way, the push to the STEM fields is not in the interest of the students/employees. It is in the interest of the companies, which really do need those STEM fields the most, and which would like to push wages down and their own choices in employees up by having many more jobseekers in the field than actual jobs available. For instance, in my country, it is officially considered "Fachkräftemangel"(skilled worker shortage) if there are only 2 applicants to any one job opening.

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I can't help but agree that simply being a teacher doesn't necessarily mean one can actually teach. This makes tenure seem such a bad idea. Would it not be interesting if teachers were graded along with their students? If most of the students in their classes always failed, perhaps they would have to look for another sort of employment. For the time being, it seems its all "no teacher left behind", though. I also agree that physical education is a complete waste of time. To me it was just a means of inspiring competition for its own sake, first athletically then academically. I could have done far better in high school but I saw people on the honor roll only wanted excellent grades because it gave them status. They didn't really care about learning itself. Emphasizing STEM stuff (it was called science and technology when I was young) might just be inappropriate in America, or any other country which outsources its technical jobs abroad. However, I sometimes find it unsettling to take online tutorial classes and find the instructors are often foreigners. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but where are all the Americans? The the ball game? This brings up another thing which I have always disliked. The most popular kids in American high schools are often athletic stars. Those kids who would rather spend their time in the library than the football field are denigrated as "nerds". I hear things are far different in Asian countries. The most popular kids are often the nerds. I suppose this shows how ludicrous it is to aspire to graduate as a football star. It is highly unlikely any of these people will ever be drafted professionally, or perhaps I should say they stand a far better chance of finding employment as an engineer or business major. Seeing how everything is getting outsources these days, learning a second language doesn't seem to be a bad idea, although I would not make it mandatory. I do agree that not everybody needs to learn algebra. I did because I eventually became a chemist, but I agree that the cookie cutter approach to education is inefficient, and indeed discourages higher education. Everything ought to be done to discourage students from dropping out of high school, and unless college tuition becomes as affordable as it was when I was young, I dare say this nation will loose most of its middle class. The wealthy will live privileged lives and the rest of us will end up as nothing more than the wretched, ignorant cotton pickers which support them. I certainly saw this happening in rural Indiana.

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At many publicly funded universities in the USA, faculty members are required to carry some sort of teaching load in addition to doing their research- regardless of their ability or interest in teaching. These skills, of course, are vastly different. I had some professors who excelled at both, and others who approached their obligations to teach undergraduates with a rather visible lack of enthusiasm. The philosophy behind this seems to be that if you want to use public funds for your self-directed research, you have to perform a certain amount of public service. Makes sense in theory, but doesn't always work well in practice.

My most memorable professor instilled a love in me for geology, which has lasted a lifetime. He loved teaching and had only limited interest in research... so the department would only hire him as a lecturer rather than give him a full professorship. Both parties were kind of boxed in, and he left after a few years to teach elsewhere.

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Here I was thinking that it was 'incorrectly' and not 'wrong', or am I just missing the point entirely?

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I tend to agree with most of those points. It's rather easy to list points though.

That said, I really think our system needs a massive overhaul. Half the crap I was being taught in high school should have been eliminated and more hands-on, actual life experience-based education, would have been wonderful in its place. I did pretty well in high school and I still think lots of work was a waste.

If we are going to continue paying big money for college or university education, it should be highly coupled with companies or contacts that will get you jobs with the skills you learn. They should also be skills that are highly correlated to ones you would need in the workplace. I don't understand how this hasn't happened for most programs yet. As a teacher, my sister had to assist a teacher part-time, once she'd learned the essentials. My brother, as an electrical engineer, had real world classes in problem solving and workplaces that flew him out to interviews while he was still in school. As mentioned in the article, I have a degree in Neuroscience that was very heavy on the science, and it got me pretty much nowhere. I lucked into one job (I had worked with microscopes as a small part in my schooling and found a lab that needed a microscope technician. My boss actually thought I was a different person when she gave me the interview.) and then couldn't find another afterwards. I run my own business right now, and could have done that straight out of high school, other than having matured and become more familiar with who I am.

I'm actually think most people shouldn't be heading off to college or university after high school. Some form of work placement or trial job related to your interests or career prospect should be necessary/mandated before you're accepted into such an educational program. Not only would it be useful to know what you're working towards, but it may really help narrow down what aspects of a job may call to you.

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Squirrel Combat

Yeah, why are we even taught algebra in school? When do they expect people to actually apply that crap outside of school?

And there were some pretty interesting thing about history that we were never taught in school either.

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Elegant Elephant

Yeah, why are we even taught algebra in school? When do they expect people to actually apply that crap outside of school?

And there were some pretty interesting thing about history that we were never taught in school either.

You use algebra everyday, you just don't realize it.

I'm a physics teacher, so this hits pretty close to home. A lot of my students ask me why they need to learn physics. It can be a difficult subject and honestly, do people really need to know how to calculate the electric force between two point charges? No, unless they are going into a STEM field. But physics, science, and other math courses teach you to think in a different way than English and history. I don't really care if my students learn how to calculate the electric force between two point charges (though my district and state insist on it). I care that my students learn how to think about the world in new ways. I care that my students understand a little better about how the world works. I care that my students have a greater appreciation for science and scientific research. I care that my students learn how to evaluate scientific claims. I am only in my first year of teaching, so I am not very good at any of this. But I try to improve and work towards bettering myself as an educator every single day.

With that being said, I know how very lucky I am to have had the teachers (in elementary, middle, and high school and even at the university level) I did. I learned so much, and they are one of the reasons I went into teaching.

I am sorry you did not learn the cool history things! I had wonderful history teachers, so we talked about all sorts of crazy things in class.

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Elegant Elephant

I'd agree with most of this. It's asinine to group people of different learning ability in the same class, someone is either held back or pushed beyond their capabilities to satisfy the class average. We've essentially acknowledged the discrepancy (EG AP classes), yet we aren't changing it on a broad scale.

I majored in engineering so I may be a bit bias here, but I disagree with the author's stance on STEM. The "uninteresting" argument is purely subjective. There are more (and better paying) jobs in STEM. Sure, 100 of those 400 may be employed, but unless he's willing to list a better alternative like say in liberal arts (which I'm skeptical of based on the job projections I've seen over the years), he doesn't make a compelling argument.

Tenure is bullshit and too easy to abuse.

Teacher's unions have a useful purpose, but they too can be abused.

Sorry for the double post, but I just saw this.

There is research that suggests pairing under-achieving students with higher-achieving students. I know this might seem counter-intuitive, but it is because the under-achieving students will learn from the higher-achieving students.

In addition, while I agree there needs to be differentiated classes, it is important to recognize significant barriers to it in actual practice. For example, I graduated from a large high school (~2000 students). We had six different levels of physics classes. No matter a student's ability, they were able to find a class for them to learn *some* amount of physics. In a school that large, there is also more regulation with regards to cut-off levels, and more resources to actually differentiate the six different levels. However, I teach in a school with approximately 400 students. I am the only physics teacher, and we only have two different levels of classes. In a school that small, it is also harder to determine a cut-off point for what is considered "advanced" versus "regular." It is so easy for a parent to bully the school into saying that their child deserves to be "advanced," when in reality, they simply are not at that level. This waters down the "advanced" class, so it starts to hold back the truly advanced students. I also do not have a separate class for my students who have special needs. It is difficult to find a place for them, so unfortunately they are often shuffled around. As a teacher, I also have many more responsibilities than I would at a larger school, cutting into the time I am able to work on making my classes better and more rigorous.

Many of the people suggesting various reforms are not educators and are basing their ideas off of limited experience in the classroom. Just because you were a student at one time does not mean you know what it is like to be a teacher (this is in general, not to a specific person). I think it is important to recognize that every student has a different experience, connects with teachers differently, and even expects something different out of their school experience. In reality, most teachers are just okay - but even an okay or average teacher can and does reach many students.

Like I said, I am in my first year of teaching - I don't claim to be a good teacher (most days I feel like a failure) nor an expert. But I do have high expectations of myself to get better every single day.

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