Education in the United States is relatively broken. Very few dispute this. Once a child jumps through whatever hoops we’ve asked him to, we reward him with a piece of paper that says he has a basic education. Like the parchment given to the Scarecrow, a high school diploma is almost meaningless. Part of the problem lies in the inconsistent standards for earning a diploma, which in practice vary widely between geographic and economic regions.

More important, though, is the fact that our education system at present is designed to teach facts, and this it does fairly well. But this stuffing of facts into students happens largely in place of teaching them how to think. The results are plain to see. The students, lacking a solid framework on which to hang these facts, tend to remember them just long enough to pass the required tests. The teacher recognizes this and, as the students are leaky vessels with no approved means of repair, she spends her time filling and refilling them with the required facts right up to the tests. This dire situation is certainly true in the K-12 system, and many colleges (more properly called technical schools) share this deficiency to some extent. I read an article recently that contained many points on this topic with which I agree strongly, and that put me in a mood to write on this topic.

It’s popular to blame the teachers for the poor state of our education system, and it’s true there are a lot of bad teachers who are still in the profession because of union rules protecting them. I have three children in school and I’ve seen some very poor teachers who certainly should have been fired, but I’ve also encountered a lot of excellent teachers who are utterly devoted to teaching.

Moreover, blaming teachers is missing the point. There are bad workers in every field – without exception. A profession should have a means of continually purifying itself of bad members and influences. The Education profession in the U.S. is for the most part delinquent in policing itself and we have to fix this, since the profession itself will not. But getting rid of all the bad teachers, by itself, is not going to fix our education system.

We need to reform our education system at its base by changing its priorities, redefining what’s considered a good education and basing the goals of the reformed system on that definition. It’s not as if our system is irreparably broken or completely off base. It’s not that the content of what’s taught is so wrong. It’s the focus on quantifiable results and on turning out young adults who have a set of basic skills (and beliefs) that have been decided to be most useful or appropriate or whatever standard applies in that region.

Education is a qualitative process and trying to force it to fit into discrete elements, buckets of knowledge that we can easily quantitatively test against, is only harming ourselves and the children we put through this. There are far better ways of knowing whether a student understands a topic than having him fill in circles on a piece of paper. Essays are somewhat better but the key here is interacting with the student, leading her or letting her lead as appropriate to explore her understanding of a topic. Of course this takes more time than just giving a test and then grading it, but we have to decide whether we want good test takers and essayists or educated citizens and provide the resources needed to do the job well.

America is defined by innovation, the pundits say, and our future success as a nation will be determined by our continued ability to innovate. And how do we teach innovation? That’s hard to answer, but to get started we can come to an agreement on a general definition of innovation. Like Justice, it’s likely to be somewhat difficult to pin down exactly what innovation is, but we can certainly agree that people like Edison, Einstein, Henry Ford, and many others are prime examples of innovative people. Once we define innovation to some extent and we have a set of archetypal innovators on which all agree, we can use these sources to extract some component qualities that are present in most or all innovative people. We can then study these qualities and our knowledge of the example innovators to identify a lot of practices that almost certainly don’t contribute to innovation and a few that do.

What qualities does an innovative person have? These are the qualities we should nourish. Doubtless freedom to investigate the world as one sees fit will be found to be a common factor in the youth of most innovators. I’m not suggesting we give children endless choices and let them find their own way. Children need guidance and they need to be taught reason as a base on which everything else rests. On reason rests the potential for good social behavior, good problem solving, and of course innovation. The idea is to educate without unduly limiting what a child can think. There should be no limits as to what thoughts a child can entertain, though there are certainly limits as to how far she can explore certain ideas.

To be continued …

Link to the article that prompted me to write this essay

• stressing that the United States is a Constitutional Republic rather than a Democratic entity.
• highlighting Judeo-Christian influences on the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state
• stressing that the U.S. free enterprise system thrives best without excessive government intervention
• Focusing more on the 2nd Amendment’s Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
• refusal to include Hip-Hop as a significant cultural movement
• Amendments to include names of significant Hispanics throughout history were denied
• removing a requirement that sociology students “explain how institutional racism is evident in American society.”

It’s clear that Texas is intent on creating radicalized soldiers ready to fight in the culture war ultraconservatives see themselves waging against the rest of the free world. What they will not be producing is educated citizens of a free state, ready to take their place in a modern and interdependent world.

The changes to Texas’ curriculum are not yet final as there is still a public comment period before the final vote in May.

The defining difference between these groups is that progressives see the world as a great community they are a small part of, and they feel a responsibility to help all (as they define all) in that community, whereas regressives see the world fundamentally as a struggle between themselves (and those close to them) and everyone else. Progressives see themselves as a member of the diverse community of humanity and this serves as a foundation for their life choices. Regressives (as well as the rare true conservative) see life as fundamentally an “Us versus Them” situation in which one side gains by defeating or taking something away from the other side. For regressives, non-humans don’t even count as something to care about while other humans count somewhat (depending on how similar they are in beliefs, lineage, race, and other prominent factors to the regressive himself).

A regressive defines himself primarily by fear, fearing that which is different or tends to cause one to lose power in relation to others. A progressive defines himself primarily by compassion, seeking to improve the lives of others in the global community and seeking to use the resources of all to that end.

These contradictory world-views create a gulf too wide to bridge and that’s why we can never reach across to the regressives to agree on anything substantial. I hope Obama, not a true progressive but a man with some good ideas, gets this through his head and starts acting on it before it’s too late.

Most people don’t understand socialism and therefore can’t make the connection that Medicare, Social Security, National Defense, and (yes, Glenn Beck) libraries are socialist structures that have long had a central place in American life. But the GOP leaders do know what socialism is and are leading their followers astray, something both Judaism (Cantor’s faith) and Christianity were stridently against. How is it that these purportedly moral men feel justified in committing so much evil in the name of their cause?

How is it that the GOP and others on the right can sleep at night and attend church or synagogue while spending most of their time lying to make sure that the poor remain poor, corporations remain free to trample the rights of individuals, and only those fortunate enough to have good insurance plans get necessary health care? How does that fit into their belief system?

The GOP and the Tea Partiers claim to be fighting for Freedom. The overwhelmingly white and affluent members of these groups are really fighting not for the Constitution or for the universal ideal of Freedom. They are fighting to keep the way of life their ancestors had when this nation was founded, when whites (even poor ones) were members of the master race, the Old Testament was the unwritten law of the land, and gays, atheists, and others who threatened the majority’s world view remained safely closeted. This is a culture war, and either progressives will win this battle and continue to drag the regressives forward into the light, or the regressives (represented by the GOP and Tea Party) will drag us all back into the dark ages.

Alice secretly picks two different real numbers by an unknown process and puts them in two (abstract) envelopes.  Bob chooses one of the two envelopes randomly (with a fair coin toss), and shows you the number in that envelope.  You must now guess whether the number in the other, closed envelope is larger or smaller than the one you’ve seen. Is there a strategy which gives you a better than 50% chance of guessing correctly, no matter what procedure Alice used to pick her numbers?

HINT: I’ll give a slight hint in that if you consider the range of the real numbers, it should make the answer clearer. Hopefully that didn’t give it away.


Link: xkcd post with math problem

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

Link to Article

Others have said how tired they are of Wired being an Apple FanBoy site, so I’ll just say I agree with them.

The author claims that the iPad is the computer for everyone, the future of mobile computing, etc. The first claim is clearly untrue. Let me count the ways:

1. The iPad is not the computer for the growing number of people who believe strongly in free and open source software and hardware, because Apple is notoriously controlling of their hardware and software.

2. Contrary to the author’s contention, the iPad is not the computer for those of us who like to hack, because Apple goes out of its way to discourage hacking of its devices. The iPhone is exhibit A for this.

3. The iPad is not the computer for those who like to control their content and to avoid DRM. Like the iPhone and iTouch before it, the iPad is designed to force you to use the proprietary iTunes software to access content (games, music, video, etc.). You have to be a tech-savvy person, the kind least likely to buy an iPad, to avoid going through iTunes and putting up with DRM-laden content.

4. The iPad is not the computer for those who need to do serious work with computers, whether that be engineering, digital content creation, complex analysis, or any of a number of other common tasks.

It’s clear that Apple intended the iPad as a lighweight entertainment device, to be used for consuming content, not creating it. A creative person might buy an iPad, but only for communications, light PDA duties, or entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with creating a device for this, but let’s not pretend it’s going to save the world.

Link to the Wired Article

Is it better than nothing? Probably. But that’s not what’s at issue here. Advocates for Abstinence-Only Sex-Ed claim that it’s the most effective (and especially the most morally correct) form of sex education. Repeated studies have shown that abstinence-only education, particularly that based on religious morality, is not as effective as education based on science based education, teaching teens about sexual intimacy, the hazards of sex and particularly unprotected sex, etc.

A single study comes out that seems to indicate that abstinence-only Sex-Ed is an effective means of reducing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, an indication that contradicts the conclusions of multiple previous studies, and the abstinence-only true believers gladly seize on this study as convincing evidence that this form of education really works. Of course, these true believers are mostly the same people who believe the earth is 4,000 years old and that the Christian Bible is inerrant, so there is a very low barrier to acceptance of “favorable” evidence and an impossibly high one for unfavorable evidence.

In fact, the sex-education program program in question did not encourage teens to wait until marriage to have sex, only until they were “ready”. Someone has taken more than a little liberty with the truth in describing this as an abstinence only study.

Read the New York Times article on this study and the commentary from Alternet. It lays out clearly the folly of taking this study as evidence that abstinence only education is an effective means of preventing the problems inherent in unprotected sex among teens who are not prepared for sexual intimacy.