Education Outrage

Larry Summers Opines about the Future of Education: A response

2012-01-22T10:16:00.001-05:00

Larry Summers, former President of Harvard and former member of both the Clinton and Obama Administrations has told us his thoughts on education in a recent article in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/the-21st-century-education.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&hpw

Let’s look at what he has to say about the future of education. He makes six points. I will consider them one by one.

Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it.

The naivete of this statement coming from a former President of Harvard is astounding. How exactly, Professor Summers do you expect that that this will happen? Will professors suddenly stop lecturing? Will classrooms cease to hold hundreds of students? Will Harvard no longer offer courses that are ‘Introduction to Whatever?” Will students no longer accumulate credits in order to graduate? Because if none of those things change, Harvard will continue to be about imparting information. Professors like to lecture. One of the primary reasons they like lecturing is that it requires very little effort and they can spend most of their time on research. Unless Harvard decides to no longer value research as its top priority in the hiring of faculty the incentives will not change. If the incentives for faculty do not change, students will continue to be treated like bodies in the seats in all but the most advanced classes, And, as any professor or can tell you, that means talking at them.

Further, you are assuming that faculty actually know how to use the information they teach. Unless faculty spend serious amounts of time as practitioners in the real world, which the vast majority of them do not, the actual use of what is done with the information they have taught is typically unknown to them. Ask your faculty what students do with the information they have learned at Harvard after they graduate and see if you get any realistic answers. The faculty typically doesn't know.

2. An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration

I am sure that is true. Now let’s think about Harvard. The kids who get into Harvard have learned to do everything but cooperate in order to get into Harvard and in order to succeed at Harvard. They fight to be number one in their classes in high school. They kill themselves to win the SAT competition. They cram for tests night and day all through school. At Harvard cooperation isn’t quite the right description. Anyone who saw ‘The Social Network” (the movie about Facebook) got the idea what really goes on when a new project is being worked on at Harvard. And, professors don’t really like cooperation because then they can’t figure out which member of the team really deserved which grade. As long as there are grades and tests and valedictorians there won’t be much cooperation. The workplace may well need it. Harvard isn’t teaching it. Neither, I might add, is the government for which you toiled all those years. Even Obama’s cabinet, of which you were a part, couldn’t cooperate which is more or less why you are no longer part of it as I understand it.

3. New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed. Electronic readers allow textbooks to be constantly revised, and to incorporate audio and visual effects.

Wow. You are so out of touch that you don’t even realize that textbooks wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the constant lobbying efforts of textbook manufacturers. Textbooks are very last century. We have them because legislators can’t and won’t stop their sale. Most faculty use them to avoid teaching. Students mostly ignore them in any case no matter how many glitzy pictures they may now have in them.

You are right that new technologies will alter the way learning happens but not because they will alter how knowledge is conveyed. That whole idea that knowledge is conveyed is exactly the problem. Knowledge was conveyed by Monks when they were the only ones who could read, so they lectured about what they had read. The fact that faculty still do this in the modern era is ridiculous. No one can remember very much of what they heard in a lecture.

And, it isn’t the conveying of knowledge that is the issue in education in any case. Real education means helping students attain new abilities, enabling them to do new things. And, yes, new technologies can and will help that happen, but that will happen by bypassing the existing university system unless that system decides to adapt to the new technologies, an unlikely event at Harvard I would think.

4. “Active learning classrooms” — which cluster students at tables, with furniture that can be rearranged and integrated technology — help professors interact with their students through the use of media and collaborative experiences.

Really isn’t that a nice idea? The last two Administrations, in one of which you had plenty of opportunity to speak, has basically killed that idea and replaced it by testing testing and more testing so that no one does anything but memorize. How dare you quote ideas from cognitive science when all that has happened in the last 12 years is the ignoring of those ideas in favor of more rote learning?

5. The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of Americans more than ever before.

So? Is that going to make Harvard’s Psychology department stop teaching statistics and how to run an experiment? Is that going to make Harvard’s Computer Science department stop teaching theoretical computer science? There are already plenty of study abroad programs and language courses at Harvard.

6. Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data.

Now this is just silly. Scientists have always relied on data. Baseball owners haven’t so maybe you are right about Moneyball. You leave out the absurd use of data like the article in the Times written by Harvard Economists

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/16/can-a-few-years-data-reveal-bad-teachers/the-value-of-data-in-teacher-evaluations?scp=2&sq=economists%20test%20scores&st=cse

saying how testing is relevant to evaluating teachers, an article that relied on the assumption that test scores were important in the first place.

I feel obligated to say that for someone who ran a university you really don’t know much about education. I offered some years ago to help you learn about education (through a mutual friend) but you weren’t interested. Maybe you should stop writing about a subject you don’t understand and go back to economics, a subject nobody understands.

If you want someone to remember something, tell them a story.

2012-01-02T11:15:00.001-05:00

As I have mentioned in this space before, when I am in Florida, I play in a couple of old guy’s softball leagues most weekday mornings. I have been playing in one league for about four years but the retired Marine drill sergeant who runs the league (and picks the teams every day) has never learned my name. Now there are more than 100 guys playing so this is understandable but last week I decided to fix the problem.

I decided to tell him the story of my name.

My parents were both Army Air Corps (now the USAF) officers during World War II. Pilots speaking over the radio on US planes when given an order always respond “Roger Wilco” which means “understood, will comply.” My father thought it would be a laugh riot to call me Roger Wilco Schank. My mother didn’t think that was all that funny. But he called the New York Times anyway and told them two air force officers had a son called Roger Wilco. He said if the Times printed the story on the front page, it stayed. I was told that they did print it, but not on the front page, so I got a more normal middle name.

The ex-Marine team picker loved this story and, this morning, he called me by my name when he picked me, muttering “RW” as he selected me.

I am telling this story because it has an important educational message. I have been talking about story telling for more than 20 years (since I wrote “Tell Me a Story.”) And, I am tempted to say, that the schools haven’t been listening, but it is not true.

Propagandists always knew the power of story telling for getting people to remember a message, which is why we all know the story of George Washington who never told a lie, but fail to remember the George Washington who married a rich widow to get her money and her 300 slaves.

If you want someone to remember something, tell them a story.

Career Choices: Please don't make me be a dentist!

2011-12-12T10:08:00.000-05:00

I attended a family occasion the other day. I saw people from one side of my family most of whom I hadn’t seen in some years. I was introduced by my first cousin to her grandson. I was told that he was graduating college and would soon be attending dental school.

I broke out laughing.

Behind him were his two younger brothers. I asked if they would be going to dental school as well. At this point his mother chimed in that she certainly hoped so.

Now I was just sad.

Now, rest assured that I have nothing against dentists or dental school. A fine career choice I am sure. I have left out some information here. The mother of this boy is a dentist. I also left out that his father is a dentist. I also left out that his grandfather is a dentist. And, I left out that he (and I) have other cousins who are dentists as well. My uncle was dentist. His son is a dentist. His sister married a dentist. Her son is a dentist.

All these dentists are perfectly fine human beings and they all seem to be living well. It is funny to come from a family of dentists but really, so what?

At some point in the party we were all attending, as the music blasted and people danced, I saw that the young man whom I had first been introduced to had sat down next to me. He said that his grandfather had told him that I was some kind of professor and he asked me what I taught. After some chit chat I asked him if he really wanted to be a dentist.

He said that he had worked hard in college, struggling through required science courses and that it would soon all be worth it.

I asked him if had ever considered any other profession. He said ‘No.” I asked him why not and he said that there had been a lot of pressure from his family to be a dentist. I asked why and he said they had had good experiences and it had worked for them and they thought it was a great life.

I asked if there was anything else he could imagine being. He replied that he really wanted to work with people and that he liked talking to people and as he went on I got the idea that it wasn’t the teeth part of people that he was referring to.

I told him that when I taught at Yale I devoted one class every term to the subject of what the kids in the class wanted to be when they grew up. I challenged them to be something other than what their parents wanted them to be. But for the most part, the children of doctors were going to be doctors and the children of lawyers were going to be lawyers.

We don’t realize as parents how much we talk with children about what they are going to be when they grow up and how much we limit their choices by talking about the limited things we actually know about or by inadvertently putting pressure on them to look at the world in a certain way.

When I suggested that this young man not make any choice right now except simply deciding to decide all this in a few years while trying some other stuff out, he was mostly concerned about how he would explain this to his parents.

Now, usually I am writing about schooling in this column and this one is no exception. Except for my weird one day class, students at Yale got no real career counseling. They only get role models (who are all professional academics) or they get pressure from their parents, or advice from their peers about what is a hot choice right now. Why aren’t we teaching our children how to think about making career choices, or life choices for that matter? Because we are too busy teaching them calculus or macro-economics.

Governments complain about the lack of skilled workers but they don’t try to help in any way except to push more math and science courses which are irrelevant and in no way help one understand one’s career options. Calculus is not a career choice.

Schools need to start helping kids figure out what they can do in life or else the advisors will all be parents who are limited in their world view.

Jeffrey Sachs, The Stanford on line AI course point to why it is so difficult to reform education

2011-11-28T09:56:00.003-05:00

My attention was drawn to this blog post:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sachs184/English

which was written by a very well respected professor at Columbia University, named Jeffrey Sachs. In it, he asserts that productivity is improving in our society and he cites the following as evidence of this in education:

1. At eight on Tuesday mornings, we turn on a computer at Columbia University and join in a “global classroom” with 20 other campuses around the world. A professor or a development expert somewhere gives a talk, and many hundreds of students listen in through videoconferencing.

2. At Stanford University this fall, two computer-science professors put their courses online for students anywhere in the world; now they have an enrollment of 58,000.

I found these pieces of evidence of hopefulness astonishing in their naïveté. Of course the man is an economist and not someone who thinks much about education one would assume. But still.

I have often said the that the main problem in fixing education is professors. “We have met the enemy and it is us” applies very well to why education is so hard to reform.

Really Professor Sachs? You are excited by that fact that more people can listen to your lectures? Ask any college students what he can recall from a lecture an hour after he has listened to it and see how much he remembers and how much he simply remembers wrong. Lecturing is a completely archaic way of teaching. It exists today at top universities only people because hot shot professors at top universities (of which I was one) think that their time is better spent doing almost anything else except teaching. Talking 3 hours a week seems like a pretty good deal enabling them to go back to doing what they really like. No one learns in a lecture. If you cared about education you would stop lecturing. But you care more about research which is fine, so did I when I was a professor. But recognize that you are the problem in education and video conferencing is the solution to nothing.

Sachs makes the same point twice when he cites the Stanford course. The Stanford on line AI course has gotten a lot of media attention. AI is my field (and one of the instructors was a PhD student of a PhD student of mine.) I don’t know what is in the course and I don’t care. The media doesn’t care either, nor does Sachs. They just like the 50,000 number. What if I said that a former student of mine was a great parent and so he was now raising 50,000 children on line? Would anyone think that was a good idea? This may seems like a silly analogy unless you really think about it.

Teaching, as I point out in my new book:

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Minds-Cognitive-Science-Schools/dp/0807752665/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322491382&sr=1-1

is basically a one on one affair and is about opening new worlds to students and then helping them do things in that world. This will not happen in a 50,000 person course any more than it happens in a 100 person course. Lecture courses are just rites of passage that we force students to endure so they can eventually start working with a good professor in a closer relationship (at least this what happens at in a good university.) A book would do as well for this, better would be a well constructed learning by doing on line course.

But what is happening in today’s world is that the action in educational change is all about getting bigger numbers on line without trying to improve quality. Stanford is making a lot of noise with this course but nothing good can come form this.

Professors need to stop and really think about education. Of course, the problem is that they have no motivation to do so. They are well paid and having a good time. Only the students suffer.

The King of Spain, classrooms and subjects

2011-11-07T08:17:00.001-05:00

Last week I was interviewed by phone from Spain. I was talking to authorities who were preparing a report for the King of Spain on how education might be improved in Spain. I am well known in Spain so it is not odd that they were calling me. They were certainly calling many others as well.

I started by saying that I am really radical and they said they already knew that. I then talked with them for about a half an hour about the kinds of improvements to education that I have been writing about for years in my columns and of course in my latest book:

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Minds-Cognitive-Science-Schools/dp/0807752665/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320670980&sr=1-1

They seemed to be enjoying talking to me and hearing what I had to say. Then, they asked one final question: “if you could just say one thing that need to be changed, what would it be?”

It is easy to imagine that they wanted a one liner for an executive summary here. I don’t think I gave them what they wanted, judging from their reaction.

I said “just eliminate classrooms.”

They audibly gasped.

Why?

First why did I say it?

Because if you eliminate classrooms everything else follows. No teacher talking to kids who aren’t listening. No tests to see if they were listening. No kids distracting other kids who are bored by what is going one. No subjects that in no way relate to the interests of the child. Instead, without a classroom you can re-invent. We can think about how individuals can learn and while doing that we would need to confront the fact that not all individuals want to learn the same things. We would have to eliminate the the “one size fits all” curriculum. We would need to create curricula that met kids interests. We would be able to let kids learn by doing instead of vainly attempting to have them learn by listening. We could eliminate academic subjects. We could make learning fun. Classrooms are never fun.

Why did they gasp?

Because they can’t do it. They knew it and I knew it. They don’t really want to fix education. They want to make schools function better. And schools have classrooms. And that my friends is the beginning and end of the problem.

Mr Obama wants big ideas? Here are 10 in education

2011-10-26T07:58:00.003-04:00

At a fundraiser yesterday in San Francisco, President Obama said that "We have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge..."

No, Mr. President, it isn’t “we” it is you. There are plenty of good ambitious ideas out there, you just aren’t listening.

Here, off the top of my head, are ten outrageous big ideas about education. You will listen to none of them. You have considered none of them. You haven’t even tried to understand them. Yes, they sound crazy, as do all new ideas.

Ten Big Ideas In Education

1. Shut down high schools

2. Stop preparing students for college

3. Stop insisting everyone go to college

4. Re-focus colleges away from academics

5. Eliminate all testing

6. Get big business out of education

7. Make learning fun again

8. Let children choose what they want to learn about

9. Help children find mentors who will help them learn what they want to learn

10. Build on line experiences that engage students and that teach thinking skills

I have written about these ideas in more detail elsewhere and won’t repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that a high school system designed for the elite in 1892 could not possibly be right-headed today, yet instead of changing it you are making sure that we test every students to tears to make sure they have memorized the Quadratic formula, disregarding the fact that hardly any adult actually uses it.

Re-think what you are doing in education, Mr. Obama. You have become the problem.

There are plenty of ideas out there.

Pat Tillman, truth, stories, and why our education system is the way it is

2011-09-15T09:03:00.001-04:00

About the last thing I am likely to do in this space is to write about a movie. But, as it happened, I chanced upon a movie on TV in which I had no interest. Yet it had an impact on me anyway. The movie is “The Tillman Story” which would mean nothing to non-U.S. people and maybe very little to many in the U.S. as well. Pat Tillman was a U.S. football star who suddenly left the National Football League and his millions of dollars of salary to enlist to fight in Iraq after 2001.

The politicians in Washington loved this story since it justified the “all American hero fighting for his country” story that Bush and his cronies were trying to sell at the time. They played the story up in all the media. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan after some years and Bush and his buddies were busy touting the “our hero died for his country” line they love so much. The problem was that after some investigation on the part of Tillman’s family, it seems he wasn’t killed while fighting the enemy. Instead he was killed by U.S. troops who just seemed to be having fun shooting anything that moved one day.

The movie details how the family fought back and uncovered the cover up that the Army had created to obscure what really happened. The movie is unkind to the Army, but, as someone who has worked with the Army for a long time, I was skeptical that the Army would be that involved in telling such an elaborate lie. Eventually the movie points the finger at Donald Rumsfeld who appears to have been calling the shots and makes it clear that George W. Bush would have had to have been involved as well.

My first reaction was that it says something that they were allowed to make this movie at all. A repressive government doesn't let you make anti-government movies. The U.S. government may have many faults, but freedom of speech still exists here.

But then, my thoughts turned to the real subjects that always interest me which are stories, and the general stupidity of the American public.

The lengths to which Bush and friends went to tell the Tillman story that they wanted to tell and to cover up the real story are well documented in this film. Why? Why lie, cover up, misinform, hush people up, manipulate the media, and otherwise be hysterical about the fact that a soldier was killed by his own troops? This happens all the time. It is called the fog of war.

The answer is that stories matter. Politicians love to tell stories and the stories they tell often have little relation to the truth. They get away with this because stories are simple and easy to understand. The truth is often much more complex.

This points to one reason why politicians all seem to agree on testing and generally making our education system about memorization of facts (otherwise known as “official stories.”) What we want students to learn is what the true stories are. We want them to know the facts about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Pat Tillman. We really don't care if those facts are true. In all nations, the job of education is the telling of official government-approved stories about everything from history to economics to how to be a success and why to fight for your country. No one cares about the truth all that much. They just care about having good stories to tell.

We are all susceptible to a good story. (That is why we like to watch movies in the first place.) It is not just poorly educated who like simple stories. We all do. It is part of being human. But how do we learn to determine if a story is true?

We wouldn’t have known the truth about Pat Tillman if it hadn’t been for his family being smarter than your average family and really wanting to know what happened. They were capable of separating truth from fiction. But this is a skill which we are more or less explicitly taught not to do in our schools.

What can be done? Ask students to think instead of memorize? I have been saying that for years, but, no surprise, no government official is ever on my side on that one. They like being able to tell simple stories that remain unexamined by their listeners.

Parenting 101: every now and then you do something right

2011-09-05T05:40:00.003-04:00

I have been in the UK for the last couple of weeks, now back in New York. While I was on the train going to Brighton, my daughter called with a business question. She was submitting a proposal and wanted to get the numbers right. When she needs advice she usually calls.

I mentioned this to my dinner companions that night and they reacted as if a grown child asking for advice, much less listening to it, was very weird.

Parents may not actually want their kids to be calling, but I do. So this is how I made that happen:

One day at Yale there was one of those pink while you were out slips that said my daughter had called. She was seven at the time and had never called before. I asked my secretary why she hadn't put the call through and she said I was busy with a graduate student at the time. I told my secretary that if I was busy with the President of U.S. and my daughter called, she was to put it through. My children always came first.

I then told my daughter that she was never to let anyone tell her that I was busy. She said she didn't want to disturb me and said she could disturb me any time she liked.

It was just a knee jerk reaction. I hadn't thought out what I wanted to say. My advice to parents is that you will get what you ask for from your children, so be sure when you ask. As for me, I have never regretted that initial reaction I had to that phone message.

A message to Bachman, Duncan, and every other politician who thinks he knows how to fix education

2011-08-18T11:12:00.006-04:00

Michelle Bachmann, who is beginning to look to be someone who those of us who have been scoffing at will have to take more seriously, has an education agenda. All politicians have an education agenda. They all are sure the schools are broken.

This leads to two obvious questions:

1. Why do they all agree the schools are broken?

2. Why are their solutions always to the left of insane?

As for the insanity question, bear in mind that this is simply not a matter of politics. Bush’s policies in education were insane. Obama’s policies are insane. And, all the people running against Obama have insane educational policies. Why is this? How can this be?

The obvious question is what is insane about them. To answer that we need to address question #1.

Here are some reasons we hear about why schools are broken:

1. There is a lack of discipline

2. The teachers are often not very good

3. Tests scores in basic skills are bad

4. The average American doesn’t know: (fit your favorite in here, who George Washington was, the capital of Delaware, where Iraq is on a map, the quadratic equation…)

5. Everyone needs to go to college and high school isn’t preparing them properly

6. We need citizens with 21^st century skills and school isn’t doing this

7. We need more scientists and engineers

8. There needs to be more religion in schools

9. Schools don’t teach everyone to love America enough

10. Schools are dangerous places

Here are my quick responses to each of these:

1. You try making 30 kids sit still all day, especially in the modern era.

2. There certainly are mediocre teachers but there are also some very good ones, which is amazing because it becomes more difficult each day to put up with the rigid system we have created for them to teach in.

3. Tests are moronic. Yes, moronic. If the tests tested performance they might have some credibility, but multiple-choice tests test nothing. Every driver who has to take a multiple choice test to renew his license has to study the manual first no matter how good a driver he may be. Multiple-choice tests test only one’s ability to prepare for and tolerate multiple-choice tests.

4. Knowing facts really doesn't matter in any way. Because schools teach facts and test facts we have become convinced that facts matter. Facts that do matter in your life tend to be learned while doing (like the names of streets are learned by those who walk or drive on them.) Otherwise it is knowing how not knowing that that matters.

5. Everyone does not need to go to college. College as it exists today bases its curriculum on a research model that is driven by faculty recruitment. Universities teach students to be researchers not practitioners. Even masters programs which are supposedly designed to train practitioners, tend to be dominated by theories and arcane subjects that will never matter to a practitioner. We need to move to a more practical notion of education that leads to jobs. Liberal Arts colleges eschew this notion. We can’t afford many more Literature majors.

6. I am not sure what 21^st century skills are but I am pretty sure they include reasoning, communication, and human relations, which were good in any century and are really not part of K-12 curricula. What we need is a populace who can think clearly, which, judging from the extant political candidates, we clearly do not have.

7. We have plenty of scientists and engineers. If anyone thought we really needed more they would create a high school engineering curriculum. But that would mean throwing something out and the 1892 curriculum has become sacred.

8. Really? There needs to be religion in schools? Whose religion exactly? And why? So we can ram more facts into kids heads. Facts are only the medium of education because religious institutions were the designers of the schools in the first place.

9. School should teach students to criticize America not love it. With thoughtful criticism comes change.

10. This last one is right. Schools are very stressful places and they are places where bullying happens and where kids learn to feel bad about themselves unless they have a really good teacher who can make sure none of that happens.

My message to Michelle Bachmann and Arne Duncan and all the other fools who pontificate about education is simply this. If we had a good education system, maybe you all could reason better and would stop saying and doing insane things about education.

A short conversation with a teacher in Florida

2011-07-21T13:42:00.000-04:00

I was playing softball in the old guys league again. The last few days there has been a very good player in his 40s playing as well. He is a teacher, so I guess he has the summer off.

Sitting wait for my turn at bat, I heard the following conversation:

Teacher: my students never heard of the great ones, like Dick Groat or Roberto Clement. (These are old famous baseball players.)

Teacher: Things are different nowadays. When I was a kid I knew the names of the old guys like Phil Rizzuto and Mickey Mantle. (These are even older baseball players.)

Other Player: Are you kidding? These days kids don’t know who George Washington was.

Teacher: I gave a test last year to my social studies class. I asked them “Who discovered the Dominican Republic?” There were four choices, one was Christopher Columbus, and another was Sammy Sosa. Would you believe that many of them thought it was Sammy Sosa! (A famous baseball player who is from the Dominican Republic, at least I think he is.)

I walked over to the teacher and quietly mentioned that no one discovered the Dominican Republic since it is a country and countries are founded, not discovered, and I doubted that any of his choices has founded that country.

What I didn’t say was that Sammy Sosa was a better answer since at least he had been in the Dominican Republic.

This is not a column blaming teachers. I am simply concerned that our multiple choice test-driven society has reduced our conception of knowledge to random facts about nothing. It is so bad that even teachers have no clue what they are asking any more because they too were taught in this way.

NO to subjects and NO to requirements

2011-06-20T06:06:00.000-04:00

I have been spending a great deal of time in Europe lately, where the talk is about what to do about the awful governments that countries like Italy, Greece and Spain seem to be saddled with. (I am not saying the U.S. Is any better, maybe it is even worse -- I am simply reporting what I am hearing.)

In the course of one of these conversations, the talk turned to education, as it tends to do when I am around. The suggestion was made that schools should require students to learn about how government works, or maybe how it should work, in order to help citizens make better choices about who governs them and to be better at it when they are actually part of the government.

I replied that this was a fine idea, especially if we let students run simulated governments rather than simply learning political theory. Feeling emboldened, a woman who had raised a family and who, I think, felt that she hadn’t done such a good job, asked if maybe some courses in child raising shouldn’t also be required.

I certainly agree with this as well. I tried to convince the developmental psychologists at Columbia, when I was building Columbia on line, to do exactly that but they, of course, wanted to teach about research.

Whenever there is a roomful of people talking reasonably about education there are many reasonable suggestions. The problem is, that soon enough, well meaning people would wind up designing a system that looks a lot like the one we already have in place.

No one ever agrees to eliminate history and all agree that mathematics must be useful even if it never has been useful to them. This goes on and on until students, in the hypothetical system being thought about by intelligent people, is as awful as the one we have now.

At some point people, and by this I mean school boards, governments, universities, and average citizens have to get over the idea that there should be any requirements at all in school.

Now I realize that this is a radical idea. Do I mean students would not be required to learn to read or write or do basic arithmetic? No. I mean after these skills have been mastered, students should be let alone, or rather enticed, to find an interesting path for themselves. The schools ought to be constantly and diligently teaching students to think clearly and should not be trying to tell them what to think about.

We will never change education as long as we hold on to our favorite subjects and insist that they be taught. Everyone has a favorite subject, or has an axe to grind, or has a stake in something not being eliminated. Soon enough it is all sacred and school is deadly boring and irrelevant.

Anyone who has ever been part of a curriculum committee in a university knows what I am talking about. Everyone fights for their subjects.

NO to subjects and NO to requirements. Let students learn to do what they want to learn to do. Schooling should be about helping students find a path and succeed at what they have chosen to do.

Fidel Castro, Greece, Spain; how education can fix an economy

2011-06-14T11:16:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine went to visit Fidel Castro a few years back. (He is not your typical guy and I have no idea how this was arranged.) They got into a conversation about education. My friend mentioned me and Castro asked whether I might want to be the Minister of Education of Cuba. When my friend told me about this, he asked what I would do if I had that job. I replied that I would ask Castro what Cuba wanted to be.

My friend found that an odd response. Some days later, Castro shot some people and the U.S. prevented my friend from visiting Castro again so that was the end of that.

I was reminded of this incident because, as I write this, I am on a Greek island and, not surprisingly, talk centers on what to do about the economy. Having recently been in Italy and Spain as well, it is obvious to me that the problems these countries are having stem from issues in education.

When I say that, the response is usually less than enthusiastic, because it seems an odd idea, so let me explain.

When I mentioned what I would want to ask Castro, this is what I had in mind. Education is meant to achieve something, although this is usually forgotten in education reform conversations. The people who designed the U.S. education system around 1900 knew this well. The country needed factory workers, so keeping students “in dark, airless places” doing mindless repetitive work, seemed like a good strategy.

Today we have the factory worker strategy still in place, reinforced by a push for standards and multiple choice tests everywhere. The fact that there are no more factories seems to have skipped people’s attention. Also we have a big push for making sure everyone goes to college, despite the fact that college produces students who study what the professors happen to teach which means English, History, Mathematics, Philosophy, Sociology, and any number of subjects that will not make students in any way employable.

In the U.S. we have gotten away with this attitude for many years because we simultaneously had a big push by the Defense Department for new technology and thus were able to create Silicon Valley and enable an atmosphere of technological innovation. So while we have no factories, we do lead the world in software. It is almost as if someone in the Defense Department in the 60s and 70s were planning this. (I was there. They were.)

Now think about Spain. Its number one industry is tourism. You would think therefore, that in Spain the schools would be pushing hospitality or cooking or hotel design. But they are not. They have their enormous share of useless language and history majors as well and the University establishment works hard to keep things as they have always been.

Or think about Greece. Their number one industries are tourism and shipping. I have been an advisor to a Greek shipowner for over a decade now, and I can tell you it isn’t all that easy to learn about shipping in a Greek university. Nor is it easy to learn about tourism, because Greek universities, like those everywhere, are run by people who are worried about insisting that things stay the same so that their professorships are still relevant.

What Greece and Spain need to do, what Cuba needed to do, what any country that is not big enough to do everything needs to do, is pick its spots.

Universities offering a classical education are fine when only the wealthy elite are being educated. But mass education requires that schools be run people who are trying to educate for the future. This does not mean educating for “21st century skills” whatever that might mean. What is does mean is that schools need to do two things.

First, they need to teach general thinking skills, not math, but planning, not literature but judgement, not science but diagnosis.

Second, countries need to decide what they want to be when they grow up. Cuba, had I been running the educational show there, would have had to decide what the wanted to be the best at. Biotech or Agriculture or the Technology of cigar making. And they would have had to offer something less than everything under the sun to their students.

To fix an economy in the long run requires planning. The planning has to start at the beginning by creating citizens who can both think and find useful employment in the sectors of the economy that the country already has or wants to have.

Education is where everything starts. Countries can simply decide to be good at something and make themselves good at it. The U.S. decided exactly that about computer science 40 years ago. But it doesn't require the wealth of the U.S. to do that. Modern educational techniques, especially high quality experiential on line education, can make any country a specialist in any industry that it can realistically dream about.

STEM in the U.S. and U.K. We need "Science Idol"

2011-05-13T13:11:00.001-04:00

I am in U.K. at the moment, and today attended a breakfast organized by Donald Taylor, meant to have good conversation with some of the thought leaders in learning in the U.K. I enjoyed it a great deal.

But, there was one conversation with a man who was clearly very smart and a delightful person that shocked me. He was thinking about getting involved with STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. He was amazed when I suggested that this was a terrible idea.

Money and a push for STEM has driven the U.S. Education scene in the last years. As always, anything ridiculous that the U.S. does it convinces others to as well, so the U.K. has followed suit.

Why is STEM ridiculous? The idea behind STEM is that we need scientists and engineers and that our schools aren’t producing enough of them. Both premises are wrong.

I was a member of the science faculties of three of the top ten universities in the U.S. Never was there a lack candidates for faculty jobs. Quite the opposite actually. Too many good candidates, many of whom have to work in industry after they can’t get a faculty job.

Does industry lack talented engineers and scientists? Hardly. Silicon Valley is overflowing with talented job seekers.

What is lacking, any scientist will tell you, is sufficient funding for science research. Why doesn’t the government spend their STEM money on research?

Because the driver for STEM education is about two things. First, our old friend the testing lobby wants testing to be more ubiquitous and more important than it is now and they have big bucks to spend and math and science are easy to test.

And then there is the real reason. Any science or engineering faculty member at top U.S. and U.K. universities can attest to the fact that an enormous percentage of applicants to graduate programs in those fields are Chinese and Indian. The Chinese and Indians aren’t desperate to study those subjects because they love them or because they are so well taught in those places. They know that these subjects are a ticket out. They want to move to the U.S. or U.K. with a high paying job: Voila! They study math and science.

And, clearly, our governments want less Chinese and Indians to emigrate. Why I don’t know. They usually make wonderful colleagues.

And why don’t U.S. and U.K. Students study these subjects? For one thing they are not trying to get to a place that they already live. More importantly, the place where they live does not idolize the engineering student who made it out and who sends money home. We have American Idol and Football, and Movie Stars. We have taught our kids that being successful means being famous and being on TV. Our culture doesn’t produce scientists, it produces aspiring actors and singers.

If the government really wanted to produce more scientists it should create TV shows. How about “Science Idol” or “Science Court?” Nah. Too complicated.

To understand those shows kids would have to be able to think. And the schools have never wanted to produce students who can think clearly. They only want to produce students who behave, and who can memorize whatever facts are deemed important to know by the test makers.

My U.K. colleague quickly understood this. But there is no stopping the math and testing lobby.

Measuring teachers as a means of education reform! You have got to be kidding!

2011-05-07T09:31:00.001-04:00

Last week, in the New York Times, there was an Op-Ed column contributed by a Professor Emeritus (of Nursing) from the University of Maryland. Why the Times considers this man’s opinion worth publishing is anyone’s guess, but his article fits in well with the Times’ continuing insistence on always being on the wrong side in education.

The article starts with this gem:

Of all the goals of the education reform movement, none is more elusive than developing an objective method to assess teachers.

Really? That is the issue? Measuring teachers? Funny. I thought the issue was making schools that excited students and made them into people who loved learning and were learning things that they chose to learn and were excited to learn. Silly me.

I was a pretty good teacher if I do, say so myself (and many of my students say exactly that in my forthcoming book (Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools.)) But I couldn’t make algebra interesting to those who are bored to death by it. And, I couldn’t make literature interesting to those who think reading nineteenth century novels is tedious and irrelevant. In fact, I avoided teaching introductory programming my entire career because there was no way that I could make that interesting. Now, there are people who can make these subjects interesting (Saul Morson and Chris Riesbeck, both at Northwestern do exactly that in their respective subjects.) But they have an advantage. No one makes students at Northwestern taken Russian Literature and no one makes them takes Introductory Programming either. Motivation matters.

But this is not the case for the high school teachers that this Nursing professor wants to measure. (One would assume Nursing students take nursing because they want to be nurses by the way, which would have made his job as a teacher a lot easier to do.)

No, he wants to measure:

the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction

Really? This sentence is so wrong on so many levels that I find it impossible to believe this man was ever a teacher.

Let’s start with the concept that the job of a teacher is information delivery. This model of teaching is not only out of date, it is simply wrong. If it were right, you could apply the speed principle. If one teacher were to talk twice as fast as another teacher, he or she would deliver twice as much information and thus be twice as good.

A teacher’s job, in today’s world, is unfortunately, to get students to do well on standardized tests that test how much information you can temporally memorize and how many test taking tricks you know.

Here is another gem from this article:

the teachers who taught more were also the teachers who produced students who performed well on standardized tests.

Wow! Teaching couldn't possibly be about motivating students or helping students be better people or helping students think well or live their lives well. No, it means teaching more (really teaching faster would do the trick!) and not even noticing if anyone is listening or anyone even gives a hoot about what you are teaching. Test scores! Test scores! Test scores!

What about re-thinking the subject matter that we teach and the idea that classrooms are really bad places to learn?

The New York Times has never had a clue about education, as I have said many times before in this column.

But this article is a new low. As one Emeritus Professor to another, I suggest that Mr. Nursing Professor go back to thinking about how to teach nurses and leave education reform to those who have some idea what the real issues are.

Teachers are not and have never been the problem. You can’t make algebra interesting to someone who isn’t interested in it. Teachers are forced to rely on that old canard “you will need it later” which is, of course, simply untrue.

Educators need to stop telling students what they should learn and should start asking them what they want to learn. How crazy an idea is that?

2011-04-10T06:25:00.000-04:00

I am in London as I write this. I have been riding the trains to get to places like Brighton and Sunbury for business meetings. I love riding trains.

Now, ordinarily the fact that I love trains would be of little interest to anyone, but there is more to the story.

Some years ago, when I was trying to get my father, who was over 80 and visiting me at the time, to do something he didn’t want to do, I told him we could ride the Chicago subway to get there and he immediately agreed.

OK. So my father and I both like trains. I loved riding down to Florida when I was a kid and waking up in Jacksonville after an all night trip from New York and seeing the sun shine and feeling warmth everywhere. My father and I rode together while my mother slept in a sleeping compartment. My love of trains started early. So just childhood unconscious emotional stuff right?

Except both of my grandsons, ages 5 and 3 as I write this love trains. Actually obsessed with trains is more like it. One lives in New York City and the other in Washington D.C. They each know every train and route in their respective cities and generally demand to watch trains when I play with them on Grandparent Games.

Is there a train-loving gene? Certainly it would have to be a very recent mutation, so it is a silly idea. And besides, my daughter, whose son is the 5 year old in New York, never seemed to be fascinated by trains.

Of course, I left out my son, the one who has a PhD in transportation and runs a Transportation policy think tank in Washington. My son was so obsessed with trains as a kid that when I showed him the Paris Metro when he was 10 (we had just moved there for a year) he said “why have you been keeping this from me?”

Train gene or not, the point of this story is to talk about education of course, and to talk about how school needs to be re-structured. My son did fine in high school but he wasn’t passionate about much. He decided he wanted to be a history major when he arrived at Columbia University as a freshman. (He chose Columbia because there were trains he ride there of course. He almost died when I suggested Cornell or Princeton.)

I was (and am) a non-typical father, one who always felt happy to direct my children’s pursuits and one who was a college professor and knew a bit about universities. So I told him history was off the table as I saw no point in studying it, and that he should major in subways. He was shocked. “How do you major in subways?” he asked. I said I was sure there were people who did transportation at Columbia and to find them. He signed up for a graduate seminar in his first semester there (putting off a required humanities course) and figured it out from there, later going to MIT for a Masters in Transportation and returning to Columbia for the PhD.

My son loves his work because he is, and always was passionate about trains (and later on planes).

Schools need to allow children of any age to follow their passions. Educators need to stop telling students what they should learn and should start asking them what they want to learn. How crazy an idea is that?

As for the genetics I don’t care really. But there is solid male line of train loving in my family.

For homeschoolers, education reformers, and open-minded citizens: a paraphrase of Montaigne

2011-04-02T08:15:00.001-04:00

Our teachers never stop talking, as if they were pouring water into a funnel. Our task is only to repeat what they told us. Teachers need to stop doing this and instead begin have student try to do things, choose among options, make decisions for themselves, and let them find their own way. Schools want to take different students who have different ways of thinking and make them take the same courses and tests. It is no wonder that most children really learn nothing from this experience. I wish that actors or dancers could teach us to do what they do, simply by performing before us, without us moving from our seats. I wish that we could be taught to cook, or to play the piano, or learn to sing, without practicing at it. School wants to teach us to judge well and speak well without having us practice either speaking or judging.

This is a paraphrase in modern terms of Michel de Montaigne's thoughts on education taken from Essays:Book One published in 1572.

For homeschoolers, education reformers, and open-minded citizens: a paraphrase of JS Mill

2011-03-30T11:52:00.003-04:00

If the general public realized how difficult it is to enforce the idea that every child must go to school and learn what is being taught there, they would not have to constantly discuss what schools should teach and how the schools should teach. If the government would make up its mind to require that every child receive a good education, it might not have to actually provide that education. It could allow parents to get that education for their children where and how they pleased, and only play the role of subsidizing the tuition of those who cannot afford to pay. The problem with government run education is not the requirement that children be educated, but that the government has decided that it should do the educating. No part of education should be run by the government. Because people are different and have diverse personalities and diverse needs, education needs to be diverse as well, with many different options. Government driven education is really just a method of making people exactly alike one another. Every government has the desire to tell students what to think and how to think it and they will do so if given the opportunity.

This is a paraphrase in modern terms of John Stuart Mill's thoughts on education taken from On Liberty published in 1859.

“Don’t worry, he will go to college”

2011-03-15T09:04:00.000-04:00

Someone I know had their three year old son, who was acting oddly, evaluated by a psychologist. He was diagnosed with something that translated as a mild kind of autism. The psychologist then said: “don’t worry, he will go to college.”

I found this remark hilarious at first but now see it as a very sad commentary on our college-obsessed society. The same day that I was pondering this, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran the following story:

Nearly a Third of College Students Have Had Mental-Health Counseling, Study Finds

“About a third of college students have sought mental-health counseling, but they are much more likely to say they experience anxiety and stress than they are to report trouble with more-severe problems like violence or substance abuse.

When responding to statements about academic distress, more than 70 percent of students reported a positive attitude about their academic ability, but 21 percent of students agreed that "I am not able to concentrate as well as usual" and 25 percent agreed that "It's hard to stay motivated for my classes."

32 percent of students have attended counseling at some point.

The report also included statistics about suicide: 9 percent of respondents reported that they had seriously considered attempting suicide before college, and 7 percent said they had considered attempting suicide either after coming to college or both before and after coming to college. Five percent of students reported that they had made a suicide attempt.”

In general, as anyone who has been there can attest, college is a stressful experience. It is an experience that doesn't necessarily result in a better job at the end, and one that allows students to major in subjects that in no way lead to a career. The social anxiety at college is palpable. Students are worried about classes and grades, but not so much they actually show up to all their classes or do the work expected of them. They are worried about their social relationships, but it is rare for them to actually be taught about such things in college.

But yet, going to college is seen as the ultimate issue. As long as the kid can go to college, he will be fine. How sad that we actually believe this.

The U.K. about to shut down engineering and science?

2011-03-06T16:10:00.003-05:00

This just in from the BBC:

"Several universities have warned they may be forced to close science and engineering courses if the government limits visas for foreign students.

Sixteen university vice-chancellors have written a joint letter to The Observer saying the plans would have a profound effect on university income."

I really like the honesty expressed here. The reason universities want foreign students is so they can make money from running courses that those students want to attend. The interesting part here is that the issue is science and engineering courses.

I have been noting of late, the U.S. President's obsession about teaching science and math. Although this story is from the U.K. the lesson is the same. Either American and British students simply don't like science and engineering, or else their universities have produced far too many science and engineering degree programs.

It doesn't matter which of these is the case really. It is clear either way, that the reason President Obama is saying science and math nonstop is that he is getting pressure from many quarters, especially universities.

Now as a long time professor of Computer Science, I am well aware that the vast majority of students in U.S. masters programs in computer science are from India and China. This is true of engineering as well. If the supply of Indians and Chinese were limited in the U.S. most university graduate programs would shut down.

Now, I have no stake in this whatsoever, but I do have a point of view, that the British and American authorities might want to listen to. The math and science programs in high school (and college too) are so awful that they put off most prospective students. The Indians and Chinese persevere in their country's version of those programs because they know that that is their ticket out. The U.S. and U.K. students have no such motivation.

We might consider building curricula that cause children to get excited about science and engineering, if that is indeed so important to do, by making some compelling programs. I am building a first grade engineering curriculum at the moment, not because I care about what happens in graduate school but simply because I know little boys like to build things and I think it would be fun for them.

In order to make a change in who applies to graduate school, you will need to change high school. But high school has been the same since the nineteenth century.

Get rid of the nonsense that is high school math and science and teach kids how to reason scientifically and how to build things and we will see a change.

Why isn't this avenue the one that is being taken? Simply -- because it would take longer to do that than any politician's term will take. No politician ever proposes a long term strategy. High test scores and more testing is a short term strategy that will never achieve any result at all.

Make it interesting and they will come.

Confused about what college is about? Sex at BYU and Northwestern

2011-03-04T08:06:00.005-05:00

This week we have had a fascinating set of stories emanating from two major U.S. universities, that make clear why our conceptions of college are muddled. Since many of my readers do not live in the U.S., I will briefly summarize these stories.

BYU, a university run by and for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, suspended one of its star basketball players, (on a team headed for the national championship) because he had sex with his girlfriend.
Mike Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern, had a live sex demonstration in his class on Human Sexuality.

How are these stories related? There has been much discussion of them, not necessarily in the same articles, but as they happened at the same time there have been some comparisons being made in various publications.

My connection to these stories is not too great, but as I was a member of Northwestern’s Psychology department, I am familiar with the Northwestern scene and with Mike Bailey. And, although it hardly makes me an expert on BYU, I did spend a few days there not long ago interacting with faculty and administrators, generally discussing education.

BYU has a strict honor code to which all students must adhere that stems from their church’s religious beliefs.

Northwestern is a more typical U.S. campus which means students come from everywhere and from every culture and all live together and interact with each other in the way that kids in their late teens and early 20’s who have no real supervision are likely to act.

As a professor, I always felt that kids should be kids, that they should enjoy sex and drugs and football if they like, but that it would be nice if they didn’t confuse those activities with getting an education. Alas, there is nothing I can do to change the idea that kids who are on their own for the first time should probably not be going to college. It would be far better if they got the partying out of their system beforehand and pursued serious education when they were ready to be more serious.

So, I am more in tune with BYU’s philosophy than with Northwestern’s only because I think university education is wasted on students who are pre-occupied with growing up and finding out who they are (and drinking excessively in the process.)

But, my view point is actually irrelevant to both of these stories.

The real issue behind these stories is determining the answer to the question “what is college really about?”

At BYU the answer is, one would suppose, preparing students to be productive citizens who live within the rules and philosophy of their particular community.

At Northwestern, the answer would be, one would suppose, the same, except the community is much broader with much more varied rules and options.

But, I can tell you, neither of these schools actually does this.

At BYU, when I spoke there, I chided them on copying, more or less verbatim, the curriculum offered at Harvard and Yale. One obvious reason that they do this is that their faculty have PhDs from such places, so they teach what they learned there. But, the goal of Harvard and Yale, is, pretty much, to produce scholars, and possibly to produce future leaders of the country.

BYU exists in a place and in a community that needs a much different approach to education. They are not producing the nation’s scholars, and while they may produce some national leaders (Mitt Romney comes to mind) that isn’t an everyday occurrence nor should it be their goal.

I think that BYU is right to teach, and to enforce, the rules of its particular world, but curiously they fail to do this, in that the university education they provide is more or less just the same as that offered everywhere else.

At Northwestern, the focus should be on producing people who can get jobs that exist in the real world and making creative people who can function well within that world. Yet, Northwestern emphasizes scholarly pursuits, and it offers up a smorgasbord of courses that allows students to pick and choose ones that seem like the most fun. Of course, Human Sexuality seems like fun. And, since the students actually do need to learn about sex, it makes sense to have such a course.

But that course exists along with thousands of others that are about random topics that fit into no coherent whole that might possibly enable students to have any idea of what they should do or can do after they graduate. Northwestern doesn't care that much about producing people who can go to work. They just let the faculty offer the courses that they want to teach.

Mike Bailey has been pushing the envelope on that for some time. He seems to like the ruckus he causes, and I personally don’t blame him for actually teaching what he is supposed to teach.

But, the fact is that he will be censured in some way for doing this because Northwestern, like most universities, is really about getting students to know things rather than getting students to do things.

The real problem in university education is that no one knows what it is really for any more. It used to be solely about making scholars. Now that the masses go to university in extraordinary numbers, university education is about appealing to the masses. This means providing entertaining courses and Mike Bailey, while he will likely get into trouble for it, has done just that.

BYU, on the other hand, has actual principles. They are not my principles but why should they be? They are at least trying to do more than entertain. At least they should be. But they offer the same stuff that Northwestern offers, more or less.

Perhaps it is time to re-think college education and ask what it is really there for and what students are actually supposed to gain from the experience. When we answer this question we might want to consider what they will actually do with what they have learned after they graduate.

Just a thought.

The math lobby makes Obama bang the drum for more math

2011-02-23T08:22:00.005-05:00

I am on my way home from Portland, Oregon where I spoke a meeting of teachers interested in technology. I went to Palo Alto before I went to Portland which meant that when President Obama visited Palo Alto and Portland last week I was there too. This mattered because I was blocked on both ends of my trip by the President's entourage. Those things happen -- no big deal.

But what is a big deal is that the President was going on that trip to speak with people about education. And so was I!

Curiously, we were speaking with different folks. Obama was speaking with Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and the President of Intel. Now, these guys know a lot about business and entrepreneurship and innovation. Education? Not so much. They did go to school. After that, there is no reason to assume they any more about education that anybody else.

Of course, Mr. Obama could use some help with respect to education. He announced yet again the critical need for more math and science, by which he means higher test scores. Why he cares about this I don't know. I guess he thinks maybe we can beat the Chinese in something if we just all study harder in high school and win the math competition. I wonder why he doesn't promote a business competition. I could get my arms around that. Teach kids business -- it might help.

But no, math and science again. He makes it sound like we just don't have enough mathematicians and scientists. There were 10000 applicants to MIT's freshman class last year and they took 1000. So, if anything, we have plenty of kids interested in science but not enough MITs. But the truth is, all the applicants get into some other school that will teach them what they want to know.

And then what will happen? They will become part of the great mass of unemployed, or underemployed, mathematicians and scientists. Really, we have plenty already Mr Obama. Look at the statistics on the number of applicants for each professorial position in these fields.

I don't know what this math and science obsession is really about, but I do have a guess. The testing industry is banging the drum and sending money to push for more testing and as usual, the lobbyists are winning.

Artificial Intelligence, Jeopardy, and the inane reporting of the New York Times

2011-02-15T11:40:00.002-05:00

I usually write about education in this column. But, yesterday, the New York Times ran a front page article on Artificial Intelligence. They ran it because there is an upcoming competition between an IBM computer and the champions of the Jeopardy TV show. It is being billed as a man against machine competition to see if people are smarter than computers or vice versa.

Whenever there is nonsense to print these days, the Times seems to be right on it. The time claims that:

“machines (have begun) to “understand” human language. Rapid progress in natural language processing is beginning to lead to a new wave of automation that promises to transform areas of the economy that have until now been untouched by technological change.”

Long before I worked on education I was a leader in the field of Artificial Intelligence. My specialty was Natural Language Processing. I worried about how computers could possibly understand language in the same way that humans understand language. I came to the conclusion that while this was a daunting task, it was probably not an impossible one. But, in order to make computers understand language they would need dynamic memories and they would need to be able to learn (because what you hear and read changes what you know). They would also need goals (because we understand in terms of what we care about) and plans, because we learn in order to help us do something better. I began to work on learning and memory, and understanding how planning works. And, while there has been much progress in AI in those areas, we are still far from having very intelligent machines that can do such things very well.

Not according to the New York Times, of course. There headline was

SMARTER THAN YOU THINK

A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans

Gee, will computers suddenly take over? I have been asked this question by every reporter and TV person who ever interviewed me about AI. The nonsense behind this question is too long to discuss her. But here is what the Times said:

“Machines will increasingly be able to pick apart jargon, nuance and even riddles. In attacking the problem of the ambiguity of human language, computer science is now closing in on what researchers refer to as the “Paris Hilton problem” — the ability, for example, to determine whether a query is being made by someone who is trying to reserve a hotel in France, or simply to pass time surfing the Internet.”

All this because a computer will try to play Jeopardy.

Computers have been getting by for decades now on key word search. Google has made key word search an art form. The “Paris Hilton” problem is not a problem for people however. In spoken English, the hotel is pronounced with an emphasis on Paris (as opposed to London.) But, people don’t really need that spoken cue so much because context tells you what is being talked about. We see or read about Paris Hilton. We make a reservation at the Paris Hilton. “The food is bad at the Paris Hilton” is not a confusing sentence. It is only confusing to a computer that doesn't know what you are talking about and processes only key words. In other words, the Times is discussing ideas about how to use statistics to make a best guess about what the words might mean. And then, seeing that a program might be good at this, the Times then predicts the takeover of mankind by smart computers.

The New York Times used to be a great newspaper. I have subscribed for over 40 years. But these days much of what they have to say is nonsense. When Bryant Gumbel asked me on the Today Show, many years ago, whether computers would soon take over, I attributed his question to the need for sensational junk on morning TV. The MacNeill Lehrer Report on PBS asked sensible questions. Redes in Spain asked sensible questions. But, alas the Times doesn’t care that the average reader is going to draw conclusions about a computer’s ability to understand that simply aren’t true. And I don’t think they give a damn.

No more factories! How about we stop training students to be factory workers then?

2011-02-13T11:42:00.005-05:00

The New York Times ran an article today about the closing of the last silverware factory in the U.S. While the shutting down of factories in the U.S. is sad, sadder still is the continuation of the "factory model" of education which was indeed, designed to make compliant factory workers.

Most people don't know that the schools we have today were meant to behave like factories:

In 1905, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories

“in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products…manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.”

William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

“The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.”

Since we now have no factories, perhaps it is time to get rid of the factory model of education and allow children to learn in a way that is less stifling, less dark and ugly, and more likely to produce the kinds of people who can fill jobs that will exist in this century.

Politicians in nearly every country have thrived by producing graduates of school who cannot think for themselves and mindlessly go about their lives. This may have worked in the era of the factory, but there are no more factories. Yet school is still a dreary mind numbing experience.

Third of Russians think sun spins round Earth?

2011-02-11T13:03:00.003-05:00

It is headlines like these that allow education people to get on their “we must teach more science kicks. Why do people need to know this stuff? Will it help them live their lives better? Will ramming it into their heads harder make it stick? And would we be better off if it did stick?

Third of Russians think sun spins round Earth?

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Does the sun revolve around the Earth? One in every three Russians thinks so, a spokeswoman for state pollster VsTIOM said on Friday. In a survey released this week, 32 percent of Russians believed the Earth was the center of the Solar system; 55 percent that all radioactivity is man-made; and 29 percent that the first humans lived when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth."It's really quite amazing," spokeswoman Olga Kamenchuk said of the survey that polled 1,600 people across Russia's regions in January, with a 3.4-percent margin of error."All of them (the questions) were absolutely obvious... the data speaks of the low levels of education in the country." However, people tend to forget what they have been taught at school if it is not part of daily use, she added: "I wonder whether our colleagues in other countries would find any different."

The study also found that women were more likely than men to believe the scientific fallacies.

I note that the spokeswoman makes the same point, but in most places she would be ignored and a teach more science furor would ensue.

Obama asks CEOs to help; This CEO responds...

2011-02-08T07:41:00.002-05:00

President Obama: "As we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America. Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers, to support the American economy, and to invest in this nation."

This statement was meant for CEOs of businesses, of which I am one (albeit of a small business) so I thought I would answer the President.

Here are some things I can (and do) do:

I hire American workers. I particularly like to hire American Ph.D.'s (in Russian Literature, History of Medicine and Archeology to name three recent hires of mine.) I like to hire people like that because they are very smart individuals who have bought the stuff that colleges sell and wound up unemployable because of it. I like how smart they are. I have no use for what they learned in their PhD programs however.

I hire American workers. I also like to hire women who have small children who want to work from home. I am happy to let them work the hours that suit them and in most cases I have never met them. I need them to be able to write and think well. Despite the ridiculous education system we have, it doesn't seem to make everyone a bad writer and thinker. Fortunately for me, such workers are in plentiful supply. Why? Because in this country nearly everyone has to work in a office and the skills of writing and thinking are way undervalued. Since my company builds school and training courses you might think I would hire people who had degrees in education. I don’t. Those degrees don’t teach much worth knowing.

I support the American economy by building learning by doing project-based courses and degree programs that teach people how to do things rather than listen and memorize things. Oh wait. That was the Spanish economy since I built those courses for Spain (and for Peru and soon for some other developing countries.) Why don’t I build them for the U.S.? I did initially, but our universities think that what matters most is the brand name of their degree and not the quality of the education entailed in that degree. The best universities in the U.S. are controlled by very conservative faculty who have no incentive to change the system in any way.

I also build high school courses and elementary school courses that would radically change the U.S. economy if they were ever deployed here. They teach students to do things and they concentrate on doing things that would make them sought after in the marketplace. But here again, they are more likely to be deployed in other countries which have some flexibility about what they can offer. Here, in the U.S., in a testing dominated school system that you have both inherited and made worse, no real change can occur. Is it any wonder then that my services are sought after in many countries around the world but rarely in the U.S.? Here we can’t fix the school system because the testing companies and the book publishers have the country in a stranglehold which you seem incapable of fighting.

I want to help this country. I really do. I want to help students live their lives better, make better decisions, learn what it interests them to learn, and learn things that will make them employable. But you have made it very difficult to do that. The schools teach so many subjects that were determined in 1892 and can never be eliminated from the curriculum, that there is no room for change. I want change. The students want change. The teachers want change. But your government stifles change at every opportunity.

The good news is that I can help and have been helping American businesses teach their own employees how to do their jobs better. I can do this because, for the most part, no government regulations prevent it. (When the government does step in and demands certain training, that training is always done in an absurd fashion that copies the school system because in those cases there are government mandated tests as well.) Our big corporations want and need their employees to think better and act better and they do invest in that. Since the graduates they hire don’t know much and can’t do much this has become a lucrative business for us. So, you might think I would really like our graduates to remain dumb so that the corporations we work for will continue to need us. But I don’t. I want change. It is all too sad really.

If it makes you feel any better, most every country in the world is as stupid as we are about education. But that will change soon. Other countries will soon step up and lead in educational change, and their economies will thrive. That will take some time and you won’t be President when it happens, so its not your problem really.

Milo, Obama, and science fairs

2011-02-05T08:32:00.003-05:00

Milo was asked, as were all his Kindergarten classmates, to build a simple boat and bring it in to school to see whose boat did best in the water. Milo's boat sank. He was very mad at his mother. She had built a bad boat. The kid who won had a father who built a very good boat.

As long as there have been school competitions there have been underlying parent competitions. Lately, President Obama has been touting the wonder of science fairs. He thinks that science fair winners will go on to become great scientists and that science fair winners should be lauded in the same way as great athletes.

This is so absurd, it is hard to figure out where to start.

There probably is the occasional science fair project that had no parental involvement at all. In fact, I judged a science fair not so long ago. I was asked to help because some kids had done computer stuff and the judges needed help. But, the truth is that I wasn't really competent to judge the only real issue -- which was originality. I saw some things that looked interesting and made it clear that the kids involved had learned a lot about computers, but it looked like obvious stuff to me. I couldn't be sure because I actually don't know everything that has ever been done with computers.

The winners were, of course, those who had built the glitziest displays, ones that had really attracted attention for one reason or another.

Far from the idea that the winners were likely to go on to become great scientists, I would guess that the kids who won had a better future in public relations or advertising because that is what they were clearly good at.

I have known many great scientists in my life. I don't know if any of them ever won a science fair, but I feel pretty sure that most never even entered. The personality of a scientist is hard to make generalizations about, but outgoing and artistic, with a need to make really great displays with the help of their parents, doesn't exactly come to my mind when I think of the scientists I have known.

President Obama is on a science kick lately. I really don't know why. If he wants the country to become more competitive, we might think about teaching kids about business, and encouraging them to become more inventive, allowing them to do more things on their own initiative and worry less about what the school says they must learn.

Of course, the President doesn't know how to do that and doesn't ask for help.

Instead he says "science" a lot.

Obama's State of the Union remarks on education: a response

2011-02-01T08:57:00.002-05:00

President Obama made clear in his State of the Union address that he is completely clueless about education. This is a very sad state of affairs indeed, since all the teachers that I talk to are well aware that things in school are getting worse all the time.

Let me discuss some points the President made:

The President said: Over the next 10 years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school education.

Let us remember that a high school education means: algebra, geometry, history, literature, physics, chemistry, economics etc. And it means memorizing facts about these subjects and passing tests. How would this qualify anyone for a job? Of course new jobs require more education that that. It is however possible to change the high school curriculum and teach things that make one employable. The only companies that hire high school graduates are those who intend to re-train them on the job like fast food outlets, or construction companies, or hotels, or airlines. We could fix this very easily Mr. President. Change what is taught in high school!

The President said: as many as a quarter of our students aren't even finishing high school.

And right they are to quit. Unless you intend to go college a high school education is useless and most students realize that.

The President said: The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations.

Perhaps, but why should we care? First you are talking about test scores again. I assure you Mr. President that you couldn’t pass any of the science and math tests. today. They are just about temporary memorization and you have forgotten it as well you should have. So others nations memorize better. So what?

The President said: America has fallen to ninth in the proportion of young people with a college degree.

Why, Mr. President do you think that college degrees are so important? Is it because you know that high school is useless? Or is it because you really want people to know more about literature and history? Or, are you under the illusion that colleges teach people how to get jobs or how to think? I assure you Mr. Present as a veteran of 35 years of professoring, college teaches students how to game the system, how to party, and how to figure out how to graduate. Thinking isn’t really taught all that well and job skills are almost never taught.

The President said: We launched a competition called Race to the Top. To all 50 states, we said, "If you show us the most innovative plans to improve teacher quality and student achievement, we'll show you the money."

Sounds good Mr. President. But “Race to the Top” is all about test scores and it is driving responsible teachers, principals, and superintendents mad. Have you talked to people about the effect of Race to the Top? Most professional educators agree that it is a disaster.

The President said: And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.

There you go again about science and math. What is this fixation about? I know plenty of unemployed PhDs in Physics and Math. We have plenty of scientists. And this country does just fine in producing great science in any case. Do you really think that we need more scientists? What for? Who would employ them? If you think learning science and math makes you more innovative you would have to work hard to prove that. If you think that doing well in science and math courses means you can build a business or create competitive advantages for the US economy, which must be what you think, I find it hard to agree.

You might Mr. President, start thinking about how we can teach our citizens to think clearly and to do things that matter. School does not teach doing or thinking. It teaches memorizing facts, in part due to the so called reforms you and your predecessor have put in place.

Our schools are a mess because the curriculum they offer is mostly useless information that comes up only on tests. Stop with the testing and start teaching kids to do things, and to think clearly, and innovation will follow.

"To really learn take a test." The Times pushes its testing agenda again.

2011-01-24T06:33:00.004-05:00

The New York Times, as part of its ever increasing drum beat for testing, printed an article on its front page called: "To really learn, quit studying and take a test." The article reports a paper published in the journal Science that says that students retained more information after being tested than they retained from studying. In the Times' logic this means, "yea tests!"

They asked various authorities in Cognitive Science to comment and somehow managed to get people (Marcia Linn and Howard Gardner) who I know are anti-testing, to sound as if they were astounded by this study.

Let me make it simple for the Times: Learning is not actually about the retention of information. Of course, in school it is, but that is because school was designed to create mindless factory workers not thinkers. Real learning involves trying things and failing, and learning from one's failures. Real learning involves having a goal and figuring out how to achieve it, and learning from the experience. Real learning is about the modification of behavior and the modification of ideas.

School is about the retention of knowledge. But school is broken. Most students are miserable and could not possibly pass the tests they passed a few years after school is finished.

The New York Times has an agenda. It constantly promotes testing. I have a question for the Times' editors. Did you learn to run a newspaper in school? Or did it takes years of practice? Or does one just take a multiple choice test to become an editor at the Times?

Teachers can't take it any more

2011-01-21T17:42:00.004-05:00

I get a lot of letters from people who hear me speak. Here is an excerpt from one that I received recently which I especially liked:

I listened with rapt attention to your talk. I was frustrated that it was difficult to listen and process everything you were saying at the same time. I didn’t want to miss a word so I was relieved when I checked out your website which helps immensely in filling in the blanks.

I am a former classroom teacher. One of my most major gripes is that we are not allowed to teach individually relevant curriculum (even to students who have Individual Education Plans) therefore we CREATE a host of behavior problems because students know that most of what they are learning is CRAP.

I also agree that the system is not going to kill itself. I lobby on behalf of changing public education at the local, state and federal levels and ran for public office for the first time this past fall. I didn’t win, but didn’t do too bad for a first timer with a lot of common sense reform oriented ideas. The current political climate is not much in favor of this. J

There was a time not so long ago when teachers didn't like my talks. But the last two U.S. Presidents have made sure taht taht is no longer the case.

The New York Times is Schizophrenic on Education

2011-01-17T12:08:00.002-05:00

Sunday there was an amazing case of the New York Times not even reading their own newspaper and drawing the obvious conclusions about education. Kristof was writing his usual nonsense of how the Chinese education system is better than ours and why. (They score higher than the US does on tests and we should all worry, is now the mantra of New York Times apparently.)

But, in a different section there was an article about Amy Chua, the so-called “tiger mother” who wrote a book about how Chinese parents get their kids to do well at tests. As she is an American, a Yale graduate, and she mothers like her parents did, which means she forced her kids to do well in school. Americans are officially horrified by this book, while at the same time extolling the Chinese for doing so well on tests. Do we want nice parenting or parents who are into test prep? The Times is on both sides of this one.

In yet another section of Sunday's Times there is an Op-Ed piece on how Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, which uses a very bad word (one which wasn’t so bad in 1880) should now be taught in college as opposed to teaching it in high school and deleting the bad word. The idea that it should be taught at all is never discussed. Why shouldn’t it be taught at all? Because of the bad word? No, because novels shouldn’t be taught. What is the reason for teaching novels? Are we trying to create a culture of literary critics? I love Mark Twain but hated him in high school. I hated any book I was forced to read. Why do we force kids to read books that don’t interest them?

Maybe it is because they will be on the tests? How about if only Chinese students were to read them since they like tests so much?

Chinese do better on tests than Americans! Oh my God, what will we do?

2010-12-13T14:16:00.000-05:00

Recently, we have been subjected to yet another round of fright about our education system because the Chinese have scored better than the U.S. on the PISA test. Arne Duncan tweeted “PISA results show that America needs to ... accelerate student learning to remain competitive." The New York Times ran its usual scare article. “The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.”

I even heard a man who should know better state that these tests were actually meaningful since they were problem solving tests. Nothing would convince me that the tests were meaningful in any way, but just for fun I took a look at some sample questions anyway. Here are four of them (chosen because they were shorter than the others.):

A result of global warming is that the ice of some glaciers is melting. Twelve years after the ice disappears,

tiny plants, called lichen, start to grow on the rocks.

Each lichen grows approximately in the shape of a circle.

The relationship between the diameter of this circle and the age of the lichen can be approximated with

the formula:

d=7.0× t−12

( ) for t ≥12

where d represents the diameter of the lichen in millimetres, and t represents the number of years after

the ice has disappeared.

Question 27.1

Using the formula, calculate the diameter of the lichen, 16 years after the ice disappeared.

Show your calculation.

Question 48.1

For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100 m by 50 m was reserved for the audience. The concert

was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing.

Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending

the concert?

A.2 000

B. 5 000

C. 20 000

D. 50 000

E. 100 000

Question 7.1

The temperature in the Grand Canyon ranges from below 0 oC to over 40 oC. Although it is a desert

area, cracks in the rocks sometimes contain water. How do these temperature changes and the water in

rock cracks help to speed up the breakdown of rocks?

A. Freezing water dissolves warm rocks.

B. Water cements rocks together.

C. Ice smoothes the surface of rocks.

D. Freezing water expands in the rock cracks.

Question 7.2

There are many fossils of marine animals, such as clams, fish and corals, in the Limestone A layer of the

Grand Canyon. What happened millions of years ago that explains why such fossils are found there?

A In ancient times, people brought seafood to the area from the ocean.

B Oceans were once much rougher and sea life washed inland on giant waves.

C An ocean covered this area at that time and then receded later.

D Some sea animals once lived on land before migrating to the sea.

Whether or not you know the answers to these questions I think it is important to think about what it means to be good or bad at such questions. As someone who studied mathematics and who considers himself a scientist, I can tell you that these questions are both simple and irrelevant to the average human being. One can lead a prosperous and fulfilling life without knowing the answer to any of them. Why then are test makers, newspapers, and Secretaries of Education, hysterical that the Chinese are better at them than their U.S counterparts?

One answer is that every nation needs scientists and that knowing the answer to these questions is on the critical path to becoming a scientist. I can assure you that that is simply false.

Whether or not a nation needs scientists, it surely doesn’t need very many of them. In any case, while scientists I know would know the answers to these questions, that has nothing to with the reason they have been successful as scientists. More relevant would be a personality test that sought to find out how creative you were or how receptive you were to new ideas or how willing you were to entertain odd hypotheses. Having been a professor who supervised PhD students from many different countries, I can assure you that Chinese students are very good at learning what the teacher said and telling it back to him. Of course they do well on tests if they come from a culture where that is valued. In the U.S., questioning the teacher is valued and most U.S. scientists have stories about how they fought with their teachers on one occasion or another. If we need scientists why not find out what characteristics successful scientists actually have? Memorizing answers is probably not one of them. You don’t win Nobel Prizes, something the U.S. is still quite good at, by memorizing answers.

But, of course, the problem with the U.S. education system is not in any way our lack of ability to produce scientists. We are very good at it actually.

Our problem is that a large proportion of the population can’t reason all that well. We don’t teach them to reason after all. What we do is teach them mathematics and science they will never need and then pronounce them to be failures and encourage them, one way or another, to drop out of school. Brilliant. We also to paraphrase President John Adams, don’t “teach them how to live or how to make a living.”

As usual, neither Arne Duncan nor the new media has a clue about the real issue in education. To paraphrase President Clinton “ It’s the curriculum, stupid.”

Bill Gates: Wrong Again; How should we rate teachers?

2010-12-04T09:10:00.002-05:00

An article in the New York Times today says that Bill Gates is spending $355 million so that teachers will be rated in a coherent fashion. This rating, of course, has to do with how teachers improve their students test scores over time. This an obvious waste of money if you question the value of test scores, which of course, neither the New York Times, nor Bill Gates have even considered.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that it is important to rate teachers. Here I list Schank's criteria for rating teachers:

does the teacher inspire students?

does the teacher encourage curiosity?

does the teacher help students feel better about themselves?

does the teacher encourage the student to explore his or her

own interests?

does the teacher encourage the student to come up with his or

her own explanation for things they don't understand?

does the teacher set him or herself up as the ultimate

authority?

does the teacher encourage failure so that the student can learn

from his or her own mistakes?

does the teacher care about the students?

Really, how hard is it to recognize that these aspects of teaching are tremendously more important than test score improvement?

Tallulah starts our new Experiential on line MBA

2010-12-02T13:28:00.004-05:00

We have been working for the last two years on building a learning by doing project-based on line MBA program with La Salle University's Business Engineering School in Barcelona. The program finally launched in October. Students are happy and excited and no one exemplifies this excitement more than Tallulah. She is the secretary to the President of La Salle BES. She decided she wanted to take an MBA this year and signed up for the traditional classroom-based one that La Salle still offers.

When her boss heard about this, he persuaded her to try our new on line experiential MBA instead. After one month of work she compared what she knew how to do with the people she knew in the regular classroom-based MBA. While they had been mostly listening to lectures, she had already been working on a complex case of a failing winery. She had been analyzing financial statements, preparing financial projections, and getting ready to propose solutions.

While our students learn how to do real world tasks, others sit in a classroom, hear about theories, and take tests.

The future is here.

Glenn Beck, George Soros, FOX News, Florida, and Education

2010-11-22T13:13:00.003-05:00

The other day, after my regular softball game, I heard two of the people I play with discussing George Soros. This was astonishing to say the least, because the people I play softball with are very unlikely to have ever heard of George Soros. I live in Florida where discussions of political issues are simplistic to say the least. But there it was. The issue was how Soros was undermining the country. I found this weird. I thought this was guy who tried to do good with his money.

It all became clearer when I heard that Glenn Beck had made one of his weird rants, and then I realized that the guys I had overheard were simply parroting what Beck had said and, more importantly, believing it word for word.

When you think about education, think about this. We have made people so stupid through our absurd system of memorizing nonsense and repeating it back on a multiple choice tests that we have set the stage for FOX News to simply say what it wants to say, and having millions of people believe it, because no one ever taught them how to construct or refute an argument.

We are creating a nation of people who can't think and who simply believe what they are told.

Yet we continue to obsess about test scores.

Tom Friedman; wrong again, this time about education

2010-11-21T09:13:00.002-05:00

I guess it wasn't bad enough that Friedman promoted the Iraq War in his New York Times column and then had to admit he was wrong. He actually is supposed to know something about the Middle East.

Now he espousing the nonsense theme of the day, that the problem in education is the teachers. I guess he saw "Waiting for Superman" and wanted to jump on the bandwagon.

So one more time for Tom: the problem is that school is boring and irrelevant and all the kids know it. They know they will never need algebra, or trigonometry. They know they will never need to balance chemical equations and they know they won't need random historical myths promoted by the school system. When all this stuff was mandated in 1892 it was for a different time and a different kind of student.

Change the curriculum to something relevant to modern life and you won't need to look for teachers. Teachers will rush to the opportunity to teach kids who actually want to be there.

How to build a culture of illiteracy

2010-11-13T07:58:00.003-05:00

I was visiting my 5 year old grandson this week and he showed me the two books he had been assigned to read by his kindergarten teacher. Milo reads fairly well for a five year old, but this had nothing to do with his two months of kindergarten. I was surprised to see that they are teaching kindergarten kids to read. I guess the obsession with test scores has made New York City push the kids harder and faster. I would rather see him be doing other things in school but there is no harm in teaching him to read. Or so I thought, until I had him read these two books to me.

The first was about a nonsensical creature called a jiggeridoo. All the sentences were of the sort "jiggeridoos like to play." Each page had a picture and a sentence like that. I was bored and so was he. What happened to the idea that reading should be fun and even remotely educational. What was he learning from reading this nonsense?

The second book made me long for the first one.

The second was about a character named Eddy, who like to eat things based on their shape apparently. So Milo was busy sounding out words like square or triangle because pizza is triangular in shape. This book was both boring and annoying. It obviously was trying to teach shapes which is a dull, and rather unimportant task, and was doing so through a ridiculous book.

From this Milo is learning that books are boring and tedious. He will survive this because his parents are literate and will be his real teachers. But I started worrying about kids who have parents who don't encourage reading at home. The message the school is sending is that reading is a useless experience teaching nothing worth knowing. No wonder illiteracy is such an issue these days.

Perhaps we should stop worrying about test scores and start worrying about whether kids like to read. Just a thought.

Who gets to design the curriculum that would replace the one from 1892 that we now use?

2010-10-22T11:47:00.006-04:00

I was giving a talk that mentioned how the curriculum in the schools is outdated and irrelevant and needs to be thrown out. Of course, I got the usual questions. People defend their favorite courses but are willing to trash the ones they didn't like or do well in. And then there is my favorite question: "who will decide what the new curriculum will be?"

There are two serious problems with that question. First, why must there be one curriculum? Second, why should anyone but the students decide what they should learn?

Of course I know that these problems are rarely mentioned. We just assume that there should be exactly one course of study in high school and that students should be told what they have to learn. These assumptions are so strongly held that any suggestion by me that school needs a re-design causes people to assume that I want to dictate what the curriculum should be. I don't. What I do want to do is to design as many curricula as possible to allow as much choice as possible. Someone I know told me that his daughter was bored in school and that what she really wanted to learn about was set design. And why shouldn't there be a "set design" curriculum for those who want that?

Since curricula can now be delivered on line, as can teaching, the old excuse -- not enough demand - goes away.

Of course there is another objection too. Such a curriculum wouldn't include the important stuff. Really? What is the important stuff? I am sure that one actually has to know a great about "the important stuff" whatever that is in order to "set design" or anything else that is part of the real world. The place to teach the important stuff is within a context of interest to the student where it would actually be used.

We need to start understanding that our unspoken assumptions about education are wrong. Every high school drop out knows they are wrong.

Obama: Money alone can't solve school predicament

2010-09-27T14:06:00.003-04:00

Yes, Mr Obama, money alone can solve the school predicament. Use the money to create new curricula that are both relevant and interesting. Stop teaching the "scholarly subjects" determined by the Harvard President in 1892. We don't need a nation of scholars. The kids know that, so they ignore what teachers are forced to teach. Try teaching students to get good at doing what they find interesting to do. Indeed, money could do allow that to happen. Also, perhaps you could try fighting the special interests that want to preserve the testing culture.

Milo goes to KIndergarten; we need to fix this fast

2010-09-22T09:21:00.001-04:00

Milo started Kindergarten last week. As it happens I was in Brooklyn this week, so I asked Milo if he liked school. He said he did. I asked him what he liked about it. He said he liked recess. I asked him if there was anything else he liked. He said, “yes, he liked lunch.” Anything else? “Snack time.” Anything else? “Choice time” (apparently you can do whatever you want then. At this point his mother said “what about science?” (His class has been learning science words or something like that.) He said “no, that was boring.”

So it took one week for Milo to learn to say the most common word used to describe school by students. (This tidbit of information I owe to my friend Steve Wyckoff, former superintendent of schools in Wichita, Kansas and now an education reformer.)

Milo had a homework assignment. His mother called to ask me what to do about it, because he was already refusing to do it. He was to circle all the “t’s” in some document. Since MIlo can already read (and write in his own special spelling) he also found this assignment boring. I told her to explain to the teacher that Milo wasn’t going to do things that seemed irrelevant for him to do.

All of this made me start to invest more in our Alternative Learning Place idea, opening in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in September 2011. If Milo has to endure the New York City Public Schools for more than this year of Kindergarten, I am sure that we all will be driven to drink

life is a series of tests anyway -- what a load of nonsense

2010-09-13T08:34:00.005-04:00

The New York Times, this time in an article by Elisabeth Rosenthal, their former Beijing bureau chief, has waved the pro-testing flag once again. She describes the constant testing of her children when they attended school in China, and notes that while it was stressful, years later they don't recall it as having been awful. Perhaps this was due to the fact they were learning a different culture and language and remember that much more interesting learning experience more?

Nevertheless she reiterates the New York Times party line by saying:

"But let’s face it, life is filled with all kinds of tests — some you ace and some you flunk — so at some point you have to get used to it."

I beg to differ. Life is full of all kinds of situations that test you. Life is not full of multiple choice memorization tests at all.

She quotes experts who argue how testing is killing our children, but somehow, amazingly, decides testing is good. The real question is why the New York Times is constantly beating the testing drum. There is lots of money to be made in textbook publishing and testing and those who make big money on that are always in favor of testing and have been the ones pushing No Child Left Behind. Time to come clean, New York Times. How much money are you making on testing?

Our Schools are all Religious Institutions, only the religion has changed

2010-08-30T09:08:00.002-04:00

When we think about education, we typically imagine that its purpose is to teach students how to think. This is a very nice idea that has very little basis in fact. School was never meant as a means of teaching thinking. Schools have their origins in religious education. It is well to remember that Harvard and Yale started off as divinity schools and that until recent times nearly all universities required religious training as part of the curriculum.

If we think about religious education for a moment, it doesn’t take long to realize that pretty much regardless of the religion, religion is about telling people what to believe and is not about questioning those beliefs. All religions know the truth and all religions attempt to dictate that truth to their followers. Most religions also run schools. No one criticizes them for this.

In our public schools we have adopted the basic tenets of religious schooling.

there is a truth that cannot be questioned
there is no real choice in what a student learns about
you can be punished for failure to attend school
you will learn by being told
there are official sacred books that everyone must know

What are the sacred books of our schools? Shakespeare, Dickens, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Great Gatsby, are some of them.

What truths cannot be questioned? Algebra teaches you to think. You must know science to have a job in the 21st century. All of U.S. history as depicted in textbooks.

Over the years I have been quoted as saying all of schooling needs to be re-thought. What we teach now was determined in the 19th century and was meant to turn the few people who actually attended school at that time into intellectuals. When I say “get rid of all of it” the response is usually: you are right about subject X but subject Y is sacred.

Sure, let’s get rid of balancing chemical equations but we can never get rid of history.

Sure, let’s get rid of algebra but literature is very important.

We can’t get rid of science because it is important for knowledge workers.

This is what religion sounds like.

Curiously school is still teaching religion. But now the religion is about the sacred texts in which one finds the quadratic formula, or SP3 binding (you can look it up if you like), or what Julius Caesar said to Brutus.

None of this teaches children to think any more than the catechism teaches children to think. School ought to be a place where open minds can explore. This doesn't happen because schools are simply the places where modern day religious instruction can be found. (It is a very odd religion -- one in which Shakespeare, Archimedes, Fermat, Descartes, Millville, and George Washington are gods.)

A fun day in education land...

2010-08-16T15:59:00.004-04:00

Today was a wonderful day for this observer of the education scene. First, I noticed an article in an Italian newspaper reporting something I did last week:

http://milano.repubblica.it/cronaca/2010/08/16/news/l_america_vuole_il_prof_italiano_dell_anno_e_pensare_che_la_gelmini_mi_ha_tagliato-6317729/

What happened is that a teacher in Italy wrote to me to say he had won the teacher of the year award in Italy and was immediately fired. He had written to me before about what he was doing in his school. Since I needed someone to help build our Alternative Learning Place, I offered him a job. The above article says all that. The Italian school system is, of course, as stupid as ours.

The second event was the usual stuff from our system. I heard from my daughter who has decided to try out public school kindergarten in Brooklyn for Milo this fall. The ALP is meant for first grade in 2011, so she decided to try out the system while we build Milo's future school. She lives two blocks from a school and it has a talented and gifted program so she had Milo tested. Milo tested at 99% which was no surprise. Equally no surprise, the New York City School System in its infinite wisdom, decided to offer Milo a place in a school in a rough neighborhood, not in the one he lives near. One of the reasons that New York has such terrible schools is, of course, that they seemingly encourage the best and brightest to leave. Milo won't be there long. As someone who was in the New York City schools all through his childhood, I can tell you that they were always very good at making smart kids miserable there. Not much has changed.

The third thing was an incredible article in the Washington Post written by Dana Milbank:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/13/AR2010081303197.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

It is amazing because it is right on about the stupidity of the Obama administration in education and tits nonsensical testing obsession. The Washington Post is owned by Kaplan testing or the other way around, (I forget which), so the truth about testing is usually hard to find there.

P.S. 247 and the absurdity of the idea that college is a necessity

2010-08-03T13:01:00.003-04:00

For a speech I am giving I was looking for a picture of the man who was principal of my elementary school many years ago. So, I went to the P.S. 247 (Brooklyn) web site and discovered that it is now a "New York City College Partnership Elementary School." When I finished laughing, I started to wonder when this "everyone must spend their entire childhood worrying about getting into college" nonsense would end.

Then I saw a very nice article called "7 Reasons not to send your kid to college" by James Altucher:

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/seven-reasons-not-to-send-your-kids-to-college/19572537/

which I recommend to anyone who wants to think carefully about this issue. Of course it is followed, in the mode of the day, by the usual vitriolic comments about how he is an idiot and how college must have taught him to be able to write his column. This again had me in fits of laughter as I recalled how I had to teach writing to Ivy League graduates who were my PhD advisees because they had never learned to write in college.

In any case, I agree with the writer. College has become, in people's minds, something it was never intended to be: a job training ground, and it fails miserably at that, since professors don't give a damn about job training.

P.S. 247 was not a great bastion of learning nor a fun place in the 1950's, and I can only imagine how awful it is now.

Why Students Cheat

2010-07-13T13:59:00.003-04:00

Lately there has been a great deal written about student cheating. Today there was an editorial in the New York Times, which as always gets education wrong. Why do students cheat is usually answered by mentioning that it is the fault of the internet or else by listing the big three reasons which are:

The pressure to get good grades

They are lazy and didn’t do the required work

They thought they could get away with it

The Times editorial quotes a professor who says: “This represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind.”

The editorial goes on to mention “more than half the colleges in the country have retained services that check student papers for material lifted from the Internet and elsewhere.” And then the writer adds: “parents, teachers and policy makers need to understand that this is not just a matter of personal style or generational expression. It’s a question of whether we can preserve the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally.”

I wonder if there could be a better explanation of why students cheat? Perhaps the answer is that the professors and their universities encourage students to cheat. Let me explain:

Consider the Motor Vehicle bureau’s approach to education. Why aren't we hearing about rampant student cheating in driver’s license exams? Perhaps there is cheating on the written tests, I don’t know. But I am pretty sure there isn’t cheating on the actual driving test. Why not? Because that test is a test of performance ability, not competence. The driver’s test tests to see if you can actually do something and there is a person looking to see if you can do it.

Now let’s think about the university model of education. Universities don't actually ask professors to see if their students can do anything in a one on one encounter as the motor vehicle bureau does. Why not?

Because the universities are cheating. They are cheating in two way. First they are claiming that education consists of one professor talking to 100 students in a series of lectures and then passing a test. That is not education. That is a way that universities can have 50,00 students while only hiring 2000 professors, a model that really doesn’t work for the students at all. Listening and regurgitating is not education. Suppose we actually tried to teach every student to think for themselves. Wouldn’t we have to individually assess their actual thinking, by engaging them in a real conversation, to see if they can think clearly?

But way more important here is the plain fact that for the most part, we aren't teaching students to do actually do anything. We are teaching them to write papers about what they know which is very different than actually doing something. You can’t cheat in a an engineering class if your job is to build plane that flies and the professor’s job is to watch it fly. You can’t cheat in a music class if your job is play the piano and the teacher’s job is to listen to you. You can only cheat if your job is read and write and the professor’s job is to grade essays as fast as he can.

As long as doing is subjugated to a secondary role in education, cheating will occur regularly. As long as being educated means being able to write an academic essay or being able to fill in dots on a multiple choice test, students should cheat. They are being cheated of an education and they know it, so they should cheat in response.

This is all a silly game and all students know it. What do they have to do to get a degree is their question. No one is really providing them an education. Professors can claim that they are teaching students to think but they are more typically teaching them how to look at the world in the way the professor looks at it.

Perhaps it is time to start producing people who can do things and to stop worrying if students rip off essays from the internet. The simple solution: stop having them write essays. But then someone might have to actually teach someone to do something and then watch and see if they can do it. That thought is horrifying to universities because it implies a different economic basis for the university, one not based on research contracts, as well as a de-emphasis on academic research for students who will never do it as adults.

When professors stop cheating students of an education perhaps students will stop cheating as well.

As an aside, in 35 years as a professor I never once assigned a research essay or gave a multiple choice test. I did, however ask students to think and write about things that had no right answer. And I asked them to build things. I actually expected them to think.

Colleges laud new national standards! Wow! Really?

2010-06-03T07:08:00.004-04:00

This just in from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

New National Standards Seek to Make All Students Ready for College

Higher-education groups praised a set of a national standards for elementary and secondary education that governors and state education officials announced on Wednesday, saying the guidelines would help improve college preparedness and accessibility.

Right. Because if everyone in the United States went to college, then things would be so much better for....

for whom exactly? --- for the colleges? for professors?

I need an explanation of how this would matter in any way for our country. Most college graduates are unprepared to do anything in the real world.

I nominate the 13 year old Mt. Everest Climber for Secretary of Education

2010-05-22T07:03:00.002-04:00

“I am happy to be doing something big,” Jordan wrote before heading up the mountain. “If I wasn’t sitting here at base camp, I could be sitting in the classroom learning about dangling participles.”

Right you are Jordan. Good choice.

Only Harvard and Yale Lawyers on the Supreme Court? Oh my

2010-05-11T15:59:00.003-04:00

It is not everyday that I feel the need to defend our educational system but I heard something so outrageous on the Today show this morning that I am afraid I must do just that.

The question was discussed between Matt Lauer and Joe Biden of the problem of having a Supreme Court full of people who had attended Harvard and Yale Law Schools. They agreed this was "elitist."

I have heard stupid stuff come out of the mouths of politicians and news anchors before but this one breaks new ground. Maybe in 1920, when Yale and Harvard kept out people who weren't WASPy enough or rich enough for them such a statement might have made sense. But, while I am the first to criticize our universities for making the entire high school systems insane, our problem does not stem from professional training which is where those institutions shine.

Harvard and Yale are creating all these constitutional lawyers because they have a competition and select the best and the brightest from all over the country and, these days, are no longer discriminating against people who were not born rich and white. It is their job to take in the brightest people they can find and produce the best legal minds they can produce.

No one willingly attends the University of Alabama Law School when they could have attended Harvard.

Producing the elite is what these schools are good at. Why shouldn't the Supreme Court be composed of only our smartest and best educated lawyers. What is Biden thinking?

School is bad for kids - it is time for new ideas

2010-04-21T08:07:00.003-04:00

The Today Show on NBC is missing an important story that they constantly fail to see. This happened 3 times in the 7-8 am slot yesterday and then again today.

Yesterday they discussed kid's texting behavior, the killing of a school principal, and 2 kids being burned or otherwise badly harmed in Florida by kids at their school. Today they reported on a teen suicide caused by bullying at a school in Massachusetts.

The real story here is that the school experience is getting worse all the time and that the government wants to fix it by more testing rather than by realizing that school itself is a failed idea. Kids have no business being shut up in a world of hundreds of other kids whom they don't know. They don't learn much because they are way more concerned with the social standards that have been set by other kids, and they spend most of their time worrying about being accepted, liked, or being in with the "in crowd."

It is time to understand that school is a very bad idea. We are smart enough to be able to figure out a replacement for school that does not endanger children and actually helps them learn skills that will matter to them later in life.

Let's start that dialogue. Let's stop allowing others to torture our children.

Measuring Student Achievement: Ten questions

2010-04-18T11:03:00.005-04:00

Governor Crist of Florida (where I live) last week vetoed a piece of nonsense that linked teacher's salaries to "student achievement." I imagine his veto of his own party's bill was about politics and not about education, but let me ask some education questions that are never asked:

1. Why do we need to measure student achievement?
2. What would happen if students were not measured or graded at all?
3. Can we imagine an educational system in which students were seen as consumers and they could consume what they wanted to consume -- letting them learn what they'd like to learn?
4. Why do legislatures think they understand what children need to learn?
5. How well would these legislators do on the very FCATs they mandate?
6. Do legislators regularly take multiple choice tests?
7. Why don't we measure legislators with multiple choice tests?
8. If adult achievement involves actual acts of labor (i.e. doing things) why not measure students in the same way?
9. Why is it so hard to re-think the idea of student achievement, and imagine it as having students actually achieve real things, real abilities, that can be seen and demonstrated and judged in the same way that the actions of adults are judged?
10. Can we imagine school as a place where students pursue their interests and demonstrate real achievements, and not have t o work at improving meaningless test scores masquerading as achievements?

I just thought I'd ask.

Wrong National Standards, Governor Wise, and Casino Management

2010-04-02T10:16:00.003-04:00

I saw this statement from Governor Wise, who is the head of the Alliance for Education. He is a nice guy who I like, but he is very much in favor of national standards:

Gov Wise: “Zip codes are no way to educate America’s future workforce.”

I found this statement so odd that I wrote to the man who sent it out who responded with:

wouldn’t you agree that current standards in far too many states are too low to prepare students to succeed after high school?

What a weird take on the problem. The standards are absurd and students know that. States differ on how effectively they force kids to attend schools that they hate. And, while we are at it, zip codes are indeed a way to manage education.

How do we find out what there is to be in life? School should tell us but it does not. I have come to realize that this is a serious issue in our society. We teach people literature and mathematics and then throw them out into the world figuring they will know what to do when they get there independent of that fact that knowledge of literature and mathematics is almost certainly not going it be helpful. We also fail to ask what we want of our students.

I realized this in a deep way one day when I went to the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. I was trying to get the legislature to give me money for building an on line school which is part of my larger effort to build many new kinds of curricula for high school students.

I went to the Indian School as part of the kind of politicking one does when one wants a bill to be passed. But once there I had a realization. Telling these people that we could build a technology oriented curriculum was not going to be all that exciting for them. I imagined myself to be an Indian in Santa Fe and I figured that I wouldn’t want my kid on going off to MIT never to return.

Of course, that is exactly what happens in the segment of society I live in. My children were sent to college and were not expected to return. I am not sure where they would have retuned to since I was always moving around myself. But, in hindsight, I am not thrilled that my kids do not live near me and I imagine, if I were an Indian I would be very concerned that they stay around so that my culture does not die.

So I asked them questions about curricula that were meant to get them to think about what their kids could learn that would help their culture survive.

Their answer was: Casino Management. This both surprised me, and then, in retrospect, didn’t surprise me at all. Of course that is what they need their children to learn to be good at doing.

We never got to build that curriculum courtesy of Governor Richardson who simply had lied to me about his forthcoming approval of the bill. But it did make me understand something about what is wrong with the national standards movement (apart from its canonization of the 1892 curriculum.)

People really are different in different places and have different educational needs. In Wichita they have an airplane manufacturing industry and no one to teach students how to work in it. In parts of the country there are hotels in the middle of nowhere that can't find anyone nearby who might know how to manage one.

Education needs to be local at just the time when the country is trying to make it into one size fits all.

What should I major in?

2010-03-24T11:54:00.000-04:00

A column in the Columbia University newspaper caught my eye. A woman was try to explain to her father why she had chosen the major she chose.

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/03/04/i-m-majoring-x-don-t-ask-me-why

She, like most college students, thinks she is making an important life choice here. She is, but she is confused about which choice she is making.

Why do college have majors? If you understand that, then the decision will become clear. All universities in the United States, even those that don’t claim to be, are modeled after the concept of the research university. This means that the professors at the school are primarily interested in research. Not only that, research dominates their lives so much that teaching is very low on their priority list. More importantly, when they teach, they are teaching what are basically research subjects.

So, when a psychology major wants to learn about people’s minds he or she winds up learning how to run experiments and how to do statistics because that is what researchers in psychology do.. When a computer science major wants to learn to become a proficient programmer they wind up learning mathematical theories connected with programming because that is what their professors research.

The major exists as a way of routing students on one track of becoming researchers. There are, of course, a few problems with this model. For one, most students do not want to become researchers. For another, those that do want to pursue PhDs soon realize that they could have majored in most anything and been accepted into a PhD program of their choice if they did well enough in college.

Students major in biology or chemistry because they want to became doctors (a field that actually requires next to none of the biology or chemistry that one learns in college.) They major in economies when they want to became business people because, at schools like Colombia, there is no business major but there are plenty of economists who do research.

In fact the concept of major is meant to move students into advanced courses in a department, namely the research seminars, which are really all the faculty actually want to teach anyhow.

When my son asked me what he should major in (he was also at Columbia) I told him “subways.” I did that because he loved subways. Now of course there is no subway major at Columbia, or anywhere else. I told him to pick and choose courses that related to his main interest and that the major he wound up in would not matter at all to anyone.

And this is my advice to students in all colleges. The major requirement is not there to serve your needs, so serve your own. Pick any courses that interests you as you attempt to determine a plan for your life. It really doesn’t matter. If your college offers real training in areas that lead to jobs and you think you might want one of those jobs, by all means major in that. But most people change their plans in life many times, so the answer to “what should I major in?” is simple enough.

It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. What matter are the choices that you make later. If you pick a major that narrows your choices then you made a bad selection.

National Standards: how crazy is our government?

2010-03-12T09:10:00.006-05:00

I have been mulling about writing a scathing commentary on the new idiotic national standards for education that have just been proposed. They are, more or less, the same standards that were rammed down the throats of Americans in 1892 by the President of Harvard. The government just seems to be want to make sure that no innovation or real change ever takes place in education in this century. They think our failed schools can be fixed by firing teachers and by having more tests. The idea that we might want to re-think a seriously broken system doesn't enter their minds.

I was going to say that, but why bother? I have said it many times before.

Instead, I want to point readers to an article recently posted in a congressional on line magazine that was written by my son. He is writing about transportation policy but really it is all the same. A dysfunctional government that can't get its head out of its lower regions.

http://thehill.com/special-reports/transportation-a-infrastructure-march-2010/86313-no-unified-visio-leaves-lawmakers-with-a-grab-what-you-can-approach

And I might add, after you read it: that's my boy!

What Really Goes on at College: the humanities are overrated

2010-03-02T14:59:00.001-05:00

Here is a part of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that came out today:

“The results of an important new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments make it clear that the humanities remain popular with students and central to the core mission of many institutions . The bad news: The survey found less-than-rosy job prospects for the rising generation of scholars. The good news: the great majority of the humanities departments surveyed—87 percent—said that their discipline was included in the core requirements at their college or university.”

I would find this article hilarious if it weren’t so sad. But it is a very good example of what is wrong with our university system. There are no jobs for English and History majors and no faculty openings for PhDs in those fields, but nevertheless the humanities survive at universities. How do they survive? By making the humanities offer required courses that every student must take.

There is nothing wrong with the humanities in principle. We imagine that people might learn more about life, to be better people, to understand issues that have plagued mankind, and be able to think well what it means to be human. So the humanities must be good stuff right? Here are some courses picked at random from the Yale catalogue:

ENGL 265b, The Victorian Novel
ENGL 158b, Readings in Middle English: Language and Symbolic Power
ENGL 305b, Austen & Brontë in the World
ENGL 336b, The Opera Libretto
HIST 166Ja, Asian American Women and Gender, 1830 to the Present.
HIST 168Ja, Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present.
HIST 201Ja, The Spartan Hegemony, 404-362 B.C.
HIST 202Ja, Numismatics.

I am sure that these are fine courses taught by serious scholars. But that is exactly my point. When people glorify the study of the humanities they fail to mention that these are scholarly subjects of very little use to the average college student. Universities require that students take them because universities don’t want to fire the professors they already have and they need to teach something. But, with a few exceptions, they are not teaching students to think better about life, they are teaching students about a narrow part of the scholarly domain in which they do research.

Here again we have the clash between the research university and what students expect to learn when they go to college.

The Chronicle of Higher Education represents professors and they think its great news that students are being required to take the courses that professors want to teach. I think this is awful news. Students need to learn to live in the real world. There are very few scholarly jobs so there is no practical reason to teach such courses. If these course teach human skills, as we all assume, that would be great, but they don’t.

Scholars need to stop running universities.

As I have said many times I don’t think Yale has to change. We need to produce some scholars after all. But there are 3000 colleges in the United States all copying Yale’s model.

How can you tell if it is a school or a prison?

2010-02-25T14:07:00.003-05:00

I read a blog (http://essentialemmes.blogspot.com/2010/02/genius-on-education-roger-schank.html) that pointed out that schools and prisons look alike, but there is much more in common between school and prisons than their looks:

1. Students/prisoners (s/p) must stay in the place they have been assigned unless given specific permission by the guards/teachers (g/t)
2. s/p may eat only with permission of g/t
3. s/p may go to the bathroom only with permission of g/t
4. assigned tasks must be completed by s/p
5. questioning the task you have been assigned is not allowed
6. expressing a point of view contrary to the g/t about rules is not allowed
7. the g/t may humiliate an s/p at any time
8. the s/p may intimidate and terrorize other s/p s
9. all recreation is supervised by g/t at specified times
10. reading material is deemed suitable or not by g/t
11. all visitors must be vetted prior to visitation
12. failure to follow the rules will result in punishment
13. failure to behave properly may add extra time onto one’s sentence
14. approval by g/t is determined by extremely arbitrary standards
15. freedom of expression is strictly controlled
16. dress codes are strictly enforced
17. getting the g/t to like you will make your time go more easily
18. resting is not allowed
19. pursuing one’s own interests is not allowed
20. deciding you have better things to do than be in prison or school is definitely not allowed

I realize that not all prisons and school are exactly the same in all this, but you get the idea.

How the U of Alabama at Huntsville murder story highlights the disaster that is our university system

2010-02-15T15:11:00.000-05:00

In my last column I discussed the problems caused by our notion that universities must be populated by researchers who are working on finding out new things and publishing about those things, instead of seriously teaching.
If it takes a murder to make clear what the problem is, then consider the case of Amy Bishop “a Harvard-educated biology professor who felt she had unfairly been denied tenure,” who recently murdered her colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
The Chronicle of Higher Education says that “The dean of the chemistry department, William N. Setzer, described Ms. Bishop as smart but weird. As for why she had been turned down for tenure, Mr. Setzer said he had heard that her publication record was thin and that she hadn't secured enough grants. Also, there were concerns about her personality, he said. In meetings, Mr. Setzer remembered, she would go off on "bizarre" rambles about topics not related to tasks at hand—"left-field kind of stuff," he said.”
I have been on enough tenure committees to know that the real reason she was turned down for tenure was that people thought she was nuts. But that is really unimportant. Why does it matter that a faculty member have a publication record at a university that is very far from being one of the top research universities in the country? Why do students at such a school need to be taught by Harvard PhDs whose specialty is neuroscience when they are studying biology?
Students at schools like this study biology prior to going into a field in the health sciences because they are required to do so. Why does it matter that their teachers have a research track record in a specialty that in no way relates to the needs of the students? Why do we keep pretending that every university in the U.S is a serious research university? When do we start demanding a curriculum and teachers who teach things that students actually will need to know how to do in their future lives? Can’t we just let Harvard and Yale etc train researchers and let the other schools train citizens?
According to the Chronicle: Nick Lawton, the son of Professor called her a competent lecturer who was willing to help students who needed it. But her teaching was "not inspired."
Her teaching is not once mentioned as a possible reasons for her tenure denial because I am sure it was hardly even considered. Who cares if a professor at a teaching institution is any good at teaching? Not the system. What they care about, even at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, is how many grants she had gotten and how many papers she had published.
The system is so stupid it is beyond comprehension.
People all over the country are reading about this situation and I think they need to understand the underlying real issue. Yes there are crazy people who do crazy things. But the system encourages professors to worry about all the wrong things. The idea that all professors must publish and get grants creates awful teachers, and irrelevant courses, and unhappy students, (as well as some really miserable professors.)

“What’s new here?”: how academic research has ruined our education system

2010-02-09T12:39:00.001-05:00

I gave a speech in Barcelona last week. (Actually I gave a lot of speeches in Barcelona last week.) In one that was meant for the general public, at least I thought that that was who was in the audience, I was asked a question about what was new in what I had said. I was speaking about the new experiential MBA program we are developing for La Salle University, in Barcelona, which will be soon available as on an on line web mentored degree program. And, I was talking about the 16 cognitive processes that need to be mastered in order to think and how they are used in our new MBA. A member of the audience, who identified himself as a professor at a local university, asked “what is new here?” The question took me aback. Last I heard, the world was offering classrooms, lectures, tests, and courses as a way of teaching people, not degree programs that were entirely on line project-based learning in a story centered curriculum. I had no idea how to respond. The question was beyond absurd. My colleague, Sebastian Barajas, who had presented before me and speaks the local language, jumped in and answered the question. I was relying upon simultaneous translation and got most of what was said but not all. Whatever he responded however, was not sufficient to quiet this man and he came back again with more or less the same question. I responded without mercy. Needless to say, impolite behavior is not well loved in Europe. No one who knows me has ever thought of me as being especially polite, but my response was over the top, even for me.

A flurry of twitters and blog chatter (in Spanish) later erupted about this, for example see:

http://trabajocolaborativoenred.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/no-todo-el-mundo-quiere-a-roger-shank/

The summary for those who don’t want to subject themselves to the awfulness of “Google translate” is that some people like me and some don’t -- no surprise. But, what I learned from this blog is that the audience was made up of academics, not the general public, as I had thought.

I had wondered about my own overreaction. I attributed it the fact that I was quite ill at the time having eaten something bad the day before. But after reading the blog I realized what the real issue was and felt the need to write this rather long column.

This is what infuriated me. The question he asked is exactly the question that has killed off our schools. Now it is a long road to my point here, so please bear with me.

Jonathan Cole, the former provost of Columbia University, and a man whom I like and admire, has recently written a book about the research universities in the U.S. that was reviewed in the New York Times on Sunday:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Goldin-t.html

I haven’t read the book, just the review, but I am hardly surprised by, nor do I disagree with, the idea that the research universities in the U.S. are a great treasure and we should endeavor to take care of them. But, that having been said, it is the fault of the research universities that our education system is so awful. And, it is the question “what’s new here” that is the essence of the problem.

Here is what occurs in research universities. Students write PhD theses that are supposed to be original research in their field of choice. I have supervised over 50 PhD theses myself and have read and advised on many more. I am familiar with the process and understand what is wrong with it. This is it:

Think about how many PhD theses are produced each year around the world. Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many of these can really be original (much less be important)? Original is defined as something no one ever wrote before in an area of research. So there are many PhD theses, particularly in Europe, that are simply examinations of what other people have said over the years together with a point of view. Even in the best science universities, PhD theses are often about minutiae so incomprehensible that no one, not even the graduate student who wrote them, will ever look at them again. There are interesting PhD theses of course, but they are few and far between. The old joke
is that a PhD thesis is a paper written by the supervising professor under very difficult conditions.

Why do I mention this? Because it turns out, that the man who had asked this question has just written a PhD thesis in which he had examined various education theories and his conclusion was that since my work is derivative of Plato and Socrates and Dewey, something I am quite proud of by the way, then it wasn’t presenting any new theory, and therefore was not worthy of serious consideration. This is kind of like asking, in a disdainful way, at an unveiling of the new 787, “what is new in theory of flight” here? Only a newly minted PhD would even think such a thing. Real world applications and innovative changes matter a lot.

But in the academic world, the questions are always about theories, and applications are looked down upon, which is odd because no one asks Google what is new here (the answer is not much since the 1950s) but it sure has changed our lives.

Research universities produce PhD students who do original work. This would be just fine and dandy if there were just a few research universities and teaching was not affected by this process. But, while there are maybe 25 serious research universities in the U.S., there are hundreds that think they are research universities and because of that there is pressure for the faculty to do research and publish research. That pressure and that focus is the cause of the awful education system we have in place today around the world. Let me explain.

I will tell about a friend of mine, named Bill Purves. I met Bill Purves when he came to work as a post-doc at my Artificial Intelligence Lab at Yale. (He was a professor of Biology at the time. He has since retired.) People apply to work in prestigious labs all the time, but it is odd to find a biologist who wants to study AI. I was intrigued so I agreed to host him. He had a PhD from Yale and I thought he might just be feeling nostalgic for his old haunts. He had been a professor at what you might call secondary research universities. There are 3000 colleges in the U.S. and the top few hundred at least are trying very hard to act as if they are Harvard and Yale. They hire professors with PhDs from Harvard and Yale who then teach their students what they learned at those places. To put this another way, while the students who go to a state university expect to learn job skills they are being taught research skills and theories which is all that their research university trained professors actually know.

Bill’s research area had to do with some arcane feature of cucumbers. He had been doing work on cucumbers for over 30 years at that point. He wasn’t coming to visit me to learn more about cucumbers.

Bill had recently moved to a more teaching oriented college and had begun to worry about how people learn. We worked on learning at our lab so he came to learn what we knew. But it was pretty unusual to encounter a professor who did research who was so worried about teaching. Professors at research universities are more typically concerned with teaching their PhD students (via the apprenticeship method) than they are with lecturing to undergraduates. They pay their dues by teaching so that they can do their real job - which is research. This is a very common attitude at the research universities.

I am not criticizing here. That was how I felt as well. My job entailed some teaching but was not really teaching. Professors at research universities think about their real work and teach about their real work. This is fine as long as they are training future researchers. They can criticize their students and each other about whether new research being presented is good work and they can compete for getting their papers published and their presentations at conferences taken seriously. But really, do you think that Bill's students in his biology classes cared about cucumbers?

This is a real problem, Students are taught about what interests the professor but what interests the professor bears little relationship to what students came to college to learn. They might want to be psychological counselors but they will be taught about experimental research methods. They may want to become writers but they will be taught about literary theory. They may want to become doctors but they will have to learn about cucumbers, at least they will if a cucumber specialist is teaching the biology course.

Now Bill was not like this at all. In fact he came to Northwestern when I moved there for a another post-doc year to learn more about what we were doing in building courses on the computer. Eventually he became the lead designer in our high school on line health sciences course. You can see him introducing biology here:

http://vista.engines4ed.org/home/index.htm

But Bill is a rare bird. He fundamentally cares about students. Now I am not saying that professors don’t care about students. I am simply saying they care about their research more. If students attend a research university they should know the truth. But Yale and Harvard don’t really explain the research orientation in a way that would help incoming undergraduates to grasp its significance.

I am not concerned about Ivy league students, however. They get a good education any way you look at it. But if every professor in every major university is playing the same game, then students at, for example, the University of Illinois, ought to know that every one of their professors cares more about research than they do about teaching. Students are not told anything like that. This matters because it means that the “what’s new here?” standard of assessing work will emphasize theory over practice every time. Since colleges hire professors trained by research instructions, every university is dominated by an issue that distracts from good teaching. Students want job skills and professors teach rearach skills.

This is why I was furious at this question. 2000 years ago Petronius asked why Roman schools taught so little of what would be useful in everyday life. Nothing has changed precisely because it is intellectuals and not practitioners who dominate the teaching landscape. Students are forced to learn things they have no interest in, in order to get college degrees.

In then end that is why we built a new MBA program. Even MBA programs emphasize theory over practice! This may sound hard to believe but professors in a business school also tend to have PhDs from Harvard and Yale and may never have actually run a business themselves. This is why I was asked to design a new learn by doing MBA program by La Salle. It is a program designed to upset the status quo. No courses, no theories, simply learning how to do what business people do.

What is new there? If this had already been done we wouldn’t have done it. It is new in the same way as the 787 is new. It is useful and important because it changes the way education works, not because it presents a new theory.

We must fight against the university professors who wish to dominate the discussion of what education should be like. Research professors should be encouraged to do research but do there really need to be so many of them? 25 research universities is a fine number for the U.S. Spain should have maybe one. But if every professor feels obliged to publish more about his work on cucumbers the world loses its best teachers. Bill Purves understands that and he devoted the end of his career to teaching -- not to cucumbers.

this just in from the AP wire...

2010-01-19T11:57:00.002-05:00

"Obama sees the use of student test scores to judge teacher performance and the creation of charter schools, which are funded with public money but operate independently of local school boards, as solutions to the problems that plague public education."

Really? What a great idea. Except, I wonder, shouldn't we stop calling them "teachers" and start calling them "test prep coaches? "

And shouldn't we just forget about charter schools as an alternative to state run schools since Obama wants to make sure they are just like every other school?

I am not sure why Obama wants to kill off all education innovation, but he is doing a very good job of it.

Now is the time to help build a new education system

2010-01-11T09:35:00.002-05:00

We will open alternative learning places (ALPs) around the country in september 2011. We have begun to build the engineering ALP first grade curriculum. At this moment the web site is up but crude (www.alternativelearningplace.com). Soon it will be better organized. Anyone who wants to help should contact me. We need help from people who want to set one up in their city or town. And, we need help from those who want to help us build the curriculum. Many people have volunteered their time already. The more the better.

Even a 7 year old knows how to re-design first grade

2009-12-29T09:13:00.002-05:00

I have been thinking about what we will do in our new Alternative Learning Places in first grade. I was talking with someone who may work with us on this and she in turn asked her 7 year old nephew what projects he would like to in school and what he thought he might learn from those projects. Here is some of what he suggested:

1. Model rocket
How far can we shoot it? How do we measure height? How do we measure distance? How fast is it going?

2. Rubberband Model airplane out of wood
How can we get it to fly more than 17 yards in the sky? What happens if we take off wings, wheels, back wings? Can the stick fly without wings?

3. How high can we build a building? With wheels so we can move it everywhere when we want to.

5. Model truck
How much can the truck carry? How far can it go with a lot of weight in it.

6. Money
How sell and buy things and count money.

7. Build robots that walk until they run out of battery. See how many miles they can go.

8. Make a remote control airplane or helicopter.

9. Build a catapult.

11. Make a model sail boat, remote control moves the flag to change directions in the wind.

12. Map & Compass to find a treasure inside and outside

So, I guess the message is that a bright seven year old has a better idea of what a good first grade curriculum would be than does any Education Department in any State.

Hana reminded me that Milo will have to go to school soon

2009-12-22T14:52:00.003-05:00

Milo will enter first grade in September 2011.

I find this news so frightening I hardly know where to start. It is time for me to start building an alternative. This is the plan. We will construct an on line First Grade curriculum. What we will build is actually a teacher's guide on what to do and how to do it. We will not be building a school at all. It will be an Alternative Learning Place (ALP), housed wherever we can find the space. We will build many ALPs but the first one will be for MIlo so I have started to plan a curriculum for him. We plan on having 12 boys in each ALP with a teacher. The ALP day will focus around projects and activities and will, of course, all be learning by doing. Here are the activities I am thinking about right now:

First Grade Activities (all of which focus on reading, writing, speaking, arithmetic, and working with others, in context)

Robot building
Airplane building
Bridge Building
Kite Flying
City Planning
Food Preparation
Map Drawing
Football, Basketball, Soccer, and Baseball
Newsletter Writing
Computer Use
Diagnosis of Illness and Treatment
Orchestra
Spanish language
Movie Making
Trip Planning

We will build other activities for kids with other interests than these, including ones for girls. They will be located in places where the private school tuition is prohibitively expensive and the public schools are considered unusable. New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. and South Florida are my first thoughts. If you have a 4 or 5 year old and are thinking about 2011, write to me. We will have to charge tuition I am afraid but should be able to charge a lot less than the fancy private schools.

what college should I go to? (The concept of a “hot college.”)

2009-12-17T13:55:00.000-05:00

The Daily Beast posted a list of “hot colleges” the other day which reminded me of exactly how insane this country has become about going to college. It is actually quite difficult to choose what college to attend. But, as a retired professor I find the concept of a “hot college” rather amusing. I can recall, when I was working at Yale, that every now and then, Brown was determined to be hotter than Yale. It was hard to fathom what this might mean. We had the same faculty we had the previous year, more or less, as did Brown. The quality of students was more or less the same at both schools. The campus hadn’t changed. How did Brown get hot, and then, later, get less hot?

When I was working at Northwestern, one year we were suddenly “hot.” This time I knew why. Our football team had played in the Rose Bowl the year before. This is, of course, a very clever way to choose a college – by examining the quality of its football team.

As a professor one is aware of other faculty in one’s field and in allied fields all across the world. Ask any professor about another university and he will judge the quality of that school by the quality of the faculty he knows or has heard of who teach there. This is not a bad measure, although it is an idiosyncratic one. Thus, I was surprised to find, on the Daily Beast’s top 15 list, some schools that I had either never heard of or certainly could not name a single faculty member there, namely: Elon University, University of Georgia, Washington and Lee, Ohio Wesleyan, University of St. Andrews.

Now, I have no ability to judge the quality of these schools, nor do I have any interest in disparaging them. I am concerned instead with the folly surrounding college entrance and college choice. So with that in mind what makes these schools “hot?”

According to the Daily Beast:

Elon is hot because: “Elon has gone out of its way to recruit applicants interested in the sciences by luring them with the possibility of undergraduate research,”

Ohio Wesleyan University is hot because: “Loren Pope’s called OW, “one of the best academic bargains in the country.”

University of St. Andrews is hot because: “More than a third of the students at St. Andrews’ come from abroad, and one academic year’s fees total less than $25,000.”

Washington and Lee is hot because: “funds went to establishing the merit-based Johnson Scholarships, which promise a full ride to about one-tenth of freshmen each year.”

University of Georgia is hot because: “$2.9 billion in aid has been meted out to students in the past 15 years.”

Clearly hotness has something to do with price, but that doesn’t explain why any state university isn’t considered hot in comparison to any private university since they are far cheaper and often quite good. And that certainly wouldn’t explain why Brown was hotter than Yale every now and again.

I found “being able to do undergraduate research” to be the funniest explanation of hotness. Why is that important exactly? And if it is important to a student, wouldn’t that be the kind of student who ought to attend a research university?

College counselors, the media, and the general paranoia about college that runs through the high schools these days, has made college selection a complex and frightening busyness. So here, without regard to “hotness” I will make a few points about how to choose a college.

1. Don’t put yourself in debt to go to college. Price does matter. If you can’t afford Yale, don’t attend Yale.
2. Know what a college actually offers. Attend a research university because you think you might want to do research in later life. A list of the top 50 research universities can be found in U.S. News and World Report. They are mostly the extended Ivies and the important state Universities. If you aren’t interested in research go somewhere else. I know that Yale is a nice brand name. If you want a brand name, go there, But there are plenty of places that will educate you as well.
3. Know what you want to be educated in. Do not go to college with no idea of what you want to learn about or are interested in doing later on. If you do that you will major in “sex and drugs and rock and roll” like everyone else and you will waste your time and your parent’s money. You can always put off college until you do know what you are interested in learning.
4. When you think you know what you want to learn find out if the people who are good at what you want to do actually teach that at the place you want to go. People say that schools are “good schools” without having a clue what the criteria might be. What is good for you may not be good for the next guy. You must know what the school is good at teaching. Find out.
5. Choose a place that looks like you. Visit. See what the students look like. They differ from place to place for many reasons. Find out where you feel comfortable.

Do not go to college because everyone you know is going to college. Go with a purpose. And -- avoid “hot schools.”

Let the parents vote for their favorite curriculum

2009-12-17T11:38:00.000-05:00

There was article in the Huffington Post today headlined: "Merry Hyatt, Tea Party Patriot, Wants Mandatory Christmas Carols In Public Schools". Apparently she has proposed an initiative to the California Legislature that "would require schools to provide children the opportunity to listen to or perform Christmas carols, and would subject the schools to litigation if the rule isn't followed."

Now you might think I would be against this, but I love the concept. Let's determine the school curriculum by having the public suggest stuff that they like a lot and make all the kids do it. We could make all kids watch TV because the public likes doing that. We could have kids read magazines about movie star's lives because many parents like doing that. We could have a going to Burger King curriculum because lots of people like doing that.

Perhaps this is the way we can finally get rid of algebra, chemistry, history, and the other nonsense they teach in school. Let's let the public vote on their favorite activities and we can have kids do those all day.

Christmas Carols instead of algebra. It works for me.

Alex Trebek: hero of vocabulary preparation

2009-12-06T10:11:00.003-05:00

I was waiting for a football game to come on TV and there was Alex Trebek selling a vocabulary building software program. It was one of those half hour infomericals which was packed with the most amazing garbage about education ever assembled in one half hour. It seems that the company he was touting, Wordsmart, was founded by a "world renowned educator" named David A. Kay. I thought I knew all the world renowned educators. Even google seems to have missed this guy. He sells a piece of software that will not only get your kids great SAT scores and get them into Harvard, but also guarantees (not really, they just make it sound that way) them a high paying job. (This last nugget is based on the idea that Harvard graduates make more money on average than Joe Schmoe.) And will this all be done by building your child's vocabulary. And why is it important to build your child's vocabulary? Because people who succeed have large vocabularies.

Wow!

I guess people must believe this nonsense so I checked to see what the software did. Predictably, it tells you a word and than asks you some multiple choice questions about it. It is has many ways of doing this but drill and practice is just drill and practice by any other name. They are making enough money on this to be able to buy half hour spots on national TV. (And they are able to buy Alex Trebek!)

Now, I assume that most of my regular readers would know why this is nonsense, but in case you happened onto this site randomly, here is the point. Because successul people have large vocabularies it does not mean that if you have a large vocabulary you will become successful. Vocabularies are acquired quite naturally by speaking to people and by writing to people and by reading by otherwise interacting verbally with people who have vocabularies a little larger than one's own. This is how we learn words naturally.

This is pretty much the only way to acquire a large vocabulary. You can try to memorize the dictionary if you like, which is more or less what this software is about, but if you don't use the words regularly you will forget them.

Another piece of nonsense brought to you by those wonderful folks who believe that testing and education are the same thing.

Don't worry. Mr. Obama will fix the stupidity problem with more math and science

2009-11-24T11:33:00.004-05:00

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education, just in time, we have the Obama administration deciding that:

Corporate donors encouraged by the Obama administration will spend at least $260-million over the next four years to help improve student achievement in mathematics and science through specially designed television programs and video games.

The plan, announced today by President Obama, will include new television programming fromSesame Street and Discovery Communications, as well as video games developed by Sony and other members of the Entertainment Software Association.

Sounds like a plan: get the voters who can't think (as illustrated below) to be able to think by teaching math and science to them. It's just that they didn't take enough algebra. That's why they can't explain why they like Sarah Palin.

The product of our education system looks like this..

2009-11-24T04:45:00.001-05:00

Does anyone wonder why politicians like voters to stay stupid?

Duncan talks eloquently and kids lose

2009-11-19T14:33:00.006-05:00

While the testing companies make great profits, the nation’s newspapers, having a vested interest in those profits, tout testing as the country’s salvation. The most visible touter is, of course Secretary of Education Duncan, who gives eloquent speeches that are, of course, printed in the Washington Post (who owns Kaplan Testing) . Here is an excerpt from one of them given in September, together with my comments:

Let’s build a law that respects the honored, noble status of educators – who should be valued as skilled professionals rather than mere practitioners and compensated accordingly.   

Duncan is saying that teachers are wonderful people so therefore it follows that No Child Left Behind is a great law.

Let us end the culture of blame, self-interest and disrespect that has demeaned the field of education. Instead, let’s encourage, recognize, and reward excellence in teaching and be honest with each other about its absence.  

Then he says that we should like teachers a lot because they will help raise test scores.

Let us build a law that demands real accountability tied to growth and gain in the classroom – rather than utopian goals – a law that encourages educators to work with children at every level – and not just the ones near the middle who can be lifted over the bar of proficiency with minimal effort. That’s not education. That’s game-playing tied to bad tests with the wrong goals.   

Then he says there should be accountability which is the code word for testing that makes it sound like it doesn’t mean that number 2 pencils and bubble sheets are what education will be all about.

Let us build a law that discourages a narrowing of curriculum and promotes a well-rounded education that draws children into sciences and history, languages and the arts in order to build a society distinguished by both intellectual and economic prowess.  

Then he says that the curriculum should be exactly what it always has been and no other ideas will be accepted.

Let us build a law that brings equity and opportunity to those who are economically disadvantaged, or challenged by disabilities or background – a law that finally responds to King’s inspiring call for equality and justice from the Birmingham jail and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  

Next he argues that black people should have good schools. Does anyone disagree with that? What is his plan? More testing.

Let us build an education law that is worthy of a great nation – a law that our children and their children will point to as a decisive moment in America’s history – a law that inspires a new generation of young people to go into teaching – and inspires all America to shoulder responsibility for building a new foundation of growth and possibility.  I ask all of us here today – and in school buildings and communities across America -- to roll up our sleeves and work together and get beyond differences of party, politics and philosophy. 

Next he argues that a good education law would encourage good people to become teachers. While that is true, he certainly isn’t proposing such a law.

Let us finally and fully devote ourselves to meeting the promises embedded in our founding documents – of equality, opportunity, liberty – and above all -- the pursuit of happiness.  More than any other issue, education is the civil rights issue of our generation and it can’t wait -- because tomorrow won’t wait – the world won’t wait – and our children won’t wait.

Then he equates education with civil rights, which means mostly that he is looking to woo the black vote.

Impressively said. Duncan can sure talk. But the speech means nothing and flies in the face of reality. This is all a justification for continuing the policies of the Bush administration in education. Why would Obama want to do the same thing as Bush did especially when he campaigned against No Child Left Behind as I pointed out earlier? The answer is simple. There has been lots of money invested in testing by powerful players that Obama doesn't want to offend. Sadly, the kids are no one’s main concern.

We voted for change (in education) remember that Mr. Obama?

2009-11-05T05:19:00.005-05:00

Here is a piece from then Senator Obama’s education speech given during his campaign in Dayton Ohio in 2008:

We will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st century economy. We'll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that's how we'll make sure they're prepared for today's workplace.

Some advisor of his had read my writings obviously and was quoting me on that one. I usually say reasoning and not critical thinking, but this is taken from my book Dynamic Memory Revisited, Cambridge University Press, 1999:

Learning to communicate, function with others, and reason, are the most important parts of any curriculum

I talk about this constantly and am quoted about it constantly:

http://everything2.com/title/Roger+Schank%2527s+Learning+by+Doing+Meets+Case-Based+Reasoning

http://kamccollum.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/school-is-profoundly-broken-roger-schank-visits-byu/

And what has the President actually done? Zero. Zip. Nada.

He said in that same speech:

And don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend most of the year preparing him to fill in a few bubbles on a standardized test. I don't want teachers to be teaching to the test. I don't want them uninspired and I don't want our students uninspired.

Uh huh. Did he change No Child Left Behind? No. Of course not. Testing dominates education as much as it ever did.

We are killing off anther generation of students Mr. Obama.

Do something.

Madrassas, Indoctrination, Education and Kristof

2009-10-30T07:18:00.002-04:00

It is always disappointing when a writer who says sensible things about most issues decides to turn off his brain when it comes to education. I complained about a nonsensical article about education in the New York Times written by Nicholas Kristof a few months again, and now he has gone off and done it again. He is writing about spending less money on troops in Afghanistan and the suggests that that money should be spent on education. Kristof:

Since 9/11, the United States has spent $15 billion in Pakistan, mostly on military support, and today Pakistan is more unstable than ever. In contrast, Bangladesh, which until 1971 was a part of Pakistan, has focused on education in a way that Pakistan never did. Bangladesh now has more girls in high school than boys. (In contrast, only 3 percent of Pakistani women in the tribal areas are literate.) Those educated Bangladeshi women joined the labor force, laying the foundation for a garment industry and working in civil society groups like BRAC and Grameen Bank. That led to a virtuous spiral of development, jobs, lower birth rates, education and stability. That’s one reason Al Qaeda is holed up in Pakistan, not in Bangladesh, and it’s a reminder that education can transform societies.

Why am I complaining? This seems reasonable enough. Indeed, Kristof is usually reasonable. And then he says:
When I travel in Pakistan, I see evidence that one group — Islamic extremists — believes in the transformative power of education. They pay for madrassas that provide free schooling and often free meals for students. They then offer scholarships for the best pupils to study abroad in Wahhabi madrassas before returning to become leaders of their communities. What I don’t see on my trips is similar numbers of American-backed schools. It breaks my heart that we don’t invest in schools as much as medieval, misogynist extremists. For roughly the same cost as stationing 40,000 troops in Afghanistan for one year, we could educate the great majority of the 75 million children worldwide who, according to Unicef, are not getting even a primary education. We won’t turn them into graduate students, but we can help them achieve literacy. Such a vast global education campaign would reduce poverty, cut birth rates, improve America’s image in the world, promote stability and chip away at extremism. Education isn’t a panacea, and no policy in Afghanistan is a sure bet. But all in all, the evidence suggests that education can help foster a virtuous cycle that promotes stability and moderation. So instead of sending 40,000 troops more to Afghanistan, how about opening 40,000 schools?

On the surface this seems right, but it is very wrong. Americans have the view that Pakistan is full of terrorists and people who take money from the U.S. and make no good use of it. There is some truth to this I assume, but Pakistan is also full of very reasonable and intelligent people who behave a lot like people in the US. They go to good schools in Pakistan, they run successful business there, and they worry about fixing their country. I have been to Pakistan a few times, always talking about education and am usually very well received. I have talked with Mushareff and with various ministers in the government on many occasions. I am on the board of a private school there that is trying very hard to make great and innovative schooling available around the country.

I have never visited a Madrassa but I have seen the kids that go to Madrassas and they look happy and healthy. Here is a picture I took:

What is the issue here? The issue is indoctrination.
Madrassas have a goal. Their goal is make the kids that attend them believe certain things that the teachers are sure is true and to think and behave in certain ways in their every day lives. In short, Madrassas, like many other religiously run schools, know what the end product should be and they have a long history of being successful in creating what they want. The fact that we don’t like what they produce is irrelevant.
When Kristof says he wants to build more schools what he means, apart from the obvious -- getting kids capable of reading and simple math -- is to create more schools like the ones we have in the U.S. In the U.S. we have thousands of schools where kids are packed in like sardines learning a set of subjects will neither help them live their

lives reasonably nor help them to make a living. The education they receive is all about getting them into college, which is pretty irrelevant for the majority of the students who just need to be able to function well after graduation.

We offer indoctrination in our schools too. We constantly indoctrinate our children to believe that college is very important and that memorizing facts to help them pass tests is how to get there. This is the system we would be exporting and it is even more useless in Pakistan than it is the U.S. Just saying the magic education word is of no

help Mr. Kristof. You actually have to understand the difference between education and indoctrination. Madrassas do it and the U.S. schools do it too. You are saying that we should indoctrinate Pakistani students with our kind of indoctrination.
I say we should consider what learning is really about is, help our children learn things that are, or will be, important to them. (This would not include say -- our indoctrination about the significance of Algebra or the wonderfulness of our glorious history.) Build a school that does that, use it to help our own children learn, and then export that.
The U.S. schools aren’t as good as Madrassas. They have no goal, they don’t know what they want to produce and they have no agenda at all except raising test scores. How would spending millions on building these kinds of schools, the ones with the horrific drop out rates, and the pregnant students, and the drug dealers on campus, be a good thing? We are not doing so well over here in education. (The Beaconhouse School in Pakistan is every bit as innovatve as any school we have in the U.S.) Here is a picture of me helping the teachers at Beaconhouse think about learning:

what cognitive science tells us about what we really need to learn

2009-10-17T08:35:00.000-04:00

We have all gone to school. We all know that school is organized around academic subjects like math, English, history and science. Why?

It is not easy to question something that everyone takes for granted. It is especially not easy when the very source of all our concerns in education can be easily traced to this one decision: to organize school around academic subjects. How else might school be organized? There is an easy answer to this: organize school around thought processes. In 1892, when the American high school was designed, we didn’t know much about thought processes. Now we do. It is time to re-think school.

School, at every age, needs to be designed around these processes, since it is through these processes that everyone learns. Academic subjects are irrelevant to real learning. They are not irrelevant to the education of academics of course. But, how many people really want to need to become experts in the academic fields?

Here is a list of the sixteen critical thinking processes. These processes are as old as the human race itself. The better one is at doing them the better one survives:

The Sixteen Cognitive Processes that Underlie All Learning

Conscious Processes

1. Prediction: determining what will happen next
2. Judgment: deciding between choices
3. Modeling: figuring out how things work
4. Experimentation: coming to conclusions after trying things out
5. Describing: communicating one’s thoughts and what has just happened to others
6. Managing: organizing people to work together towards a goal

Subconscious processes

1. Step by Step: knowing how to perform a complex action
2. Artistry: knowing what you like
3. Values: deciding between things you care about

Analytic Processes

1. Diagnosis: determining what happened from the evidence
2. Planning: determining a course of action
3. Causation: understanding why something happened

Mixed processes

1. Influence: figuring out how to get someone else to do something that you want them to do
2. Teamwork: getting along with others when working towards a common goal
3. Negotiation: trading with others and completing successful deals
4. Goal Conflict: managing conflict in such a way as to come out with what you want

All of these processes are part of a small child’s life as well as a high function adult’s life. Education should mean helping people get more sophisticated about doing these things through the acquisition of a case base of experience. Teaching should mean helping people think about their experiences and how to handle these processes better. Unfortunately education and teaching rarely means either of these things in today’s world.

The New York Times misunderstands education again: this time the GED

2009-10-13T13:42:00.003-04:00

The New York Times is at it again, promoting nonsense about education. I can only guees that it owns a test making or grading company because it sure does love this stuff. From today’s editorial:

Millions of Americans are trapped at the margins of the economy because they lack the basic skills that come with a high-school education. This year, more than 600,000 of these people will try to improve their prospects by studying for the rigorous, seven-hour examination known as the General Educational Development test, or G.E.D., which should end in a credential that employers and colleges recognize as the equivalent of a diploma. The most fortunate live in states — such as Delaware, Kansas and Iowa — that have well-managed programs in which 90 percent or more of the test-takers pass. The least fortunate live in New York State, which has the lowest pass rate in the nation, just behind Mississippi. Worse off still are the G.E.D.-seekers of New York City, which has a shameful pass rate — lower than that of the educationally challenged District of Columbia. This bodes ill for the city, where at least one in five adult workers lacks a diploma, and the low-skill jobs that once allowed them to support their families are dwindling.

The New York Times wants to make sure that New York City has great GED courses so poor people can get jobs. For fun, I looked at the web site of the GED testing service. Here are three typical sample questions on a GED:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these rights are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Which of the following political actions violated the principleof “unalienable Rights” of liberty that evolved from the above excerpt of the U.S. Declaration of Independence?

1. In 1857, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling promoted the expansion of slavery in U.S. territories.
2. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed the practice of denying the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude
3. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted women the right to vote nationwide.
4. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment and public accommodations.
5. In 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution extended the right to vote to 18-year-old citizens.

A cook decides to recover some table salt that has been completely dissolved in water. Which of the following processes would be the most effective method of extracting salt from the solution?

1. spinning the solution in a mixer
2. boiling away the water
3. pouring the solution through cloth
4. dripping the solution through a paper filter
5. bubbling oxygen through the solution

In May, I graduated from Prince William Community College. Graduating with an associate of arts degree in horticulture.
Which is the best way to write the italicized portion of these sentences? If the original is the best way, choose option (1).

1. College. Graduating with
2. College, I graduated with
3. College. A graduation with
4. College. Having graduated with
5. College with

I don’t’t know about you, but as an employer I know that I would certianly hire people for low paying jobs if only they could answer these important questions. Perhaps it is time for the Times to notice that employers won’t hire people who can’t do anything useful and that our education system doesn’t teach much that is useful. Pouring money into test passing courses will fix nothing.

Here is the Times again:

New York will need to invest a great deal more than it spends at the moment. But the costs of doing nothing clearly outweigh those of remaking a chaotic and ineffectual system.

Right you are Times. New York needs to invest in real eduation however, not in test prep courses. How is it that the Times is this much out of touch?

George Washington one more time

2009-09-22T16:54:00.000-04:00

I happened on an article in Huffington Post written by someone named Schweitzer who is listed as “having served at the White House during the Clinton Administration as Assistant Director for International Affairs in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.” Here is a piece of what he said:

“The health care debate cannot be understood in historic context because many Americans have never heard of Thomas Jefferson. Extrapolating from state surveys, only 14% of American high school students can name who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Nearly 75% do not know that George Washington was our first president… We can say that our educational system has failed when the vast majority of American students do not know enough to pass an exam to qualify as American citizens.”

Really?

First let’s talk about why we have such a failed system. Could it be the policies of Presidents like Clinton, who pursued a policy of never offending the teacher’s unions by doing anything threatening to them like changing the curriculum?

Or, could it be that fools like you define education in terms of random facts you wish everyone knew? The problem is not that people don’t know who Thomas Jefferson was. If citizens knew who he was would that mean that they can now think clearly and not be Influenced by all the special interests who are trying to tell them what to think? If they knew who George Washington was, what exactly would they know about him? That he could never tell a lie? -- obviously untrue. That he was a brilliant general? Doubtful. That he owned 300 slaves? Not usually mentioned. That he married a rich woman probably so he could get her land? Nah. You are upset because our students don’t know our national myths and some random facts.

I am upset that people can’t think clearly. Surely this is the problem with our so–called national debate on health care. Surely the schools could address this issue. Nah, it would mean giving up on tests that see if students can memorize a right answer.

Children can read any book they want. (Really?)

2009-08-30T12:53:00.001-04:00

The New York Times, in yet another of its front page articles extolling improvements in education is very excited that: “Starting this fall, the school district in Chappaqua, N.Y., is setting aside 40 minutes every other day for all sixth, seventh and eighth graders to read books of their own choosing.”

Woo hoo!

You mean occasionally they will allow children to do something that they are actually interested in doing in school?

Not so fast.

Will students be able to bring in Popular Mechanics or even the New York Times? No, of course not. They will choose books approved by teachers. But, even this appalls the Times approved Bush appointee Diane Ravitch, who is always on the side of everything backward in education. She worries that no “child is going to pick up Moby Dick.”

Indeed.

The Times goes on to say that: “In the method familiar to generations of students, an entire class reads a novel — often a classic — together to draw out the themes and study literary craft. That tradition, proponents say, builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests.”

It didn’t take them long did it? Yea tests.

This is just more baloney intended to make the public feel like things are getting better in schools when In fact things are so bad that no one is happy (except maybe Diane Ravitch.) You can’t allow real choice in school because then you can’t test it to see what kids have done.

I once built a program meant to get kids to learn the geography of the U.S without really trying, as they searched around the country for stuff they were interested in. It worked quite well. Kids loved it and they learned geography.

Nope. Rejected. Why?

Because some students might go to California and others might go to New York. How would we test them? As soon as the tests appear innovation goes out the window. You mean kids would learn different stuff? Omigod!

In any case, this “choose what to read program” is an illusion. It is better than being force fed Moby Dick for sure but what it is the real goal? The Times says; “Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.”

That is the goal. Making kids read a lot in the hope that some of them will like it. Same as the math goal of shoving algebra down their throats in case any one likes it. Kids rarely like what you make them do, or am I the only who has noticed that?

Can you live a long and happy life without having a love of literature? I think so. It is important to learn to read but that does not mean, by any means, that one needs to read “literature.” If it isn’t obvious to people by now, literature will soon be ancient history anyway. While humans have always told stories and always learned from them, they have not always had “literature.” Novels have become common place for a very brief moment in human history and are now clearly being replaced by television and movies (for better or for worse, that is what is happening.)

Teachers and politicians hate this of course. What I hate is that the idea of discussing life choices and issues in getting along in this world, which is a positive benefit of discussing literature, can only be done by reading Moby Dick according to the experts. There are any other ways to do learn to think about life.

We have, as a society, lost the forest for the trees. While we could be teaching deeply about why they do what they do, instead we are teaching them to pass tests. We insist that they learn what was fashionable for the elite to learn a century ago. And we torture them and wonder why they drop out. Moby Dick indeed!

The "myth" of educational reform

2009-08-26T08:51:00.003-04:00

The Obama administration is very busy bemoaning the "myths' that the general public believes about their proposed health care package. In a recent statement they mentioned myths such as: "About five out of 10 believe the federal government will become directly involved in making personal health care decisions." and "Roughly six out of 10 Americans believe taxpayers will be required to pay for abortions."

Who is to blame for the fact that the American public cannot separate truth from myth and cannot think their way out of a paper bag? Here is my best guess: the schools. The schools do not teach people how to think, how to discern truth, or how to figure out what the real agenda of talk show hosts might be. They learn algebra, and they analyze Shakespeare, and they memorize physics formulas, and still they can't think. Amazing!

Could we try teaching them to think so that they won't believe "myths?" Apparently not. Mr. Obama insists on a national curriculum and more testing on the same old crap. Rest assured Mr. President, that future Presidents will have to deal with these kinds of myths as well, because the students you will be creating will be just as incapable of thinking as the citizens that you have to deal with now on a daily basis.

Answering: “what should I go to school for?”

2009-08-12T03:28:00.001-04:00

These days one can easily find out how people get to one’s website. My outrage column is often found via the question "what should I go to school for?" This question drives the answer seeker to my column on “why little girls shouldn’t go to school,” which is certainly not what they were looking for. (Of course, I don’t think little boys should go to school either, in case you were wondering.)

So, I thought I would attempt to answer their question since people keep asking it. The problem is that the question is ambiguous. They could be asking why go to school at all and they could be asking what should I study in school? As I have no idea which meaning predominates, I will take a shot at answering both questions. I will make the assumption that the people asking these questions are in high school and perhaps thinking about going to college

Why go to school at all?

In a society other than the one in which we live, this is a very good question. I think school, as it exists today, is a very bad idea. Still, I would be remiss in answering this question by saying drop out. Drop outs are viewed badly in our society. School is stupid, but dropping out is stupider. Why? Because, as one travels through life one accumulates a set of accomplishments. Quitting, no matter what you quit, is never a great accomplishment. Unless, of course, you quit for something better. If have a good plan that will net you something better and enable you to say I quit to start Microsoft or the equivalent, by all means quit. One learns very little of value in high school. Still the credential entitles you to a minimal amount of respect that you may need at some point. So stick it out if you can.

Now to the more important question. What should you study in high school, or more importantly, because there are more choices, in college? Let’s start with what you shouldn’t study. Study no academic subject. Do not study English, History, Math, Physics, Biology, or any of the other standard subjects that one always starts with in high school. Whoa! Did I really say that? Heresy. So, why not then?

It is important to realize that there are many myths in our society and that these myths are usually offered by people who stand to gain if people believe in them. The you must drink 8 glasses of water a day myth, for example, is offered up by companies that sell bottled water. In school the significance of studying literature, or mathematics, or history, or science, is offered up by those who teach those subjects, those who make a living testing those subjects, and more importantly by book publishers and others who have serious vested interests in selling things related to those subjects. In addition, the educated elite, having been educated in those subjects, can pooh pooh anyone who doesn’t know them and keep the high ground for themselves. If you don’t know what they know you can’t be much. This attitude has always been with us, in every society, but the subjects change. Sometimes the subject is religion, sometimes astrology, sometimes some secret knowledge that only the village elders have. These days it is literature, which certainly won’t last, mathematics, which makes hardly any sense at all in the age of computers, and history, which never made any sense since history is written by those who come out bets in the telling . Science seems to be making a big move these days. When I was young science was for geeks and those who knew it were looked down upon by the people who knew important stuff. Things change.

There is, not surprisingly, a serious lack of employment possibilities in those areas of study. So many people have been pushed to study those subjects that there is a serious oversupply of job seekers who were English majors, for example. It should not be possible to be an English major, but tell that to English professors.

So what should you go to school for? This is really an easy question to answer. First ask yourself what you really like to do in life, what you think about on a regular basis, whom you admire, and whom you wish to be? Only you can answer those questions. When you come up with answers, ask if there are jobs in that area. Be creative. Make up a job if you don’t think one exists. Ask what you need to learn to do in order to become a person who thinks about or does all day whatever it is you like to think about and do all day. Extrapolate up. If you like working on your car, maybe you would like working on airplanes or ships for example. If you like hanging out and talking, ask yourself who gets paid to do that (salesmen?). Find out where those who do what seems to be fun learned to do it. Often the answer is “on the job.” If that is the answer ask yourself how you can get a low level job in that area and work your way up. People learn by doing. Ask how you can start doing.

If you do need training to start doing what you want, find a community college that offers that kind of training. Most of all do not go to school if you have no inkling at all about what you think you would like to learn to do. Work for a while and start finding out more about the world, then ask the above questions again.

In the U.S. most people go to college immediately after high school. My experience as a professor was that those students who did something else, who went into the army, the Peace Corps, traveled around, worked for a while and such, made much better students in college. They knew why they were there. Do not go to school if the only reason you are there is to get a degree. Wrong reason. Know yourself first, then learn what you need to know that will make you become a person who you would respect.

What is Wrong with Trying to Raise Test Scores? Five short answers.

2009-07-19T09:30:00.004-04:00

I had the opportunity to meet with the great test score promoters in Washington but turned it down. What would be the point? The entire administration is devoted to raising test scores. I would convince no political person to change his or her view. That having been said, what could be really be wrong with testing and emphasizing test scores?

Testing teaches that there are right answers. The problem is that is that in real life, the important questions don’t have answers that are clearly right or wrong. "Knowing the answer" has made school into Jeopardy. It is nice to win a game show, but important decisions are made through argumentation and force of reason not knowing the right answer.

Testing teaches that some subjects are more important than others. The tests are small in number. If there were thousands to choose from, then perhaps people could get tested in fiber optics instead of history. But the system has determined which subjects are the most important. Just remember that the system made that determination in 1892. Some things have changed in the world since then. No one in Washington seems to have noticed.

Testing focuses teachers on winning not teaching. Many teachers are extremely frustrated by the system they have found themselves to be a part of. They cannot afford to spend time teaching a student or getting a concept across if the issues being taught are not on the tests. They are judged on the basis of test scores. So, any rational teacher gives up teaching and becomes a kind of test preparation coach.

Students learn that memorization is more important than thinking. Teaching students to reason ought to be the beginning and end of what education is about But in an answer-obsessed world, "go figure it out for yourself" or "go try it and see what happens" are replaced by more memorization. Giving kids a chance to fail helps them learn. Actively preventing failure by telling the right answer just helps kids pass tests.

Innovation in education is eliminated. How can we offer new curricula and new ways of learning if no matter what we do children must pass algebra tests? The administration says science is important over and over again but since science in high school is defined by boring tests of vocabulary terms and definitions for the most part, who would be excited to learn science? If a really good scientific reasoning curriculum were created the schools could not offer it unless it helped kids pass the very same tests that that curriculum was intended to replace.

Oh. One more thing. Testing also reduces knowledge to short answers like the ones I have given here. In reality, serious argumentation is much more lengthy.

My Transportation Policy son sends me a job announcement about Education

2009-07-15T14:05:00.004-04:00

My son, who works in transportation policy in Washington, forwarded the following announcement to me:

Job Announcement for Executive Director
The nation's largest coalition of education associations seeks new executive director
starting January 1, 2010. The Committee for Education Funding (CEF), established in 1969, is a strong, unified voice in support of federal education funding, ranging from pre-school to postgraduate education in both public and private systems.

I wrote back saying that I was against federal funding for education and he responded that of course I was right. This is a funny thing for someone who works on funding issues in transportation to say. What is the difference between transportation and education?

Highways that don't connect to highways in other states would be a problem for the country. Airlines that followed different rules in each state would create chaos. That is why we have a federal government. Making rules about infrastructure is critical. But education is not infrastructure. States can, and should, have different rules. Farming matters in some places and managing casinos matters in another. Some states have aircraft jobs and some have marine related jobs.

The federal government, nevertheless, insists on national standards, treating everyone the same, which usually means lots of algebra and literature for some unknown reason.

The President announced $12 billion in funding for community colleges the other day. Yippee, Yahoo. Real education for real people related to real jobs.

Uh oh. Maybe he means to impose national standards on community colleges too. Please don't do that Mr. President. Community Colleges are not interstate highways.

all opinions all the time aided by technology

2009-07-10T03:14:00.004-04:00

I read an article the other day about a 3 year old child talking on a cell phone and infuriating the doctor he was going to see by walking right past him while talking. The writer of this article was asking for people to express their opinions about it.

We live in a world where all opinions are equally valid and must be expressed.We also live in a world where children must all have cell phones and will imitate their parents who likely treat their phone call as more important than the people they are having dinner with. This is the technological world we have created. I am all for new technology of course, but at some point we need to ask software companies to start creating intelligent applications for that technology.If kids are going to play with electronic gadgets at dinner, could we at least make the software on them something that opens their minds in some way? When we build e-learning software could we try to make it better than school and not worse? When we report news constantly could we be done with Michael Jackson in something less than all day every day for weeks in every country in the world?

The fault is, of course, due to Google and Microsoft. They have plenty of smart software people whose main intention, it seems, is to beat the hell out their competitors. How about harnessing their abilities to help education?

We are heading for a time when no one talks to anyone except via technology any more. This wouldn't be so awful if they had anything of interest to say. Everyone expresses their opinion all the time. No one gets any smarter as a result. (Me too.)

Duncan and Obama are actively inhibiting education change that is meaningful

2009-06-15T13:03:00.006-04:00

Bill Maher made an important statement last week when he criticized President Obama for failing to do much to satisfy those who had voted for him.

"But when I read about how you sat on the sidelines while bailed-out banks used the money we gave them to hire lobbyists who got Congress to stop homeowners from getting renegotiated loans, or how Congress is already giving up on healthcare reform, or how scientists say it's essential to reduce CO2 by 40% in 10 years, but your own bill calls for 4%, I say, enough with the character development, let's get on with the plot."

But Maher left out education. How is our President doing on education? His education secretary has announced plans for national standards:

"This Sunday Duncan proposed a system in which schools signing on to the standardized benchmark will benefit from a $350 million pot aimed at assisting in the development of the new test needed to measure the potentially nationalized educational standards."

He has also announced his intention to lengthen the school day and school year with the express intent of helping students prepare for tests.

Or, to put this another way. The President has so failed on education already that his failures on banking, health care, and the climate pale by comparison, He has effectively said, to people like me, who are actually trying to make real change in the schools: forget your ideas about teaching modern subjects (like scientific reasoning, medical decision making, internet startups, or how to take care of a child) because we are going to continue to ram the algebra, US history, and science facts formulas view of education down everyone's throats and will actively prevent meaningful change. And forget learning by doing. There will be none of that. There will learning by memorizing.

WHY?

I asked my sources in the White House. "We are trying to get re-elected here. The voters care about test scores." That is what they said. Really.

Bill Maher, you don't realize how bad it really is.

Why students major in history and not science

2009-06-09T08:44:00.002-04:00

My 25 year-old niece offered to drive a friend of mine to the airport. As she was leaving she returned to get a bottle of water. She said she needed to stay hydrated. I asked her is she was planning on taking the long route through the Gobi Desert. She seemed confused. I told her to look up the 8 glasses of water a day myth on the web. She is a young lady who fights big corporations with her every breath yet she had bought into the bottled water company’s campaigns to make everyone carry water with them at all times. She was truly astonished to find out she was being manipulated.

I had less success with two other college students in recent weeks, both of whom had decided to be history majors because “history teaches you everything.” Now I have nothing against history or history majors, although I suspect that are way too many of them for the available historian jobs out there. But I couldn’t help but note that these kids had been sold history in the same way that my niece had been sold water. Every liberal arts college is desperately trying to stay relevant by selling the advantages of majoring in history or English to a group of young minds who have no idea how to make these decisions. The sellers look askance at practicality and tout students into their fields because if they don’t their departments would cease to exist. If no one majored in history there would be no history departments except at the most elite and wealthy universities.

Would this be a bad thing? It is easy to assume that this would be a terrible thing. We assume this because we see universities as repositories of scholarship and wisdom. If that is indeed what they all were all would be fine. But they are primarily places where young people start the rest of their lives. I asked one of these students what she loved about history and she replied that she really was only excited about astronomy. I asked why she wasn’t majoring in that (she attends a university where should do exactly that) and she replied “what could I do with that, discover another planet?”

There was no convincing her that the path she had chosen for herself was nuts. She planned to go to law school next – because it helps you think, she said– she does not intend to be a lawyer.

Universities are doing students a disservice by perpetuating ideas of what is worth studying that are really mostly intended to keep their most irrelevant faculty member employed. Science has been marketed badly and history has been marketed well. Business is marketed (and taught) terribly. Medicine is made so annoying to study in college that we have less doctors than we need. But we have plenty of history majors. Maybe it would be a good idea if universities stopped looking out for their own needs and starting acting more on helping students make decisions that are right for them and their actual areas of interest.

Of course this won’t happen. Faculties run universities and faculties are always interested primarily in maintaining the status quo.

AI winter, AI history, and history in general

2009-06-02T13:44:00.003-04:00

For some reason I found myself reading an article on line about AI Winter. AI winter was a clickable term and suddenly I found myself in a Wikipedia article with that title. I read the story and discovered that Marvin Minsky and I had invented that term in 1980 to describe bad events for AI that we expected to happen due to unwarranted exuberance by venture capitalists.

I remember worrying about that, and even running a panel on it at an AI conference but I didn't remember inventing the term. The next day, as luck would have it, I found myself sitting in a small office with Marvin Minsky (and others). I asked him who invented the term AI Winter and he had no idea. We began to discuss the events of those days and the fallout from AI investments at that time and had fairly different views of what had happened.

All this reminded me of the column I posted here a couple of months back about Lamar Alexander and his insistence on making kids learn history. History is very nice as long as it is true. I wonder how he knows what is true.

On line learning one more time

2009-05-27T15:16:00.002-04:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a run a few articles on the perils of on line learning lately. It seems that students:

1. take on line courses just to get the credit

no? do tell

2. need to be prodded into having discussions on line

really? might this be because they are just trying to get a credit?

3. don't get the full value of the lecture using this medium

actually this one is beyond my sarcasm; do people really think lectures are a valid way of teaching? still?

4. have trouble forming "virtual communities"

you mean that nonsense is nonsense?

5. find that the quality of education is compromised

apparently a lecture hall of 500 students does not compromise educational quality?

and my favorite: teachers of on line courses find it a lot of work

So, let me set the record straight about on line education. It is a disaster. Why? Because the idea that every school that offers it has is that they will "put their existing courses on line." In other words they will provide the same junk they provide now but will use a method not suited for that junk. Current lecture courses work for faculty not students. Students are forced to take them and they sleep (or text) through them. They take them to get credit not because they want to and teachers like them because they are not a lot of work to produce.

But, get this, on line education will win in the end. It cannot be any other way. This will only happen when what is offered is exciting, experiential, and adapted to the new medium. In other words, it will happen when we re-think education and when we re-consider what it means to teach. Helping somebody do something that they want to do is the right metaphor, not forcing them to endure a set of hurdles in order to get a credit.

Why do we still have schools? Part 2

2009-04-22T15:45:00.001-04:00

Part 2: What should we teach students?

It is very difficult to think about replacing sacred institutions. The only way I know how to think about it is as a thought experiment. Just imagine that we live in a different world, maybe a colony in the 1^st century, and ask yourself how we might educate our children in this environment pretending that schools are the one thing we cannot build for some reason. As we think about this, we need to bear in mind that we must also not assume that what we teach in schools now needs to be taught in some other way. We simply need to ask: what should one teach children? while making no assumptions that we have been teaching today is the right thing.

To put this another way, the right question to ask is what do we need to be able to do, in order to function in the world we inhabit? The next question is, of course, how would we teach children to do those things?

Now admittedly I am prejudicing the answer here by simply leaving out the word “know.” The usual question is what should children “know?” It is this question that leads crazies to make lists of things every third grader should know and allows school boards to create lists of facts students need to be tested on. So, let’s leave that word out of the discussion and see where it gets us.

A good place to start is to ask what a highly functioning adult can do and moreover has to be able to do in order to live in this world. While we ask this question the phrase “21^st century skills” will not come up. Every time that phrase comes up somehow the answer turns out to include algebra and calculus and science, which, the last I heard, were 19^th century skills too.

In fact let’s not talk about particular centuries at all. To see why, I want to diverge for a moment into a discussion of the maritime industry, a subject with which I have become more fascinated over the years. What did a mariner from Ancient Greece have in common with his modern counterpart in terms of abilities?

The answer is obsession with weather, ship maintenance, leadership and organization, navigation, planning, goal prioritization, and handling of emergencies.

Effective mariners from ancient times would have in common with those of today is understanding how to operate their ships, the basic laws of weather, tides, navigation and other relevant issues in the physical world, and an ability to make decisions well when circumstances are difficult. They would also have to know how to get along with fellow workers, how to manage those that report to them, as well as basic laws of commerce and defense.

In fact, the worlds they inhabit, from an educational point of view, that is from thinking about what to teach and how to teach it, would be nearly identical except for one thing: how to operate and maintain the equipment. Their ships were, of course, quite different.

So, let’s re-formulate this question that seems to haunt every modern day pundit on education (usually politicians or newspaper peoples). What are 21^st century skills? can be transformed (for mariners) into what does a 21^st century mariner need to be educated about that his Ancient Greek counterpart was not educated about?

The answer, it seems obvious to me, is 21^st century equipment and procedures: Engines, navigation devices, particular political situations, computers and so on. But, and this is an important “but,” none of this stuff is the real issue in the education of a mariner. The real issue is decision making. What one has to make a decision about is secondary to the issue of knowing how to make a decision at all.

You can learn about a piece of equipment or a procedure by apprenticeship. Start as a helper and move on gradually to being an expert. But this is not what school emphasizes. School typically attempts to intellectualize these subjects. Experts write books about the theory of how something works and the next we know schools are teaching that theory as a prelude to actually doing the work. Scholarship has been equated with education. You do not have to know calculus to repair an engine. You might want to know calculus to design an engine, but that is no excuse for forcing every engineer to learn it. Similarly you do not have to know theoretical physics to master the seas. Mariners do know physics of course – practical physics about load balancing for example, but they do not have to know how to derive the equations that describe it.

What I am saying here about the shipping Industry holds true for every other area of life as well. 21^st century skills are no different than 1st century skills. Interestingly, Petronius, a 1^st century Roman author, complained that Roman schools were

teaching “young men to grow up to be idiots, because they neither see nor hear one single thing connected with the usual circumstances of everyday life.” In other words, schools have always been about educating the elite in things that don’t matter much to anyone. This is fine as long as the elite don’t have to work.

But, today the elite has extrapolated from what it learned at Harvard and decided that every single school child needs to know the same stuff. So, they whine and complain about math scores going down without once asking why this could possible matter. Math is not a 21^st century skill any more than it was a 1^st century skill. Algebra is nice for those who need it and useless for those who don’t. Skill in mathematics is certainly not going to make any industrial nation more competitive with any other no matter how many times our “experts” assert that it will. One wonders how politicians can even say this junk, but they all do.

Why?

My own guess is that, apart from the fact that they all took these subjects in school (and were probably bad at them -- you don’t become a politician or a newspaper person because you were great at calculus), there is another issue: They don’t know what else to suggest.

Thinking about the 1^st century will help us figure out what the real issues are. People then and people now, had to learn how to function in the world they inhabit. This means being able to communicate, get along with others, function economically and physically, and in general reason about issues that confront them. It didn’t mean then, and doesn’t mean now, science and mathematics, at least not for 95% of the population.

How do we choose who studies the elite subjects? We don’t.

Offer choices. Stop making lists of what one must know and start putting students into situations where they can learn from experience while attempting to accomplish goals that they set out for themselves, just as people did before there were schools. Education has always been the same: learning from experience with the help from wiser mentors. School has screwed that all up and it is time to go back to basics.

Why do we still have schools?

2009-04-14T09:41:00.002-04:00

People often find my blog when they ask "should I go to school?" So, today, I thought I would answer that question in depth. The answer will appear as a downloadable paper on my web site as well.

Part 1: What is the problem with school?

People get used to the institutions that have been a part of their lives. This is especially true of institutions that have been around for many generations, and of institutions whose purpose is seen as doing something worthwhile. Add into the mix that the absence of that institution in certain places around the world is always correlated with poverty and you have a situation where no one ever questions the value of that institution.

Nevertheless I will ask a heretical question: Why do we have schools? Instead of answering this question by listing all the good things that schools provide, which anyone can do, I will turn the question around: What is bad about having schools?

Competition: Why should school be a competitive event? Why do we ask how a kid is doing in school? Learning in life outside of school is not a competitive event. We learn what we choose to learn in real life.

Stress: When 6 year olds are stressed about going to school you know that something is wrong. Is learning in real life stressful? Stress can’t be helping kids learn. What kid wouldn’t happily skip school on any given day? What does this tell us about the experience?

Right answers: School teaches that there are right answers. The teacher knows them. The test makers know them. Now you have to know them. But, in real life, there are very few right answers. Life isn’t mathematics. Thinking about how to behave in a situation, planning your day or your life, plotting a strategy for your company or your country – no right answers.

Bullying and peer pressure: You wouldn’t have to have "say no to drugs and cigarettes" campaigns if kids didn’t go to school. In school there are always other kids telling you how to dress, how to act, how to be cool. Why do we want kid’s peer groups to be the true teachers of children? Being left out terrorizes children. Why do we allow this to happen by creating places that foster this behavior?

Stifling of curiosity: Isn’t it obvious that learning is really about curiosity? Adults earn about things they want to learn about. Before the age of 6, prior to school, one kid becomes a dinosaur specialist while another knows all about dog breeds. Outside of school, people drive their own learning. Schools eliminate this natural behavior.

Subjects chosen for you: Why algebra, physics, economics, and U.S. history? Because those subjects were pretty exciting to the President of Harvard in 1892. And, if you are interested in something else – psychology, business, medicine, computers, design? Too bad. Those subjects weren’t taught at Harvard in 1892. Is that nuts or what?

Classrooms: If you wanted to learn something and had the money, wouldn’t you hire someone to be your mentor, and have them be there for you while you tried out learning the new thing? Isn’t that what small children have, a parent ready to teach as needed? Classrooms make no sense as a venue for learning unless of course you want to save money and have 30 (or worse hundreds of) students be handled by one teacher. Once you have ratios like that you have to teach by talking and then hope someone was listening, so then you have to have tests. Schools cannot work as places of learning if they employ classrooms. And, of course, they pretty much all do.

Grades: Any professor can tell you that students are pretty much concerned with whether what you are telling them will be on the test and what they might do for extra credit. In other words, they want a good grade. If you tell them that 2+2=5 and it will be on the test, they will tell you that 2+2=5 if it means getting a good grade. Parents do not give grades to children and employers do not give grades to employees. They judge their work and progress for sure, but not by assigning numbers to a report card.

Certification: We all know why people attend college. They do so primarily to say they are college graduates so they can get a job or go on to a professional school. Most don’t care all that much about what hoops they have to go through. They do what they are told. Similarly, students try to get through high school so they can go on to college. As long as students are not in school to get an education, you can be pretty sure they won’t get one. Most of our graduates have learned to jump through hoops, nothing more.

Confined children: Children like to run around. Is this news to anyone? They have a difficult time sitting still and they learn by trying things out and asking questions. Of course in school, sitting still is the norm. So we have come up with this wonderful idea of ADD, i.e. drug those who won’t sit still into submission. Is the system sick or what?

Academics viewed as winners: Who are the smartest kids in school? The ones who are good at math and science of course. Why do we think that? Who knows? We just do. Those who are good at these subjects go on to be professors. So those are certainly the smartest people we have in our society. Perhaps they are. But, I can tell you from personal experience that our society doesn’t respect professors all that much, so something is wrong here.

Practical skills not valued: When I was young there were academic high schools and trade high schools. Trade high schools were for dumb kids. Academic high schools were for smart kids. We all thought this made sense. Except that are a lot of unemployed English majors and a lot of employed airplane mechanics. Where did we get the idea that education was about scholarship? This is not what Ben Franklin thought when our system was being designed, but he was outvoted.

The need to please teachers: People who succeed at school are invariably people who are good out at figuring what the teacher wants and giving it to them. In real life there is no teacher to please and these “grade grubbers” often find themselves lost. When I did graduate admissions, if a student presented an undergraduate record with all A’s I immediately rejected him. There was no way he was equally good at, or equally interested in, everything. (Except pleasing the teacher.) As a professor, I had no patience for students who thought that telling me what I just told them was the essence of academic achievement.

Self worth questioned: School is full of winners and losers. I graduated number 322 in my high school class (out of 678). Notice that I remember this. Do you think this was good for my self-esteem? Even the guy who graduated number 2 felt like a loser. In school, most everyone sees themselves as a loser. Why do we allow this to happen?

Politicians in charge: Politicians demand reform but they wouldn’t know reform if it hit them over the head. What they mean is that school should be like they remember rather than how it is now and they will work hard to get you to vote for them to give them money to restore the system to the awful state it always was in. Politicians, no matter what party, actually have no interest in education at all. An educated electorate makes campaigning much harder.

Government use of education for repression: As long as there have been governments there have been governments who wanted people to think that the government (and the country) is very good. We all recognize this tendency in dictatorships that promote the marvels of the dictator and rewrite history whenever it is convenient. When you point out that our government does the same thing you are roundly booed. We all know that the Indians were savages that Abraham Lincoln was a great President and that we are the freest country on earth. School is about teaching “truth.”

Discovery not valued: The most important things we learn we teach ourselves. This is why kids have trouble learning from their parent’s experience. They need their own experiences to ponder and to learn from. We need to try things out and see how they go. This kind of learning is not valued in school because it might lead to, heaven forbid, failure, and failure is a really bad word in school. Except failure is how we learn, which is pretty much why school doesn’t work.

Boredom ignored: Boredom is a bad thing. We drug bored kids with Ritalin so they will stop being bored. All of my best work has come when I was most bored and let my mind wander. It is odd that we keep trying to prevent this from happening with kids. Lots of TV, that’s the ticket.

Major learning by doing mechanism ignored: And last but not least, scholars from Plato to Dewey have pointed that people learn by doing. That is how we learn. Doing. Got it? Apparently not. Very little doing in schools. Unless you count filling in circles with number 2 pencils as doing.

Lamar Alexander fails to save the day (again)

2009-03-20T12:56:00.005-04:00

I happened on C-SPAN yesterday and there was Lamar Alexander, former Secretary of Education and now a US Senator, speaking in the Senate on restoring teaching history to it "rightful place" and making sure that history was part of the NCLB act. Since he says this same stuff all the time, here is a quote from him from 2006 taken from what was pretty much the same speech:

"Just one example of how far we are from helping our children learn what they need to know. The fourth grade national report card test asked students to identify the following passage, quote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Students were given four choices: Constitution, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation. Less than half the students answered correctly that that came from the Declaration of Independence. Another question said, "Imagine that you landed in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. Describe an important event that is happening there." Nearly half the students couldn't answer the question correctly that the Declaration of Independence was being signed."

Of course, since science and math is so very important as we all know, one wonders what history being restored to its importance does to STEM. When something comes in, something has to go out, in education. But this is not my point.

My point is that politicians never seem to get it about education. What history do students "need to know?" None actually, unless they plan on being historians or maybe senators. Now I realize this is a radical point of view, but just like math and science, history is not something anyone needs to know.

Why not?

Because knowing what happened in Philadelphia in 1776 does not in fact make you a better citizen, no matter what Alexander says. A good citizen would be one who carefully considered the issues when voting. That would mean being able to think critically and ask hard questions of politicians.

In 1776 we had a bunch of politicians who, if the present is any example, were surely voting for their own special interests. The fact that we, as a country, feel the need to make them into folk heroes does not make it one bit more likely they they were any better or worse than the current people who govern us. What Alexander is really arguing for is more indoctrination - more informing students what to think instead of teaching them how to think.

Students don't need to know any official facts. They need to know how to live their lives intelligently. It is quite obvious that schools and school reform movements do not have this as an item on their agenda. Just more cramming for tests.

The phone rings... its Milo

2009-03-14T17:42:00.002-04:00

"I was wondering if you would like to play grandparent games with me..." says the small voice on the other end of the line.

Milo is 3 years and 4 months old. We read words for 30 minutes. You want to know how to educate children? Make it fun.

What were your test scores Mr. Obama?

2009-03-10T11:13:00.003-04:00

“It means treating teachers like the professionals they are while also holding them more accountable,” Mr. Obama said. “Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement."

Really? Is that how professionals are treated these days? Do we measure other professionals by how those they mentor do on standardized tests? Would you, Mr. Obama, like to be measured by how your staff does on standardized tests?

Treating teachers like professionals might include letting them actually teach to a student's interest and concerns rather than helping them raise their math scores.

And, while we are at it Mr. Obama, what were your scores on the SAT? Did anyone ask you that while you were campaigning? Would you have thought it was stupid if they had?

Tell me the quadratic formula Mr. Obama. Can't? Might that be because it doesn't matter in any way to know it? Stop making kids memorize nonsense and you will be treating teachers like professionals.

More College Graduates? Say it ain't so Mr. President.

2009-03-03T10:44:00.004-05:00

Mr. Obama has promised that by 2020, America will "once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world."

Can we think about that for a minute? Why does this matter? We Americans so believe in college that we rarely ask why. I asked my students at Yale and later at Northwestern why they were in college. I heard a lot about parties, a four year vacation, going because their parents made them come, and a lot about how you need a college degree to get ahead.

I never once had anyone say they were there to learn. Never.

College offers diplomas. Education, not so much. And to the extent that colleges do offer education, a Yale English major is typically considered well educated by modern standards, what difference does it make to the country? Those English majors don't easily find careers and in bad economic times even a Yale degree may not buy you much.

I am sure what Mr. Obama meant to say was that by 2020 our population will be able to reason effectively, work well with others, and communicate well. At least that is something he quoted from me while he was campaigning. But alas, now it all about making sure those 3000 colleges we have survive regardless of whether they are turning out more productive and reasoning citizens.