JFK, the Boston Bombings: why can't we express emotion properly? A call for new school standards

I was in college when John F Kennedy was killed. We were finishing lunch at the fraternity house. We walked around in shock, or were glued to the TV. Those were simpler times. Less political. Everyone loved the President.

Not knowing what to do with myself, I went to my next class. All the class was there. It was an Economics class. The professor thought it would be a good thing to discuss the potential economic impact of Kennedy’s death.

I never took that class (or economics as a subject) seriously again. I didn’t know what I thought he should have done, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a discussion of the economics of assassination.

I was reminded of my feelings about those events, and that class, by the recent events in Boston. The news coverage is more elaborate now, but the newscasters said then, and said again this time, most of the time,  that they had no idea what was really going on.

But there was something different this time. While everyone I knew then was simply in shock or angry or numb, the people in Boston, at least according to the TV coverage, were singing, waving flags, applauding, and going to Red Sox games where Red Sox songs were being sung. There was a lot of cheering for the good old USA, and lots of being proud of Boston. 

Didn’t people die? Weren’t people horribly injured? I would have expected more crying and less cheering and singing.

It is possible I am out of touch after all. The world changes as you get older and young people’s behaviors change. But this is a column about education, and I can’t help see this as another failure of our education system.

Why would it be wrong for children to be discussing their feelings and thinking hard about what can be done 

to prevent such horrible events? Or thinking about why people do things like this? 

Why can’t adults think clearly about these events. Heightened security at the London Marathon?  Did someone expect a series of Marathon attacks? Heightened security at Airports? Maybe in Boston if the bad guys were leaving the city, but at every US airport? 

This is not meant as a criticism of Boston of course. Look at this headline from Yahoo Sports:

Citi Field breaks into ‘U-S-A!’ chants after Boston Marathon bombing suspect is taken into custody

Of course I am not the only one to be appalled by this. From the 21st century wire:

How did Friday become such a huge ‘patriotic moment’ for the people of Boston? Was this some kind of victory for America? 

My answer to all this simple enough. Its school. In school where we should be discussing things, expressing points of view, trying to figure things out, we are instead preparing for tests. We are learning right answers and one of those is that the USA is the greatest country on earth. We are not learning how to think. We are not learning how to express emotions in a reasonable way.

This is, of course, not limited to the US. I received a letter from Spain yesterday from a mother concerned about her son. She said (among other things about how her son hated school):

As most kids his age, he loves music and sports ( I do encourage it as far as I can). He also writes beautifully, I know, because he complains in writing and always impresses me how successfully he does it too. But at school they don’t encourage it at all as they’re always more concerned with spelling and so on than with the content. So he just complains in writing instead of using that talent more creatively.

At school his results in music are always low as they value the theoretic part of exams (you’d never believe what all that is about), so, the practical part of the subject is always buried  and he loses interest in that also. Same goes for sports. I wonder if our Spanish sports talents such as Rafa Nadal was successful in theoretical sports at school?

Of course if he was engaged in music and writing it would be because he had been emotionally engaged. Learning is emotional because we care about we learn, and get excited about what we learn, and share what we learn with others.

Well that would be the case if school were about what people wanted to learn. Yesterday there was some discussion in the press about college readiness of High School students (as there usually is, this being the topic of the day) and a report from the ACT (the testing people for my non-US readers) complained about how students aren’t college ready. The translation of this is that they need more test preparation (sold by the ACT of course.) Here is a paragraph from that report:

Especially at the high school level, where there are differing degrees of familiarity with the improved standards, state and local efforts to implement the standards have not yet achieved their goals. This suggests that not enough teachers are yet ready for the necessary changes in curriculum that are likely to accompany the switch into a classroom environment driven by college- and career-ready standards.

The translation of this paragraph is they want more testing, more test prep, and making sure the new standards in math science etc are being met.

I would like to call for some new standards too. 

I would like to see a happiness standard. 

If kids aren’t happy in school, the school is failing and we need to fix it.

I would like to see an emotional readiness standard.

If kids can’t express what they are feeling, in writing, in discussion groups, to friends, then they need to learn how to do so. If we express emotions about bad guys getting killed by dancing and waving flags and singing we have clearly missed the lesson on how to express empathy, relief, fear etc.

I would like to see a clear thinking standard.

We need to teach people how to react to events they don’t like by planning new courses of action that make sense. Learning to plan a course of action is very important, but if that happens in school I missed it.

And, lastly, I would like to see the following standard:

Schools are not allowed to bore their students so badly that they see school as being irrelevant to real life.

Here is an ACT question that comes from the practice tests you can find on line. I fell asleep reading it. But I learned that no one can express or feel real emotions because any real emotion you might have while taking this test would not be dealt with well by the school administering it.

It starts like this (and goes on and on):

Passage I

Unmanned spacecraft taking images of Jupiter's moon Europa have found its surface to be very smooth with few meteorite craters. Europa's surface ice shows evidence of being continually resmoothed and reshaped. Cracks, dark bands, and pressure ridges (created when water or slush is squeezed up between 2 slabs of ice) are commonly seen in images of the surface. Two scientists express their views as to whether the presence of a deep ocean beneath the surface is responsible for Europa's surface features.

Scientist 1

A deep ocean of liquid water exists on Europa. Jupiter's gravitational field produces tides within Europa that can cause heating of the subsurface to a point where liquid water can exist. The numerous cracks and dark bands in the surface ice closely resemble the appearance of thawing ice covering the polar oceans on Earth. Only a substantial amount of circulating liquid water can crack and rotate such large slabs of ice. The few meteorite craters that exist are shallow and have been smoothed by liquid water that oozed up into the crater from the subsurface and then quickly froze.

It is followed by exciting questions such as:

1. According to the information provided, which of the following descriptions of Europa would be accepted by both scientists?

1. F. Europa has a larger diameter than does Jupiter.
2. G. Europa has a surface made of rocky material.
3. H. Europa has a surface temperature of 20°C.
4. J. Europa is completely covered by a layer of ice.

1. With which of the following statements about the conditions on Europa or the evolution of Europa's surface would both Scientist 1 and Scientist 2 most likely agree? The surface of Europa:

1. A. is being shaped by the movement of ice.
2. B. is covered with millions of meteorite craters.
3. C. is the same temperature as the surface of the Arctic Ocean on Earth.
4. D. has remained unchanged for millions of years.

3. Which of the following statements about meteorite craters on Europa would be most consistent with both scientists' views?

1. F. No meteorites have struck Europa for millions of years.
2. G. Meteorite craters, once formed, are then smoothed or removed by Europa's surface processes.
3. H. Meteorite craters, once formed on Europa, remain unchanged for billions of years.
4. J. Meteorites frequently strike Europa's surface but do not leave any crater

Go here to see the sample tests:

 http://www.actstudent.org/sampletest/

Then ask yourself why people who have gone through a system that is this devoid of emotion, that fails my standards so badly, that is so irrelevant to anything they will actually do in life, do not know how to express emotion  or find solutions, when bad things happen.

Artificial Intelligence. Neuroscience. Education Technology, and the misreporting of science by The Times and others

Reading the newspapers about new technology is a lot like going to a fortune teller to find out about the future. Nice stories, but the reality is unknown. Here are the first three paragraphs from a recent New York Times article on computers that can give a grade to a college essay:

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.

And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html?pagewanted=all

Sounds great doesn’t it? Better service for students, less work for professors and smart computers, all in one article.  Except that is all nonsense. The Times doesn’t say the software is AI but most every other paper printing the same story did. Here is the headline from the Denver Post for the same article.

New artificial-intelligence system grades essays at college level

We live in a time where every new piece of technology in education is touted as a great breakthrough. Now, AI is my field and my specialty in AI is processing language. No computer can read an essay. Maybe someday, but not now. So, how they grade them if they can’t read them? By counting how many big words were used? By seeing if the sentences are grammatical? The articles that tout the glories of this stuff never actually say how. But, no computer can tell if the writer had a good idea. This is actually very hard to determine. It is the reason why well educated professors would take on the task of reading an essay -- to see if there were any good ideas in it. But now that we have MOOCs and everything  is about mass education, why bother? No one is listening to anyone’s ideas anyway. Just tens if thousand of students hearing the same lecture. Yet, The Times and other papers keep touting MOOCs as a great breakthrough. They even had the audacity to mention that professors would now have time free to do other things. What other things? Their lectures are already recorded and they don’t grade papers, so what others things?

The answer that any professor can tell you is research. All these MOOCs, essay grading software, and everything else we are hearing about, is meant to allow professors to teach less and do more research. No problem with that. I had that view of the world too when I was a professor. The students get shortchanged by this and will get really shortchanged by MOOCs, but neither The Times nor the faculty of elite institutions care much about students.

The Times doesn’t care much about the truth either, at least when it reports about scientific breakthroughs. This is not unique to the Times however. Here another report from the same day that also hit the press about science:

Scientists 'read dreams' using brain scans

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22031074

This time it was a BBC headline, but many other papers reported the same scientific breakthrough. The scientists quoted in the reports did not say anything like this of course. The scientists said that they can now detect images in the brain for some people whom have they studied. The sleeping person is awakened and asked what he was dreaming about and the scientists can detect a similar pattern when it occurs another time. Hardly “reading your dreams.”  

Newspapers like to make stuff up and people remember the nonsense they read in a headline. So the public thinks that computers can read and understand an essay and the public thinks that the computer can read your dreams. So what if this isn't even close to true? Another paper sold. 

One wonders if the scientists aren’t complicit in all this nonsense. The answer is yes and no. I am interviewed all the time and I know that the reporter will exaggerate what I said and write a ridiculous headline. I do the interviews anyway on the grounds that some good might come out of it. But many scientists want people to think they are doing stuff that they actually aren’t doing. This is particularly true of artificial intelligence, my own field, where the experts quoted in the Times article must have known full well how their work would be misinterpreted and didn't care.

Scientists are always selling so that people will get excited and give them more money to do research. And newspapers are always writing headlines that aren’t true but catch your eye.

The public loses by being misinformed. At the moment it is is being misinformed about education in a serious way. Things in education are not improving. Technology is not helping (although it could.) Things in education are getting much worse. Let’s see if the Times ever says that.

ADHD, Test Cheating Scandals, Ivy League admissions, and the state of education today

Today I happened to glance at Time Magazine on line and saw these three headlines on the front page:

Ivy League Schools Accepting Even Fewer Kids

http://nation.time.com/2013/04/02/ivy-league-schools-accepting-even-fewer-kids/?iid=us-main-lead

Understanding the Rise in ADHD Diagnoses: 11% of U.S. Children Are Affected

http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/02/understanding-the-rise-in-adhd-diagnoses-11-of-u-s-children-are-affected/#ixzz2PJAlLmEY

What’s Really Scandalous About the School Testing Scandal

http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/02/whats-really-scandalous-about-the-school-testing-scandal/#ixzz2PJB7ZbEr

Taken together they tell an interesting story of our education system don’t they? Kids are behaving badly in school so we drug them into submission. Teachers are being judged by the test scores their students produce, so they are inclined to risk jail and cheat. And, last but not least, the Ivy League Schools are taking less kids (well, not really, what the Time headline writer meant to say was that they were getting more applicants and rejecting more kids.)

What story do these three stories tell when seen as one story? -- Wow have we made a mess of our education system! 

Now, let me provide three radical solutions to these three problems. They will be seen as weird of course. All I ask is that people think about them.

1. ADHD: solution: close the schools. 

Yes, I know, that is too weird for words. I also saw an article about arming teachers and putting police in every school. The solution there? Close the schools.

School is an awful place. Do the adults reading this really remember school fondly? Do they remember sitting in classes and loving listening to the teacher and taking tests? Maybe you had a nice social life with the other kids outside of school, but school itself? It doesn’t work. ADHD isn’t real. It just means that kids can’t focus on doing stuff that bores them to death. I was always in trouble in school. They didn’t have ADHD back then or else I would have  been drugged too. I hated school (but somehow got to be a full professor at Yale before I was 30 -- I didn’t hate thinking hard, just school.)

The alternative? School is really about day care so I propose day care centers manned by specialty teachers who encourage kids to learn what they want to learn. This would be easy to do in an online age. Materials to learn anything could be available. Projects could be designed by experts and teachers could mentor kids who want to learn. Compulsory schooling is a dead idea. Only a matter of time until formal school must go away.

1. Testing: enough already

Behind testing we find all the publishing and test grading companies, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan and a cabal or business people who simply don’t care about kids. The tests test nothing worth knowing. Apart from reading, writing, and arithmetic, all the other stuff really doesn’t matter. Why don't we teach job skills in school? Why don’t we teach life skills in school? The reason is simple. We used to. But now everyone has to go to college. I am not sure why everyone has to go to college except that most every politician thinks so, every rich person trying to do good in education thinks so, and nearly every parent seems to think so. So it must be true. We could, of course, change the high school curriculum and teach stuff more useful than say algebra or literature, but we won’t. We could also build curricula  ( on line or face to face) where you can learn real job skills. I vote for that one.

1. Ivy League School acceptance rates

Really, who cares? Kids who apply care, I guess. Parents (especially ones in New York City it appears) care. I never went to an Ivy League school. I taught at them but could have never gotten into them (since I hated high school remember?)

To put this in perspective, consider what you are missing if you don’t get into Yale. You are missing the possibility of majoring the the following subjects.

African American Studies (B.A.)

African Studies (B.A.)

American Studies (B.A.)

Anthropology (B.A.)

Applied Mathematics (B.A. or B.S.)

Applied Physics (B.S.)

Archaeological Studies (B.A.)

Architecture (B.A.)

Art (B.A.)

Astronomy (B.A.)

Astronomy and Physics (B.S.)

And those are just the A’s. Real job skills there eh? Or, consider G through L:

G

Geology and Geophysics (B.A. or B.S.)

German (B.A.)

German Studies (B.A.)

Global Affairs (B.A.)

Greek, Ancient and Modern (B.A.)

H

History (B.A.)

History of Art (B.A.)

History of Science, History of Medicine (B.A.)

History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health (B.A.)

Humanities (B.A.)

I

Italian (B.A.)

J

Japanese (B.A.)

Judaic Studies (B.A.)

L

Latin American Studies (B.A.)

Linguistics (B.A.)

Literature (B.A.)

Attending an Ivy league school is so important that a slight increase in applications causes headlines. But no one ever looks to see what one learns there.

Can you learn something practical at Yale? Harder than you think. I was a professor of Computer Science there. (Notice I left out the C’s.) But even Computer Science isn’t a practical subject at Yale. It is mostly theory. And the students don’t want to learn anything practical. They have been trained to think that they should be the intellectual elite and practice is well, too practical.

At a meeting of Freshman at Yale, back in 1981 when I was chairman of Computer Science there, I suggested that the best reason to major in Computer Science was so you could get a job. The students reaction: they booed me.

We have got something seriously screwed up in our collective minds about school and education. Learning is supposed to be fun. Learning is supposed to be useful. We seem to have forgotten all that and simply want drugged kids who perform well on tests and get into Yale. I taught a lot of those kids. They weren’t so interesting to teach, trust me.

I was wrong about the Testing Bed, but they are almost here

In 2001 I wrote a book called “Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane” that predicted a school that consisted entirely of testing beds:

from page 87 

“When did they invent the test bed? inquired the girl. “That surely changed things I dare say.”

“It just made clearer what was already a done deal,” said old Joe. “The goal was to get students to be comfortable and perform as well as possible on tests. Once they were wired into the internet in their own test bed, they could get questions and answers repeated over and over until they knew the answer pair. This made it easy to require 100% on every test and students could just lie there until they had memorized it all.”

So it turned out I was wrong about the bed. Here is a picture of a room at the Carpe Diem school, (sponsored, of course, by Bill Gates.)

measure or die: why the schools will only get worse

If you want to know why education is bad and getting worse all you have to do is read the questions sent by potential investors who were thinking about working with our learn by doing experiential model of education.

Now, I have to say that these particular investors are well known bad guys in the education space and why they were interested in investing in us is anybody’s guess. But the questions were so telling, I thought people should see them. 

1. What evidence do they have of the effectiveness of their particular programs, if any?  What evidence do they have from Socratic Arts of effectiveness of a similar model with a similar student base and similar subject matter areas? How do they plan to gather evidence of effectiveness?

Why do I think this is a terrible question? Imagine that someone asked how we could measure your effectiveness as a parent. You might take a offense at this question or you might say “my kids love me and lead happy and fun lives.” Or you might say how they were doing in school.  What you would probably not say is “ I am a very effective parent and I know this because my kids got 800s on their SATs.”

But if these people were put in charge of parenting, or if they invested money in parenting classes or mentoring, they wouldn’t accept subjective answers.

Effectiveness always means test scores. We don’t have them yet for parenting measures but we sure have them for school and that is because measuring effectiveness is now seen as a legitimate question to ask.

I always thought I was an effective teacher when my students got excited about ideas or came up with ideas of their own. But no. Now, we have to measure it, and, in order to do that, we have to measure kids. Maybe these people think they are helping or maybe all investors think like this. I don’t know. I just know it is questions like these that kill educational innovation.

2.       What learning analytics are they gathering on their offering and/or what do they plan to collect and why? What metrics matter to them?

Do our graduates get jobs? That would be the question that mattered to me. But, no.  They would hate that answer. Do our students enjoy themselves? No. They would hate that answer as well. Do our students send their friends? Maybe that one. But, alas, they mean test scores. Of course the only real question is do our students find they passion? Do they know wth they want and know how to pursue it? But, no one asks those questions. How sad for kids.

3.       How standardized are the assessments of the artifacts of their story based approach vs. having an expert pronounce it “just like we do it in the real world”?

Can these people think about anything but measurement? Nope.

4.       Have they considered a competency-based learning model? 

Aha. The real question. Could your guys just forget about helping people learn to do things and just concentrate on the important stuff which as we all know is fact memorization, formula application, and lots of math which is after all so easy to test.

Want to know why our schools are a disaster? Ask investors what they want to measure next. (And, for fun, ask a parent how he or she measure success in child raising.

MOOCs: The New York TImes gets it wrong again; Europe is not lagging behind the U.S.

I feel compelled to again write about MOOCs, but this time because of a recent New York Times article entitled:

“Europeans Take a More Cautious Approach Toward Online Courses”

which can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/world/europe/18iht-educside18.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

The Times has been lately thrilled with MOOCs as a subject but has shown no interest in addressing the real issues in education in their discussions of them. Take for example this quote from Adrian Smith of the University of London printed in the Times article:

“However, you ignore them at your peril,” he said. “The challenges they pose to the traditional classroom model of knowledge transmission are obvious. The question is no longer whether we should consider MOOCs, but how quickly to get involved.”

According to Mr Smith, and one would assume, to the Times, MOOCs challenge the traditional classroom model in some important way. But how do they do that? The very idea of education as “knowledge transmission” is the problem in the first place. Yes, MOOCs transmit more knowledge to more people but knowledge transmission as education is exactly what is wrong with the standard university education model and most education of any sort.

The idea that people can learn by being told, has been ridiculed by movie makers and by philosophers (like John Dewey and Immanuel Kant, not to mention Plato.) Still we persist. Do you know how many life rafts there are on a 757 and where they are located? Why not? That knowledge has been transmitted to you tens or even hundreds of times every time you board a 757. No one listens. Still we talk.

The TImes does quote John Zvereff from Barcelona’s Open University saying:

“I think we should be responding to challenges to the learning model,” Mr. Zvereff said. “At U.O.C., our philosophy is based on accompaniment — each student is assigned a tutor who stays with him or her all the way through till graduation. None of the MOOCs I’ve seen offer anything like that.”

What a weird idea. Teachers are important. Yet, teachers are exactly what MOOCs don’t have. The valid part of the classroom model is not the lecturing and not the tests, it is is the idea that there is a teacher present who you might engage in some intellectually stimulating way. The idea of school, at least in principle, is the interchange of ideas that cause you to challenge cherished assumptions and grow intellectually. This requires a good teacher. That is the teacher’s job, not knowledge transmission. MOOCs pretend to do this of course by having students talk to teach other, which is probably as useful as all the comments sections after a New York Times article. If the Times let one interact with the author of its articles and it we the author’s job to respond to every comment, then maybe the Times would show that it knew something about teaching. Perhaps the Times likes MOOCs so much because they are so much like newspapers -- great at the one way transmission of knowledge.

Another quote from the article, this time from Drummond Bone master of Ball College who: 

told the conference that his university “was very strongly associated with face-to-face, and very expensive, one-to-one learning,” and was unlikely to change.

Good for him.

But, here is the most honest quote from the article:

Veronica Campbell, the dean of graduate studies at Trinity College Dublin, said her school had no open online courses, nor plans to offer them, but “there is a fear of being left behind, so we are considering what to do.”

This is the truth of the matter. Universities everywhere, not just in Europe, are afraid. The Times and others are promoting MOOCs, so universities are afraid of the MOOC tidal wave (for which the Times is, in part, responsible.) 

But this is what universities are actually afraid of:

1. High quality education, the face to face challenging interaction type, is very expensive to produce. Even the best universities offer mostly lectures. The reason: small seminars taught by famous researchers are too expensive to do too many of. They must be balanced by lecture halls that have a 1000 students even though most everyone knows this is not real education.

1. On line learning will clearly beat classroom learning eventually. By on line learning I do not mean MOOCs. Why will on line win? Because one can produce authentic experiences, where students learn by doing, with mentors available to help student produce things, at less cost than it takes to run a giant campus.   Build the best Search Engine Optimization course, or Data Analytics course, for example, and no university ever has to put up the money to build another. They just have to provide mentors for that course.

By the way, Europe is not lagging behind at all. A new open university offering on line learn by doing has just been launched in Andorra:

http://www.uols.org/en

They offer an experiential MBA that I built for them. No U.S. university would dare offer anything like it. Why not? Because universities in the U.S. are run by their faculty and faculties wants no challenges to the existing model. A faculty member may be happy to be the lecturer in a MOOC just for fun, but if that became their actual job they would be running for the hills. Faculty control of U.S. universities means they will never change since faculty have a pretty cushy life that they want to protect. 

But, this is less true in other countries where the bets university education is not private. The Times needs to stop thinking that the U.S. is at the centre of the university world. It may have that position in research but not necessarily in teaching. And, other countries may well be willing to change a broken teaching model that relies on knowledge transmission because their citizens are demanding it. 

Benito Juarez, Don Quixote, and Mexico City street kids; Really?

I have just returned from a long trip which included Mexico City and Riyadh among other places. Riyadh was certainly fascinating in many ways, but my mind keep returning to Mexico. This is because the people who invited me to Mexico (Telefonica Epsana) made a serious mistake -- they invited me to visit a school. 

Now this wasn’t just any school. It was school for street kids, those who sweep up, sell Chick-lets, run errands, or do anything else they can to earn money. Telefonica had convinced the parents of these kids to let them go to school until noon, enabling them to work the rest of the day. Clearly Telefonica is trying to help, but the result isn’t so clear. They don’t have the freedom to design the half day they provide for these kids. The Mexican government, like all governments, still dictates the curriculum. So, the first lesson I heard was about what a wonderful man Benito Juarez was. 

The picture above is of the teacher asking questions of the class about Benito Juarez. Notice that the children are all sitting in front of computers, but they are not using them, they are hearing lecture/quiz kind of thing. They were using them at an earlier point to play with a jigsaw puzzle that had a map of Mexico on it that as far as I could tell was just abut finding pieces that fit and not really about Mexico at all.

Later the students went to into the yard to sing a song about Benito Juarez and to march around while singing it.

The next day I gave a speech about “the role of the teacher in the 21st century” which was the theme of the two day meeting. That speech can be found here. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIquall9HjM

It is in English of course but there is a louder Spanish translation above it. Telefonica has been holding discussions about my speech in most of the Latin American countries and in Spain for the last few weeks. Some of the basis of those discussions can be found here (in Spanish.)

http://blogs.educared.org/encuentro/2013/02/01/jornada-1-evento-en-mexico-un-debate-muy-politizado/

For years I have been pointing our the absurdity of the curriculum taught in schools. It is outdated and irrelevant to most children. But in Mexico, I saw a serious need for which I have much empathy and still the school authorities don’t get it.

Really Benito Juarez? (I have the same point of view about George Washington by the way.) So, when these kids go back on the street (and quit school at 14 as I was told they all do) they will know about their national hero. They won’t know how to get a good job however. 

We could be teaching them how to run a business, how to program a computer, how to raise a family, how to find ways to make money -- really anything that might help them get out of poverty. But no, they sing about Juarez.

Now I wish this were just a problem in Mexico but it is problem anywhere and everywhere.

As it happens I speak in Spanish-speaking countries more often than I do in English-speaking ones, so I have learned what I can say that will drive Spanish-speaking intellectuals mad into to get them to think harder about what they are doing to kids.  

I always say for example, that they should stop teaching history. This remark is generally hated in Spain, but apparently I upset a few people in Mexico as well. But how accurate is the history we teach? Mexican history as I understand it is about Spanish occupation and the mistreatment of the local population, some of which is still going on as can be seen from the color of the faces of the children in these pictures. The descendants of the Spanish are not selling Chick-lets.

If you look at the Spanish text in the last link you will see questions that the debates held after my talk have been   centered around. One of these is about my remark that teaching Don Quixote is not necessarily the cleverest idea I ever heard. Don Quixote is required reading in Spain, and as far as I know ,in every other Spanish speaking country. It is defended as learning about their culture. How what happened in Spain in 1605 (or really a novel set in 1605) is of value to Mexicans who really have no need to know about Spanish culture I don't know. Many say that Don Quixote was the best novel ever written. Maybe it was . I don't know. I have managed to live a good life without ever having read it, which is probably true of most Americans (and American Intellectuals) as well.

The only relevant question for me is how these street kids can be helped to live better lives. I don't get how making them read Don Quixote and sing about Juarez will help.

Further I don't get why the Mexican government and the Spanish speaking intellectuals who argue with me about this, are not getting that idea that what they are doing is simply wrong.

It is all well and good to have a view of education that says we need to teach our culture and history and where we came from but this idea flies in the face of reality.

Spain isn’t where most Mexican street kids came from. (A little known fact here is that Spain is actually where my ancestors came from and this makes me not one bit more interested in reading Don Quixote.)

Culture and history is very nice for intellectuals. Let them have it if they want it. And maybe, through Telefonica’s efforts one of these kids will stay in school and become an intellectual. But is that really anyone’s goal? We have plenty of intellectuals. What about the rest of the people? What about the kids who will, at best, live ordinary lives?

Why can’t we start teaching them skills that will help them with their lives and why and why can’t we start doing this now? Teach them to be healthy, productive, have some fun, think clearly, be good to others. Teach them life skills.

The answer that there is no government that I know that actually has that goal. (Maybe Saudi Arabia -- they hinted at it while I was there, but I don’t know if they meant it.)

Governments design schools to make citizens behave themselves, who won’t don’t threaten the status quo. But the status quo isn’t so good in Mexico (or in my country either frankly.) It is time we stopped trying to turn everyone into an academic scholar and help students become functioning adults who can earn a living, raise their children, and all get along with each other. Don Quixote wont help a bit in that kind of education and neither will Benito Juarez.