“In the Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores” is the headline of a New York Times account of the uselessness of high-tech education. Since the Clinton administration, liberal “experts” have argued that giving every kid a laptop, “educational” software, and Internet access will produce a generation of geniuses. That has to be the stupidest idea in the history of education. Of course, it hasn’t worked. But that doesn’t discourage the New Age nerds who run the Obama adminstration’s education policy.
The Times reports on the miserable performance of students in Arizona’s Kyrene School District, where taxpayers have spent $33 million to digitize classrooms since 2005.
Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen.
AdvertisementTo be sure, test scores can go up or down for many reasons. But to many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.
This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements. Advocates for giving schools a major technological upgrade — which include powerful educators, Silicon Valley titans and White House appointees — say digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets.
Some backers of this idea say standardized tests, the most widely used measure of student performance, don’t capture the breadth of skills that computers can help develop. But they also concede that for now there is no better way to gauge the educational value of expensive technology investments.
“The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data,” said Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an investor in educational technology companies. When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”
And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: “It’s one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.”
Just what are they doing with their computers?
Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way.
In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.
How idiotic is that? What about trying to understand what Shakespeare actually said? At my kids’ Waldorf school, the seventh-graders performed “Twelfth Night” in costume, alternating major roles so that all of them had to memorize a couple of hundred lines of the Bard. They learned about the characters by acting the roles, that is, reading the play through the eyes of its author.
“This is such a dynamic class,” Ms. Furman told the New York Times. “I really hope it works.” She recalls the ethnic joke about the prospective chicken farmer who buries chicks in the soil with a bit of manure and is disappointed when chickens fail to sprout.
But what about the educational foundations, the Silicon Valley sages, and the Obama administration? They bring to mind the second half of the joke; the farmer reports his methods in detail to the Agriculture Ministry, which sends him a telegram: “Send soil samples.” The education gurus at the White House really are that dumb. Obama’s National Education Technology Plan calls for a “transformation of American education” that will be “powered by technology”:
The National Education Technology Plan, Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, calls for applying the advanced technologies used in our daily personal and professional lives to our entire education system to improve student learning, accelerate and scale up the adoption of effective practices, and use data and information for continuous improvement.
Obama’s report echoes a 1997 Clinton administration plan urging the same thing. There isn’t a lot of research to support the notion that saturating classrooms with high-tech toys improves education, but the American counterparts of the Slobovian Agricultural Ministry don’t have any other ideas.
David – Your article provides a good reason to shut down the Department of Education (which, based on the enumerated powers in the Constitution, is in, any event, unconstitutional). The reason I would shut down the DOE is that when it comes up with a dumb idea, it can force the whole country to adopt that idea. By contrast, when the States (or better still, school districts, and even better still, private schools) set education goals, and means to achieve them, competition will determine whose goals are better and which means are superior. Such competition is absent in a centralized state.
Amen.
And has anyone noticed that our greatest authors and orators came from a time when the chalkboard was the high water mark of classroom technology?
When I was in high school we had typewriters. That made us better typists, but students who couldn’t spell or write using pen and paper still couldn’t spell or write using a typewriter – even if they could type. Now, with the advent of PDAs, strong writing and grammar skills are even more elusive, i.e. “C U L8R.”
Heh. It’s amazing and wonderful how one well-chosen title can cut through so much cant.
I’m old enough to remember a pre-digital version of the saying:
“A fool with a tool is still a fool.”
Thank-you for expressing exactly what I was thinking when I read that piece in the Times yesterday.I home school my two sons and even amongst other home schooling families, I am fairly unique in my refusal to let my boys do their work on the computer. We use paper and pencils for everything, including proper instruction in cursive writing which is also rapidly disappearing from modern education. Sigh.
That’s not to say that learning about technology isn’t important but it is only one part of a comprehensive education.
You are doing your kids a favor. After reading a bit about neuroplasticity, the way the brain adapts to stimuli, I’m convinced that handwriting stores language in the brain in a completely different (better) way than typing does. I think your kids will end up with a larger active vocabulary and better spelling than those who do their writing on a keyboard.
But, Mr Goldman, how will Obama’s crony-capitalist friends get their pay-back for supporting him? Green jobs just aren’t enough, you know.
I’ve made a commitment to send the next generation (the grandchildren, when they are finally born) of my family to private schools from 1st-12th grades. The powers that be did a fine job of “dumbing down” the “public” educational system in our country. We couldn’t get much less for our educational buck then we are getting right now. The last 4 or 5 Presidents just threw money at the problem and now, nobody knows how to fix it. If it can’t be fixed, then it’s time to take our children out of the public school system and put them into a system that works.
My 2 cents.
And of course this classical music gap is why the Germans defeated the frat boy Americans in WWII and why the Russians won the Cold war and its aftermath.
Don’t be so complacent. Germany expelled tons of its scientists, musicians, and other top minds — that’s why we got the bomb before Hitler. We benefited from a gigantic German brain drain. Who do you think built the rocket program after WWII? Even so, according to all the studies, German soldiers were twice as efficient as Allied soldiers in both WWI and WWII (they killed twice as many of us as we killed of them). Germany punched way above its weight, and it took enormous efforts (and some dumb moves on Hitler’s part) to beat it. I hope we get the same brain drain from China (and India). Might be what saves us. In that case, the frat boys will be getting coffee for a Chinese boss. But it’s better than selling pencils.
Go take a stroll in San Jose. Yes, we are already importing most of our best technical minds from Asia. Problem is, China could furnish the US a million top engineers and never miss them. They have that level of depth. And India, as well. American high tech is already running on Asian talent, and has been for decades.
A bigger problem is the infrastructure we’re losing. I get circuit boards made in China, because that’s where the good suppliers are. I can get on the internet, correspond with someone who speaks adequate English, and get a quality product delivered in a week DHL. There are still some board houses left in the US, but their quality isn’t as good, they’re more expensive, and harder to deal with.
That’s just the way it is.
Sorry, but it reminds me of all the doom and the gloom about how the Soviets learned strategy by playing chess while Americans learned by playing poker. Even at the time it seemed pretty clear that a game that had equal resources and perfect knowledge of both sides’ capabilities was less useful as a strategic learning tool then one that assumed the impact of unequal resources and uncertainity about your oponents’ options. The impact of beliefs and confidence is also clearer in poker than in chess.
That said, the Germans did punch above their weight in both wars, but the fact that they put themselves in that position twice does not speak well for learning from classical music.
Also, I suspect comparing Allied casualties to German ones includes the Russian casualties and does not reflect the American practice of trading superior logistics for reduced casualties.
Of course, you could argue that it is all part of the “Alas, Babylon” cycle of civilizations, where the culture leading civilization in the 19th century with the best music, inventing modern chemistry and the research university goes to hell in the 20th century.
And as you point out, it is the American assimilative ability that gives a strength unmatched by any potential competitor. That craziness of expecting underperforming seventh-graders to learn about Shakespeare via computers may be the craziness that expects to convert anyone to being loyal citizen. Sort of that “Dude, hold my beer and watch this” craziness that salesmen have.
Thanks,
Drew
Sorry to stretch on – but forgot to add the point that the winning side was commanded by an Eisenhower and a Nimitz in WWII – another example of an ethnic group being more successful in America than in their country of origin – and thus adding to America’s strength.
David – You say: “Don’t be so complacent. Germany expelled tons of its scientists, musicians, and other top minds — that’s why we got the bomb before Hitler.” I would amend that slightly by putting the word, Jewish, before ‘scientists.’ On that, and other such matters, read (if you have not already read), Andrew Roberts: The Storm of War. It describes how Hitler’s ideology, particularly with regard to the Jews led to Germany’s defeat in WWII. In particular, read his ch. 7 as well as pp. 573-575.
Yep. We didn’t really win. Hitler lost. Had his ego not caused him to make multiple major blunders, the Third Reich might still be a world power.
The only thing we did better was to manufacture lots of weapons. Compared one on one, for whatever weapon type (machine gun, plane tank, whatever) most of his were better than ours.
Maybe so, maybe not. Who cares about WWII? Our educational standards were much different then. Just look at whose kids are better educated today, German or American, or Chinese? And the rest of the world does believe in standardized tests. That’s how they measure competency of teachers, student progress and student level of achievement. Why do you think our educators are against standardized tests? To hide the fact that our education system sucks and many teachers are incompetent.
A big portion of why teachers are against the standardized testing isn’t because of how it reflects on them as a teacher, but because it is a high stakes test. Too many times there is pressure to do well on the test or else. The or else is cuts in funding to the school, loosing a job, a bad name for a school or district, etc… Pressure is always the worst at the bottom of the heap – right where the students are. Often times you find districts, schools or teachers who “teach to the test” rather than teaching regular curriculum. I remember being in school and drilling test taking strategies so I could “do well on the test”. Yes, I was taught other things as well, but there was such a push to do well on the test that we focused more on that than was probably necessary. This was in the 80′s. Standardized testing will NOT raise the level of education being administered in schools. Standardized testing should be used as a tool for evaluating the overall level of schooling in the district, region, state or country without all the threats that “if you don’t do well then ____.”
But if you notice, at the same time that standardized tests are being pushed, music and other “extra curricular” activities are being diminished. The author makes a good point. The learning of music, especially privately, will encourage and foster good skills that are necessary to doing well as a student. In music you learn good practice habits which can translate over into good study skills. Music many times will help engage both sides of the brain at once. There are a myriad of ways in which music education can benefit a student. It ties into many aspects of education. And I believe it was Plato who said that education requires gymnastics for the body and music for the soul. (Not sure if that is an exact quote or not.) Those two things are what many of todays youth are missing.
Mr Goldman – speaking of discipline and competitiveness, I have one personal question about education: Why did you choose a Waldorf school for your kids?
Maybe in America it’s different, but in Germany anything related with Rudolf Steiner is regarded a bit esoteric. For example, the Waldorfs have far more theatre plays, but are considered not as challenging as public schools in Maths, foreign languages and other “hard” subjects.
In New York City, the Rudolf Steiner school is the closest thing one can find to a humanistisches Gymnasium. Steiner was a gifted mathematician and a complete nutter, complete with Atlantis and astral projection, but that element is very diluted in the Steiner curriculum here. Orchestra was compulsory, as was German language (was ich ganz in Ordnung finde), and the “main lesson” teachers for the most part dedicated professionals; the ones with whom my children spent the most time were first rate. It was not my only choice, but it was a good one, and the one that worked out for a set of practical reasons. It was pretty good on both languages and math, less so on hard sciences.
Thank you for your reply.
I guess, you have the improved Waldorf version. Music, foreign languages and hard maths is really important. The physics that one learns even at a technical school will provide advantage for only one semester when studying Engineering how I could experience, but for maths, language (besonders Deutsch!) and music it’s important to start early, I think.
David – Don’t mean to be parochial, but why not a Jewish Day School?
The only caveat I have to your argument is that the Chinese themselves are very concerned that their strong educational emphasis on rote learning is harmful for creativity.
And they have a point. First, in matters of basics — with a character-based (non-alphabetic) writing system, to read and write involves years of brute memorization. Simplifying the commonest characters (as the mainland did in the 1950s) helps a bit, but not much.
Second, the teacher in a Chinese classroom is next door to God, and classwork consists of loads of read-and-recite and memorize the facts. In a system like that — and the Chinese are quite aware of how this crushes free inquiry — kids don’t ask questions, and the kind of experimental inquiry that is crucial for creativity never (or seldom) happens.
Now given the sheer numbers of people there, even a much lower rate of creative individuals in society will still produce in absolute numbers one hellava of a lot of smart, creative kids. But these will be buried wthin a society that (1) needs them, but (2) doesn’t really trust them because they don’t fit the model.
Where this all goes, I don’t know. I’ve been much impressed by Michael Barone’s “Hard America, Soft America” (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004JZWZSW/). And I come away from this concluding that American kids need a whole lot more rigor in their schooling (and teachers who actually know the subjects they teach), but not to the extent that we end up copying Chinese-style education. (I realize you aren’t recommending the latter, but given how people see such issues in dichotomized terms…!)
China invented the clock, movable type, the magnetic compass, the printing press, and most of the other key technologies of the industrial revolution. Its problem never was the creativity of the elite, but the ability to disseminate technology in scale, which democratic capitalism does splendidly. They have one foot in the market model, and it’s worked out fairly well for them–but things still could go wrong. Their educational system leaves a lot to be desired, but there’s a world of difference between a kid who learns math by rote, and a kid who learns math while playing Bach.
“China invented the clock, movable type, the magnetic compass, the printing press, and most of the other key technologies of the industrial revolution.”
And did jack all with it. And it was no inability to disseminate it which prevented them, unless you are thinking of a cultural inability.
China is still China.
We have nothing to worry about from that quarter, we can destroy them if we need to.
IOW, I’m betting on the American Garage band, not the Chinese playing Bach who can’t tell you why.
Tom, don’t be complacent about China. They’ve been conquered and destroyed many times, and always, within a generation of two, no matter where they started, the conquerors are — Chinese.
But only because “Chinese” is basically empty of meaning. Compare the philosophies of Chu Hsi, Wang Yang-ming, K’ung-fu-tzu, and Meng-tzu; yet all are called “Confucians”.
The Original Spengler seems, from his writings, to have had no knowledge of China after the fall of the Eastern Han. Toynbee, who did, denied that the cycle of Sui through Ch’ing dynasties had anything to do with the Chou-Ch’in-Han civilization, beyond growing up in the same territory and borrowing some names and forms from the former (what Spengler the Elder would have called a “pseudomorphosis”).
The PRC may be another pseudomorphic culture, the result of annexation to the West, or random motion. As Chou En-lai said of the effects of the French Revolution, it’s too early to tell.
Robert writes, “The only caveat I have to your argument is that the Chinese themselves are very concerned that their strong educational emphasis on rote learning is harmful for creativity.”
That concern has manifest itself in China’s special curiosity about Israel. In recent years they’ve marveled at its culture of innovation and have worked hard to learn how they do it and try to replicate it, even persuading Israeli companies to relocate to China. Mind you, Israel suffers similar education deficiencies as the US, for they too have born the fruits of two generations of education “reform”, with similar effect. But the cream rises there anyway. And yes, many there still go for music. (Violinist Gil Shaham just last week performed in London’s Royal Albert with the Israeli Philharmonic, despite repeated interruptions by pro-Palestinian activists within the hall.)
I remain convinced that China will remain a second rate nation until the citizens are allowed more freedom. This is unlikely to occur because it existentially threatens the power of the authoritarian leaders. Our major advances are often the result of “nerds” like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates taking enormous risks. It is virtually impossible for an Apple or Microsoft to start in a fairly closed society like China. Gates would have likely been ordered to return to Harvard and finish his education, and eventually get a real job.
Depends on how you define “second rate nation”. The Japanese have attempted to deal with the creativity issue, with little success. Their economic growth is stunted. But they’re still formidable. What’s likely to happen is the Chinese will continue to dominate the mundane areas of manufacturing, and when they need creativity, they’ll buy it. From us. Our “creative class” thinks the world revolves around them, and they’re about to learn otherwise.
The Chinese will get all the Western creativity money can buy from a hand full of Western design studios. That Chinese car that you’ll buy in 2020 will be designed (not engineered) by somebody in Florida, getting paid $25/hr. Sorry, “creative class”, you’re not that special.
Creative societies must encourage risk taking. Their citizens have to be able to act freely—and not be compelled to constantly place their wet finger into the air to see which way the wind is blowing. That’s it in a nutshell. Albert Einstein barely finished his university training. He was unable to obtain a teaching position because many of his grades were poor.
His resume was an almost total joke when he introduce the theory of relativity to the world.
I am disinclined to differ from David Thomson, but the idea that, today, it is difficult for bright, imaginative individuals to achieve success in China is not supported by reality. he reason that all our stores are stocked with Chinese manufactured goods is that the Chinese are not only obedient students, they are also highly entrepreneurial. Among those hordes of sheep-like sophomores there are the types who have responded to the demand for cheap, reasonably well-made merchandise and have. over the past decade, built small shops into giant factories – with the approval and support of the nominally communist government. There is no deadly Commissar’s hand running these businesses. The owners/managers are permitted to get rich and enjoy the trappings of wealth just as long as they pay the tribute and remember who is the boss. As a matter of fact, Beijing is coddling these capitalists with special privileges. For further evidence, consider how quickly rip-offs of U.S. high-tech innovations appear on the export market. Do you think communist cadres are doing this? Not all of those dull-eyed students are robotic. You can loin a lot from an abacus.
It seems to me that leaders of the PRC, proud, as all chinese are, of their Imperial heritage,and only one hundred years after the end of the Qing dynasty, are developing a central government system that is a Communist/Mandarin blend, with a uniquely Chinese nomenklatura.
As for Bill Gates, recall that his “genius” was not technical: it was marketing. including generosity to educational institutions who were in the market for computers.
You are confusing China’s willingness to allowing risk taking in manufacturing. This is not the same thing as creating new products. Much more intellectual freedom must be granted in the latter.
That concern has manifest itself in China’s special curiosity about Israel.
But they don’t seem too worried about Israel’s situation in the world.
The problem with Israel’s education system is that it is run by the same mindset as the Dep of Ed and they have to copy everything America does including the reality shows.
Second, the teacher in a Chinese classroom is next door to God, and classwork consists of loads of read-and-recite and memorize the facts. In a system like that — and the Chinese are quite aware of how this crushes free inquiry — kids don’t ask questions, and the kind of experimental inquiry that is crucial for creativity never (or seldom) happens.
Having taught adult Chinese students, including many who were literally right off the plane from China, as well as some who had lived in the West for years before I encountered them, I can certainly attest to the fact that it is very rare indeed for students who are Chinese to ask questions. This is especially so for those who have never lived in the West; occasionally those who have lived in the West will ask a question, presumably after being influenced by Western teaching methods.
Initially, I thought the language barrier was the obstacle, since in some cases I was teaching people who had perhaps studied English for years but could still barely string a sentence together. But I was assured that they understood much more than they could say. Still, even when a fluent ethnic Chinese interpreter was provided and I encouraged people to ask questions in Chinese, questions were very few and far between.
I remember one of the interpreters explaining this to me. He told me that Chinese education followed the Confucian model where the student basically sits quietly and waits for wisdom to come flowing from the instructor’s lips. The student has been indoctrinated to believe that he should not waste the instructor’s time with questions which are inevitably foolish and should simply absorb all that he can from the learned person who is leading the class.
This reality certainly made it difficult for me to determine if I was reaching the class and telling them what they wanted to learn in the way that was most effective for their individual learning styles.
It is perhaps a telling point that the only one of these students who ever expressed any great curiousity about the subject I was teaching made the decision to emigrate to the West and actually contacted me for assistance in finding a job once he was here.
I couldn’t begin to question the validity of your observations, but think it important to point out that, while creativity is a strong force in American culture, the discipline and focus to carry through and accomplish something with it is what we are losing here. I worked until retirement in an agency whose employees were almost all engineers. Approximately half of them were Middle Eastern or Asian. We may continue to be a breeding ground of ideas, but design and production is for the more highly disciplined.
“…strong educational emphasis on rote learning is harmful for creativity.”
Except that pretty much everyone whose works we study learned by rote. A person can learn what he or she has to learn by rote (facts, structures) and then apply them creatively.
Any evidence that rote learning stifles the imagination, or is that just a commonly held belief that sounds like it should make sense?
IMO, the worst enemy to lack of creativity is lack of discipline – and America has that by the truckload!
Discipline — what used to be called “stick-to-it-iveness” — is necessary for any creative idea to get beyond the idea stage. And being usefully creative in any field requires you to master (probably through some rote learning) at least the basics of that field, or your bright ideas simply won’t work.
However, what happens in Chinese schooling (and Japanese and probably Korean ones as well) can be summed up in the phrase, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” That attitude, plus the years of memorization and writing characters hundreds of thousands of times to learn them,
I understand the Japanese have from time to time looked at abandoning characters and going to a version of the language written in Roman letters: romaji. Problems with this are obvious, ranging from cutting everybody off from past literature as it was written to the many homonyms in Japanese that are distinguishable only using characters.
Chinese? Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has nine — one way to put those alphabetically is to use diacritical marks or little numbers to indicate the tone. (Chinese has homonym problems, too.) But Vietnamese shows that a tone- and character-based language (used to use Chinese characters) can be transferred successfully to a western alphabet. So maybe there’s hope.
Anyway, the key problems in Chinese education are not going to go away in a hurry, nor, I think, will steady applications of western music suffice to unlock the conformity built into the system. That, I’m afraid, goes bone-deep. And the fact that the Chinese are concerned over the problem suggests that they half-suspect this, too.
Back to western, specifically US, kids: it strikes me that behind all the slippage of standards in our schools lies a pervasive unease with both exercising authority and with western culture in general.
I assume that in “learning by rote” you are talking about grades K-12. So what? The point is that they have a basis on which to build, which is far different than many of today’s American students, 50% of who must receive remedial math and English compositions skills in college. Real thinking starts when kids graduate from high school. Many Chinese are attending our most prestigious universities, after being able to pass entrance exams.
Moron is as Moron does.
Technology is flashy, glitzy, and empty. Only well-designed pedagogical structures focusing on serious and meaningful content employed by teachers who themselves have both extensive content and pedagogical knowledge can create conditions where (almost) all students can learn. But with technology you don’t have to do the dull, boring stuff. You don’t have to be a real science educator – you can just play one on TV. Perhaps that is why the technology silver bullet is so appealing to so many in the educational establishment.
My son’s got all of the old broken computers I could find. I told them if they wanted a computer we could fix them up one. So, they learned how to fix them, and then they learned to program them. Now, one is teaching chemistry at Harvard and the other is in law school. A monkey can punch the keys on a computer. Fostering natural curiosity and the desire to learn takes involved parents. All the money and laptops in the world will not make children learn.
I may be dating myself a bit, but there has always been a fascination for the new technologies among our education establishment. When I was in school, it was film strips, and later 16 mm movies. We had to become literate in the audio-visual arts so that we could learn from places and peoples far away.
Riiiight.
When computers started making inroads in to classrooms, the first thing they tried to do was to teach students how to program them. That in and of itself isn’t a bad bit of experience. The difficulty is that teachers themselves didn’t know a thing about this stuff either. And unless you’re very lucky, they usually still don’t. Most can not explain what a kernel is, what it does, or what kinds there are. Most know nothing of assembly language, what a compiler does, what a linker does, or why anyone should care about this.
Then they started porting the Internet and all of its insanity in to the classroom. Are the students any better off? NO.
The skills still boil down to Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. With these skills one can then discuss critical thought, information gathering, and other such endeavors.
In and of itself, a laptop in the classroom is not a help. It takes structured and knowledgeable guidance by a teacher to show them what to do with it.
Otherwise, we might as well revert back to film strips and 16 mm Movies and Weekly Readers.
I thought the “moron” and “cretin” were no longer PC terms, and thus no longer existed in polite company?–except perhaps in military basic training units as motivational terms for the troops (although admittedly morons and cretins still do exist). Dave, you’re being insensitive and may hurt some feelings, especially people with low self esteem. I think the proper terms for morons is developmentally challenged, as apposed to handicapped. As I recall, the Chinese also invented the imperial court eunuchs who were considered more reliable than the scholar officials with normal testosterone levels, and they apparently worked out rather well as bureaucrats. I suppose substituting more of today’s feminists for the typical urban male could achieve the same low testosterone results in government.
When we can no longer put a name to human stupidity, we are all truly doomed.
Totalitarians need subjects, not citizens. Therefore, they need to destroy the system of education.
That’s what they have done in the last thirty or forty years.
That’s how you get a mob of subjects who happily vote for a President who has no qualification whatsoever.
Isn’t it funny that the “sophisticated” and “refined” left ends up for being THE main enemy of culture ?
When will we learn that if you give people middle-class things (houses, college educations, computers) they don’t become middle class? It’s the character and drive that is required to obtain those things that lets people succeed in the first place.
There are no shortcuts. No amount of toys will fix underlying the underlying problems and it doesn’t how matter how many times the government tries or how much money is thrown at it. The massive social experiment foisted on us over the last 50 years has failed us, and failed the poor most of all.
“The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data,” said Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an investor in educational technology companies.
I wouldn’t expect much from a foundation bureaucrat who doesn’t know that the word “data” is plural, and/or can’t manage subject-verb agreement. It implies he spends his time around others with weak Latin language skills.
“Data” is no longer always plural.
It’s a plural noun, and as such can be used in either singular or plural constructs; the former to denote data as a concept, the latter to denote a collection of items each of which is a datum.
Just like “news” and “media”. Nobody says “The war news were bad today….” or “The mainstream media are biased….”
As a concept, the correct word is “evidence.” And your operative term is “no longer” because the use of “data” with a singular verb is another example of the loss of precision in English. Do you approve of “the criteria is, the phenomenon are?” We hear these expressions all the time, so they must be correct.
Did giving everybody a house make a good citizen out of them? Did giving everybody a college degree make every one of them a highly-employable worker ready for the 21st century economy? Will giving everybody a dog make them all into animal lovers?
Of course not. But apparently the whole country is filled with cargo cultists now, getting cause and effect totally bass-ackward.
Amen!
Using the computer well requires a good education. However placing a fool in front of a computer will not educate them.
I guess this article sums up the differences between the American and the Asian creeds.
Throwing technology at a problem has been the American way. It’s part of why America has always been at the forefront of widespread adoption of new technologies, well ahead of Europe for sure. The somewhat naive faith in technology’s ability to solve all problems of humanity is quintessentially American. In the 60s America thought social scientists with computer models could “fix” poverty, now many think more computers will fix education.
Meanwhile Asians are very applied and single-minded on advancement. It’s hard-wired into their notions of honor and respect. The Chinese do not play Mozart out of a cultural appreciation, they play it as mimicry because it’s a signifier of upward mobility. The same reason British middle-class families gave their children elocution lessons so they could sound like the scions of nobility seen as social role models at the time: if you sound like a master, you may get to be one. Classical music in fact illustrates quite perfectly the difference between Europe and Asia. Talented Asians perform it quite marvelously, eccentric European geniuses had to write it because nobody else would have. Amongst cultures, the East Asian cultures are still the company men. They are quite brilliant and admirable in their pursuit of excellence but individuality and its celebration remains foreign to them and thus so does true inspiration.
The real lesson in the rise of Asia is that the same rules still apply, if you want something you need to go get it, if you want to achieve you need to not just work hard, you need to do whatever it takes to beat the competition. The moral high ground is a moot point in the equations of victory and defeat.
Europe and its cultural offshoots could compete against and hold their own against Asia, if we hadn’t forgotten those lessons.
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I guess this article sums up the differences between the American and the Asian creeds.
Throwing technology at a problem has been the American way. It’s part of why America has always been at the forefront of widespread adoption of new technologies, well ahead of Europe for sure. The somewhat naive faith in technology’s ability to solve all problems of humanity is quintessentially American. In the 60s America thought social scientists with computer models could “fix” poverty, now many think more computers will fix education.
Meanwhile Asians are very applied and single-minded on advancement. It’s hard-wired into their notions of honor and respect. The Chinese do not play Mozart out of a cultural appreciation, they play it as mimicry because it’s a signifier of upward mobility. The same reason British middle-class families gave their children elocution lessons so they could sound like the scions of nobility seen as social role models at the time: if you sound like a master, you may get to be one. Classical music in fact illustrates quite perfectly the difference between Europe and Asia. Talented Asians perform it quite marvelously, eccentric European geniuses had to write it because nobody else would have. Amongst cultures, the East Asian cultures are still the company men. They are quite brilliant and admirable in their pursuit of excellence but individuality and its celebration remains foreign to them and thus so does true inspiration.
The real lesson in the rise of Asia is that the same rules still apply, if you want something you need to go get it, if you want to achieve you need to not just work hard, you need to do whatever it takes to beat the competition. The moral high ground is a moot point in the equations of victory and defeat.
Europe and its cultural offshoots could compete against and hold their own against Asia, if we hadn’t forgotten those lessons.
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Now that is an intelligent thought, MKH.
I have often compared the armies of Genghiz Khan to those of the European West. Yes, the steppe armies were incredibly successful, and we were very lucky that the Great Khan died when he did. However, consider the Knights, encased in metal armour: they were a part of a society that recognized and supported men who liked to tinker with metal, who were interested in nuts and bolts and levers. A lot of what they did had no immediate practical value, but gosh did they have an interesting time. In the long term, that talent and value system has worked to our advantage for the past thousand years. The Khan, however, was ruthlessly practical. Just ‘messing’ was not respected at all. (Example: yes, a Chinese invented a water clock, but when the Emperor died, it had no backers anymore.)
But now, it seems that we have forgotten the base of our civilization: the recognition that learning takes work, self discipline and concentration. Too bad, isn’t it?
“The real lesson in the rise of Asia is that the same rules still apply, if you want something you need to go get it, if you want to achieve you need to not just work hard, you need to do whatever it takes to beat the competition. The moral high ground is a moot point in the equations of victory and defeat.”
Keen observation. Well said!
If I get your argument correctly, you’re saying that *replacing* intelligent teaching with technology is foolish. I have to say the headline on this article made me think I was going to agree with you a lot less than it turns out I do. Frankly, computers, laptops or whatever, are the wave of the future, and expecting children to be educated *without* them is fallacious also. They’ll need to learn at some point, otherwise how will they get Pajamas Media?
That being said, it’s just a tool, like a textbook or chalkboard or overhead projector. If the instructor isn’t using it properly, it’s not worth that much, and frankly our education system has been able to waste billions, perhaps trillions, failing to educate children. This is just another way they’re doing it. One of my bugaboos right now is textbooks. The schools make kids buy big ones for each class, and out here in California some teachers have downright draconian requirements for their students: they have to have a particular type of notebook, blank, with a certain amount of paper, and particular types of pencils and pens. Failure to have these things apparently gets you in lots of trouble: I was inadvertently at an office supply big box store in the Los Angeles area last year on the wrong day, and the place was literally packed with students and their parents. The guy who sold me the stuff I needed was the store manager, manning a register, and when I asked he confirmed: that day is now the *best day of the year* for the store, several years running.
Anyway, given that many schools now have discontinued lockers, because the kids fought over them and kept drugs in them, the kids have to carry these books, and the notebooks and so forth, in backpacks. It sounds absurd, but some of the kids have begun to exhibit back problems as a result, and of course if such things occur when someone’s in their teens, they’ll often persist for a very long time. My feeling is that someone needs to have new textbooks written, and digitized, and then download the whole thing onto a Kindle or laptop or iPad or something, so that the kids can get what they need without scrambling, and of course the costs would be lowered considerably. The difficulty, of course, is that the textbook publishing lobby is *VERY* powerful politically, and will resist this strongly (because they make so very much money selling the actual books). Whereas electronic copies of books on Kindle cost between several dollars and maybe twenty, I once saw a textbook for a grad-school level course in military science for $96.00. The hardback was $105.00 or so, but still…why would the electronic version be so expensive. The answer is they want to push you to buy the physical book still; they know that electronic books will eventually drop in price, and it frightens the hell out of them.
Breaking this impasse in the publishing industry, in my mind, is one way they can reduce the cost in education astronomically. If they did it at the college level (where books can be ridiculously expensive) it’d have a wonderful effect on things. But of course it’s not going to happen, widespread anyway, any time soon.
I have had three kids in college and have found that a large part of the problem is the first two years is basically liberal indoctrination. When they finally get to the upper division classes most are tired of school and many kids drop out at that point before they actually learn something useful that might ge them a job. Liberals elites are really only interested in their own power and creating serfs to keep them in office.
I had always heard Waldorf schools were just crawling with disease due to their strange vaccination beliefs. There’s seemingly something weird about every private school that is otherwise excellent. Maybe home schooling works, but at some point one just wants the kids to sit down and stare at the wall. It worked for Plato. What’s most unfortunate, however, is that skilled music requires lots of musicians, since even the best motivation isn’t enough to make everyone a soloist.
As for public schools, the quality of many is so hopeless that the poor teachers deserve for the kids to get distracted on facebook instead of starting fights. Educational programs are too often based in self-interest, but I can empathize with this one.
The kids at the Steiner school in New York seemed like a healthy bunch to me. For a certain kind of boy or girl, it is a very good choice indeed, although it surely is not for everyone. There is a lot of nuttiness in the Steiner movement, but the average pupil or parent doesn’t get enough of it to become uncomfortable.
Depressing, yes … but there’s a silver lining. If Western cultural heritage is being embraced by Asians, well, at least that heritage continues to live. If Western culture must go east for a while, ok …
The wife of an immigrant friend of mine took their pre-schooler to visit the family in Beijing. They were at some event where Chinese tv was making a chilren’s program and the producers asked his daughter if she could perform any song or dance. Sure she said and proceeded to sing a song in Chinese. Afterwards, mother asked where did you learn that song? (since her kid’s preschool here in Vancouver is in English) I made it up, she replied. This deeply impressed my friend who said she could never have done that if she grew up in China.
It’s just an anecdote but it provokes the idea that the great “Asian” future will be somewhat more with the hybrids than the pure Asians, if there are any of the latter anymore. I’m a little surprised Mr. GOldman only mentioned the Chinese desire for classical music. Won’t it be the kid who learns math while playing Bach and going to Christian or English school who is likely to rock the future?
In other words, they become the new us.
They’ll become the new old us, as the new new us become unemployable.
I am old enough to remember the first great “electronic revolution” in American education. Television was going to link us all together, so great, unwieldy sets on rolling stands were purchased by the district. If I remember correctly, they got put to use exactly once a year, when we got to watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade during recess.
Another anecdote sticks in my mind, from one of the first California experiments in computer-based learning. Students with broad computer access were compared to a control group on math, reading comprehension, social studies, science and computer studies. In all categories except computer studies, the control group outperformed their computer-savvy schoolmates, and the results only got more pronounced the longer the computers were present. It turns out that working with computers chiefly teaches one to…work with computers.
This is not rocket science. Which is just as well, since we probably don’t graduate any rocket scientists anymore.
The US graduates few rocket scientists because there are few jobs for them: the US military is not buying or developing new rocketry systems, and private firms aren’t jumping to do the same, either. Of course, Purdue University and others with aeronautical engineering doctoral programs might say otherwise to keep those engineering grads’ dollars flowing. The catch is the rocket scientist will still get a job, just not as a rocket scientist.
South Korea, however, does have a real and likley pressing need for rocket scientists, at least as long as the Norks are there.
Mr Goldman, for a smart and motivated student, a computer (at home or in the classroom) can do wonders; for most others it is just another distraction. I certainly agree that various fads of educational reform have greatly diluted the teaching of ´hard´ subjects that, besides their intrinsic worth, help develop the mind (that is, err, to educate). I would offer a few caveats however:
- Although the average level of math and science education in the US is abysmal, from my (direct and indirect) experience talented and motivated students do not lack in mentoring or resources to become very, very good.
- Americans seem to be good at networking. Motivated students form all sorts of clubs, societies, bands and whatnot spontaneously. It may sound a bit of a Tocquevillian cliché, but this sort of peer to peer education can indeed remedy and to some extent even improve upon traditional education. I don´t think such groups are common (or even tenable) in Chinese education.
- Computer programming requires discipline, attention to detail, planning, structured logical thinking and creativity. I would put it on par with music, languages and math as a mind-training subject. This is not a subject matter that is taught in any detail in either the US or China; most hackers are self taught (and the internet, being made by them and largely for them, is their paramount educational resource). Giving a laptop to each student might help find a number of budding hackers; but of course most students won´t take up programing, and would rather post on Facebook than invent it, so to speak.
- Americans like sports, and American students practice sports to a far greater degree and competitiveness than their Chinese counterparts, it seems to me. Sports training share a number of qualities with music training, i.e., promoting discipline, deferred gratification, fine motor skills, etc. It may not be as intellectually exacting as classical music, but it may go some way towards explaining the discrepancy in musical education for reason which are not entirely detrimental to US students.
- Some of the (largely social) skills imparted by American school seem to successfully produce top advertisers, graphic designers, media executives and the like. Mac users, for short. Whatever one thinks of these apple cultists, their habits and opinions, they clearly have an economical role to perform.
- A good ´hard´ education may be necessary, but it is not sufficient to sustain a modern economy. Russian students probably receive the most thorough math and physics education in the world; Russian physicists are renowned for their problem solving and their ability to work out very hard math. Russian criminal hackers are the world´s main source of malware. But there are no Russian googles to be seen; in fact I know of no prominent Russian non-weapons high tech company.
Please do not take this as an attempt at refutation; the problems raised in the article are real and serious. It seems most American students get a semi-farsical education indeed, or would if present trends were to continue. But it appears also that the US educational system still have some unique cultural goods that the Chinese may find hard to replicate (largely due to not been an open society). This is hardly cause for complacency or self-congratulation, but a source of hope for your country nonetheless.
I take a middle position here.
Computers should not be used as gimmicks to attempt to hold students’ interest, as this NYT article suggested they’re being used. If the teacher can’t keep students interested, then computers aren’t going to fix that. But computers should be used to do those things that require a lot of rote routine processing, like the following:
With Google, you can do a better literature search in seconds than you used to do in hours or days at a public library. And being able to do research is part of education. I wish I had Google back when I was in school writing term papers.
Your productivity in writing large term papers also improves. You can edit and re-edit and re-edit your text as much as you want till you’ve polished it–while the computer handles the pagination, the footnotes and endnotes, and all the other clerical aspects that used to drive me crazy every time I realized I had to revise my draft term paper yet again. Back then, with a typewriter, we had to measure off space for each footnote by hand. Even corrections of typos had to be done with White-Out, which looked ugly. What a mess.
But a computer isn’t going to write the term paper for you. You have to know how to write. You have to know how to organize your paper with abstract, preface, chapters, conclusion. And how to write a coherent English sentence.
Those skills don’t come from computers.
They come from teachers. And parents.
We’re told that tablets will revive the reading of long articles. That’s disturbing, because it means that fewer people read long articles now. What about reading a book from beginning to end, and absorbing what it has to say? This is not as simple as it sounds. My education in reading began in 9th grade, when my teacher, one Malcolm Keith, parsed Poe’s story “The Cask of Amontillado,” spelling out for us what the author implied but did not state outright. It occurred to me then that I really did not know how to read. I had the same lesson in college when Michael Wood taught Fielding’s “Tom Jones.” And I have it every week at synagogue when we read the weekly Torah portion. I have done almost every week for almost twenty years, and I still feel woefully unqualified to read the Pentateuch.
Yes, the Internet is a fabulous electronic library and Google is a marvelous digital card catalog. To write term papers, though, it also helps to know how to read.
David, your points are well-taken. Along with all this, in order for a person to learn, they must first want to learn. Somehow, the skills that my teachers had in the 60′s and 70′s to get students interested in the subject matter are vanishing or have already gone. Part of the reason for that is the heretofore mentioned bureaucracy that enforces that the teacher’s personality is a liability. They want everything “equal” so do the rote learning, read the slides, quote the (politically correct) position, do not draw on personal experience or reference anything not sanctioned by the DOE. To do so is anathema to the approved methodology, as prescribed, again, by the DOE.
My mother was a schoolteacher. She knew how to make me want to learn something. Granted, some kids are more inquisitive than others and it takes a special knack to get to that part of the student that wants to know. The sterile, programed, by-the-numbers methods does two things. 1) It allows the teacher to fill squares and meet predetermined gates and goals while simultaneously disallowing for variance in the abilities of the students. Like it or not, they all get the same drivel.
Where debate should be allowed and different points of view should be heard, there is none, unless it’s “debate class” where the students learn the “correct” way of discussing points and making counterpoints while all the passion for the argument is dismissed. And then, only politically correct subjects are allowed to be “debated”. Any/all students who “think outside the box” are reigned in and scolded to work harder to belong.
And there we have the root of the problem. Belonging trumps independent thought. Ask me how I know because even in the 70′s it was happening. I’m not talking so independent as to be antisocial but ridiculed and humiliated for having a differing point of view. Admittedly my point of view came from living in many different parts of the world which my teacher both embraced and then humiliated me when my way of thinking didn’t fit her textbook determination.
Where education is today has simply become a haven for how to belong 101. In my substitute teacher days in the early 90′s I also found the public school teachers being more concerned with hanging with the “cool” kids which I found absolutely repugnant. The star jocks were given obvious preferential treatment(by teachers) and never held accountable.
It was then that I made the determination that some people become high school teachers because they wish to live eternally in the social construct that such an environment has to offer which, apparently is also fostered and supported by the DOE.
My classmates and I (class of 1974) were able to identify things down to a year at the time. The high school class of 1967 had a pattern of checking out books from the school library that reflected inquiring minds that later classes did not. My own class had a few enormously smart kids. The final calculus class in the spring was only 17 students out of a class of f500. But the following class of ’75 was lager. Since taking high school Calculus require five years of Mathematics in high school (double classes of Geometry and Analytic Algebra in the sophomore year) it is a fair metric of commitment to leaning.
I think that the introduction of nihilistic thinking was the trigger. Some of the teachers would express the belief that resources were running out and that the having of children would be child abuse because they would just die in nuclear war. There were a large number of other things but because the library use dropped off a cliff and the High school collected students from seven or eight grade schools it had to be introduced into the grade school curriculum before the great society.
We now have conclusive proof that when the networks show as suicide the number of teenage suicides goes up but I don’t know what would cause everyone under a certain age, those born after 1949, to completely change attitudes and reject what had been the core of learning for years. We, members or the classes of ’74 and ’75 collected the checkout records for most of the non-fiction section of the library around 4,000 books. I don’t know what happened only when it happened, like the sexual revolution ending in 1976. The coffee table magazines, Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, and Petersen’s Photograph had nudity in every in many issues before the summer of 1976 and then afterwards nothing. There is material there for a History Thesis.
To read – and to reason. I have long believed that the reason there are so many outstanding Jewish scholars, thinkers, writers and scientists stems from the experience you cite. Abraham, Job, the prophets argue with God. You learn reasoning at at Synagogue from earliest childhood. What other faith gives training in reasoning? Our schools teach non-judgmentalism, oppose criticism as disrespect, The thinker, the reasoner uses all the cyber devices as tools to assist in getting information to support reasoning. The non-reasoning mind, not necessarily moronic, uses them for entertainment and self-gratification. The worst device of all is the electric calculator which has produced millions of retail clerks unable to add 65 cents and 72 without it.
The percentage of innovative minds emerging in China will probably be about the same as for the U.S.A. but there is a helluva lot more of them.
A computer. It gives a wise man something to expand his mind and an idiot something with which to look at porn.
New take on “A pipe”. “It gives a wise man time to think and an idiot something to stick in his mouth.”
This is what lazy government types do: create a protocol, or a program, or a rule, whiuch will magically fix all problems, and implement them ruthlessly. It is difficult to train TSA agents to stop criminals, but easy to take away everyone’s shampoo, thus, take away the shampoo.
All beaurocracies have this problem. Up until not too many years ago, police use the “do no harm” methodology. If you were stopped, driving drunk, say, yet didn’t seem to really be any danger to anyone, they would simply escort you home. But beaurocracies, like any other organic being, view self-protection as the greatest consideration. Rather throw 2000 innocents in jail, and ruin their lives, than let one person die.
It is an immature reasoning, because every action has a price and a worth, which need to be balanced. Bureaucrats don’t care. They must issue orders to validate their jobs. You must obey them, no matter how stupid, because otherwise, they are not needed. Any logic merely complicates things and makes their job harder. Thus, we still have business departments, which at the high school level are just typing classes, to teach kids who’ve been typing over 100 words a minute since they were 8 years old, playing with their friends on the internet. A complete waste of time and effort, unless you’re a business teacher.
Teachers are lazy. If they can play like they’re working, while the computer babysits their students, so much the better.
I recall a sociology class in the early 1960s. We studied ethnic groups (believe it or not). When it came time for the Chinese I recall someone raising their hand and saying the Chinese are wonderful at physics. According to the speaker, of the Fortune magazine 10 top physicists in the world two were Chinese. Quite an accomplishment for impoverished 1960s China.
The next person raised his hand and acknowledged that, yes, two of the top ten were Chinese. The other eight were Jewish.
Get those kids out of that Rudolph Steiner parvenue circus and into a Jewish school — the more modest the better.
Welfare and unemployment insurance: Make high school graduation a condition of getting both and the learning curve will be enhanced. And be sure the standards for high school graduation include an adequate education in mathematics, science, english and history.
… but will stimulate computer manufacturing jobs in China.
Great essay
money has precious little to do with education. the progressives/liberals are always obsessed with money …other peoples money as the cure for all that ails.
then never learned that it isn’t about the money. they throw money at every problem and make every problem worse …in magnitude and time. but then they are stupid.
for all their Ivy league educations the liberals never learned that human issues are not solved with money. Anybodies money.
The entire time I was living in Atlanta, there would be clockwork revelations of some or another politically connected “computer technology” firm getting propped up then popped for failing to provide the equipment they’d jacked up ten or twenty times in price and re-sold on specialized (read, minority set-aside) pricing to the Atlanta public schools.
Such scandals were more predictable than the leaves changing, a subtle phenomenon in the piedmont.
And so you have the picture. We weren’t really providing computers to children: we were providing payoffs to civil rights leaders’ brother-in-laws and their connected ministers. Hello, bread and fishes: $600 units magically became $3,000 each, multiplied by child (who rarely received the actual fishies). The social justice ministers were big, big into this. I worked as VISTA for a guy in on that action and saw the fringe take-in, and that taught me the parameters.
And the poor kids — because they were kids, poor kids — got a lesson in only one thing (and unfortunately it stuck, as all successful goal-setting sticks). They received the lesson that rolling the taxpayers on the grounds of historical guilt while remaining as ignorant as possible was a comfortably winning racket.
I have to laugh when I read arguments about one minority or another being intellectually inferior to Asians or whites. Groundless claim. The only thing that matters is the values you model for children. And when computers themselves are symbols of lowered expectations and heightened deceit, what are children going to learn when they boot up?
Bring back nuns. Voluntarily, or by strong-arming them.
Thanks for the great article, Mr Goldman. I say that as a Waldorf teacher who happens to teach the Shakespeare that the students learn through reading and acting. I even teach “The Cask of Amontillado”, and the combination of Poe and Steiner, leavened by Shakespeare, is pretty nutty, eh? But seriously…
Joseph Weizenbaum, who managed to escape from the Nazis and then become one of the pioneers of the modern computer, warned against its use in education, most especially early education, and how right he was. Our educators would be wise to insist on music and Shakespeare, unadulterated, but the trend is going the other way. The schools of education have been captured by that liberal elite that you speak of, and the teachers they send out there are only doing what they have been taught to do. We are already paying the piper, and it will only get worse.
Herb,
Good to hear from you. As I tried to make clear, I’m an admirer of Waldorf education and a former Waldorf parent. And some of the best teachers I’ve met are at Waldorf schools. My reservations about Steiner is a different matter.
I understand your reservations. Steiner is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the education comes directly out of his insights. In any case, I have been an admirer of your work for a few years,since the days when you were only known as Spengler. It is good to see that you are continuing to give us your thoughts on the world, now at PM.
Thanks for the generous words. Personally, I would have preferred the classical humanistiches Gymnasium, against which Steiner rebelled. As in so many cases, the rebellion, frozen in time, comes to resemble the original more than anything else available.
You are probably right that Waldorf education is closer than any other contemporary schooling to the classical education that you refer to, but it is in many ways distant from the old Gymnasium. You should not underestimate how dry and intellectual that education had become by Steiner’s time. He wanted education to be more lively, organic, and artistic. After all, he saw teaching as an art. His inspirations were more along the lines of Goethe and Schiller, something I imagine you know. For anyone here who wants to get a sense of the aims and philosophy of Waldorf education without reading Steiner directly, one can’t do much better than Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, a great book rarely read these days.
I just retired from a career of public school teaching. I taught computer literacy the last decade of my career. I will say unequivocally that computers do nothing to increase the intelligence or performance of a child. They should have no place in elementary school; secondary schools, yes, but not until then.
I mostly agree w/you Mark.
Both of my children are in elementary school (K @ 2nd) and they do have a computer lab at the school (which they get to use about once every two weeks) and a couple of computers in the classroom. I think they are very beneficial for the students who do not have computers in their homes, and are also useful assisting teaching. Seeing something is nearly always more insightful then having the information simply relayed to you. My son asked me about tornadoes a few weeks ago… we talked about it for a while, then we pulled out the iPad and found a couple of great videos that explain in detail how tornadoes form. Sadly, I don’t think teachers are using technology in this way.. and certainly not the ones in that article.
As a teacher in Ontario, all I can say is that computers are of limited use, unless the students can differentiate between information and knowledge. Over the past years I have seen an increase in cut and paste papers hitting my desk. This even after the (plagiarized papers will receive a zero) talk. The computer however does make it easier for me to find the plagiarists.
Education starts at home, and toys do not a good home make.
My wife, at a big REIT has noticed that children are consistently ignored while people work or play.
What we have now is “Lord of the Flies” When I was a kid in my blue collar ‘hood, we did not have bullying because we did not permit it, and no amount of law will prevent it.
Learning to program is a tremendous asset not only because it can lead a person to a lucrative career, but first and foremost because it teaches logic and precision in thinking. A totally misunderstood Hamlet production can still be popular if performed by attractive talented people with trendy music and not much clothing. Misunderstand your programming, and your program will crash.
Teaching young people to program is a mammoth task. Telling them to do facebook pages for fictional characters in violation of the facebook use policy is easy. I am not sure it is legal, but it is definitely slacking.
As a retired Latin teacher in the public schools I can recommend that a good vigorous course in Latin will do much more good than a multi million dollar high tech investment. The problem is that a computer in every classroom does absolutley nothing for the students. I will confess I use the computer to access Perseus an on line Latin/Greek site where one can access a library of classical works in both translation and the original language. After I retired from teaching the school district where I worked dropped Latin; apparently the educationists who run the schools could find no value in teaching real disciplines to America’s dumbdown younger generation. American public education has become such a farce that the computer culture is just one of many of its problems. Public schools have become a bottomless money pit from which the parasites find their livelihood.
I wholeheartedly agree.
The computers will have to be “dumbed down” to the level of the students’ comprehension.
And this will most likely be future legislation from the Democrat Party.
One tutor with eight students in a bare room will vastly outperform a wealthy educational racket where rot starts at the top.
While they still existed, and with all their obvious disadvantages, the one room schoolhouse consistently measured first in achievement among public schools.
Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters still are worth reading, I strongly agree. But the conventional gymnasia did not neglect Schiller; Felix Klein said that his proudest achievement was translating four stanzas of Schiller’s “Ibykus” into Attic Greek at age 16. Schiller also said (with some truth) that Goethe’s scientific research was what Goethe did when he was goofing off from what he should have been doing, namely writing. Steiner, who edited Goethe’s scientific works, placed too much emphasis on them, in my view. And he ignored the biblical dimension of Goethe, a personal hobby-horse, as in this:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/07/hast-thou-considered-my-servant-faust
and this:
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/53221/faustian-bargains/
Still, the Waldorf schools are the only place in the US where high school students have to read Faust, to my mind the most important work of modern fiction.
Those were two fine articles you linked to, and I learned something from both of them. I especially liked your linking the opening of Faust to Augustine’s “You have made us, O Lord, for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” I hadn’t thought of that, and it reminded me of George Herbert’s great poem, The Pulley:
When God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can:
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.
So strength first made a way;
Then beautie flow’d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottome lay.
For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse:
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.
I don’t know about your assertion that Faust erred in trying to wrest nature’s secrets. Perhaps only in the way he went about it. Certainly Goethe exerted himself greatly in an attempt to wrest nature’s secrets. He wrote:
You must, when contemplating nature,
Attend to this, in each and every feature:
There’s nought outside and nought within,
For she is inside out and outside in.
Thus will you grasp, with no delay,
The holy secret, clear as day.
Despite what Schiller may have thought, Goethe believed that his scientific explorations were as important as his literary ones. Time will tell.
Most important in my view is that Faust abandons the attempt to find this “Holy Spirit” after his quite unsatisfactory interview with the Earth Spirit.
I agree with the fallacy of computers in elementary school, but two datapoints on this post:
1. I attended a classical European gymnasium (> 600 years old, 10 hours of Greek and 10 hours of Latin every week during six years). My children are learning more, and better, at a Midwestern public high school.
2. You are pushing against a mountain. There are clear ethnic and racial differences in IQ, and these have a genetic basis. Because research into this subject is almost impossible in the US (but the Beijing Genetics Institute in China where it is allowed has started such research), it is also not possible to address these differences, at least in the US. If we can agree that differential performance in the classroom is at least to some degree affected by innate differences in IQ, we can also stop the fallacy that given enough discipline, though love, and motivation, every Detroit kid can be a physics Nobel prize winner.
ad*m;
Here, here. Succinct and to the point.
The U.S. government is mandating “indoctrination”, and not education.
I have witnessed this since the 1960′s.
This will never end well.
Perhaps every Detroit kid can’t be a physics Nobel prize winner, but they can be competent at math and science. Take a look at which schools in a given area have the strongest chess teams. There’s basically no correlation with socioeconomics. Show me an outstanding chess team, and I’ll show you an outstanding chess coach. I’ve seen this over and over and over.
And testing shows that inner city kids, while not doing great in math and science, do better at that wrt white kids than they do at language skills. And furthermore, they do a lot better in Texas than they do in the rust belt.
IQ is an overly simplified model for people of low IQ.
What is naive is not so much the failure to allow that populations geographically, or linguistically, isolated for any significant (!) period of time may have evolved different average levels in various cognitive skills, but that if we were in full knowledge of these differences we would stop worrying about making “Detroit” kids smarter. Why might not full knowledge of group differences lead to ever more liberalism or “white guilt”, not less?
What those obssessed with quantitative tests and statistics often don’t think enough about is where the human impulse to defend equality comes from in the first place. If it is a fundamental human quality, an originary condition of human language, as I think it is (and I am a strong defender of individual freedom in opposition to the various totalitarian impulses that build on our fundamental intuition of human equality), why would it bow down to some knowledge of (temporarily) evolved differences? Might we not witness, say, political movements to favour, or even enforce, mixed marriages instead of people saying, heh it’s alright there’s a reason your group is less successful? Or, if that were unworkable, why wouldn’t even more money be poured into certain “disadvantaged” schools, while hampering others, in the belief that it might minimize differences “as much as possible”? etc. etc.
Isn’t genetics interesting?
When your experiment is complete, I hope you will let us have a glimpse of the results.
Why the sarc? I’m not advocating any experiment, just asking those who think we need more knowledge of group IQ differences to reflect more on their notion that this knowledge will lead to less and not more “white” guilt. If that notion is dubious, as I think it is, it would follow that anyone who thinks white guilt is a dangerous cultural phenomenon would need to seek a way to explain why individual freedom and differences are a good thing irregardless of any merely genetic “explanation”.
Measuring intelligence is one of the dodgiest things we might do. I’m dead set against attributing much significance to the results of any such exercise. First, how does one measure “intelligence”? How do you compare “Rain Man” math skills with Emily Dickinson’s poetic genius? Was Bobby Fischer smarter than J.D. Salinger? And even if we could agree on a measure of intelligence, separating cultural and (presumed) genetic factors is statistically intractable. I hired and fired PhD statisticians. Many of them were utterly clueless when it came to designing practical models, and I had a couple resign when I shredded their models. There are very academic few statistical models that stand up to close scrutiny. In short: I don’t trust the assumptions, and even if I did trust the assumptions, I don’t trust the methods by which hypotheses are falsified. All in all, I’m against having the discussion; it tends to dredge up half-baked results that inflame passions before anyone has the chance to examine them thoroughly.
truepeers;
It’s common knowledge that kids are being taught how to pass the assessment tests nation wide. The end results show “equality” of education, and from that you may deduce an “intelligence” factor.
Isolating any “white guilt” in those figures has to incorporate some kind of witchcraft.
But, then again, witchcraft could indicate a higher level of intelligence.
I know if my kid is performing to his/her age and peer level. And if they are not, I take remedial action.
As an example of “artificial intelligence”, I submit the dunce we now have in the White House acting as an “intelligent juvenile” with an unrestricted allowance.
“There are very academic few statistical models that stand up to close scrutiny. In short: I don’t trust the assumptions, and even if I did trust the assumptions, I don’t trust the methods by which hypotheses are falsified.”
-That’s true, but true of all models and methods in the social sciences which by their nature can only model/measure discrete phenomena that, in order to be measured, have been “methodically” isolated from the larger questions more characteristic of the “less scientific” yet potentially more profound reflection of the humanities (with its roots in religious and ethical thought on the nature of human origins and purpose); and all arguments which link these discrete “scientific” measurements to wider social concerns are always questionable, revealing as much what certain people want to believe as any ultimate or necessary truth. All social scientific methodolgies must face erosion by the growing human awareness of the (historical) limits inherent in their construction. (And those who figure it out before their colleagues are sure to suffer the inevitable resentments.)
Is this a reason not to do social science, however? Can we do without piecemeal learning? Generally not, in this bureaucratic day and age, though on some questions, yes. Anyway, there probably isn’t much chance of convincing some people not to come up with ever more intelligence tests and noting demographic differences in the collected results that meet some established assumptions about statistical significance. Ultimately, however, the field must give way to the “Yeah, but so what?” questions. And that’s where all social “scientific” methods will give way to ultimate (religious) concerns social science can barely address, let alone rule.
The fact is, the fundamentals of educating children haven’t changed over the course of hundreds of years. We had a historian speak at my church recently and he said that in the 1700′s, most of the organized schools were at churches, and kids, at 5yo, learned the alphabet one day and began reading the next. Computers, new math, no child left behind, and every other “new” method of prgressive educanto teaching do not change how kids learn – which is, initially, by rote memorization (the alphabet, multiplication tables, et al) and later by critical thinking. Most teachers today wouldn’t understand ‘critical thinking’ if it hit them in the head, much less engage in doing it. Critical thinking skills won’t be obtained, or improved, sitting at a TV monitor screen watching someone else.
And btw, the historian also said that churches erstwhile also served as local hospitals, soup lines, welfare centers, unemployment offices, inns, and more. We spend billions on all those things today, without significantly better results.
‘education …. begins with discipline and extended concentration span.’
‘education …. begins with discipline and extended concentration span.’
This point seems so often ignored by those – and there are many – that tell us that ‘educational’ games are the key to keeping kid’s attention and teaching them something. We think this is very wrong-headed, especially for young kids. Elementary school kids need to receive a message that learning is really really important – and sometimes hard work – not that it is always ‘fun’.
Computer based learning can be very good or very poor, and each program needs to be judged on its own merits. Nonetheless, the measuring stick should be whether the kids are actually learning something, not whether they are having fun.
Watch kids practice the piano. They’re not always having fun, but they are learning a lot, and not just about the piano. Discipline, focus, effort.
http://www.k5learning.com
China will get there, but at the moment, one of the biggest problems in China (and India) is the “cult of management”. In many Chinese companies, engineering and technology are considered “junior” positions, and to get a decent salary (ie, at a level where you can actually raise a family in Beijing or Shanghai), you have to become a manager. So, you end up with a lot of well-educated managers who have some understanding of technology, but you don’t get a lot of career technologists, which is where a lot of serious cutting-edge innovation comes from.
Silicon Valley loves the stories of 20-something kids who get rich “doing tech”, but a lot of tech still comes from 40 and 50-something career technologists who understand existing technologies and business problems deeply enough to do serious innovations. China (and India) don’t really have career paths for such people, so they end up as unhappy managers or they end up in Silicon Valley.
You often see this in outsourcing: people who are finally experienced enough to deal with interesting technical problem get promoted to management or quit to do their own companies.
I was with you until you said PhDs in electrical engineering get dozens of jobs offers. Currently not true for many recent graduates, I know too many bright (with great grades and internships) with PhD specifically in electrical engineering degrees who are not getting squat right now when it comes to job offers. There is a great deal of regional variation for engineering jobs across the nation.
However, I do think STEM degrees and STEM training give graduates a chance at a job and a future in the long-run. It is not quite a gravy train, but a fighting chance. In my case, I am a STEM graduate that works in a non-STEM job, but I think my STEM background still helped to prepare me for my non-STEM job and made me better at being a critical thinker.
The electrical engineers I’m in touch with are in first-tier schools on the two coasts. But they have a lot of offers. It’s hard to get good data. I’ll be interested in what you hear.
My information is from mainly two sources.
First, I have a cousin who graduated with a PhD in electrical engineering in 2010 from a state university. (I don’t feel right being too specific about my cousin in a blog, but it is a really good state school.) I am biased, but he is brilliant. He was a national merit scholarship student and he received a full ride for his undergraduate degree at the state university that was close to where he grew up. He actually was accepted into Harvard for Math, but he chose to stay near home, get the full ride scholarship, and go into electrical engineering. He stayed at the same state university through a PhD, he also did internships, worked for professors, and as far I can tell, did everything right.
If it was just my cousin who struggled, I would think it was a fluke, but he had friends and people he knew across the nation with electrical engineering degrees that wound up in the same boat as him. As for job offers, there was a lot of hype about companies in Texas for example begging for engineers. Problem is that they were only temp work offers, like a few weeks a time, and no prospect for permanent work. I don’t think my cousin would have minded a temp job that had a reasonable prospect of going permanent, but it is hard to move across country for temp work. A few engineers that he knew actually tried pooling together resources and obtained temporary housing to go for these temp jobs across the country, and it was a disaster, broken promises, and wound up costing more money that they earned before most of them moved back home. A few did make it that way, but it was a struggle, far from the golden ticket that it is perceived to be. Based on that it actually made more sense for my cousin to stay underemployed and live with his parents. He even did statistics for the census. My cousin did very recently get a job that he loves, moved out, but it is a math job, and it his love for math that got him a job, not the electrical engineering.
My other source is locally (a different region of the country from my cousin mentioned above), and locally I realize that I am just in a really bad place for STEM jobs. The vast majority of engineering jobs have moved out of the local region. I have a lot of acquaintances that are/were engineers and I have been hearing their sob stories for quite a while. That said, I have looked at STEM jobs across the nation, and there seems to be a lot of regional variation when it comes to demand of STEM jobs. I don’t think that regional variation ever gets properly recognized. It seems like an accountant or teacher can get a job almost anywhere in theory, but STEM jobs seem much more specialized and patchy.
I did choose to move back to my hometown, so for me to work a non-STEM job with a STEM background was my choice, but the reality is that non-STEM jobs are much more plentiful where I live. I did turn down several STEM jobs that would have required me to move several hours away from my hometown, but I have personal family reasons for living in my hometown. If I could work a STEM job in my hometown, that would be my preference.
I should clarify between my two posts that I don’t consider temp work to be a real job offer unless there is a reasonable chance at permanent or long term steady employment for a smart hardworking person.
I am also hoping that the recent STEM graduates that are struggling to find jobs is due more to the current economy than anything else, and in the long run, prospects will be alright.
I taught English for many years in a top-notch public high school. One basic truth of teaching is that education has to honor what Whitehead called the rhythms of romance and precision. In our culture, the romance tends to swallow up the precision and in the Chinese culture apparently the opposite. At times students must be forced to do the hard stuff, close reading of Shakespeare and classic poems, read long works, learn enough grammar to understand critiques of their writing etc.
Computers can add a lot with its ease of word processing and correcting and finding sources easily, but they also make plagiarism so much easier. The teacher must understand that students need to do hard stuff a significant amount of the time and understand how they will try to avoid it by complaining, cheating, whatever.
“Guns, Germs, and Steel” is instructive on how China fell behind the west because of their group-think, do what the current emperor says mentality. They had all the inventions at least as early as the West did, but the competing European city states allowed people to compete and follow their technology, without the tyranny of the latest emperor banning all watercraft, or whatever else struck his fancy.
Computers are great tools, but they cannot be substituted for the discipline of alternating between romance and precision. If they are used as part of that process, they can add a lot. As for programming and music, both are great tools and disciplines, but beyond my pay grade.
And for sticklers on agreement, it is, of course “computers with THEIR ease of…” Ones mind goes back and forth between computers and “the computer.” One does not proofread internet posts much more rigorously than one speaks. So it goes.
I read the same article with a lot more hope – ultimately dashed.
I’m skeptical on computers for kids too. My daily bread comes from the cpu, but I keep my daughters far away. The pc is normally a glorified videogame – as mind-numbing and parent beguiling as “Baby Einstein” videotapes.
That said, the tide will turn. Skeptics used to rail that pcs could never replace the card catalog (I’m looking at you, Clifford Stoll!). Schools, drained of captive labor from underemployed women and Jews, and then unionized out of the education business, are failing.
Computers will eventually deliver on the promise – at least in high schools and colleges. The Khan Academy, MIT Open Courseware, etc. are truly building something amazing. A friend opened a Jewish day school (today! – http://www.pclcnj.com/) with $5,000 tuition and amazing, individualized instruction. While the nyt article points to more foolishness, don’t ignore the very real and positive trends flying under the educational radar.
As a survivor of the Catholic school system I often thought of myself as abused and in recovery but as time marches on find that despite my best efforts to defy the faculty of Penguins and Priests(Jesuits)I have a new-found respect and undying thanks to the former for their patience and my parents’ foresight(and money)to see that I got a decent education. Kids today don’t have a chance as their merely pawns, chattel in a tug-of-war between clueless parents and a system fraught with corruption and greed.
As a survivor of the Catholic school system I often thought of myself as abused and in recovery but as time marches on find that despite my best efforts to defy the faculty of Penguins and Priests(Jesuits)I have a new-found respect and undying thanks to the former for their patience and my parents’ foresight(and money)to see that I got a decent education. Kids today don’t have a chance as they’re merely pawns, chattel in a tug-of-war between clueless parents and a system fraught with corruption and greed.
“All in all, I’m against having the discussion; it tends to dredge up half-baked results that inflame passions before anyone has the chance to examine them thoroughly.”
Well, that is dissappointing: first I am reminded that mainland Chinese are working hard to learn more, and when I then show a clear example of how we might learn from a Chinese example, namely to study the genes responsible for IQ – not intelligence, just a measure that happens to predict income and job performance – I am told that that specific subject is beyond discussion.
I will try again later, because I am sure this subject will return again and again.
“All in all, I’m against having the discussion; it tends to dredge up half-baked results that inflame passions before anyone has the chance to examine them thoroughly.”
Well, that is dissappointing: first I am reminded that mainland Chinese are working hard to learn more, and when I then show a clear example of how we might learn from a Chinese example, namely to study the genes responsible for IQ – not intelligence, just a measure that happens to predict income and job performance – I am told that that specific subject is beyond discussion.
I will try again later, because I am sure this subject will return again and again…
There’s no combination of researchers out there I trust to deal with an inflammatory subject with the requisite competence.
Martin Gladwell’s theory in his book Outliers is that the Asian’s are beating us in academics primarily because it is cultural. He calls this the Rice Farming syndrome. The planting and cultivation of Rice in China is labour intensive and gives back results directly in proportion to the effort exerted. Farming in the Western World is less labour intensive due to mechanization and somebody Else’s science. For a farmer in Asia his lively hood is directly proportional to how he tends to his crop. This has lead to a cultural phenomenon where effort is given great credence. Earlier in the book Gladwell also postulates that you need at least 10,000 hours at an endevour to become wholly proficient. The Asian cultural imperative for the glorification of the effort put forward then adds to the hours of practice, and then therefore a higher proficiency.
As a teacher I can tell how much time a student puts towards their work from the results achieved. In the end what it comes down to is that if you do not put in the hours, you will not get the results.
I seriously disagree with your proposal to eliminate technology from education. Standardized tests absolutely do not measure the skills that are necessary to succeed in today’s economy, much less the economy of the future. And what do Shakespeare and classical music have to do with success in science? Sure, music is kinda mathematical, but so are a lot of things, and 20 hours of studying music isn’t worth one hour of actually studying math.
I hated English class my whole life. I read the Cliff’s notes to every book I was ever assigned to read and I never played an instrument. I’ve played 20-40 hours of computer games per week from age 6 when I first got a computer to my current age of 27. Fortunately, I was interested in math and although my parents allowed me to play the games, they made sure I did my homework first. So while I was developing math skills in school, I also become highly proficient with computers in my spare time. I never did anything productive with them, I just learned to really love computers. Math and computers led me to a PhD in mathematical algorithms at age 25, and a 6-figure salary right out of school at a quant job that I didn’t even apply for, all while maintaining a 20-30 hour/week gaming habit. Even though I was roughly average in grad school, my speed on computers has made me vastly more productive than my older colleagues, which I credit to roughly 30,000 hours of fast-paced online multiplayer gaming, and many other things I learned just from using a computer so much. When I sit in meetings with executives discussing strategy, I can pull data and run calculations mid-meeting that most quants would need an hour to process. I threatened to leave last week and they doubled my salary.
The point is that yes, if technology is invading our kids lives so much that they neglect their schoolwork, then it is a problem. But as long as we keep it from reaching that point, then acquainting kids with technology early and often is the best thing we can do for our long-term economic progress. Reading Shakespeare may be correlated with high achievement, perhaps because it requires incredible discipline to read that boring stuff, but it is far from causing high achievement. Do you want to make our kids sophisticated, or do you want to make them productive? (Or do you just want them to have to suffer as much as we did in school?
Did I say, “banish technology”? Technology is no substitute for discipline and attention span and might even interfere. But it has its obvious uses.
“liberal “experts” have argued that giving every kid a laptop, “educational” software, and Internet access will produce a generation of geniuses. That has to be the stupidest idea in the history of education.”
I am a computer hardware engineer and there are only four things lacking from making today’s computers the ideal teaching machines. First is a social structure where the kids who do learn are not robbed of all social status and are branded as uncool by the teachers. The second is primary content teaching knowledge of the past third is content teaching current knowledge and fourth is content that teaches the things that will be true in the future. Para phrasing the old real-estate saying it is content, content, content…
The things that are considered unsuitable to teach to kids today would be worth a whole University of PhD’s. Try looking up how to make a rocket. My Grandfather’s encyclopedia contained that and so did the encyclopedia that my Father bought in the fifties. My college Physics and Chemistry texts do not. Given the hapless first efforts by “Myth Busters” The technology of the 12th century Mongol hoard is beyond what todays’ student is allowed.
The costs are such that a single state could commission preparing the software content for every body.
It occurs to me that I might have emphasized how important respect is. Most things we learn require months or years of application before they make any sense to us. That is certainly true of foreign languages and musical instruments, which is why so few people master them. Most people require years of drudgery before they become fun. But the same is true of any subject; unless students begin with the presumption that there is something important to be learned which they must accept as a matter of respect, all the gadgets in the world won’t hold their attention.