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Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.
And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the "appearance of a machine," one that teaches the student "to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.") We don't openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested. School administrators prepare curriculum standards and "pacing guides" that tell teachers what to teach each day. Legions of managers supervise everything that happens in the classroom; in 2010 only 50 percent of public school staff members in the US were teachers.
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That's why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn't a commodity that's delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students' own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.
Good, long article on how education could be reinvented for the 21st century.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 24 2015, @04:31PM
The best programmers I've met have tended to be pretty lazy.
"hard workers" will cut and paste (or retype!) the same code all over the place, the lazy ones refactor the code into something smaller and simpler and more testable and reliable. Or replace entire departments of "hard workers" with very small shell scripts. Automate testing instead of making some poor bastard work real hard to do it manually. Automate/implement version control because they're tired of "fixing" manual version control. Automate deployment processes. "Well I could write my own bug filled XML processor from scratch in a couple days but there's a CPAN module that'll do it in about two minutes of work"
This is a good argument against programming being engineering aka software engineering. I've never met a really good lazy EE or lazy engineer in general. The lazy ones tend to under spec driving the techs nuts or over spec driving the buyers/accountants/sales nuts.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday August 24 2015, @04:51PM
I didn't think OP was referring to that kind of laziness, which is productive effort motivated by the goal of reducing workload.
I think he was referring to this kind of laziness:
- Not bothering with any testing at all on the code, automated or otherwise (e.g. one person who fits the characterization under discussion sent me code with syntax errors all over the place and told me it was production-ready).
- If extra time is available, instead of automating deployment, setting up version control, refactoring, etc, will put their time towards perusing Facebook.
- Refusing to do any documentation whatsoever, because the code (which is nearly incomprehensible to everyone, including the guy who wrote it) is "self-documenting".
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 24 2015, @05:07PM
I'm not disagreeing with you that those people suck, but what software engineering needs is to borrow the concept of "malpractice".
You could say a medical doctor who says "F it I'll roll the DnD dice to get blood lab results instead of waiting for real labwork and your blood sugar is rollin 5d20" is kinda being lazy sorta in a sense, but most would recognize that behavior as malpractice.
A lazy medical doc would say "I'll schedule all my elective surgeries back to back so I don't have to drive between the hospital and my office every couple hours". Those guys suck if you're the last in line and have to wait an extra three hours because of unpredictable earlier delays, but they're not technically malpractice.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday August 24 2015, @05:26PM
Reminds me of a saying I heard ages ago (and can no longer find). It went something like this:
"A poor programmer always adds lines of code whenever he touches a program. A good programmer only adds lines when adding functionality. A guru adds functionality by deleting lines of code."
There's a lot of truth to it. I have an annual assignment to implement a simple game (a different game every year). A good solution can be usually be implemented in under 1000 lines of code. I have had poor solutions handed in with 20k lines or more. Funny how some students complain that the project is just too much work...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.