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posted by CoolHand on Monday August 24 2015, @01:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the who'd-a-thunk-it dept.

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.
...
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Monday August 24 2015, @05:16PM

    by AnonymousCowardNoMore (5416) on Monday August 24 2015, @05:16PM (#227119)

    Indeed. There have been competing opinions on education since practically forever. As I remember it, e.g. Einstein went to university in a time and place where you could just show up (or not) for whatever lectures you wanted. This was contemporary with the Harris quote. We can also take it back to e.g. the different opinions of Plato and the sophists.

    This paper [udel.edu] gets mentioned from time to time. It is uncomfortable to think of but it may be that people just learn differently, in a way that is correlated with IQ. Apparently those who score high in IQ benefit from less structured learning and struggle when 'spoon-fed'. The low IQ crowd experience the opposite. It may help explain why various unstructured learning methods show up on sites like this one like the weeds in my garden.

    P.S. since I know it will come up: I don't care what you think of IQ test results. If they correlate with something, they are at least somewhat relevant for that thing, especially when the population as a whole is being discussed.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday August 24 2015, @05:37PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 24 2015, @05:37PM (#227135)

    A creepy quote from your linked paper:

    The middle 50% of the bell curve (IQ 91-110) - the average person - is readily trained for the bulk of jobs in society: clerks and secretaries, skilled trades and protective service workers, dispatchers, insurance sales representatives, and other midlevel work.

    Consider that paper is only about two decades old, and those jobs are gone or going fast, via a combination of mergers, automation, and offshoring, except for the cops, and even they'll get droned and surveillance-d up, eventually.

    Think of living in the city, where there's plenty of places to live if you're under $15K/yr or over $500K/yr but nothing for anyone in between? The economy of the future is going to be like living in the city, plenty of jobs digging ditches in landscaping and plenty of jobs for board certified neurosurgeons, and nothing for anyone in between.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Monday August 24 2015, @06:00PM

      by AnonymousCowardNoMore (5416) on Monday August 24 2015, @06:00PM (#227147)

      I work in industry, in a sector which today employs half as many people in my country as two decades ago. I am a thinker; I play some small part in this decline in jobs because I do work which saves costs, which are directly or indirectly wages.

      If we did not do things this way, it would only make matters worse as we would not be able to compete. (And we struggle as it is, with the current economic climate.) Political interference make things especially tough over here but problems exist even where that is not a factor.

      I genuinely do not know the One True Answer. But I can say this: Malnutrition, illness, poverty, psychological distress, etc. all influence the sharpness of the mind directly and sometimes permanently. It is in the interest of everyone to combat these things, and promote education, because we're running out of easy jobs and its better for society to spend the money now than carry all that dead weight in a few decades. We already have a huge surpluss of unskilled labour.