Watch this.
Many members of my family are teachers (including my wife), and as a current student, I think about education a lot. There’s a gigantic difference between training and education, the former being a type of skill acquisition that generally relies on repetition over critical thinking. Both have their merits, but I’ve got to push a mix of both to make a person whole.
College is the new high school, but in my town, kids are really struggling just to get through high school. According to a recent report I examined, NYC kids are graduating between 59%-68% of total entrants (depending on how you count “graduate” I guess). This is a major improvement over the past decade not because high school kids are getting smarter, but because the system is more efficient at pushing graduates through. I uploaded the pdf if you’re interested (GRAD_RATES_2009_HIGHLIGHTS).
This is the difference between creating mass produced crap that maximizes production efficiency versus creating hand-crafted works of art. Which do you prefer?
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Absolutely terrific video. I’m in love with that guy. I wish I had his eloquence when trying to defend my position…particularly as regards free public education and the necessity of a society-wide commitment to it.
Should we be “molding young minds” to be able to “make money” as part of the historically destructive species, or allowing them to find a new form of humanity?
The current system of credentialed cogs is mostly just making colleges bigger.
“None are so enslaved as those that believe themselves to be free.”
and none are so ignorant as those who believe themselves to be educators. I wouldn’t trust any teacher that believes the students are a product of their work. The teacher should be learning more each year than the students, and admit that they must do so. A good teacher doesn’t have to “kick ass”: their students will do it for them.
Dan — are teachers necessarily molding young minds “to be able to make money”? I don’t make much money myself…but I definitely value education. And if you don’t come from a family that values it then you need teachers to help you learn. Education CAN be about allowing students “to find a new form of humanity.” But I would argue that you need teachers of SOME sort, and an educational system of SOME sort. I don’t know…too much to debate here I think.
“By the end of 2008, the U.S. had spent approximately $900 billion in direct costs on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.” – wikipedia
All that money and yet I have to become a debt slave if I want a college education. Total bullshit. I’ve always resented this. For as much money as this country wastes, everyone who wants to go to school should be able to, and not pay a dime.
I think we have teachers to make up for a lack of reality-based education in our culture. There is no room or time for school in a profit-based society except to make a profit. It is a miracle that we have the public education system that we have, but the cracks in its facade are there if you look: the lame-ass textbooks from Texas, the college “Rapture” toward ‘better jobs’ and more pay, the election of the village idiot and the near election of an illiterate.
My high school was built on reservation land. It now sits next to a casino. They got a new gym, though.
I don’t think the solution to a failed culture is to buy parents for our children.
Will: I agree with you in principle. Maybe if we had free (liberally applied) college educations, then we wouldn’t be so eager to spend our money to blast everything to solve problems. Then again, it has been my experience in R&D work that most of what is supposed to be taught in colleges could have been finished up in high schools (basic problem solving, basic physics, electricity, how to read and write and use a computer), and colleges should be used to broaden the applications of technical skills and temper one’s views while maturing, rather than teaching kids how to get drunk faster (remember, my view is tainted by Wisconsin’s reputation).
I used to teach guitar lessons, and to me the most important thing was to give students the tools to create their own music — to understand the building blocks so they could think for themselves rather than just copy. It was a great feeling for me when I got to see one of my students get up on stage and play a whole set of all original music with his band. The difference I made in his life made a difference in mine. To see him succeed made me feel successful. The core essence of “educate” is “to bring out.” But to bring out what? The unique and talented person that is inside each of us. To me the purpose of education is to bring us closer to our own authenticity. All of civilization itself could be a hand-crafted work of art. I’d like to see humanity create a common vision of what that is and start moving in that direction. There’s nothing stopping us. Let’s go there.
I think teachers deserve a lot of credit. Of all the influences I can think of who encouraged me to do something other than pursue filthy lucre and mindless conformity, many teachers I had come to mind.
Beyond this, though, and at the global level, basic education may be the key to stabilizing population and saving what’s left of the planet. It’s been well documented that in the developing world literate women (the equivalent of a middle-school level of education) have significantly fewer children. Educating young girls in particular has been shown to have powerful and lasting positive effects on communities. It’s no coincidence the Taliban are so vehemently opposed to girls receiving any education.
For anyone who doubts this, I encourage them to read “Three Cups of Tea,” by Greg Mortenson. Mortenson is a bad-ass, a visionary, and a saint all rolled into one. This guy deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, in my opinion, for his work building schools in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. If our government spent a fraction of the money it’s pouring into destroying the place to build schools instead, the Taliban would be out of business and we would be respected as a nation instead of hated.
Exactly. Thanks, Matt. I agree.
On a similar note, we can assist education by helping everyone in the world have clean water. Starting in 2006, Ndolela Primary School in Tanzania starting using the SODIS method to disinfect its contaminated water. Absenteeism due to diarrhea dropped and exam scores soared. Prior to that, only 10 to 15 percent of the kids passed the national 6th grade exams, now it’s 90 to 95 percent.
I found about this in the April issue of National Geographic, “Our Thirsty World.” Here’s a SODIS link if anyone’s interested: http://www.sodis.ch/index_EN
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