The school system isn't working. It's not just because of a lack of funds or because it's a public system or what-have-you, it's because of the entire methodology of our teaching. Our schools teach you how to do the exact same routine, monotonous job day in and day out, which is great if you want to do someone's taxes, but the problem here is that people in India will do people's taxes for astonishingly low prices, so if you're going to compete you'll have to live out of your car and eat cold beans straight from the can. Now if only your country had an education system that cultivated a different set of talents, to make our students into crafty innovators who spend their life working to fulfill their dreams instead of just going to work, paying the bills, and slowly slipping into senile madness.
That's what the Education Liberation Front is for. We're going to bring about immense reforms to the education system, designing it to be significantly more flexible and efficient. Instead of spending their time calculating projectile motion on Pluto, information useful only to Astrophysicists, students will be cultivating their own interests, developing their own talents, and honing the skills they will actually be using in the market place when they get older. Of course, with just over a hundred members, we're hardly an organization that commands fear and respect in Washington, so if you want to see these reforms sometime in your lifetime, look us up on facebook and join our group.
-Ashen
Monday, January 12, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Dazibao 6: The ELF is Flat
So, I've recently started reading Thomas L. Friedman's book The World is Flat, the basic premise of which is that America is broken, but don't worry, we can fix it. The way in which America is broken is that we're still thinking vertically, in the concept of hierarchies within a single system getting the job done, instead collaboration between multiple different systems. We want to believe that America will always be on top, but the concept of "top" is rapidly shrinking as the world gets flattened, mostly thanks to outsourcing (there's actually ten "flatteners" mentioned in his book, but outsourcing is one of the more obvious ones). We can't compete with people in India because they'll work for so much less than us, so we have to do the jobs they can't. That means mindless number-crunching is out, and things like innovation and design are very much in.
During the chapter on education, he brought up the same issue everyone else and their dog has, that American High School Seniors regularly score lower on standardized tests than Japanese students still in the womb, but his approach to actually solving the problem seemed, to me, haphazard in a lot of ways. He suggested, first off, that we start making school teach things faster, as in Japan, Germany, Romania, and basically every other country on the planet, and in the sense that American students are mostly slackers he's on to something, but he's failed to identify a good method of stopping it. In a flat world, ordering students to do as they're told via an arbitrary hierarchy is dissonant with reality. Other than that, he's mostly just looked at what other educators have already done to improve the quality of education (as opposed to just its quantity) and said "More of this." And in a lot of ways, that's what we need.
Take, for example, the methods employed in recent years at Georgia Tech. There are multiple different "threads" which all follow the same basic formula of "Computing and X," where X is people, marketing, communications, whatever. By mixing and matching two of these threads, the system becomes highly adaptable, and that's with one half of each thread dictated to you by the nature of the school you're in. In the ELF system, you don't need to be "Computing and X," you'd be "X and Y." There is a mind-numbingly massive amount of combinations in a system like that, and if you require students to take two or three of them, they'll have the multiple specialties necesarry to compete in the world, in case work for one of their specialties ever dries up. They can still avoid specialized information in things they despise altogether, though, which is important as such things are more or less a waste of time.
There are other things which are in line with both the ELF philosophy and The World is Flat, but I haven't got the space to point them all out here. The point is that in a flat world, a world where we're competing not just with the people down the street or in the next town over, but rather the people in New Delhi, we need an education system that teaches people to flexible, adaptable, and multi-specialized, not rigid, routine-obsessed generalists who are hopelessly under-specialized or, for that matter, over-specialized to the point of uselessness.
During the chapter on education, he brought up the same issue everyone else and their dog has, that American High School Seniors regularly score lower on standardized tests than Japanese students still in the womb, but his approach to actually solving the problem seemed, to me, haphazard in a lot of ways. He suggested, first off, that we start making school teach things faster, as in Japan, Germany, Romania, and basically every other country on the planet, and in the sense that American students are mostly slackers he's on to something, but he's failed to identify a good method of stopping it. In a flat world, ordering students to do as they're told via an arbitrary hierarchy is dissonant with reality. Other than that, he's mostly just looked at what other educators have already done to improve the quality of education (as opposed to just its quantity) and said "More of this." And in a lot of ways, that's what we need.
Take, for example, the methods employed in recent years at Georgia Tech. There are multiple different "threads" which all follow the same basic formula of "Computing and X," where X is people, marketing, communications, whatever. By mixing and matching two of these threads, the system becomes highly adaptable, and that's with one half of each thread dictated to you by the nature of the school you're in. In the ELF system, you don't need to be "Computing and X," you'd be "X and Y." There is a mind-numbingly massive amount of combinations in a system like that, and if you require students to take two or three of them, they'll have the multiple specialties necesarry to compete in the world, in case work for one of their specialties ever dries up. They can still avoid specialized information in things they despise altogether, though, which is important as such things are more or less a waste of time.
There are other things which are in line with both the ELF philosophy and The World is Flat, but I haven't got the space to point them all out here. The point is that in a flat world, a world where we're competing not just with the people down the street or in the next town over, but rather the people in New Delhi, we need an education system that teaches people to flexible, adaptable, and multi-specialized, not rigid, routine-obsessed generalists who are hopelessly under-specialized or, for that matter, over-specialized to the point of uselessness.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Elementary, Dear Donnie
Donnie has been kind enough to rebuttal my last dazibao. This response isn't a dazibao, because then I'd have to cram a summary of his initial rebuttal, my last dazibao, and his rebuttal to my rebuttal of his rebuttal all in one piece that could, theoretically, be physically distributed. It's much easier to keep it on the internet where I can just say read this link: http://redcityblues.blogspot.com/2008/12/elf-education-liquidation-front.html I suggest you keep both this blog and his open in seperate windows so you can go back and forth, since I address his blog directly without quoting it in my own pretty often.
First things first: I'm actually a guy.
My rebuttal to the first paragraph solid of his post, about progress and how the free market inhibits it, is "prove it." Global warming? Between 1920 and 1940, arctic temperature anomalies spiked upwards with absolutely no corresponding spike in CO2. So what causes global warming? We don't actually have the evidence to find out. Maybe CO2 (and, thus, capitalism) does have something to do with it, but maybe not. Obesity can be attributed to capitalism? Proof, please, I think prosperity is the cause of obesity, whether that prosperity is brought on by the free market or not (unless, of course, you're advocating that everyone should be miserably poor, which would explain why you seem to like the Soviet Union). The oil crisis can be attributed to capitalism? So if we weren't capitalists, we'd magically have more oil? Or are you once again contending that people should be poor? Credit card debt can be attributed to capitalism? No, credit card debt can be attributed to a lack of foresight. If they thought about what they were doing in advance, if they thought like capitalists, people would realize that credit cards are a bad deal and the whole industry would go under. The fact that our schools are grotesquely underfunded has nothing to do with capitalism: school funding is a government function. That problem can be attributed to socialism.
On to the second paragraph: I think I said already that my philosophy is heartlessly realistic. You've failed to give me any evidence that my purely capitalistic outlook on the world is incorrect, and given the massive amounts of progress that came out of the US and Europe immediately after World War II (just about every modern appliance in existence) compared to that of the USSR (they invented the Klashinakov assault rifle, a killing machine. Hooray for them), I think there's some precedent for capitalism and progress going hand in hand. Besides, I never said that High School students had to succeed or die, merely that they had to adapt or die, that they can't just keep trying the same thing over and over again and expect it to magically start working someday. That's also my take on communism, by the way.
Now in the third paragraph you point out a common misconception that a quick look at history will rapidly prove horribly incorrect, that teenagers have no discipline. Well, they certainly had discipline in Han Dynasty China, where the age of adulthood was fifteen, and in certain Native American tribes, where it was thirteen. They had discipline as young as fourteen or fifteen in medieval Europe. People have a marked tendency to live down to low expectations, however. Because they're asked to be nothing more than drones in school and expected to be idiots after it, most teenagers do exactly that. When expected to be competent adults, as in the Han Dynasty, teenagers did so. They adapted. So yes, I believe teenagers are fully capable of handling the challenge. You give them far too little credit. I don't think being thrown into the real world at the age of fourteen would be significantly more traumatic than being thrown into it at eighteen, besides which I'm not suggesting we make them live or die by success, only by their capability to adapt. I'm simply suggesting we teach them the rules of the real world instead of forcing them to learn as they go once they become adults.
Next paragraph: You're being pretty vague here, but you're kind of implying that Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Iraq, all three countries that are famous for their mass graves, aren't really that bad. Are you serious?
You've contradicted yourself in the next paragraph. Your incentive for respecting the math teacher is that he has power over you, as you said, which means there could be nasty consequences for failing to respect him. I never said the free market was a bureaucratic dictatorship. Housing, actually, is an area wherein the bureaucracy is rapidly crumbling thanks to the power of the internet. You can compare housing prices yourself, now. The secrets held by the real estate bureaucracies are out, and everyone wins except the bureaucrats.
The school system is made to educate? What's the purpose of education? You aren't seriously advocating that we shove random trivia down students throats for no reason whatsoever? If we're going to do that, why not make it trivia they're interested in, at least? Teach them HALO and Paris Hilton, because if the only purpose of school is to fill their heads up with information unrelated to reality, there's no point in not making it a fun experience.
First things first: I'm actually a guy.
My rebuttal to the first paragraph solid of his post, about progress and how the free market inhibits it, is "prove it." Global warming? Between 1920 and 1940, arctic temperature anomalies spiked upwards with absolutely no corresponding spike in CO2. So what causes global warming? We don't actually have the evidence to find out. Maybe CO2 (and, thus, capitalism) does have something to do with it, but maybe not. Obesity can be attributed to capitalism? Proof, please, I think prosperity is the cause of obesity, whether that prosperity is brought on by the free market or not (unless, of course, you're advocating that everyone should be miserably poor, which would explain why you seem to like the Soviet Union). The oil crisis can be attributed to capitalism? So if we weren't capitalists, we'd magically have more oil? Or are you once again contending that people should be poor? Credit card debt can be attributed to capitalism? No, credit card debt can be attributed to a lack of foresight. If they thought about what they were doing in advance, if they thought like capitalists, people would realize that credit cards are a bad deal and the whole industry would go under. The fact that our schools are grotesquely underfunded has nothing to do with capitalism: school funding is a government function. That problem can be attributed to socialism.
On to the second paragraph: I think I said already that my philosophy is heartlessly realistic. You've failed to give me any evidence that my purely capitalistic outlook on the world is incorrect, and given the massive amounts of progress that came out of the US and Europe immediately after World War II (just about every modern appliance in existence) compared to that of the USSR (they invented the Klashinakov assault rifle, a killing machine. Hooray for them), I think there's some precedent for capitalism and progress going hand in hand. Besides, I never said that High School students had to succeed or die, merely that they had to adapt or die, that they can't just keep trying the same thing over and over again and expect it to magically start working someday. That's also my take on communism, by the way.
Now in the third paragraph you point out a common misconception that a quick look at history will rapidly prove horribly incorrect, that teenagers have no discipline. Well, they certainly had discipline in Han Dynasty China, where the age of adulthood was fifteen, and in certain Native American tribes, where it was thirteen. They had discipline as young as fourteen or fifteen in medieval Europe. People have a marked tendency to live down to low expectations, however. Because they're asked to be nothing more than drones in school and expected to be idiots after it, most teenagers do exactly that. When expected to be competent adults, as in the Han Dynasty, teenagers did so. They adapted. So yes, I believe teenagers are fully capable of handling the challenge. You give them far too little credit. I don't think being thrown into the real world at the age of fourteen would be significantly more traumatic than being thrown into it at eighteen, besides which I'm not suggesting we make them live or die by success, only by their capability to adapt. I'm simply suggesting we teach them the rules of the real world instead of forcing them to learn as they go once they become adults.
Next paragraph: You're being pretty vague here, but you're kind of implying that Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Iraq, all three countries that are famous for their mass graves, aren't really that bad. Are you serious?
You've contradicted yourself in the next paragraph. Your incentive for respecting the math teacher is that he has power over you, as you said, which means there could be nasty consequences for failing to respect him. I never said the free market was a bureaucratic dictatorship. Housing, actually, is an area wherein the bureaucracy is rapidly crumbling thanks to the power of the internet. You can compare housing prices yourself, now. The secrets held by the real estate bureaucracies are out, and everyone wins except the bureaucrats.
The school system is made to educate? What's the purpose of education? You aren't seriously advocating that we shove random trivia down students throats for no reason whatsoever? If we're going to do that, why not make it trivia they're interested in, at least? Teach them HALO and Paris Hilton, because if the only purpose of school is to fill their heads up with information unrelated to reality, there's no point in not making it a fun experience.
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