Best News of the Day
Apparently a leading group of math educators has released a new report that supports traditional approaches to teaching math at the expense of some of the newer, um, more novel approaches. Wow. Learn the actual fundamentals. Shocking.
I don't know enough to say whether this is a decisive win in the 'math wars,' but it sure seems like fantastic news. The 21st century will belong to the nations that lead in math education. Feminist film criticism majors will not give us this century's equivalents of the jet engine, the Internet or the Bessemer process.
I don't know enough to say whether this is a decisive win in the 'math wars,' but it sure seems like fantastic news. The 21st century will belong to the nations that lead in math education. Feminist film criticism majors will not give us this century's equivalents of the jet engine, the Internet or the Bessemer process.
posted by Donny Baseball at 12:44 PM
5 Comments:
Feminist film criticism majors
That is a great line. The state of education is pretty sad right now. How did all the kooks and cranks get tenure in Academia? Is this an indication of the deterioration of moral and ethical principles in our society? If so, why did it happen, and was it necessarily inevitable?
No, not an ethical or moral decline, simply a complete takeover and establishment of an effective government monopoly. The education industry has become the post office or the DMV.
That makes sense. If the education industry is the new post office, then we should expect more inefficiencies, lower quality of service, and higher cost. Yes, it fits.
What does this mean to our kids? What can we do to ensure that they will receive a quality education? Are there UPS and Fedex out there?
I expect that the dawn of an equivalent of UPS or Fedex in the education industry will be the big story in the next two decades. I can see "chains" (for lack of a better word) of schools opening up, and either charging modest tuition or getting some gov't money that might be linked to the child. These schools would be of sufficient quality to be an alternative to public schools but "cookie cutter" in the sense that they would replicable and consistent so as to establish a brand identity for consistent, decent performance. Right now the alternatives are small scale and operating at the margins, but the big meaningful alternative is not far off. We know how to do the educating part of it, we just have to figure out the economic model.
The money is just not there, not yet anyway. As long as the government gives the money to public schools instead of the end users (the kids), I am afraid that the UPS and Fedex equivalent in educaiton would only benefit those who can pay. It is ironic that the Dems talk about inequality so much and yet ignore the biggest inequality of them all, education. The rich clearly has the edge here.
The internet could be very interesting as far as offering cheap education to those who are willing to be self taught. But it takes discipline, and most kids don't have enough discipline to do that.
So I guess I expect only two kinds of people to receive quality education: a) the ones that can afford Fedex and UPS, and b) those who have the discipline to become self taught.
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