Education Today: What's Different?
Metrics
Cost
Opportunity
Diveristy
Policy
Discoveries
Findings
The 21st Century Institution
"According to Chomsky, schools, college and universities in today's educational institutions are similar to factories. Students are indoctrinated by "liberal elites" or "intellectuals" to increase their obedience and conformity.; The "liberal elites" or "intellectuals are the ones who write history" used in schools and "we should be cautious about the alleged "lessons of history" in this regard; it would be surprising to discover that the version of history presented is self-serving and indeed it is" (Arnove, 2005)." New Foundations by Noam Chomsky
"Chomsky defines the opposing concept of education as indoctrination, under which he subsumes vocational training, perhaps the most benign form. Under this model, “People have the idea that, from childhood, young people have to be placed into a framework where they’re going to follow orders. This is often quite explicit.” (One of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary defines education as "the training of an animal," a sense perhaps not too distinct from what Chomsky means). For Chomsky, this model of education imposes “a debt which traps students, young people, into a life of conformity. That’s the exact opposite of what traditionally comes out of the Enlightenment.” In the contest between these two definitions—Athens vs. Sparta, one might say—is the question that plagues educational reformers at the primary and secondary levels: “Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?” Noam Chomsky
"If we want to reignite innovation and passion, we have to humanize [school]" Brene Brown
Kids Have Innate Curiosity, However Bound to The Education System
"I love learning. I despise school. I love math. I hate math class." Ivy1Musical on YouTube
Thoughtful Human-Centered Design Matters
"In a study of first- and second-graders [...] Gary found that children attending a school with airplanes flying overhead scored 20 percent lower on word recognition tests." Gary W. Evans, PhD
"Even small amounts of noise can be harmful. Evans has found that clerical workers exposed to conversation and other mild office noise showed higher stress levels and gave up on performance tests faster than those with quiet offices did." Gary W. Evans, PhD
"City planners, architects and others need to pay more attention to this and other research from environmental psychologists." Gary W. Evans, PhD
"Architects think of themselves as sculptors and see what they're doing as leaving their signature on the landscape," he notes. "But architecture has profound implications for human health and behavior." Gary W. Evans, PhD
"Juhasz has proposed a solution in numerous design competitions: high-density cities that are long and thin instead of round and fat, giving all inhabitants easy access to the surrounding countryside." Joseph B. Juhasz, PhD
"Too often, people think of schools as systems for building good people. Perhaps it’s time to think of them as places to let people be good." Aaron Swartz
"In architecture, the quality of your methodology or approach doesn’t lie in its universal applicability but in its capacity to adapt to a diversity of situations." Giancarlo De Carlo: How to Keep Educational Architecture Human or Creative Anti-Institutionalism
"If people take an institution for granted, they are less likely to ask questions about it, to think why it is needed, to consider carefully the work it enables and constrains but also to think of alternatives (Jepperson, 1991:152). Why would you think of doing something differently or changing your environment if you are unaware of what it actually is, why it is like it is?" Giancarlo De Carlo: How to Keep Educational Architecture Human or Creative Anti-Institutionalism
"For Mary Douglas, institutions need either to acquire “self-validating truth” (1986:48) or die (or at least risk being transformed). Their passage into taken-for-granted-ness is therefore insurance against change." Giancarlo De Carlo: How to Keep Educational Architecture Human or Creative Anti-Institutionalism
"The curriculum, the rule book, the headteacher’s policy, the staff hierarchy, the punishment regime and other socially prescribed matters may appear to exert a far stronger influence on the way a school works, but the spatial setting is nevertheless ever present and never neutral … We become blind to this once habituated in the use of a building, for it seems just to be there, and we have to make an imaginative leap to envisage how it might be otherwise. (Blundell Jones, 2015:13). School Design Together, 2015, pg. 13
"We cannot deal with problems of ‘how to’ [build schools] without first posing the problems of ‘why.’ If we were to begin discussing immediately the best way to build school buildings for contemporary society without first clarifying the reasons for which contemporary society needs school buildings, we would run the risk of taking for granted definitions and judgments which may not make sense anymore; and our speculations would turn out to be sandcastles (1969:12)." Barbarian Education, state-evading learning and James Scott’s “Against the Grain”
"We must experiment with ways of arranging and designing schools to create a dedicated space and time separate from that of the family, the economy and the political sphere. This should be a time and space that is not characterised by multifunctional use, permanent circulation and flexible services rendered to individuals with personal learning needs and individual learning paths geared toward maximising learning gains. But rather a time and space that stand alone and help to enable a shared interest in the world; a tranquil time and space in which one can dwell, a time and place where things can emerge in themselves and whose functionality is temporarily suspended. How might time and space appear if it were not (completely) occupied by expectations of individually-achieved gains but by a temporary suspension of those expectations allowing for the creation of shared, new interest through which a shared world can be awakened? This calls for experimentation in the design of a time and space that emphasises the ability of the world (the thing, the subject) to emerge and not one focused on the needs of individuals. (2013:139)" Barbarian Education, state-evading learning and James Scott’s “Against the Grain”
"Better value does not mean building schools very cheaply, but creating cost effective environments that help drive up educational outcomes, enhance teacher and pupil wellbeing, and limit future running and maintenance costs." Better Spaces for Learning
Insights
The World Has Changed, So Should We
"This is a conversation that we have to have and it's a different generation, it's a different world view, and it's a different intellectual ante that has to be put up to talk about these difficult topics. It requires humility, willingness to learn, to camp / decamp, and to change one's mind and revise." Sam Harris Faith in Reason #41 10:59
Systems: When Size Increases, Value Decreases
"The trend is clear: more power, more people, more problems. It’s not just a series of mistakes, it’s the tendency of the system." Aaron Swartz
"But formality shall go no farther. The Institute must remain small; and it will hold fast to the conviction that The Institute Group desires leisure, security, freedom from organization and routine, and, finally, informal contacts." The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner p. 552
Discovery is Collective, Not Attributable
"One must be wary in attributing scientific discovery wholly to any one person. Almost every discovery has a long and precarious history. Someone finds a bit here, another a bit there. A third step succeeds later and thus onward till a genius pieces the bits together and makes the decisive contribution. Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources." The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner p. 549
Inquiry is Iterative, Not Linear
"Both were made by thoroughly scientific men, who realized that much "useless" knowledge had been piled up by men unconcerned with its practical bearings, but that the time was now ripe to raise practical questions in a scientific manner." The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner p. 549
Roles Matter, Not Titles
"Wikipedia’s biggest problems have come when it’s strayed from this path, when it’s given some people official titles and specified tasks. Whenever that happens, real work slows down and squabbling speeds up. But it’s an easy mistake to make, so it gets made again and again." Aaron Swartz
"A stipend was awarded to enable a Harvard professor to come to Princeton: he wrote asking, "What are my duties?" I replied: "You have no duties; only opportunities." The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner p. 551
Contradictions
The Gamification of Learning
Failing
"People hate failing, so much so that they’re afraid to try." Aaron Swartz
"Which is a problem, because failing is most of what we do, most of the time. The only way to stretch your abilities is to try to do things a little bit beyond them, which means you’re going to fail some of the time." Aaron Swartz
"Try and fix the people so that they don’t feel embarrassed at failing or try to fix the environment so that people don’t fail. It seems quite likely that a lot of the fear is induced by a goal-oriented educational system, obsessed with grades for work (A, B, C) and grades for students (1st, 2nd, 3rd). And perhaps the fear of being wrong you see in older people stems from having been through such experiences in childhood. If this is the case, then simply building a decent non-coercive environment for children will solve the problem." Aaron Swartz
"Find some way to detach a student’s actions from their worth. I failed therefore I am a failure. I succeed therefore I am successful." Aaron Swartz
"How do we build educational institutions that discourage these ways of thinking. Obviously we’ll want to get rid of competition as well as grades, but even so, as we saw with Mission Hill, kids are scared of failure." Aaron Swartz
Making The Grade
"If you have a classroom of kids and you give them a bunch of tasks they can work on of varying difficulty, the kids will pick the tasks that are just outside their level, that stretch them to do a little bit more. (This is, of course, if they aren’t getting graded on this. If they’re getting graded, they’ll always pick the easy ones.)" Aaron Swartz
"Curricula's promote copy-paste learning. Google the assignment, copy the work done by a previous student, and paste the solutions." Scott Hebert
You learn it, memorize it, test on it, forget it. The Learning Curve
"Our educational systems are really a result of this same structure which is why kids learn to memorize things rather than critical thought, while being organized in grade hierarchies, while also subservient to authority. They are being groomed for "jobs." Peter Joseph on Reddit
Deadline Learning
"Removing deadlines and requirements should help students live more fully in the moment. Providing basic care to every student should help them feel valued as people. Creating a safe and trusting environment should free them from having to keep track of how much they can trust everyone else." Aaron Swartz
Competition in the Classroom
"Even weirder are the competitive situations. If I’m playing a game that relies solely on practice against someone who’s practiced more than me, I’m probably going to lose, no matter how good a person I am. Yet I still feel degraded when I do." Aaron Swartz
"When nobody knows you’re getting it wrong, it’s a lot easier to handle it. Maybe because you know it can’t affect the way people see you." Aaron Swartz
Question Everything (with an asterisk)
"Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support.
But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they’re likely to be kicked out.
The standard thing, though, is that they won’t make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they’ll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line.
So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it’s not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that’s how they got there.
And that’s pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that’s the basic story of how it operates, I think."
Status Quo Bias: A Culture of Institutionalized Conformity
“Going to college was not a prerequisite to the practice of the learned professions. Learning often took place outside the academy in various forms of apprenticeship.” A History of American Higher Education by John Thelin
"Currently, Chomsky's considers educational institutions today to be where "human beings have no intrinsic, moral and intellectual nature, that they are simply objects to be shaped and private managers and ideologues-who, of course perceive what is good and right" (Arnove, 2005); Instead, educational institutions should be interested in "what the student discovers for themselves when their natural curiosity and creative impulse are aroused not only will be remembered but will be the basis for further exploration and inquiry and perhaps significant intellectual contribution" (Arnove, 2005)." New Foundations by Noam Chomsky
“The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library.” Education of a Wandering Mind by Louis L'Amour
Annotation: Louis says education was tied to schools despite having access to public libraries. Despite now having the Internet, education is a multiplier-effect times more coupled to the schooling system than what it was in a half-century ago. How is that possible? Can that be sustainable?
Setting Students up For Failure
"A system cannot fail those it was never designed to protect [or educate]." WEB DuBois
"If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob students of tomorrow." John Dewey
"We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't currently exist using technologies that have not yet been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet." unknown
Value
Value Degradation
Textbooks
Paper
Material Supplies
Printing
Traditional Campus Buildings
Lecture Halls
Majoring
Degrees, Certificates
Information Paywalls
Value Appreciation
Internet Devices
Web Services (collaborative platforms, development tools and environments)
Internet Cafe Culture
Open Curricula (Interdisciplinary learning)
Asynchronous Online Learning
Free Information
Value Flow
tuition
campus buildings
on-campus housing
food plans
hidden misc. fees
parking
technology
salary
textbooks
athletics
extracurriculars
College: Land of Opportunity For Profiteers
College = business park full of corporate office buildings and administrators
sold to students
necessary for a career in nearly every field
professors have become adjunct
privatized institutions
unregulated by proxy of shady lobbying business practices
A degree is an investment in students' financial success backed by
banks, government, corporations, capital investors, and families.
Inflated tuition. how? university tuition are littered with mandatory living
fees (mandatory parking, meal plans, expensive housing, hidden misc)
Mediocracy through Mass Appeal
"Colleges need to drop the focus-group-enforced blandness. As Malcolm Gladwell would put it, people don’t want ten varieties of bland tomato sauce to choose from. Some people love mild and some love extra-chunky. Trying to appeal to both only makes the experience worse for everyone. It doesn’t seem like you should have to go to college to realize that"Aaron Swartz
"Without some kind of firm structure, the thinking goes, students will just follow a fad, a job market, an easy grade. They’ll be cloistered in their specialties, their particular interests. They’ll emerge narrow-minded." Why We Need an Open Curriculum
Meaningless Work
"Over a period of one or two hundred years the contributions of professional schools to their respective activities will probably be found to lie, not so much in the training of men who may tomorrow become practical engineers or practical lawyers or practical doctors, but rather in the fact that even in the pursuit of strictly practical aims an enormous amount of apparently useless activity goes on.
Out of this useless activity there come discoveries which may well prove of infinitely more importance to the human mind and to the human spirit than the accomplishment of the useful ends for which the schools were founded."
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner p. 549
Creating Value in Capitalism
"Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix.”Johnny - College is Dying
Assumptions
There exists an education system of an aged paradigm and a bad policy that hinders the progress of global learning and a learner's ability to learn.
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