Education
These past few decades have been witness to great change. It is hard to imagine that the Covid Pandemic will not increase this rate of change; that the pace of change will be slowing down anytime soon. Looking back, the advent of the microprocessor and all that followed changed the world forever. Looking forward, the COVID-19 pandemic, too, will little doubt change the world forever. The one gave us the means to do things differently, the other, the desperate need to do things differently. The pandemic has forced us to rethink things like education, office work, retail, healthcare, work commutes, construction, … .
Education was already under great stress. Over the past several decades, as more and more mothers went to work, as poverty and drugs took their toll, as the social fabric become more tattered; schools k-12 were being asked to take on the additional role of being parent. Tasked to do more with less: money is needed. All sorts of schemes have arisen for schooling children for less. Privatization was the favorite of conservatives; surely there must be a way for the market to do all this that needed to be done that wouldn’t require their paying more taxes. For forty years and more now, education has been a victim of the Magic of the Market con. As with many another essential service, a great toll has been taken by this great ruse.
Truth be, fact is, the biggest problem with k-12 education isn’t teachers, or teachers’ unions; it’s one of underfunding. The nation needs to step up; to put up the money. The money for facilities, counselors, teachers’ aides, tutoring, internet, computers, … .
Even with 35 students per classroom, teaching is still way too labor intensive. Teaching may be a labor of love, but then we all know about the problems with labor. What if we gave each student internet access, taught online? Surely, some clever programmer, or university research group, could come up with an algorithm that would be better, or at least almost as good as, the classroom teacher. Should we give artificial intelligence a try? Computers are being, have been for some time now, used to supplement/augment teaching. No doubt, a lot has been learned with the remote learning programs schools have developed during the pandemic that can be incorporated.
In some parts of the nation, for the while of the pandemic, schools have gone hybrid. Hybrid teaching, with some kids in class, alternating with others online, is being beta tested. Generally, this means the teacher will be using a camera, a mic, a laptop in conjunction with a Promethean Board and probably a Chromebook; all the while on Zoom. Other Zoom, nothing new other the greater amount of combining. To teach, one needs to be a juggler, a studio engineer, … . The good parts of all this will no doubt remain in use long after the pandemic ends. Teaching, even in K-12, is ever employing more technology.
The selectivity of the private and charter k-12 schools have left the public schools with a greater proportion of those students with learning and behavioral issues; a tsunami that has been hitting the middle-schools and that is now hitting the high schools. More counselors, more paras, more assistants, are needed in order to deal with this consequence.
—
As shocking as it might be to say, to hear, higher education has become a business. A really big business built on brand and presumed necessity. An advanced degree from a prestigious institute of higher learning is thought to virtually guarantee financial security and more. The big name brand universities school the sons and daughters of the world’s wealthy at a handsome profit; improving the trade balance. Even a little bible college can tap into this foreign student demand. Tap in or tap out; no degree relegates one to a hard life with little hope. Everyone needs a ticket to ride! The Marketing 101, and Life 101 of it all.
Time was when a degree from a prestigious institution likely signified a well rounded individual.
Today, it is more likely to be all about advanced training in a narrow field. The ticket is still considered well worth the price; if by hook or crook one can afford it. Throw in graduate degree and one has a first class ticket. Of late, careers have often come with a huge 30 year mortgage, aka, a student loan.
As with K-12, during the pandemic, a lot of higher education even the Academy of Art University has been online. Some form of online Higher Ed has been around for a while. For some time professors have used recorded lectures when they were going to out of town that students could watch in the classroom or download. During the pandemic, its stream or Zoom. In this time of greater usage of the video/online lecture, tuition has stayed the same; and the Professors’ offices are still ridiculously small. What’s up with this? Where is the $40-50k tuition going? Worse yet, how did tuition at state universities and colleges get to be so high? If the bachelors degree is essential, the education therefor must be also. All roads, even paths, are infrastructure.
On the horizon, out of sunset, comes the Magic of the Market, aka, University of Phoenix copy cats. What do we know about online learning? We know that it can be a relatively effective means of teaching. But, what about the rounding of individuals? Without the give and take of classroom, student union, …, on-campus debates, will too many online learners turn out ill formed? Half-baked? How to implement the give and take of discussion, the bright light of of being challenged, …, achieve the rounding? Zooming on in, we are about to find out, and the Magic of the Market of it all says that the prestigious ones, too, are going to have to come up with a response.
Ken,
AI can teach each student at their owned self-paced by both speed of comprehension and areas of interest. AI never loses its patients and treats every student the same. Khan Academy provides great teachers’ aides in video, but K-12 moved the bar a little closer.
***************************************************************
K12: Online Public School Programs | Online Learning Programs
How Is AI Used In Education — Real World Examples Of Today And A Peek Into The Future (bernardmarr.com)
“…Differentiated and individualized learning
Adjusting learning based on an individual student’s particular needs has been a priority for educators for years, but AI will allow a level of differentiation that’s impossible for teachers who have to manage 30 students in each class. There are several companies such as Content Technologies and Carnegie Learning currently developing intelligent instruction design and digital platforms that use AI to provide learning, testing and feedback to students from pre-K to college level that gives them the challenges they are ready for, identifies gaps in knowledge and redirects to new topics when appropriate. As AI gets more sophisticated, it might be possible for a machine to read the expression that passes on a student’s face that indicates they are struggling to grasp a subject and will modify a lesson to respond to that. The idea of customizing curriculum for every student’s needs is not viable today, but it will be for AI-powered machines…”
Maybe we should make AI doctors since AI never loses its patients :<)
Maybe kids should get their education at the face of one of Joe Manchin’s beloved coal mines.
It will build both character and resistance to Covid-19.{Please ignore the black lung issues.)
davebarnesApril 24, 2021 8:05 pmMaybe kids should get their education at the face of one of Joe Manchin’s beloved coal mines.”
Gentlemen Prefer strippers. I’ll have to agree with the gentleman even though I’m not one of them. I prefer strip mining but the interesting thing about that is that most of the stripper trucks are automated, don’t need drivers; it’s not really labor-intensive. Even construction work and infrastructure are not nearly so labor-intensive anymore.
sure! great strides have been made in education. some really great people have made those Quantum leaps into the future, but what we really need to concentrate on at the moment is that some children live in unsafe neighborhoods where drugs will wipe out their improved education. alcohol will kill off the Betz cells of their cortex and occasionally accidents will cause children to be shot. the guardian angels were organized to protect subways; and I think people in each community should organize a similar Force to keep the children safe, keep them away from the Mickey Finn.
good
luck
!
I fear it will take more than a few years of dealing with Covid 19 to really change college education in the US. Too much money to be made from the status quo and sooo much inertia in the form of bloated academic bureaucracies.
Ken
I think you are right about the problem. Desperately wrong about the solution.
I got my education mostly on my own, with a great deal of help from the maybe two or three teachers I met along the way. Their help cannot be replicated by a computer. And no one needs a damn computer to read a book.
Back in 1967 or so I worked as a scab during a teachers’ strike. I found the kids trying to learn geometry out of a nice new book, with pictures and different colored inks. Neither they nor I could learn anything from that book. So I taught them the way I had been taught: straight forward, no picture book, one color of ink. They caught on immediately. I like t think I helped just by being a friendly human who talked TO them and listened to them. I told the county supervisor or whatever the hell she was called about my success, She told me very coldly to teach it their (the county’s) way or not at all, a
Quite similarly, kids don’t need more and better “day care.” They need moms and dads.
Suggest you get rid of the damn computers and computer games. Bring mom home, let the kids work alongside dad, and don’t even bother to go to a college you can’t afford, or doesn’t teach anything, None of the colleges I went to taught a damn thing. At least nothing I couldn’t have learned out of a book on my own, with a kind person who knew something about the world, or the work, directing my self study and helping avoid or overcome roadblocks.
Much more on this, but you get the point. Dobbs cites an article on another thread; kids love Biden, but 25% of them have suicidal thoughts. We don’t need no education. We don’t need more smarter computers, we don’t need more money. We need to be more human.
and yes, I know there are lots of problems with what I am saying here. but they are problems of implementation, not problems of direction.
We are, as you know, going to hell as a civilization. Won’t help us to go there faster, better… by spending more money to do it cheaper.
my cut and paste skills are not great. i offer the following as a kind of example toward what i am talking about above. ignore the petition stuff.
Restore Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden
Sign now with a click
I
In 2019, Melania Trump had the cherry trees, removed as well as the rest of the foliage
Sign now with a click
i
coberly
That was a better cut and paste (earlier) than what I had seen in the past.
I agree with Colberly except for not learning anything of worth in college. But, that was my choice as I did not go simply to get the credits need to go onto my next part of my professional education.
To sum up the problem, we elevated economy to be atop society. Since that time we have been trying to solve the problems this approach has created by using economics to solve the problems this elevation created. In short, we’ve just keep digging.
Because we followed an ideology that says all we have to do is mind the money and social order will follow we think commercializing all is the solution.
Thus, here we are. We have commercialized the raising of our children and believe we just haven’t foisted enough commercializing into raising the children as why we still are not successful.
As we moved from an agricultural social structure (which was still with us to a large degree into the 60’s, I grew up in RI with a state fair into the 60’s) we lost a natural environment for raising children. The children were always with at least 1 parent, had free time with nature.
If we look at the social structure we were building coming out of the depression, (via unions) even with industrializing we incorporated aspects of life from the agricultural period though looking back we did not recognize this. Heck, we used to have garden tractors, now we have glorified riding mowers as “tractors”.
Even in the cities, people had weekends, 40 hour weeks and the big one a feeling of trust.
I’ve written in my postings here as far back as 2008/09 that we were in trouble because the fuel of ours or any economy is trust. We’ve been following a political ideology that believes the way to win was to sow mistrust. Here we are today and the right/Republicans are pushing mistrust even deeper into the veins of society.
We used to tell our children “go to college, get a life”. For decades we’ve been telling them: Go to college get a job. WRONG MESSAGE. We have totally lost sight of the purpose of education. We put education into service of the economy (economy before society). We need to stop this. We need to put education back into service of society. Of course that means restoring the economy to servicing society (and banking back to serving production).
Lastly, we refuse to acknowledge that the work of nurturing humans is and will always be more costly than putting a car out the factory door every 5 minutes. It just takes more time to do it but in the end it is creating the most valuable of capital. Technology needs to stop being look as the solution and/or substitution for human and return to being viewed as simply a tool.
Coberly is correct: Won’t help us to go there faster, better . . . by spending more money to do it cheaper.
Becker
Thank you for getting my point and saying it better than i did.
i did not say i learned nothing of worth in college. I said I didn’t learn anything I couldn’t have learned on my own…with direction from someone who knew the world and the work.
I honestly don’t know if that would have worked with most students, or with one of those real guides having to deal with hundreds of students. But i know that sitting in lecture rooms for three hours at a time “taking notes” didn’t help me at all. Even when the classes got smaller and shorter, listening to a lecture that might as well have been on videotape was less helpful than the same words would have been in a book… which i could have read ten times a fast as listening to the lecture. Putting it all on a computer just compounds the misery.
as for “most students”… i believe college is not the place for them. or not the best place. people learn by doing, not by being talked at, or even reading stuff they are not particularly interested in. that said, college is the traditional place for the children of the rich to go and play until they grow up, while aquiring a patina of learning which, like nice clothes, will help them in their careers. my apologies to anyone who enjoyed college and actually learned something there. it can happen. my guess is that if it did, it’s because along the way you met that “one teacher” and discovered an interest, or a way to pursue an interest you always had (probably nurtured or at least acquired at home before you ever went to school).
Lots of people learn lots in college. I know I did. One of the things I learned in college was how to be self-instructing. I learned it from the better profs, who taught not just content but how to figure out what I didn’t know and when I knew enough. One of the main functions of college is to credential graduates as “finishers.” To graduate a four-year liberal arts with a B average or better, you have to *complete* a bunch of diverse courses that require regular competency exams. Over and over and over, for four (or now, more) years. For many jobs, you don’t have to already possess all the skills-you can train for skills. What you can’t train is someone who can’t reliably finish the job assignments. Employers want people who finish, over and over and over.Yes, you can get the content in a library and/or on the internet. What you pay for (if you’re doing it right) is the expert guidance and the efficiency. What you get (if you’re doing it right) is the ability to ask the right questions *and* to find the right answers.
Joel
that sounds like the way it’s spozed to be. it wasn’t that way in any of the six colleges i attended, two of which i taught at.
as for “finishing,” i think you can train that if you are real good at training, or at least select for that if you are an employer. but i have read books by harvard graduates (PhD) who could write a whole book without ever knowing the first thing about their subject. lots of “things” they could look up in the library, but not the first thing. i think maybe the hardest thing about self-teaching is to keep yourself convinced you are not wasting your time… that is to say, teach yourself to finish. that’s where good guidance helps.
to be honest, with a few exceptions, I never saw a “teacher” who cared enough about students…maybe they didn’t have time, or past experience had taught them the futility…who cared any more than a bureaucrat behind the counter at the DMV.
no. that’s not fair…to the DMV. the DMV has to get the job done, has to actually talk TO the person. school teachers don’t. neither do computers however much artificial intelligence they have.
run
re cut and paste
problem seems to be you cant just scroll around what you want to cut. there are all kinds of sub-routines going on that make that not work. maybe i could learn how to manage that, but i no longer have the time or patience. i never found a way to cut out the stuff you saw on-screen with my post, or the lots of stuff off screen if you clicked the (obscure, to me) link i did manage to include.
@coberly,
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m sorry you didn’t get anything out of your six-college experience. I attended only four colleges and only have been on the faculty at one additional one, albeit for 34 years. Both of my parents went to college and grad school, as did my wife. My daughter went to college and law school, passed the bar two months after finishing law school, and has practiced law in her chosen area (immigration) since. I’m quite confident that all would testify to having had worthwhile college experiences.
I’ve known over 100 PhDs personally, including members of the National Academy of Sciences, and they have, with only one or two exceptions, been intellectually accomplished persons whose work has been widely cited.
“i think maybe the hardest thing about self-teaching is to keep yourself convinced you are not wasting your time… that is to say, teach yourself to finish. that’s where good guidance helps.”
Absolutely. That’s why the MOOC fad flopped.
Joel
you really don’t have to defend the education establishment rom me. i have known a few PhD’s myself, including my daughter. they are mostly nice people. smart even. but school was torture for me, and for many people i knew. i used to say the smartest people i knew in high school never went to college. I don’t say that much anymore because most people would not understand it.
thing is, i’m sure it works out for some people. perhaps those who for whatever reasons, are so constructed as to succeed under those circumstances. perhaps you went to better schools than i did. perhaps times have changed.
so don’t feel that I am attacking you or your friends. but it would be very hard for you to convince me that college is not the wrong thing for most people… except, of course, that it is “required.” and harder to convince me that it can’t be done better. and impossible to convince me that more computer time for kids is good for them.
but here is something that suggests something, to me at least, about the quality of education in America:
from a college physics text published in 1988: “To walk, a person exerts a force on the earth. Consistent with Newton’s third law, the earth exerts an oppositely dircted force of equal magnitude on the person’s foot, thus causing the foot to accelerate forward.”
i can forgive people who didn’t “take” physics for not seeing what is wrong with this. but not those who write physics texts saying this.
JOEL
we may not disagree as much as you think.
i read the wiki on MOOC. at a glance it looks to me just like the colleges i went to.. except that you get to get up out of your chair when you want (desperately need) to. on the other hand you might go blind from staring at a computer screen for hours. and of course the lectures at real colleges were often done by arguably human beings, as long as you did not expect the to talk to you (would have failed Turing test). a good TA could help, but most of the ones I saw were not motivated to waste their time talking to mere students. it’s not that it was impossible to learn anything, but that at some point you found yourself asking “why? Why? WHY?!”
from the wiki.. apparently one of the courses was “The Greek Hero.” While I can get interested in such a topic myself, I can’t imagine anyone taking it “for credit,” to get “tested” and be “graded.” especially if he had something more interesting to do.
MOO! indeed.