Regarding the Resolution to Save Education in California:
The following resolution was sent to members and other attendees of the local Orange County, Ca Patrick Henry Democratic Club by the club organizer Mark Hull-Richtor:
http://phdc-oc.org/home.html
Whereas, the top students in California and elsewhere are eligible to attend the University of California, unlike private universities that allow students with much lower grade point averages to buy their way in or use their family name to gain admission, and
Whereas, the University of California system is receiving more money from the state and federal government, donations and other sources than ever before, including when the tuition was close to free and there were enough teachers to make class sizes small, and because the purpose of educational funds should be education and the use of funds going to the colleges should be to pay the teaching staff and then cut the tuition rates first and later for all other purposes, and
Whereas, the University of California reportedly has squandered most of its money on purposes other than education, such as gambling on toxic assets and real estate, paying off wall street bankers and executives with lucrative administrative positions and other purposes and instead of stopping this misuse of funds, the University of California Board of Regents has voted to make the cost of a University of California education unaffordable for the vast majority of California’s top students, such that few but the wealthiest students will be able to attend.
Therefore, be it resolved, that the Patrick Henry Democratic Club of America calls for the elimination of undergraduate tuition at the University of California, for the re-hiring of all teachers laid off for financial reasons, for the elimination of the majority of administrative positions, and for the full re-imbursement of the educational and pension funds by administrators and/or regents or their agents who have used university funds to gamble on toxic investments and real estate.
Be it further resolved, that the Patrick Henry Democratic Club of America calls for a criminal investigation to be launched by the office of Attorney General Jerry Brown into the misuse of University of California funds for purposes other than education.
My Response: Phil Osborn 12/26/09
I think that this resolution addresses real problems, but without a real answer. Certainly, getting the money back that various miscreants in power have squandered would be nice in itself, but, in the long term fails to address the key issues. Education is failing on a par with and for the same reasons that health care is.
In both cases the outcomes are irrelevant to the process. Schools do not get paid for successful students and HMOs, despite the name, do not get paid for keeping you well. That is the essence of what must change. There must be an objective and measurable connection tying expense to result.
Secondly, there is a fundamental misconception as to the nature of a proper education which is little more than a worship of TRADITION! for tradition’s sake. The Dewey/Thorndike model of “progressive education” was designed to produce good little citizens who would go to war or slave on the assembly lines. The entire psychology of their design of the classroom and curriculum – desks in neat rows assigned regardless of student preference, lockstep collective curricula, classes divided by age rather than maturity or academic performance – was aimed at producing people who would accept arbitrary authority and boredom. And then, of course, there was to be a separate track for the illuminated ones, the philosopher kings, who would be allowed, to some degree at least, to think for themselves. This was not what we needed in the 20th century, much less the 21st.
The 21st century reality is that we will never stop learning until we die. The rate of change is not slowing down, and the demand of the economy is that the successful worker must spend a good portion of his time absorbing new information just to stay on top of the job requirements. Education is not a set of curricula that everyone must learn, and, once learned and certified with a piece of paper, guarantees a position in some modern day guild, such as the AMA. Anyone who drops out of learning for five years today pays a serious price, unless of course you’re a lucky member of some state monopoly with that precious piece of paper providing you a license to steal.
Maria Montessori pointed out the fundamental flaw in all the other approaches to education early on in 20th century. Paraphrasing, she said that education is wrongly seen as the passing on of the collective wisdom of society to the next generation. The problem is that you are making copies of copies of copies, each one more derivative, more sterile, less clear and more lacking in motivational force. And, as the recopied message approaches the status of religious ritual, it takes more energy to force the child to absorb it.
Her approach, in contrast, was to study the child and his or her natural needs, and then to provide the material to enable the child to meet his or her own inner timetable. Montessori students are not told "You vill do this NOW!" Nor are they subjected to a flood of cute toys and fairy tales. And, while there are group activities in a Montessori school, the individual child's work is considered sacred. No one, including the director, may interfere unless what the child is doing harms the Environment for Discovery.
Thus, whatever motivation exists must come from the child. Instead of being forced into the mold of other-directed psychological slave, the child becomes accustomed to doing what he or she really wants, while respecting the equal right of all others to pursue their own goals. For the Montessori child, the important issue is not passing a test, pleasing a teacher, but rather truth, measured by whether something actually works in the real world. The Montessori didactic equipment consists in the main of hands-on puzzles that cannot generally be solved without a clear understanding of the concept.
Several major studies of educational outcomes have demonstrated that Montessori students, when measured against students matched by age, parental educational level, and all the other major factors in the child’s life, maintain a three year academic advantage on average throughout their lives.
However, during the war between Montessori and Dewey from around 1910 to 1930, the artists and scientists who backed Montessori lost out to the corporate interests who wanted an educational system that left them firmly in control. And then there was the fraudulent twin study by the co-founder of Mensa, Cyril Burt, which purported to prove that heredity was the dominant factor in educational achievement. This study, which was quite popular among the British upper classes, got him the top bureaucratic position in the British Commonwealth's world education system, and doomed millions of students to substandard educations.
In the 1920’s a substantial study was conducted to determine how much it would cost to bring a completely illiterate adult up to an overall 8th grade level of general literacy, including mathematics, history, etc. (roughly equivalent to a high-school degree today). The results boiled down to 9 months of intensive education for the average illiterate adult.
What happened to the other eight years? Why is it taking even longer today to reach the same level of proficiency? Why is it that when the late Senator Edward Kennedy had his office do a historical study of levels of literacy in Massachusetts, they discovered that the state had a HIGHER level of general literacy in the 1820’s before public education was available.
Simply making education “free” ignores the fact that it is NOT free! It takes time, people and resources. Someone has to pay for these real goods and services.
“Free,” is shorthand for “paid for by taxes.” When some private company manufactures a widget, it does so on the assumption that it will be able to sell the widget at a profit to the customers. If it misjudges the consumer demand, it takes a corresponding loss and adjusts its course or goes out of business. If a government agency produces some service, and fails to deliver, on the other hand, it gets a bigger budget. Do the police get more money if crime goes up or goes down? Do the schools get more money thrown at them when they succeed or when they fail?
Economists can provide us with endless examples of what happens when something becomes “free,” such as the nearly free bread that was available throughout the Soviet empire. The most common thread among them is that on the one hand, the value is squandered – people loaded wheelbarrows with bread and fed it to their pigs or made kitchen vodka with it – and, on the other hand you get enormous lines that grow until the cost of waiting in line is equivalent to the actual value of the “free” item. Any attempt to make it “free” simply imposes another burden on the taxpayer and inevitably results in costs rising to the point that the “free” education becomes worth what it costs – 0, nada, zilch.
What are the chances for an actual reform of education? First, who would profit from an educational system that actually worked? The students? Society? So what? A more salient question is “Who profits when education doesn’t work?” Answers: The teachers unions, the politicians, the educational bureaucracy, the tenured teachers and professors, 3500 of whom make over $200,000 salaries in California alone - even more than prison guards! If we can’t defeat the prison guards unions, is it likely that we can defeat the combination of beneficiaries of the destruction of education?
Apart from a serious if hopeless effort to actually reform education, there are some things that can be done. We can start by eliminating whenever feasible the obvious aspects of "higher ed" that are sucking the money without producing commensurate results, recognizing that education in general is the product of a top-down, entrenched, corrupt, intellectually moribund and myopic bureaucracy that resists every innovation, unless pressured into it by the corporate and other economic powers that really dictate its hidden agendas.
For example, it is no longer either necessary or optimal that students go to a particular lecture hall at a particular time and then hand-write or type notes that could and should be available online 24/7 to begin with. What? The instructor doesn't use a computer? FIRE HIM! Q and A can also be handled via chat room type interactions, where any student can peruse the discussion to date and post questions, without having to hold his breath and wave his arm forever, after checking to see if someone else may have already asked the same thing.
There is also no need nor any viable reason why a public, tax-supported institution should not make this and similar courseware available for the taking online. Several major universities have been offering free audit versions of courses to the public via Second Life, a virtual online world that mimics the real world. This process should be expanded to as many courses as feasible.
Even for many courses that are "hands-on," involving lab work or field exercises, there are readily available virtual alternatives such as Second Life, where, for a tiny fraction of the cost, custom environments, including virtual labs that exactly match real labs (including the physics of the real objects) or real field environments, such as archeological digs, can be provided and used by as many people as want to, with little per-participant increase in costs. Second Life is already being used by professionals in the fields, to prototype architecture and landscape designs.
And, this includes the arts, in which for music as well as for visual arts, it is silly to do the work in a digital media and then pay for a physical facility to practice it. Concerts combining dance, music and visual special effects that surpass anything that a university could possibly afford in the physical world are a regular feature of Second Life today and are only going to get exponentially better in the near future.
(A recent article in the OC Register featured Jennifer Lindsay, whose progress I have followed for the past fifteen years. Lindsay was a child prodigy in about a dozen different fields, once thought to possibly be the next coloratura in opera and also a top-ranked violinist at age 14, and is now a self-taught musician and composer (as well as a systems analyst in her day job). She just released her first album, "Songs in the Dark," in which every aspect of the music was done by her personally, using only a Mac computer in her spare time. I have friends who spend hours every day creating new dance moves and costumes for their Second Life avatars or new architectural features for their virtual homes.)
http://www.myspace.com/jenniferlindsaymusic
Imagine doing Shakespeare with no limits on the set design. Imagine sculpting with an "undo" and "save version." But that's exactly how virtually every movie today is produced and there are 3D printers now to produce what you design virtually in the real world. What, you thought "2012" used real sets?
In general, there is no reason why, for example, a high-school - or younger - student should not be able to participate on-line in a college course of lectures for zero dollars, or a minimal fee to reflect costs, and then pay to be tested and certified on a particular course, thus cutting hundreds or thousands of dollars out of the ultimate cost for a degree.
Degree? We don’t need no stinkin degrees! Actually, we need more. A degree in most fields is obsolete almost before it is awarded. Human progress is accelerating at a rate that ensures that anyone who fails to make education a life-long project is going to fall sadly behind. Rather than some lifetime certificate, we need the kind of ongoing training, involvement and certification that MicroSoft provides to systems administrators. It doesn’t matter whether you are a gardener, an architect, a doctor or a plumber. People today are using the internet in particular to stay abreast of a tsunami of change, and it will become more that way in the near future.
The generally accepted information future of five to ten years ahead includes “overlays” or “augmented reality.” The smart phones are the gateway to a world in which your phone continuously projects information on top of your perception. Glance at something and twitch your eye the right way and you get a menu or some other kind of overlay projected directly into your eye, offering you any kind of information available for what you’re looking at. If you’re a carpenter, and you can’t figure out exactly how a job is supposed to go, you call up the blueprints – in 3D – for that particular part of the building and you ask the autocad system to show you exactly how it’s supposed to go.
Today, the architect can do this on his laptop – or his smartphone if necessary. Tomorrow, the guy with the hammer will think nothing of accessing that same information minute by minute as he works. Instead of a course in carpentry that attempts to provide a little of everything, tomorrow’s competent carpenter will have the option to call up a video library or a real expert in whatever particular kind of carpentry is needed at the moment.
Tomorrow’s real estate agent will not just provide the virtual tours of homes that have become popular, but will also be able, in real-time, to call up alternative kitchen plans for a potential buyer, or visualize exactly where the wiring conduits and plumbing is behind the walls. Ten years from now it will be the rare exception for someone to purchase a new house without full CAD documentation of the entire structure, including wiring and plumbing.
The point is that a “degree” from 1990 is of far less value in any of these everyday examples, than the ability to quickly, accurately and creatively access information in realtime.
Meanwhile, however, our universities depend upon the perception of the value of some piece of paper for their continuing existence and funding. And those people who have mortgaged their future to some gargantuan student loan in order to get those arbitrary documents also have a vested interest like DeBeers in crystallized carbon in preserving that value. Thus, the elitist educational hierarchy leads inevitably to the elitist licensing hierarchy.
Various economic studies of licensing have shown, meanwhile, that it typically has little if any impact upon quality, but often drastically raises prices for the consumer. A classic example is that of taxis. It used to be that cities generally limited the number of cabs allowed. Then, Yellow Cab would simply buy up all the licenses for that city, permanently park hundreds of licensed cabs, and reap the profits of a state monopoly.
I witnessed this in Columbia, South Carolina, when I drove a cab right during the interval in which the monopoly was finally broken by the courts. The yellow cab drivers could care less for the customers. Who else were they going to go to? Thus, the Yellow cabs were broken down pieces of junk, barely roadworthy. The fares were outrageously high. After the city was forced to offer licenses to whoever could pay and provide documentation of insurance, suddenly prices were open to competition and cab companies competed over who had the best vehicles.
In Florida, during the late ‘70’s recession, there was one year, reportedly, that NOT ONE APPLICANT OF THOUSANDS passed the exam to be certified as a plumber. Did the quality of wannabe plumbers suddenly drop universally for that year? I don’t think so…
So, now we have licensing in California not just for psychotherapists, but also for “counselors.” I.e., if I charge you for giving you advise on how to live your life better, I can be fined or imprisoned. Meanwhile, there are fifty different schools of psychotherapy – Jungean, gestalt, rational emotive, Freudian, primal therapy, Dianetics, neo-Reichian, just to name a few – all of whom are somehow licensing therapists, even though their principles and practices are often completely contradictory. Perhaps next we will start licensing witches or fortune tellers… Oh, wait….
This is the vicious racket that follows from the system of static degrees. Like the medieval guild system, it ostensibly ensures quality, but in fact merely enriches an elite at the expense of everyone else. Yet this is, in essence, much of the reason for the continued existence of traditional education. Want to be part of the medical monopoly that keeps jacking up the health care rates? That’l cost you a cool $200K+. But then you can get that and more back from your victims once you have that AMA certification.
The research requirements - "publish or perish" - that up the ante by creating a model in which a top guru in some field has to be bid over from competing institutions belies the underlying reality that for a student beginning in a field, a closer relationship with a journeyman instructor who pays attention to individual students' progress may be more intellectually nourishing, and cost a fraction of what very limited access to some top-name researcher costs today.
In general, much of the time spent in required courses ends up wasted anyway, as the ultimate employers report having to retrain graduates regardless. An arrangement in which students interned at companies actually doing the work the student wants to pursue would forestall that waste while giving the student a much better picture of the reality of the potential career.
Additionally, the military/industrial/educational complex is itself inherently corrupt, resulting in private corporations cashing in on patents that reflect investment of tax dollars. Education should be the primary goal of a university, not patent generation for the benefit of rich corporations at taxpayer expense.
The reality is that education has become as overpriced as health care, for similar reasons, boiled down to not being paid on the basis of objective results, while profiting by means of state intervention in the form of licensing requirements for various professions and intellectual property paid for by the taxpayer. The answer in both cases is not to look for some other way to pay vastly exaggerated costs, but to examine the system from the standpoint of the delivery of actual desirable services. In this cause, protests and politics are equally useless and serve merely to divert energy from real solutions. What is needed is an outcome-driven system in which success evolves to more success, replacing a system that inherently invests in failure.
http://www.betterverse.org/2009/10/metanomics-talk-on-university-of-texas-in-second-life-october-21.htm
The model of education that is still being promoted via both private and public schools is itself not only wrong but also destructive of its intended purposes, as the Rand Corporation demonstrated in the early ‘70’s. The Rand Corp. report, commissioned by Nixon and then buried by him as too controversial, concluded that NO increase in funding, reduction in class size, or any of the other standard political solutions would significantly reduce a projected ongoing decline in educational results, because, at the root of the matter, the fundamental premises of education were themselves fatally flawed.
Today, there are additional reasons to reject the standard model of education. In a world in which the doubling time for human knowledge is dropping exponentially - every five years in 2002 to much less than one year by 2020 - there is no good reason to force students to memorize volumes of facts that can be retrieved instantly from online or other electronic media sources. No matter how much a student has memorized, he will generally lose any competition with a factually ignorant student who knows how to efficiently find the answers.
Teaching facts and then testing on them via multiple choice exams is the smallest part of what students - which includes today the entire active population - need in order to function in the information age. It is the methodology of finding and using information that is critical, including a proper epistemology and a strategic focus and self-correcting paradigm for verifying effectiveness. In the information age, we are all permanently students and researchers.
The verified success of the Montessori school approach in producing well-rounded, responsible, self-determined individuals who also happen to average three years ahead academically, for example, rests not on the volume of information presented, but on the implicit teaching of the integration of observable facts into principles via the scientific method. Students are expected to only accept that which can be supported by objective evidence. Consequently those students expect both the natural world and the social/political/cultural world of human conception to function in a reasonable - or at least understandable - way.
The Montessori approach, however, has changed little since Maria Montessori's death in 1952. The Montessorians have by and large resisted the inclusion of computers in the Environment for Discovery. This failure has cost them dearly.
Unfortunately there has been little incentive to fill that gap by anyone else. Papert, in his classic "Mindstorms," discusses the critical role that computers can and should play in teaching epistemology. Note that the original book, based on intensive research at MIT in conjunction with Marvin Minsky and guided by principles developed by Piaget, with whom Papert studied for five years in Switzerland, was published around 1980. (Also, little noted is the fact that Piaget himself was the president of the Swiss Montessori Associationl.)
Not only have the solutions and methods of "Mindstorms" and LOGO, the programming language specifically designed by Papert to teach epistemology, become dated with the vast improvements in computer technology, but the original work lies still largely unused by educators. Most educators fiercely resisted the personal computer, not because it didn't work as advertised, but because, like the equally rejected teaching machines of the '60's (which also worked quite well in the limited role of rote learning), the computer took away power from the class dictator.
Most teachers quickly fall into the mode of power conservation over all else in the classroom. They have to, because in the traditional classroom, they are dealing with conscripted prisoners who naturally rebel at first opportunity. (Montessori kids often have a tough time going from a totally self-directed paradigm to a totally authoritarian system. So? Which is the problem?)
Any independent, self-guided action by a student is thus perceived as a challenge to authority. The computer allowed the exercise of incredible power by the student, the power to discover independently new ways of doing things, requiring the teacher to collaborate and nourish the very traits that caused the most headaches. A few teachers were able to make this work. Not many.
Most simply resisted until they were replaced by younger teachers who grew up with computers. Even those teachers, however, had to teach to the exam, and, by then, wordprocessors, etc., made it possible to use the computer effectively as a composition tool while staying with the top-down, rote-learning, lockstep paradigm of John Dewey. Then the internet came along and teachers resisted it with as much passion as their predecessors had resisted personal computers. Meanwhile, Papert, whose work is still totally relevant, has been mostly forgotten, and the real power of the computer to enhance thinking itself has been largely unused.
Note that Lego is virtually the only source of LOGO today. Their various robotic systems building environments have won all kinds of praise from parents and kids, but they are rarely seen in the classroom. The cost of one computer could easily pay for several Lego systems, whose payoff would be in terms of students capable of thinking creatively.
(One could imagine a LOGO that also dealt with information as such, allowing the user, for example, to design and test various search and retrieval systems for the internet, not just thinking about thought but thinking about thinking about thought, making decision theory and information access the very subject of learning. How do we effectively critique and improve practical epistemology itself?)
Unfortunately, this failure to employ appropriate technology is ingrained. Perversely, from the very inception of personal computers, educational systems have consistently bought the very worst machines at the highest price – and the same for software. I spent a fair portion of my free time in the mid-80’s working with schools and educators. It was appalling then and worse now.
http://educatorsweb.lego.com/en-us/Seriousplay/InPractice/default.aspx
The need to grapple with overwhelming volumes of data effectively, to control our lives and our cultures in a sustainable, rational way, is fast becoming the major challenge to humanity. It is all too easy to simply believe in some religion or conspiracy theory that produces a pattern that appears to make sense of the flood of data.
The result of this kind of wish-fulfillment epistemology, however, is the production of a myriad of sects clinging desperately to sets of mutually incompatible paradigms. Some of them have nuclear weapons. This is not a sustainable solution. However, it works in the sense of promoting a sense that one is in control of ones life, and thus any challenge to it will naturally be met with hostility.
What is needed is not more people who will grasp for any ideology that offers to provide meaning to their lives, but rather people who have the mental skills and attitudes necessary to sift through the BS and find the underlying truth.
Putting more money into a solution that doesn't work while ignoring real alternatives is folly. Unfortunately that won't stop it from happening.
Do the schools get bigger budgets when students fail or when they succeed? Why do today’s eighth and ninth graders function in terms of basic skills at the level of my generation’s fourth or fifth graders? The longer it takes to bring someone to a functional level as a citizen, the more money it costs, and thus the more money is there to be taken by those who specialize in taking. Rewarding failure is a formula for getting more failure.
Imagine, however, one possible alternative, an educational system that invested in its products, the students. Instead of a top-down hierarchy that sells one size for all, imagine that each student created a nanocorp or nanotrust in his or her own name. The role of the educational system would be to accept shares in the nanocorp or nanotrust in return for providing whatever means the student needed to become competent in a given field. Good advice and effective learning environments would pay off in the market value of the student’s shares.
Note that this system, in direct contrast to the existing systems, is rewarded for positive outcomes, not failures. Please also note that because it gets its income from the value of the shares in the student, the income or economic status of the family or culture is much less relevant. Kids or adults in third world countries could participate right along with first world yuppies, their investment covered by expected future earnings.
The obvious failures of our educational system are the inevitable consequence of rewarding failure. Let us explore the possibility that other approaches entirely might work better, approaches in which success for both the student and the educational provider would be rewarded.
Notes: ____________________________________________________________________________________________