Mal Education - System Design - Should Be VS Is

<b>[shando] "So it looks like we will need a protocol to reach out and recruit these endangered individuals."</b>

Well, we will need a product or service (for real) before we can recruit anyone to it. MOOC and the KhanAccademy are already there.

And there are others.

And, even the monopoly schools manage to do a fair to middling job for at least half of their victims (er, half of the kids).

But that leaves 20 or 30 percent of the "customers" of the monopoly system that are effectively screwed. And these screw-ees tend to be the minorities and the poor. If the parents of kids in these groups had access to an affordable alternative they would JUMP AT IT.

But it is the nature of a monopoly (especially one as advanced and politically sophisticated as the school system) that they will not tolerate <u>true</u> competition.

***

The tools you and I dream about are already out there.

All we really need to do is find a way to stop blocking the poor and the disadvantaged from gaining access to them.

Something like a voucher system would do the job. A poor black mom takes her kids to a local private school, and the state she lives in gives her a voucher for the amount the monop, er, public school would have spent on the kid. Actually, in many cases about half of that would work.

But the monopoly system won't allow this. Or anything similar.

***

So, what we really need to be doing is to find a different way to connect the needy customer with the products THAT ALREADY EXIST.

Or, do you see it differently?

LB

LB, Thank you for speaking for me about this odd topic. Its good to see you guys have been discovering so many new web sites paralleling your project. Some of the webmasters had similar ideas years ago and just kind of bumbled along like the Pied Piper of old. I think at lot can be learned from Mother Goose although these days it might be politically incorrect to read her stuff.

I want to go back here for a moment:

<b>suggested by shando, Aug 22
Devise a protocol for measuring and evaluating the performance of any given Hyper School clone.
</b>

Actually, when I suggested it, I was thinking about the evaluation of individual students, but LB inserted (correctly) HS clones.

I am thinking that the clones would be evaluated by the students using them, as part of a "course completion" exercise - sort of similar to the vendor evaluation on eBay.

<b>LB: The tools you and I dream about are already out there.</b>

Now, thinking about AE's assertion that "education is training the mind to think", I went in search of the meaning of "think".
I didn't find much.
There are a lot of words that describe the act of thinking but very little (none) describing the essence of what thinking is.
It seems to me that
if we are going to reinvent the educational system, and
if education means training the mind to think, then
we should have an actionable definition of the verb "think".

Could it be that what we call an IQ test, actually measures one's ability to think?

What do you think? (How do you think?)

<b>[shando] "Could it be that what we call an IQ test, actually measures one's ability to think?"</b>

No.

Most IQ tests I'm aware of are actually tests of what you know versus what others your age know. IQ 100 means you have average knowledge. IQ 90 means you have less than average "stored facts", and so on. (This is not as useless as it sounds. Probably why they are still being used so much.)

The only IQ tests that are an exception are the ones that do not require you to read or listen or push a button. (Your eyes do have to work, however.) They do not measure WHAT you know, they measure your ability to know. (Paradoxically, this is not as useful as it sounds. Probably why they are rarely used.)

LB

<b>[shando] "when I suggested it, I was thinking about the evaluation of individual students"</b>

We used to do that with something called a "grade". But the monopoly system managers (politicians and their cronies) realized that if that was allowed to continue their inability to provide a reasonable product/service would someday become obvious even to the graduates of their system. So they used a "slow but steady" technique to kill it. First they introduced the concept of 'grading on a curve' (I laughed out loud the first time we had a test like that. Got in trouble, too.). Later they introduced 'pass-fail' and 'social advancement' and 'every one's a winner' and 'don't keep score' and so on.

Many kids are still able to learn enough to get by. Some do quite well, especially in certain schools. But there is that 'residue' of (mostly) poor and minorities that don't do well (especially in certain other schools), and these new and improved programs to replace grading are used on them (to boost their self esteem) and on their parents (to help them see their kids in a positive light) instead of actually trying to help them.

***

Yeah, I suppose I am a bit cynical. I was lucky enough to be a self educator and to have at least a small helping of ambition. And a b*tt l**d of luck. So I did OK. My heart breaks when I think about the kids that got crushed in that machine. (I could have done much better, and wish now that I had, but that's no one's fault but my own.)

To paraphrase an old saying, 'it's not cynicism if things really are going down hill'.