The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn't know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. Government-controlled schooling didn't eliminate dumbness - in fact, we now know that people read more fluently before we had forced schooling - but dumbness was transformed.

Now dumb people aren't just ignorant; they're the victims of the non-thought of secondhand ideas. Dumb people are now well-informed about the opinions of Time magazine and CBS, The New York Times and the President; their job is to choose which pre-thought thoughts, which received opinions, they like best. The élite in this new empire of ignorance are those who know the most pre-thought thoughts.

Mass dumbness is vital to modern society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision.

Modern scientific stupidity masquerades as intellectual knowledge - which it is not. Real knowledge has to be earned by hard and painful thinking; it can't be generated in group discussions or group therapies but only in lonely sessions with yourself. Real knowledge is earned only by ceaseless questioning of yourself and others, and by the labor of independent verification; you can't buy it from a government agent, a social worker, a psychologist, a licensed specialist, or a schoolteacher. There isn't a public school in this country set up to allow the discovery of real knowledge - not even the best ones - although here and there individual teachers, like guerrilla fighters, sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are set up to classify people rather than to see them as unique, even the best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning they can tolerate.

The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult.

Deschooling Society

If a team wants a good field goal kicker it will indeed seek a kicker who demonstrates to them he can kick. That someone comes to the team with a certificate that he went to kicking school and got all good grades in kicking would be laughed out of court. The issue would be: can the person kick field goals with accuracy and distance under pressure of game situations.

Similarly, with much in entertainment worlds. Webster University has a highly regarded theater department. Students work hard here and hopefully learn a great deal. But when they go out looking for an acting job, that they have a degree from Webster University with a major in theater is of extremely little interest. The issue is performance and demonstrated ability, not a credential.

Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."

Cargo Cult Science

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to cheek on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress-- in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and
science that isn't science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are
examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the
South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw
airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same
thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like
runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a
wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head
like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's
the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're
doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the
way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So
I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the
apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but
they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Cargo Cult Science

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Adults Too Quick to Dismiss Educational Gaming?

Educational methods that revolve around memorization, be it in games or anything else, are usually very ineffecient. Teaching facts is along the lines of giving a man a fish instead of teaching him how to do so. Once you learn that fact, it does little to nothing to your overall education in other areas.

The most effective teaching methods involve giving students the tools to be able to learn how to learn. Most learning will be done on a student's own through exploration, even if much of it is passive.

That's where video games come in. Legend of Zelda may not teach you Mayan history, it might not show you, directly, how to do algebra, but it develops problem solving and creative thinking skills in fairly complex ways that will make a student's job in learning those things FAR easier. Zelda isn't even an "education game" but its innate problem solving is more involved that almost any story problem you'll encounter in HS, and kids play Zelda in grade school. The problem is, it's not easilly quantifiable because there are no hard-and-fast facts being learned, but as I said, fact learning is one of the least inefficient educational methods. Sure, facts must be taught, but there should be much less emphasis on fact learning and more emphasis on critical thinking skills.

Meanwhile, over the course of Zelda, or even an adventure FPS, RPG, or most other modern games, you're reading a lot of on-screen text, you're doing mathmatical computation for stats, puzzles, and the like... and all surrounded by various time limits that act as drill. And to top it off, it's fun and doesn't FEEL like work. What more could an educator ask for?

http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/04/09/2039258.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Munchers

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=517212&cid=23018860

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html

Games that can educate: SimCity donated to OLPC project

Electronic Arts announced yesterday plans to donate the original version of the SimCity computer game to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project so that it can be distributed to schoolchildren in developing countries on OLPC's XO laptop.

The original SimCity game, which won numerous awards and paved the way for an immensely successful franchise, transforms the player into the mayor of a virtual city. The simulation encourages cultivation of problem-solving skills and requires users to plan elaborate city infrastructure and respond to the needs of virtual citizens. The idea of including SimCity on the OLPC XO laptop was conceived by Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder and OLPC advisor John Gilmore.

Teacher turnover leaves void in U.S. schools

The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone - a higher turnover rate than in the past.

Los Angeles has offered teachers signing with low-performing schools a $5,000 bonus. The district, the second-largest in the country, had hired only about 500 of the 2,500 teachers it needed by Aug. 15 but hoped to begin classes fully staffed, said Deborah Ignagni, chief of teacher recruitment

According to the most recent Department of Education statistics available, about 269,000 of the nation's 3.2 million public school teachers, or 8.4 percent, quit the field in the 2003-04 school year.

Thirty percent of them retired, and 56 percent said they left to pursue another career or because they were dissatisfied.

lecturefox.com

What is Lecturefox?

It’s all about the joy of learning.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties computer science, mathematics and physics. In the category faculty-mix you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

infinitethinking.org

The Infinite Thinking Machine (ITM) is designed to help teachers and students thrive in the 21st century. Through an active blog, an Internet TV show, and other media resources, the ITM shares a "bazillion practical ideas" for turning the infinite universe of information into knowledge. We showcase examples of innovative instructional methods, talk with leading experts, and share real stories from the classroom to improve how we think, learn, teach, and live. And we try to have a little fun along the way.

Our shows and website are an important way to spark dialogue and help educators explore a wide range of innovative ideas. We rely on the collective wisdom of many experienced educators to select interesting ideas to share, but we cannot validate these practices beyond that. Also, please keep in mind that any mention of products, ideas, websites, and organizations does not represent an endorsement by the producers or sponsors.

Ideas to help teachers and students thrive in the 21st century.

lecturefox.com

Lots of interesting video lectures.

These guys use django.

What's the current high-school dropout rate?

We hear a lot about how American high schools are in bad shape -- not enough funding, not enough teachers, and too many kids dropping out. Do the numbers support the anecdotal evidence?

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 10.3% of high-school students dropped out in 2004. (Among Hispanic students, the dropout rate is a disturbingly high 23.8%.) Overall, the rate is trending downward. In 1995, 12% of all high-school students dropped out.

But pinpointing an accurate high-school dropout rate has proved to be something of a challenge. States use various and sometimes questionable methods to calculate the rate, and often report only the most favorable figure.

Amid all the variables, one thing is constant -- those students who choose to drop out face tough challenges in adulthood. A study by the Education Trust found:

The unemployment rate for high school dropouts is more than 30 percent higher than that of graduates. And when employed, dropouts earn close to 30 percent less. Dropouts are also more likely to end up incarcerated and rely on public assistance.

How are those for reasons to stay in school?

Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Pay attention to ways to lighten student loan load

It's no small matter. The median debt load for graduates of a four-year private college is $19,500, according to the College Board, a non-profit association of colleges and education groups. For students at public schools the figure is $15,500.

Then there's credit-card debt: More than half of undergraduates carry a balance, an average of $2,864 by their fourth year, according to the latest data available from Nellie Mae, a student loan originator. Faced with that level of debt, you easily can feel overwhelmed when you're also trying to scrape together a deposit for an apartment or buy a work wardrobe.

Humor helps make simple science fun

Angier does care about educating the public -- she just won the Exploratorium's Public Understanding of Science Award -- and she feels tempted to demonstrate the effects of gravity on Waterford crystal glasses when confronted by science skeptics at weddings. But mostly, she just thinks science is really, really cool. "In place of civic need, why not neural greed?" she writes. "These things are fun, and fun is good."

"The Canon" starts with an introduction to the scientific process and moves at a zippy pace through probability, physics, chemistry, biology, geology and astronomy. As promised, the book covers the basics: We find out how the universe began, the four fundamental forces of nature (not counting Donald Trump's hair, Angier notes), what lies at the core of the Earth, why proteins are more than just hamburgers and how alcohol originated. Along the way, readers will surely have a few "Really?" moments. Yes, some tiny sea creatures really do eject their brains when they've finished the "thinking" phase of their lives. Chemistry Professor Peter Atkins tells Angier, helpfully: "[I]t is a good idea to get rid of your brain when you discover you have no further need of it."

Duke Probe Shows Failure of Post-Enron Ethics Classes

The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure.

Thirty-four first-year master's of business administration students at Duke's Fuqua School of Business were disciplined in the program's largest cheating scandal. Nine students face expulsion for collaborating on a take-home test, violating the professor's rules.

Business students are more likely to cut corners than those in any other academic discipline, several studies show. A Rutgers University survey last year found that cheating at business schools is common, even after ethics courses were added following scandals that bankrupted Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc.

``What is taught in a business program sometimes reinforces'' students' tendencies to be entrepreneurial and results-oriented, said Timothy Dodd, 50, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke, in an interview from Durham, North Carolina. ``Those sometimes aren't the people who understand that moral means have to be used to achieve moral ends.''

A study released by the center in September and conducted by Rutgers professor Donald McCabe in New Brunswick, New Jersey, showed that students pursuing MBA degrees cheat more than other U.S. graduate students. McCabe found that 56 percent of those in business schools acknowledge violating the rules, compared with 54 percent in engineering, 48 percent in education and 45 percent in law.

I'd also eliminate the Department of Education

I'd also eliminate the Department of Education, since anyone who's bright enough to succeed in this world should be self-motivated enough to teach himself everything he needs to know.

Ambrose Video

Ambrose Video is a leading producer of videotapes and multimedia materials for education and libraries. We have a library of over 1,000 titles that feature award-winning materials, in social studies, literature and the sciences.

The core of our collection is broadcast quality productions from the BBC, public broadcasting, HBO and assorted independent producers. The titles range from the BBC Shakespeare Plays, Public TV's Legacy to Discovery's Connection series.

Our goal is to provide relevant educational materials for students from middle school to college.

NCERT Textbooks online

Dr. Vishal pointed me to this: http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbooks/testing/Index.htm

Once you select a book, it opens a clickable PDF. Those of you who want something to criticize can take a look at that. NCERT is kind enough to host the critiques on their site. Take a look at Educational Debate and Discussion and Suggestions on National Curriculum Framework Review.


There is some useful information online, for example educational survey.

Learning Resources

• Complete courses with Audio and Video
• MIT OpenCourseWare
• Courses with course materials, assignments
  
• http://ocw.mit.edu
• Videos, Webcasts
• University of California, Berkeley (Note: look under archived semesters)
• Modules for building courses
• Connexions
• India Specific
• Virtual Academy for the Semi Arid Tropics
• Other useful videos
• UCTV
• UC Berkeley
• Googleplex

Just found this link: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/247. Need to investigate.

Update: NPTEL by IISc and IITs

To be continued..