- Jeronique Bartley
- Washington, DC
- United States
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The true problem with education is ___________?
I don’t want to further complicate the topic of education (as it seems to be more complex than it should be.) My goal is to get a general idea of your personal views on what the TRUE problem is in terms of education. We will go more specific later, but for now please just post your general thoughts on the above question.
Complete this statement: The true problem with education is___________.
Jason Slover
On a side note, for anyone who doesn't think there is a problem. . . Remember that we once had a TV show called "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?", and people rarely won. W. . .T. . .F!! That's entertainment? "look how dumb we are?", is prime time TV? There's your problem.
B. Reynolds
Personally, I don't find topics nearly as interesting as I find the way people talk about topics. My educational experience (to answer your question) is only loosely correlated to my interest to the topic. There are topics I'd wade through stereo instructions to learn more about but by the nature of that fact the educator plays a small part if any. I suspect we don't have a systemic lack of good grades or effective education in topics for which children show up eager to learn. It seems to me that we're at a disadvantage with topics where kids aren't interested in getting interested.
Chongjian Wen
Sorry for replying so late.
Jeronique Bartley
David Hamilton 50+
Alonso Espinosa-Domínguez
Every single child is unique. We all learn differently, think differently, and learn at different paces. Yet this system groups us all together into a room were the teacher gives everyone the same lesson in the same way at the same time. And this makes grading unfair, because instead of measuring intelligence or academic skill, grades measure how well you learn in the environment you are in, and whether or not you get into a school should not depend on how you learn. This also applies to standardized tests. They are better at measuring how well you are at tests with a particular format than they are at measuring academic skill (I am not saying they don’t measure ANY academic skill, though)
Juliette Zahn 50+
I feel this point is ever so constructively illustrated by Thomas in his presentation:
http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_suarez_a_12_year_old_app_developer.html
Jeronique Bartley
Thomas is a brilliant kid! I can honestly see how having a student like him can be intimidating, but I can only see it that way because it's the way we are trained to respond to younger, more talented, and creative individuals. We are trained to fear the spotlight being removed from us and being placed on someone else. So your answer is "The problem with education is the inability of teachers to remove emotional judgement from their teaching methods?"
Salim Solaiman 50+
Jeronique Bartley
Salim Solaiman 50+
Here comes elaboration of what I feel.
The current so called education system fails educate in most cases. Rather it just certifies. very limited scope of creativity, nurturing innovation, it just make student to swallow data, fact, information etc and success of student depends on how efficiently one can vomit those in a time bound examination. Does not matter whether student understood or not what s/ he vomited on paper , grades comes accordingly. So main problem of current system is, it certifies, not educates.
David Hamilton 50+
Won't you at least agree that vomiting up facts, correlates with learning and understanding those facts? I will concede it's not one hundred percent accurate, but we need people to be certified to know things don't we? Why do so many people seem to expect more than that from a state sponsored educational system?
Also... I would just like to point out, that when we didn't care about creativity, and nurturing children, we were more literate, and better at math... as a culture.
James Dixon
Jeronique Bartley
Chongjian Wen
Jeronique Bartley
Dania Mah
However, I think...that education needs to include a class where kids learn to engage and explore...to learn how to learn... if that makes sense.
Jeronique Bartley
Gerald O'brian 50+
Teachers are expected to know everything, and they feel menaced when you challenge their knowledge. That's a shame.
Half of my education was getting rid of the other half of lousy education.
So I wish teachers were masters at saying "I don't have a clue, but I know exactly how to find out, and I know how to help you understand whatever it is that we find out."
Jeronique Bartley
Gerald O'brian 50+
Which is something I can understand. Everybody doing a job and getting paid for it feels the need to display professionalism, give clients or employers reasons to be trusted.
It's a shame that some teachers think that their ability to teach is less valued that their ability to come up with answers.
Phillip McKay
Jeronique Bartley
Phillip McKay
Jeronique Bartley
Scott Armstrong 50+
Here's my 2 cents, for what it's worth..
Less system. More education.
Communities governing their schools and not central government.
A more open-ended definition of 'teacher'.
Far less assessment and 'accountability'.
Jeronique Bartley
Scott Armstrong 50+
The first is to be clear as to the purpose of the assessment. In New Zealand, most of the assessment done in schools is for the purposes of the ministry of education for their statistical purposes (largely unnecessary in this day and age).
Much teacher-student contact time is given over to this type of assessment. Effectively, it's admin for absent bureaucrats.
Some assessment is for the purpose of identifying a student's abilities and knowledge so as to inform teaching practice to best move a student forward or "add value".
We need less of the first kind (make bureaucrats do their own spade-work) and more of the second.
Also, when the student is involved in that process, it becomes even more effective - that is, the student sets their own goals and monitors their progress towards and past it. Self Assessment.
As far as some external yardstick set by central government to 'fit' all students goes, it ignores the fact that everyone is different, therefore it fails from the outset.
The only people teachers and schools need to be accountable to are the students and parents (their local community).
Jeronique Bartley
Scott Armstrong 50+
It's really just teaching them thinking and reflecting skills so that they can apprehend the process by which we learn new skills and retain information.
If we can get students to be self-critical, then that will act as a built-in assessment process that goes wherever the student goes, 24/7.
Stephen Camm
First in yesterday's world the majority of knowledge actually came from industry. It took schools around Silicon valley more than just several years to start asking for people from the industry to teach new classes as an example. Today with technology a major subject and research being done on campus in many areas plus the Internet that has changed.....BUT.....changing people, particularly academia is a much more difficult task. AS a pointed criticism why is the master apprentice teaching method (the most effective possible) non existent when technology allows it....ie.....watch the lecture but have the professor available as the mentor (and why not have the best presenter or professor give the lecture....once recorded it). To further embarrass the academic elitists go to the Internet and do a simple query. How do students learn? Two hours later you will discover (with the exception of going to sites on primates) very little is known. II this an assumption that what exists is best(?) or an entire industry that is very slow to improve and only very recently has even started to use the Internet for Education....despite it's being around for 20 years. Nor does it question it's methods (In industry no improvement = failure). Sadly white papers of any substance are missing and that was with 9 hours prowling the net and college papers. To ultimately embarrass them ask the simplest of all questions.....what is the purpose of school? If you get back anything other than "to learn to think" they are from possibly not "sapiens". Basics plus the Internet (the world's library contain everything you need fortunately does exist (less the mentor). Bottom line....academia in general is not progressive....tenure and security are goals...improvement eliminates jobs. States, the DOE and alumni can change this if you revolt if only for cost reasons alone. Education is an industry that has not had much competition and that is changing. Share the thoughts.. change
Joshua Brown
To understand what problems are in the way of the solution we need to spend some time evaluating the different levels of the system (i.e. the macro level, the micro level). I think it would be more helpful if we seek to address city-specific problems that are directly connected to the entire education system rather than looking for a total "one-size fits all" solution. I.E. School lunch nutrition.
Also, we could think about our stance on "global competition." How long have our children been alive? So long that they have seen the world beyond a screen? How many of our children have had opportunities to travel abroad and actually see the world through an unfiltered lens? Have we given our children choices or limited them with our wants? How much strain do you suppose it places on young minds, who know nothing more of the world than what we tell them, to be competitive in a global market? What does the phrase "competitive in a global market" even mean to children? Such is our philosophy, sadly, to hinder their personal development for the sake of the concept of competition. And what about expectations? I wonder how much pressure is on the youth in America to be "number one" rather than to do one's best.
Timothy Sumpter
The teachers job is at school teaching the children how to read and right and so forth. The teacher has a limited reach to the children in the sense of education. That is all a teacher is there for.
Friends are there to simply get a student through school and what not.
So that would leave us with the parents. What are they doing?
Child wakes up, goes to school, learns math, comes home and the parents don't bother checking up on their beloved child. Then the child goes plays basketball, some videogames, and remembers that he has a project due and works on it for a couple minutes slapping some weirdness together and falls asleep to spongebob.
Umm.... is there something wrong with this picture?
Where are the parents in all this? If you guessed nowhere your right!
Parents are not checking up on their children like they should be. Parents are not helping their children with homework, or asking how did school go, what did you learn today in school, how can you apply that to daily life and so on. If the parent never shows them how to apply school work or never reminds them of it...well that is bad.
Parents are the motivators. Not the motive but the motivators.
Now don't get me wrong, sure our education system has problems. But that is not where it starts. It starts at home.
Jeronique Bartley
Timothy Sumpter
A student learns a certain idea or concept or thing and the parents learn about it. Then the parent should ask your very question Jeronique to the child. How can we apply what you learned today to your life?
Now obviously not everything can be applied to life. But what can be should.
The basic idea is to interact with your child specifically about what they learned on a daily basis. Otherwise what's the point of learning if you can't use what you learned? Who better to use it with than your parents?
Jeronique Bartley
Timothy Sumpter
That whole statement wraps up what I said about the parents and goes even further.
Khabir Salahadyn
B. Reynolds
Jeronique Bartley
B. Reynolds
Jeronique Bartley
David Hamilton 50+
Another true problem is that we now want 95% graduation rates from high school. Formal education is designed to create distinctions between competente people willing to work, and incompetent people, unwilling to work. In a formal education, hard work should make up for slowness, and sharp wit, should make up for lazyness... but at least 20% of people are a little slow, and a little lazy, especially at 17/18... So about 20% of people should fail out of high school.
I recently heard a study suggest that 54% of women who attend college, now graduate... Are 54% of women distinctively smart? If not, what does the degree mean, if you haven't distinguished yourself? Something like 44% of men graduate... not much better... it should be like 20-25% of people, that's the percent of people that are actually distinctively smart AND hardworking. Or am I just being cynical?
I tend to think the biggest problem with education is that we tend to expect too much of it, and we pay people who are educated too much more than people who aren't, especially if we're letting half the people graduate from college. If 95% of people graduate from High School... Dropping out shouldn't matter... because graduating doesn't matter, you haven't made any distinctions among the students.
Scott Armstrong 50+
It's the most convenient, perhaps, and certainly, it seems logical to bureaucrats. Unfortunately, it's simplifying things too much.
I'm all for performance pay IF teachers are also allowed to hand-pick their students and limit class sizes to a maximum of 9 students. But you can see the obvious problems that would lead to.
The other solution is to cure all societal ills so that teacher performance is the only variable, making student performance a realistic indicator of teacher performance.
Or, as most schools already do, have appraisal systems independent of student performance.
You start to see that the issue does not lie with teacher performance alone. Rather with myriad other influences.
David Hamilton 50+
Scott Armstrong 50+
Given that there is already too little money in education, teachers would stop sharing resources and ideas and get protective of their "intellectual property".
It's probably not teachers that would get the right to veto 'poor achievers' from their class, but the school. They would end up turning students away to keep themselves high on the school ranking list.
David Hamilton 50+
If ministries won't pay enough money... here's a thought... Do something about it. Volunteer tax dollars, protest outside the ministry... That's on you. It's only your childrens education though, I'm sure there's some much more important TV on.
Btw, in my country, too little money is no where near the problem, in California, they've fired less then a hundred teachers for cause this decade out of 50,000, as our kids started dropping out like crazy and "graduating" from high school illiterate. Meanwhile every teachers lot is full of beamers and benz's, and administration budgets which should be virtually negligible in a not for profit field like education, are enormous.
"Statistics are too removed to be meaningful." This is just nonsense. We don't pay educators to raise our children... We pay our educators to teach our children facts, and a curriculum. If we want them to be creative, or artistic, or suave, or sexy, it's up to us to instill those values in them. Lately we've focused on sexy... but once again... That's on us, collectively as parents. It's not a teachers job to teach your kid how to live his life, that's your job, and theirs. Whether or not you can answer simple dumbed down multiple choice questions, whether you have basic competence in the subject your studying... That's what the teacher is there for, and that's measurable. If it's not being measured by the test... well then design a better test.
Scott Armstrong 50+
As for merit based pay, my "brilliant" idea is to keep it separate from student performance.
To base teacher pay around student performance is a bit like docking a doctor's pay because people still die from smoking-related diseases.
I'm not saying that teachers should not be appraised, just that it should not be attached to student performance. It's lazy and there are too many variables involved for it to be accurate.
David Hamilton 50+
So they either have something concrete saying, "yes, that teacher's a problem and we're working on it", or "your kid was lazy this semester, or he's dumb, learn to deal with it, teach him a trade, or kick his ass next semester"... Right now, in California, all the ministry/school board has the right to say to the parent is... "Oh yes, that teachers been underperforming for decades, but don't worry in a few years he'll be retired with a hundred thousand dollar a year pension.
Scott Armstrong 50+
You've scratched the surface of the issue. Class sizes being drastically reduced would increase the teacher contact time with students meaning that a struggling student could get the help and time they need to move forward.
Students taking responsibility for their own learning would help in the area of attitude towards school. Education isn't like a hypodermic that you inject and everyone gets the same out of it. It requires a receptive mind as much as a dedicated teacher.
Parents need to be a part of the process too and not just being 'kept in the loop'. They need to be actively supporting their child.
If you need retribution for failure then the buck stops at the top - that was a US Prez that said that.
If a teacher is incompetent but can't be removed, then the appraisal system within the school itself needs to be revamped and probably made a lot more robust.
The hard part is separating personality clashes from actual incompetence. A lot of parents don't like a teacher and it has very little to do with the teacher's abilities.
David Hamilton 50+
I tend to still side with variable teacher pay, based on student performance, because I think it inspires innovation, and risk taking... I think some teachers would feel like trying extreme, and unusual methods, if they thought it could get them impressive results... I would like to see teachers, rewarded and punished based on their personal innovations, and I think the teacher focused methodology may be too uniform, it may make every teacher the same, and that might be good at first, but I think long term it will evolve slower. I understand where you're coming from now though, and there's probably a middle ground there somewhere.
Jeronique Bartley
David Hamilton 50+
I would argue that despite what class you start with, your responsibillity as a teacher, is the same. Teach the child the curriculum. How close you get to your goal, should effect your paycheck in a capitalist society. Yes, some years you will get a "bad" batch, and your pay may be reduced unjustly... Shit Happens. People need to stop assuming they deserve pay raises based on seniority. If they did a good job, and there students do well, at the end of the semester they should get a bonus, if their students do horribly, they should be put on probation, and have their pay reduced.
This means there are no excuses... No matter how bad your students are, you are held to the same standard, teach them the curriculum.
Now, I would also concede that there are two other ways in which teachers can generate merit, that are much more difficult to adequately tie to pay. Can you take a student that doesn't like society, doesn't like culture, and doesn't want to contribute, and bring him or her in? Make them want to learn.
Second, after they learn do the students feel accomplished, do they want to learn more. Are they happy with the choice to engage in society. Those two would be impossible to standardize, and if incentives are offered for such behavior, which they should be in my humble opinion, they should be in the form of public awards, and principal/employer based incentives. Does the person in charge of the school believe on a personal emotional level, that this teacher great. If they do, they should be able to give a teacher extra money.
While these two things are different from testing merit... I think will they correlate, better than one would assume.
Scott Armstrong 50+
"Fred performed exceptionally on his Tip Calculating test but when it came to his terrible performance on his thinking creatively test, well, Shit Happens.
Brilliant.
Jeronique Bartley
Scott Armstrong 50+
Gisela McKay 30+
Really? I thought it was to give people the tools they need to live the best lives they can.
I think we may have actually found what is wrong with education right there. Perhaps we could start thinking of the "customer" as the student, and not his future boss. Schools are not flaying machinery separating wheat from chaff, they're supposed to be places where people actually get TAUGHT.
David Hamilton 50+
I'm not paying 100 000 dollars, for an education that doesn't make distinctions and give a prospective employer the impression that i'm worth the extra money it will take to pay back that loan. Things have to be worth what they cost, and education is really expensive. Education has never been about being taught btw, it was always private, and it was always a tool for wealthy elites to insure that their children retained their power.
Formal education was designed to take education away for the "unwashed masses", and keep it in the hands of a select few. We have tried to remodel that, with public education... And that's a good thing, but now that it costs ten thousand a semester for some public schools... we're back to the old model, and we have to be because of price.
Also, people can only live better lives if they get, or create better jobs for themselves, so you start with the real customer, students AS employers, or students as employees. If the education system no longer makes you a more valuable employee, it's not worth the money, watch ted and read project gutenberg, it's free. If public education was actually free, you could make the argument that it's goal was to teach... but so long as it costs money, it must be worth what it costs, and thus it must make you worth more money as an employee... Who cares about the employers... You're going to work some day, will this education make you get paid more? cus experience will. If it's not difficult to get a degree, and it's still expensive, then degrees are obselete.
Gisela McKay 30+
There are plenty of personality types that never finish university and not for lack of skills or because they are "unwilling to work." I, like many entrepreneurs, didn't even finish my BA. In my case, it was because it was the Great and Wonderful Tech Bubble and I was offered a rather obscene amount of money to go work in the US in a field that was only tangentially related to what I was studying (film theory and philosophy - though primarily logic).
And then I started my own business, so it seems unlikely that I will ever go back and finish the requisite 200 hrs of foreign cinema and a breadth requirement.
Very few people I know are actually working in the field they studied, so no, I don't actually think that people pay $100K to be elevated somehow. My social circle runs high in entrepreneurs and execs who have either no degree or an irrelevant one to what they are doing. Or, EMBAs who effectively paid $60K a year to have an assistant do the MBA for them.
I'm also, btw, a former Associate Director of the byDesign eLab at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, without so much as a BA. There's a reason why so many gifted programs are autonomous study programs - the students learn better on their own. The education system, even at the post-secondary level, is currently aimed at the middling swath. You can go ahead and pay your $100K to prove that you are the best of the average.
Jeronique Bartley
David Hamilton 50+
I actually propose a two tiered approach. Free online education and testing for all, which provides baseline credentials of competency. And expensive, grant, and scholarship oriented private schools, that are really hard to graduate from. If you get a degree online, you can get an entry level job in the field you choose, but you are considered an apprentice, or trainee... Where as, if you prove that you're in the top 1-5% in IQ and work ethic, and then you graduate from a college that fails 80% of it's students... As a society, we should fast track you into leadership. We do want the best and brightest to take on leadership roles right?
In that spirit. I would say to Jeronique, "The problem with education, is that the cost is much higher than the rewards, and formal higher education programs are becoming unnecessary, as access to information grows... but we still need a structure for proving competence, while accessing these new alternative information sources."
The only caviate to that would be that I still believe formal education does a decent job with engineering, chemistry, biology, etc. Some degrees still get bang for their buck, but we tell our kids all degrees get that, and that's not really cool.
Krisztián Pintér 200+
B. Reynolds
Guillaume Regis
I have a child of 7 months I don’t expect the educator to take sole responsibility for my childs education as like you say the responsibility lies in the environment that he lives. Although I am certain that in time my son will develop his own likes/dislikes but in the meantime I have taken him to the London Science museum, art galleries and music venues as these are my wifes and I likes. Yes like any good parent I want happiness and success in life for my son, and there are lots of subjects I and my wife cannot teach him as we are not experienced enough that is where schooling comes in. however let me give you an example of how I can teach my child, I have heard many parents say how ‘black history should be taught in schools. The reason some will say this is because they believe it may raise self esteem and boost exam results. Now in my opinion I would not want a school teaching my son any ‘black history’ why? Because I am confident that most schools would not do a better job than my family or I in teaching him many facets of history.
im more interested in him being taught the national curriculum rigorously so that he can stand a chance in our globalised worlrd.
Jeronique Bartley
Guillaume Regis
Jeronique Bartley