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Our "education" model is fundamentally broken. It's based on the idea that we need to warehouse kids in institutions modeled on 18th century factories so that t

by dpatru 16y ago

Our "education" model is fundamentally broken. It's based on the idea that we need to warehouse kids in institutions modeled on 18th century factories so that they can do well on "standardized" tests. Certainly Bill Gates did not obtain his education this way. He basically educated himself by following his passion from an early age. He working in his field of choice at the age of 15. By 20 he had founded Microsoft. "School" for Bill Gates was his educated home environment, the block of computer time he could use in 8th grade, the Computer Center Corporation where he worked while in high school, and his projects with Paul Allen as a teenager. It was the unstructured resources that were around him. Not every kid is a Bill Gates. Most probably need less formal instruction because they do not need as much abstract knowledge. Schools as they exist today should be abolished and the teachers and other staff that work in them should be taken off the public payrolls and allowed to take useful jobs in the private sector. Schools, to the extent that they exist at all, should be more like graduate study where an advisor suggests resources for further study. These advisors could be unpaid volunteers. People with successful careers in areas of that the student is interested in who interact with the student intermittently perhaps over the internet. The bulk of kids' time should be spent in projects or actual work, apprentice-style, in an area of their interest. Instead of being grouped together in dysfunctional groups of their own kind, young people should be distributed in the economy, working with and under the supervision of competent adults in the various fields.

jseliger 16y ago
Schools as they exist today should be abolished and the teachers and other staff that work in them should be taken off the public payrolls and allowed to take useful jobs in the private sector. Have you worked as a teacher or in front of a classroom? I ask because I might've been sympathetic to these kinds of views before I started grad school at the University of Arizona. Most students in grades K - 16 are not going to do intensive projects or actual work; many of them simply aren't ready to do so. Most students in most subjects are there because they need the spur and structure school provides. This is true even at very high levels; how many people would actually write a dissertation if not for the fact that they'd already spent several years in grad school, that their professional lives depend on it, and they'll look like a fool if they don't? Hell, even with those constraints, there are a shockingly high number of ABDs floating around out there. Schools, to the extent that they exist at all, should be more like graduate study where an advisor suggests resources for further study. These advisors could be unpaid volunteers. This is insane. It does not scale. If volunteers did a better job of educating than the system we have now, no one would send their kids to mediocre public schools. All of your ideas are wildly utopian, and I don't mean that in a good way. There is no practical way to implement them.

by dpatru 16y ago

jseliger 16y ago

Schools as they exist today should be abolished and the teachers and other staff that work in them should be taken off the public payrolls and allowed to take useful jobs in the private sector. Have you worked as a teacher or in front of a classroom? I ask because I might've been sympathetic to these kinds of views before I started grad school at the University of Arizona. Most students in grades K - 16 are not going to do intensive projects or actual work; many of them simply aren't ready to do so. Most students in most subjects are there because they need the spur and structure school provides. This is true even at very high levels; how many people would actually write a dissertation if not for the fact that they'd already spent several years in grad school, that their professional lives depend on it, and they'll look like a fool if they don't? Hell, even with those constraints, there are a shockingly high number of ABDs floating around out there. Schools, to the extent that they exist at all, should be more like graduate study where an advisor suggests resources for further study. These advisors could be unpaid volunteers. This is insane. It does not scale. If volunteers did a better job of educating than the system we have now, no one would send their kids to mediocre public schools. All of your ideas are wildly utopian, and I don't mean that in a good way. There is no practical way to implement them.