The author begins this book in a truly maddening fashion. If I hadn’t needed to finish at least half of it for class I wouldn’t have bothered reading past page 5. The opening quote, which inspired the title (probably not the ideas though, as we’ll see later) actually turns “teachers” into a pejorative: “We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers.” What in the world is teaching, if not designing learning experiences? Any class you plan ahead of time (teaching out of the copy of Wired you read on the bus that morning does count) is a designed learning experience; it may not be a good one, but it fits the descriptor.
For the next few pages he goes on a remarkably cliche rant about traditional methods and citing graduates’ lack of knowledge as an indictment of those lazy professors who “repeat the same practices…for years.” He suggests that a college graduate’s inability to date the Civil War between 1850 and 1900 is the result of poor college instruction, but I’m pretty sure that should have been covered more than once by eighth grade. You can forgive a prof for not including it on the American History exam.
He also suggests that students who take an intro class freshman year (with no later courses in the discipline) should be able to remember the specifics of the material 5 or 10 years later. This is horrifically unrealistic, and makes for an unhelpful criticism.
Farouk Shami is running for Governor in Texas. He’s got an impressive business resume, and some ambitious ideas, but I won’t be voting for him.
For one, he’s betting $10 million and half his term that he can create 100,000 jobs in two years. That just doesn’t seem realistic. But I guess if he doesn’t do it we can get rid of him.
The other reason is a line from one of his radio commercials:
“He’s a grandfather who will bring sweeping educational reform so that every child in Texas can go to college.”
Every child? That’s more than ambitious, it’s unrealistic. There’s no chance that every child in the state (nearly 1500 high schools) is qualified or capable of college-level work. It’s unlikely that all the students in a single graduating class in a single high school is qualified and capable.
And is it even desirable for every student to go to college? The only way to make it so is to reduce the level of work at the college level that it is achievable by every student. And that eliminates the function of college. It would become a hollow shell of its former purpose, and would do nothing but delay maturity and entry into the workforce.
Sam Nielson, an artist at Disney Interactive, writes this about creative expression and art education:
Based on things I’ve read and seen (ie. just a hyphothesis), I believe there’s a big dip in creativity as artists increase in learning. I think this is one source of the common (but mistaken) idea that education inhibits creativity—because most people and artists stop actively learning about their craft before they reach their creative and expressive potential
This seems like something that will translate into other areas of education. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that content focused education for young children destroys their creativity.
In Cultural Literacy E.D. Hirsch discusses the importance of a wealth of shared background knowledge in teaching in learning. “The more you know, the more you can learn.” He argues that as you acquire information—even through simple memorization—you create frameworks, or “schemata”, for integrating future learning. The more schemata you possess, the less effort is required to integrate new information, making it easier to learn overall.
It follows that there is great benefit to having a diversified set of schemata; the more subjects we know, the easier it is to learn. This is part of the basis for liberal education.This diversified set not only allows us easier access to broad knowledge, it also allows us to make connections that we wouldn’t have otherwise made, and understand things in different (and sometimes unusual) ways.
Over the last few months I’ve heard and read time and again that “things are changing more rapidly than they ever have before.” I wasn’t buying. In my mind there were just too many things that are the same as they were 50 and 100 years ago.
We still use phones (though not tied to the wall or party lines), watch TV and listen to radio (though with higher fidelity and more options), and travel in vehicles powered by fossil fuels.
The one major change that I’ve acknowledged over and over (since the telephone and telegraph) is the computer processor. It’s the common thread in most of the advances I can pinpoint over the last 50 years: advances in space travel, science, engineering, communications, the internet. But I wouldn’t admit that any other change was more than cosmetic, or a shifting of emphases.
Then I asked John Dyer an open-ended question: “What do you think about the idea that things are changing faster than ever before?”
“I think it’s statistically verifiable.” Then he proceeded to walk me through just how wrong I was.
Little did my reader know that as she wrote “compare and contrast” essays about me in her head, I was writing “compare and contrast” essays about Anne Jackson in my head. Little did she know that published authors are just as insecure and jealous and frightened as unpublished authors, sometimes even more so. Little did she know that my relative success in th […]
In 1900, some divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. Early stu […]
James Cameron's 3-D movie Avatar gave me a four-hour headache. Probably the headache was caused by a combination of the 3-D effect, a seat near the front and at the far edge of the theater, the way the 3-D glasses skewed my plain old glasses beneath, and the dark in which I biked home afterward, my bike light having been stolen while I was in the theate […]
So why won't anyone in Hollywood build my service? The reason isn't stupidity. When I called people in the industry this week, I found that many in the movie business understand that online distribution is the future of media. But everything in Hollywood is governed by a byzantine set of contractual relationships between many different kinds of com […]
