Teenage Problems

In "What's wrong with the teenage mind?" researcher Alison Gopnik points out the essential "problem" of adolescence: teenagers are developmentally and motivationally ready and able to work, to engage with the real world, but we no longer make that possible for the most part.

Instead we warehouse them in endless classes where they must sit still and listen to adults tell them what to do and think. And our civilization is so rich that many don't have a real need to work, undermining their self-motivation to do so.  Also, parents feel they must buy their children what they want, disincentivizing them to work as well.

Having recognized these deep needs of the adolescent almost a century ago, Montessori argued that adolescents should learn their academic subjects while being in charge of the crops, animals, buildings, and living needs of a farm. She knew that responsibility for the lives of plants and animals would motivate them to get out of bed in the morning. That helping things grow would make adolescents feel competent and valuable. That these experiences would prepare them for full, self-responsible adulthood, while teaching valuable practical skills such as carpentry, cooking, marketing of goods produced on the farm, self-organization and time-management.

And we can see all these benefits in the Montessori farm programs around the country, such as the Hershey Montessori Farm School in Huntsburg, OH.

The Best Business Education

"The best way that business faculty (i.e,. academics who often have minimal business experience themselves) can utilize their intellectual capital is to have students read classic business writings (e.g., Smith, Keynes, and Friedman) and wrestle with difficult questions that cannot be answered with multiple-choice bubbles. For example, addressing the classic question, “Is the social responsibility of a business to earn a profit?” would give young adults practice in tackling future abstract challenges in the workplace. The real world has more than four answer choices, and there is no answer key. "

This is from John W. Pope Center's Jason Fertig lucid article about business education - and he harkens back to a 1959 book, Higher Education for Business by Robert Gordon and James Howell, a lengthy study sponsored by the Ford Foundation, in which they say:

"When ranking academic performance across disciplines, business students are near the bottom…Too many students seek a business degree for economic vis-à-vis educational gain…Classes in business schools are too vocational…Business students need a sound grounding in liberal arts, not training for their first job."

I couldn't agree more with both Fertig and Gordon and Howell. How ironic, that this was their concern in 1959 - and it's still a problem today.

New Evidence on Math Gap Between Genders

Read the new study available at the Notices of the American Mathematical Society on the mathematical ability gap between boys and girls. Researchers Kane and Mertz find it's much smaller than imagined, and examine various theories about it.

In Montessori we've found that girls can do just as well as boys at mathematics, using our hundreds of mathematics materials, but most girls seem to need to use the materials longer than the boys. We start all children out using materials as three year olds and introduce them to more and more advanced mathematics materials up through middle school.

No Child Left Behind Leaves the Talented Behind

City Journal writer Sol Stern explains how No Child Left Behind has caused talented students to do worse, and contributed to the decline of high-achieving math, science, and engineering American students.

“scientific innovation has generated as much as half of all U.S. economic growth over the past half-century, on some accounts....[but] bachelor’s degrees in engineering granted to Americans peaked in 1985 and are now 23 percent below that level.” 

One of my favorite quotes, because these regulations make me furious: "Among the worst regulations is the prohibition against hiring instructors who, though they may have advanced science or math degrees, lack the useless graduate-level education courses needed to qualify for a state teaching license. "

Flourishing

Flourishing has the latest theory based on research of Martin Seligman, one of the godfathers of the Positive Psychology movement. His other books, such as Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism are excellent, scientific, and extremely useful in improving individual lives.

I haven't read this, his first book in ten years, but it looks very good, promising "an electrifying new theory of what makes a good life." I'll be curious to see how much is truly new because what the summary proposes sounds very much like the excellent life as described by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. 

Invest in the future through education

Read about a young woman's mental transformation through The Great Connections Seminar.

"The Best Money I Ever Spent."

Read why a student from Naperville North High School decided to spend his hard-earned money on our Great Connections seminar rather than go to Europe - and decided it was the best money he ever spent.

Two year olds can remember

For years, developmental psychologists have claimed that children cannot remember much of anything before the age of three. New research shows that it varies by person, some remembering far earlier.

MITx and to Online or Not to Online

MIT is launching a new educational initiative, MITx, which will offer courses with MIT credentialing. It's an extension of their Opencourseware offerings.

The game-changing aspect is: no admission process and no prerequisites required. You want to take it, you can. If you show mastery, you get the credential, for a small charge. 

How they implement this will be crucial. In this New York Times article reviewing eight books on higher education, Anthony Graft makes the astute comment:

"Online courses, the other popular suggestion, can work well—so long as one also provides competent human supervision online, twenty-four hours a day, which makes such courses just as expensive as the traditional sort."


Online courses without "competent human supervision" can work well if:
1. You want to acquire knowledge or mastery of a specific set of facts, ideas, and/or skills.
2. You already know how to reason fairly well about the domain of knowledge you're studying.
3. You're good at working on your own.
4. You're good at coming up with questions on your own AND good at finding the answers.

Just some of the reasons why I think young people need in-person instruction.


Hattip Pat Peterson

Student Debt

Very useful website on student debt, including a state-by-state map which opens to a list of average debt, tuition and other facts for EACH college in that state!

Hattip Vanessa Tomlinson Smyth of the Goodlark Educational Foundation.

"Don't Lecture Me"

Good article about professors at the University of Maryland and Harvard using "peer instruction" in large classes to facilitate learning in physics and other subjects. This means the professor doesn't lecture, but proposes questions to answer about the text all students should have read, and then the students talk to each other about the question to come up with the answer.

It has a nice video example and links to the research supporting the methods.

"Mazur now teaches all of his classes using a “peer-instruction” approach. Rather than teaching by telling, he teaches by questioning. Mazur says it’s a particularly effective way to teach large classes."


"I don't go into the class lecturing on what I think they need, no they tell me what it is they want me to cover." "I find out from the students what they need "You can forget facts but you cannot forget understanding." He sounds like a fantastic teacher!


This is similar to the methods we use at the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute, called "Socratic Seminars." Here's a description of what a Socratic Seminar is, and why it works so well. And here's a short video in which you can see a bit about how it works.

Hattip Dave Saum.

How to Get More Out of Google

Here's a great website, Infographic from "Hack College," that teaches students - and anyone else - how to do better, more efficient and successful searches on Google. It details how to use the Boolean search terms - "operators" - more successfully to find exactly what you need.

Hattip Rachel Davison.

Science Scares

The American Council on Science and Health has published a study examining the National Resources Defense Council's claims of 13 disease cluster areas in 42 states around the U.S.

"a peer-reviewed analysis by ACSH, using well-established principles of scientific investigation, shows that only one of the 42 sites meets the scientific definition of a disease cluster...

• "All but five of the purported clusters lack any supportive evidence at all;
• "13 examples cited by NRDC as confirmed disease clusters are in fact places where investigations by public health officials are still ongoing;
• "Several cases have already been ruled out by public health officials as disease clusters as no statistically significant elevations of any disease have been found;
• "Only four of the NRDC-claimed sites are possible clusters, and just one of the 42 can actually be identified as a disease cluster based on the scientific definition."

What does this have to do with education? I see the rising number of specious claims about the links between disease and technology, medicine, and science as a result of poor science education and poor scientific thinking.

This kind of thinking can be difficult - it often doesn't follow intuitive human reasoning tendencies, especially conclusions based on statistically-based evidence. But good education in reasoning and especially reasoning about statistics would make a world of difference.

Someone who's been thinking a lot about how to improve students' "statistical literacy" is Professor Milo Schield at Augsburg College. Here he has a wealth of information and resources about this issue. I suspect the people at NRDC need a course from him - in the hope that they weren't bending the facts on purpose.

Rediscovery of What We Already Knew in Montessori

Apparently the Erikson Institute's new program "The Early Mathematics Education Project," recently instituted at 300 Chicago public schools, incorporates real objects and events to teach young children the fundamentals of mathematics. This was reported today in the Wall Street Journal in an article titled "New Calculation: Math in Preschool."

According to the article, "Evidence is mounting about the importance of teaching math in preschool and kindergarten."

I'm glad they've just discovered this! But it's not a new calculation: Montessori schools have been teaching fundamental mathematical concepts in preschool (Children's House to us) for over 100 years, because Maria Montessori discovered the importance of doing so that long ago.

We use fabulous, beautiful materials, such as the Trinomial Cube. Here's the equation it represents:





And the Golden Bead materials teach the basics of addition and subtraction so that even 4 year olds can do equations to the millions.

The Montessori Method has dozens of carefully designed and tested mathematical materials to work with.

One of the first graduates from my school, Council Oak Montessori, is now a parent of a three year old there. He came to a parent meeting and described how the mathematics materials helped him in all his later school career (and even to today), by teaching him how to concretize and visualize mathematical operations. And he didn't start at our school until 2nd grade.

Ah well, it's great that the students at CPS are getting SOME mathematical concretization.

More on the "99%"

Following up on my last post, I found a website, History is a Weapon, with the entire text of Zinn's People's History of the U.S.  Here's a quote from Chapter 24 on this webpage:

"One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another...Against the reality of that desperate, bitter battle for resources made scarce by elite control, I am taking the liberty of uniting those 99 percent as 'the people.'"

Not only is it clear from the text that this is the origin of the Occupy movement's "99%" mantra, but the Occupy movement is advertising on the very webpage of the book which discusses this issue. No wonder: over 1 million copies of this textbook have been sold and used at high schools and universities across the country in the past 20 years.

Is Howard Zinn the originator of the "99%"?

Researching some quotes of Howard Zinn, author of the widely used history text, The People's History of the United States, I came across a 2004 blog entry from historian Michael Kazin on George Mason University's History News Network about Zinn's book that said this:

"According to Zinn, '99 percent" of Americans share a  "commonality" that is profoundly at odds with the interests of their rulers.' And knowledge of that awesome fact is 'exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them--from the Founding Fathers to now--have tried their best to prevent.'"

Since many, many young people today are educated using Zinn's book - is this where they got the "we are the 99%" slogan?

Manipulating Happiness - Maria Montessori

In this article , researcher Robert Biswas-Diener writes in the International Journal of Well-Being about the Montessori Method and its relation to optimal living:

"One  Montessori   teacher   I   interviewed told me that using the term "work" to describe the children's activites lends   a   sense   of   dignity   and   importance   to   what   they   do,   and   set   up   kids   for   a   lifetime   of   believing that work can be fun, rewarding, and educational...When I asked Ella [a Montessori student] what, specifically, she liked about 'work,' her answer was immediate "I like that it is challenging.' Either  Ella  is  being  fed  some  excellent  propaganda  or  she  is  participating  in  a  school  system   which   fosters   enjoyment   alongside   learning.   Which   begs   the   tough   question:   Was   Maria   Montessori   a   happiness-­‐‑enabler?"

"What's the little difference that makes the big difference" between apes and humans!

Watching this NOVA special, Ape Genius, I almost fell over (while exercising!) when I heard one of the researchers say that in their quest to understand the apes and their relation to us, they were trying to find out "what's the little difference that makes the big difference."

And these were not neurologists, talking about brain anatomy/physiology differences! These were cognitive psychologists and anthropologists. I'm afraid it is yet another example of the deterioration of education.

"The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes"is Reason! Humankind's ability to conceptualize abstract ideas.  It makes ALL the difference.

I suspect this ignorance on the part of the scientists is a result of the century+ attack on Reason and that attack's influence in the humanities and sciences.

"My Teacher is an App"

Learning through the Internet reminds me of Isaac Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica in his Foundation trilogy - all the knowledge available at one's fingertips. A life-altering resource of knowledge.

"My Teacher Is An App" discusses elementary schools using computers for most of the learning, or "hybrid" models in which children do some in-person work, often through a homeschool, but more work through computers.

It's good that their virtual experiences and activities are so much richer than the mere paper and pencil learning of traditional schools. But I worry that they will not get enough real-world experience through such systems to develop their senses, their motor abilities, their knowledge, and their imaginations well.

We are living animals and our reason is highly connected to the functioning of our bodies. In the '90's, Antonio Damasio began demonstrating how poorly reason operates without a well-functioning connection to emotion; reason cannot enable us to choose well if cut off from emotion which relay our deepest core values and needs to the reasoning mind.

This connection is developed through sensory-perceptual-motor experience, through physical interaction with the world, through interaction with other people. These experiences can be simulated on computer but not replaced.

What happens to a person's ability to reason well and wisely about life-choices if they don't have sufficient real-life experience?

The Montessori Mafia and India

"But most highly creative achievers don’t begin with brilliant ideas, they discover them."


The Wall Street Journal had two immensely contrasting articles on education April 5th: "The Montessori Mafia" was one of them - reviewing the remarkable evidence for the creative advantages of a Montessori education. 


In the same issue, April 5th, I was saddened to read the article "India Graduates Millions, But Too Few Are Fit to Hire," which featured some of the rampant corruption and cynicism in Indian colleges.


"I was not prepared at all to get a job," says Pradeep Singh, 23, who graduated last year from RKDF College of Engineering, one of the city of Bhopal's oldest engineering schools. He has been on five job interviews—none of which led to work."


"Mr. Singh and several other engineering graduates said they learned quickly that they needn't bother to go to some classes. "The faculty take it very casually, and the students take it very casually, like they've all agreed not to be bothered too much," Mr. Singh says. He says he routinely missed a couple of days of classes a week, and it took just three or four days of cramming from the textbook at the end of the semester to pass the exams."

What are such students thinking? Apparently, they have no idea that they need the engineering knowledge to perform on the job. The same kind of thinking that led to the Bhopal disaster years ago. What would lead to such an idea? (not that this is unique: plenty of U.S. students seem to act the same way).
Hattip John Gillis.