The Practicality of the Liberal Arts

Excellent, well-articulated statement about the immense value of the liberal arts from my friend and co-instructor, Andrew Humphries:

The Con of the Common Core Standards

          Good post by veteran teacher R.D. Hughes, "Common Core Standards and the Destruction of Mind and  Freedom."  Now, I'm a big proponent of teaching the classics, because these books are mostly so well-written, with such great examples of thinking, and so influential, that knowing them deeply teaches and informs the reader. Broadly speaking, I think it's a good idea to use these works as central to the curriculum.

On the other hand, I know that each individual learns differently, and has different needs and interests, so that good teaching requires the subtle art of taking this into account while presenting the student with a rich array of important knowledge. This individualism is one of the reasons I'm a major proponent of the Montessori method and have worked to bring that educational philosophy up to higher education.

I've thought for years that the No Child Left Behind program was a Soviet-style, top-down system, which has wreaked havoc on education. Ironically, this program was pushed by conservatives who wanted to correct the frightening mess caused by progressive education, which had no apparent standards (if you've ever read "The Comprachicos," you realize progressives do have "standards" or shall we say goals, but they're not to enlighten and inform.) Unfortunately, as traditionalists, the conservatives didn't seem to understand how to individualize what they wanted to see happen and their program is now dovetailing with this new turn.

So, it's awful to read about how a basically good idea, i.e. that there is a core body of knowledge and skills which are important to learn, is now being used in this Brave New World style. But the details he discusses here! Couldn't agree with him more.

Unfortunately, the bureaucratic nature of centralized education leads even the most well-intentioned to this kind of system. See this post by Michael Strong, an expert on Socratic Practice and individualized education, for a searing story of his attempts to work with the education bureaucracy and an analysis of what's wrong.

Students Don't Need College

Not really a surprise, if you pay attention to who's employed at Starbucks, Whole Foods, Barnes and Noble, Trader Joe's, and myriad small businesses. But the Center for College Affordability and Productivity is now putting a number to how many people don't need college for their jobs: 37%. See their study: Why are recent college graduates underemployed?

Ken Robinson Again on the Education System & Creativity

Our education system is killing creativity. from Business Insider. "our education system — and the way our companies are run — undermines this creativity."

Hattip Jim Kandrac.

Words, words, words

E.D. Hirsch's article in the latest City Journal offers the evidence that vocabulary alone is a great predictor of upward mobility. Why? Because it's an indicator of the child's knowledge-resources.

"Vocabulary doesn’t just help children do well on verbal exams. Studies have solidly established the correlation between vocabulary and real-world ability."

Implication? An old principle: reading can unlock the world, enabling a child from an impoverished background to travel around the globe, and gain the knowledge to achieve great goals. Abraham Lincoln did it, and Ben Franklin, and today's children have so many more resources at their fingertips.

The statistics Hirsch cites regarding what's happened to vocabulary in the past decades are unfortunately disturbing, but in line with all the rest of the research on educational decline.

The Graduation Rate Myth

Robert Weissburg, professor of Political Science at Cornell, gives a stunning indictment of student irresponsibility in this John W. Pope foundation article, and some of the reasons faculty put up with it.

What he doesn't analyze are the psychological effects of their previous twelve years of schooling. The flaws in lower education are rife; I can't go into them all. But I'd like to examine two which have devastating effects and are directly related to the kind of behavior Weissburg laments:

• False self-esteem-building practices
• Test-driven instruction

First, the mis-directed ideas of phony self-esteem dominant in the last 20-30 years has encouraged teachers and parents to praise children regardless of accomplishments or effort. This practice seems to be motivated by at least two beliefs:

1. Children's egos are so delicate they cannot withstand any negative feedback from others.
2. Children cannot develop self-esteem without continuous praise from others.

In fact, a large portion of solid self-esteem results from achieved competency as a result of hard work, and from the regular experience of failure.

Why?

Because failure will always be a normal part of life and if a child does not learn how to overcome failures and continue to strive for his or her goals, that child will have a very difficult time in adulthood.

A child who has a false sense of self-worth and efficacy, and little experience with overcoming failure, is extremely vulnerable to depression, drugs, and suicide when faced with the actual problems of life because he or she is, in fact, incompetent. No amount of praise will overshadow those facts.

Optimally, parents and teachers encourage students to work hard at their learning, while modeling and expecting serious achievement, and giving praise for actual accomplishments. Negative feedback should be factual and task-oriented - "Here's where the equation has an error" - not directed at the child - "You should know better than to write the equation like that; here, this is how it should be."

In a Montessori classroom, self-development and self-esteem are achieved by mastering the work. The materials through which learning is accomplished are designed to be just hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard as to be impossible to master. At the same time, they are just the kinds of things children find fascinating to do, given their level of development. All this results in flow experiences for children, making them highly motivated to work.

Here is a video that illustrates how young children (3-6 years old) develop their sense, motor, and observational skills through the materials:




 And here's a video illustrating the mathematics curriculum:


The older a child gets, the more advanced and complicated the materials, until he or she is competently working abstractly, but with a rock-solid foundation in reality through previous work with concrete materials. Here's a video about the elementary level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBs73rff0n0&feature=share&list=PLFB81B46845AB1919 (embedding wasn't allowed).

and one about the arithmetic of fractions, usually the hardest and least-understood arithmetical operation: http://youtu.be/GKHM5unkza4

This kind of work develops happy, competent, self-directed individuals who want to learn.

And one of the other elements that makes this possible is the competency-driven curriculum that does NOT center on standardized testing.

Which leads back to Weissburg's complaints: the second major element motivating poor student behavior has been the inordinate emphasis on standardized tests these past 20 years.

Schools, teachers, and students have been rewarded on test scores alone - not actual learning or competent teaching. Students are talked at, not engaged in the learning. Teachers feed information (not understanding) and students learn that all they need to know is what's necessary to score well on tests.

So are we surprised that's all they're interested in? That they just want to "get through" the class and will find any way to do that efficiently and economically? That they don't respect their teachers - that they're not oriented to understanding the material? They have not been encouraged to be invested in learning or in achieving the actual competency of understanding.

I lament the situation with Weissburg, because of the enormous wasted time and potential - and worry whether they will be able to learn enough as adults to overcome these handicaps.

Technology Comes to the Dismal Humanities Market

Technological innovation in the Academic Humanities? It's happening, if we can judge by "Rebooting Graduate Education in the Humanities" from The Chronicles of Higher Education. And just in time--because the job market is dismal yet the graduate students deluded:

"A 2011 Survey of Earned Doctorates shows that 43 percent of doctoral recipients have no employment at the time they receive their degree. But Rogers presented an SCI survey indicating that 74 percent of respondents entered graduate school with the expectation that they would become professors, and 80 percent reported “feeling fairly certain or completely certain” of achieving that outcome. At the same time, only 18 percent were satisfied with the preparation they received for careers besides being a professor."

I can only hope these students, who've invested considerable time and treasure, can find clever new avenues for their knowledge that will benefit us all. 

The lecture you should have had

What Professor Devlin explains about the relationship of calculus to the real world is the kind of explaining that helps motivates students to learn math. The first 20-30 minutes is especially useful.

Motivation Trumps Intelligence in Learning Math

From the January 5-6, 2013 Wall Street Journal "Week in Ideas" by Dan Akst:

"When it comes to learning math, intelligence counts at the outset. But after that, it's a matter of motivation and study skills.

"That's the result of a German study of 3, 530 students in grades five through 10. Researchers examined six years of data with an eye toward establishing the effect of IQ, motivation and study skills on growth in math achievement.

"Intelligence, it turned out, wasn't a factor in this growth. And rote learning strategies actually did more harm than good. But feelings of control, high motivation and study skills that involved explaining a summarizing math and connecting it to other material did predict greater achievement. What it takes to learn math, the researchers said, isn't just innate; it can be fostered."

Summary of the research from: "Predicting Long-term Growth in Students' Mathematics Achievement: The Unique Contributions of Motivation and Cognitive Strategies," Kou Murayama, Reinhard Pekrun, Rudolf vom Hofe and Stephanie Lichtenfeld, Child Development (Dec. 20)

Notice that explaining and summarizing and connecting the math to other material was very important. To me, that means verbally conceptualizing the math and integrating it with other knowledge about the world - which tends to be motivational because it enables the learning to know how to use the math.

Educate for Problem-Solving, Not Factories

Good article in Forbes about what education should be like, with interesting statistics from 1948 about homework and lots of information about very successful contemporary programs.

Frankly, just about everything mentioned are things we do in Montessori schools.

“It’s the teacher’s job to point young minds towards the right kinds of questions,” suggests Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University.

“The teacher doesn’t need to give any answers, the answers are everywhere. And we know now from years of measurements, that learners who find the answers for themselves, retain it better than if they’re told the answer.”Been doing this 105 years now!

How to Rank Colleges and Universities

Here's the interesting methodology the Center for College Affordability and Productivity uses to rank institutions - and then is published in Forbes. I'm especially happy to see their measures of productivity, i.e. how well do the students do after graduation.

Remembering on Memorial Day

John A. "Black Jack" Logan, Civil War general and founder of Memorial Day.


From Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "...from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." 


Picture taken by Joe Ravi in Chicago's Grant Park. License CC-BY-SA 3.0

What's wrong with distance learning?

Thoughts from an expert teacher

Very, very often when I tell people about our project to open a new college program, their first question is: “Will it be online?”

And they have good reasons to expect that it would be: online is vastly cheaper than in-person teaching and it can reach people everywhere in the world. Companies like the Floating University are trying to utilize the best of online resources to game-change higher education. With top lecturers and teachers, they have online tools offering certifications rather than the whole enchilada of a college degree.

A few of the best things online education can do:

• Provide the best lecturer on Shakespeare, or Feynman, or Von Mises, when and where you want to watch.
• Provide the best demonstration of angular momentum at 3 AM when you can’t sleep.
• Teach you how to make a bowtie or what the ancient Romans ate for lunch, just by Googling.
•  Connect people who might never have a chance to meet, and help them collaborate.

In other words, give you access to an enormous amount of the world’s knowledge about facts, ideas, skills, procedures, and analysis.  And it allows you to connect with experts and others all over the world. This is a fabulous resource for learning! And, don’t get me wrong, the RIFI program incorporates all these uses, and others.

But our program requires a significant amount of in-person learning, and some people look askance at this.

Tales from the Front

About six months ago, I mentioned this issue to an applied scientist from a big lab who’s a friend and supporter. She immediately said “Oh, remote learning is never as good as in-person!”

I was a bit surprised because of the usual enthusiasm which technical people have for remote learning: they’re often the most adept at using these resources. So I recently interviewed her to get her story:

About once a month she is either teaching or learning something for her job. She often teaches other scientists, engineers, and technicians how to use the information on the website of their mutual organization—which has facilities all over—and she also teaches them how to explore new ideas for their projects.

Sometimes she teaches on-site but, often, she’s using teleconferencing or video-conferencing with a group of people at another site. During these sessions, they see her presentations, hear her voice, and see her image. If she sees them, it's not close up, but they can make comments and submit questions.

She finds that the distance teaching never works as well as in-person. And she’s thought a lot about why. “If you go into a restaurant decorated with real plants, there is a different feeling than if the plants are artificial. A different atmosphere. The same thing happens in class.”

So what are some of the differences?

It’s in the Atmosphere

Remotely, “I have no idea what the audience is understanding,” she says. She can’t see them in enough detail in order to notice whether they have questions, are confused—or bored out of their minds. Consequently, she can’t adjust her presentation to suit their needs.

If she could see their faces and their reactions, she might get a sense of how to interact with them. I suggested having shots of their individual faces onscreen while she teaches, but she thinks that would be too difficult to absorb, probably because they would be separate images and because they would lack the detail of the real.

What’s the data she’s likely missing? Information from 3-d body movements, facial expressions, subtle eye movements, tone of voice or even pheromones that would indicate mood and reaction.  I also wonder how comprehension is affected because  mirror neurons can’t operate.

Mirror neurons identify and respond to others’ emotional expressions, helping us navigate social relationships. It’s the lack of these factors that can make email and online discussion a nightmare of misunderstandings.

Further, she thinks the remote participants feel, “’I can’t learn how interested the lecturer is in ME.’ A good teacher genuinely wants to help you learn something,” and, consequently, conveys excitement, interest and, concern about whether the participants are learning and enjoying what’s being taught.

And this “atmosphere,” these motivations, are essential to encouraging audience questions. Why does this matter?

Because questions, are crucial to good learning. They allow the teacher to find out how the students are understanding the material, and adjust what she conveys to suit them. And they ensure that the students are actively learning, i.e. thinking about the material in relation to their other knowledge. This is how new material is best absorbed and integrated.

Yet, most people are reluctant to ask questions, for a variety of reasons.  A common one: they don’t want to appear stupid or draw attention to themselves. Asking a question in front of the whole class is akin to public speaking—and most people fear that worse than death!

My friend’s experience with in-person classes demonstrates this problem and how it’s even worse with remote learning. In a one-hour in-person class, if the class is very active, she may get a dozen questions. Infrequently, the class engages in a deep conversation. But when she runs the class remotely, she rarely gets any questions whatsoever, and never a deep conversation.

Another example is what happens to her group’s “Zen presentations.” These involve perfectly crafted visuals with no words on them. The pictures have to convey everything the teacher is going to talk about, so the audience can grasp the ideas just by sight. In the presentation, the teacher gives them the words to go with the picture.

Further, the Zen presentations have to have exactly the right pace to be successful—with the teacher conveying casual thoughtfulness and considered responses to the audience. This simply cannot happen through mere audio or even video.

What's the Relationship?

She’s identified a few of the causes for these problems with remote education:

• There’s a slight time shift, a gap between when she talks and when they hear, causing participants to be unsure of the right time to ask questions; this results in a feeling of formality, making them hesitate to speak up,
• It allows no eye contact, so the participants can’t convey when they might have a question; consequently, the participants don’t know when it is polite to interrupt the speaker,
• The teachers and participants cannot easily share knowledge and interest in the subject, even interest and motivation for the work they are doing together, yet motivation is so important to learning.

As a result, a weak relationship develops between teacher and participants, or participants with each other.

Instead of mutual engagement, learning some new, fascinating information and working well together towards their mutual goals, there is a void, the void of the learning relationship, of the learning and working community in which they should belong.

The importance of the personal relationship becomes very apparent when she compares two different kinds of classes they have at her organization. In one, they learn information and procedures, and rather introverted, scientific and technical types are the participants. They often do this remotely.

But the other kind of class is with extroverted, sociable types who need to work with the engineers, scientists, and technicians. The purpose of the class is to help the more sociable types, administrators and the like, learn how to interact with the technical people. These classes can never be done remotely.  There’s simply no way the people can learn what they need except in person.

Maybe When We Have Holodecks?

I think my scientist friend has trenchantly identified some of the basic problems with distance classes of any kind. That doesn’t even address the needs of young people, who are trying to learn not only information but also how to think well and what kind of person they want to become.

However, that’s a discussion for another day, soon.

As far as my friend’s classes, she thinks it would be just as productive to tape her presentations and let participants watch when they like, as to do them remotely.

Alas, until we develop holodecks, those simulated reality rooms in which people could meet and interact on “Star Trek,” online education cannot replace the kinds of learning only possible with in-person interaction; the full learning relationship. We'll talk about that more in the future.

Who's Graduating?

The John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy reports only 35% of freshmen from 2008 will graduate this year. Read more about why here.

Why Colleges Don't Teach the Federalist Papers

Peter Berkowitz of Hoover examines the import - and ignorance - of The Federalist Papers. 

"In the misguided quest to mold political science to the shape of the natural sciences, many scholars disdainfully dismiss The Federalist—indeed, all works of ideas—as mere journalism or literary studies which, lacking scientific rigor, can't yield genuine knowledge....By robbing students of the chance to acquire a truly liberal education, our universities also deprive the nation of a citizenry well-acquainted with our Constitution's enduring principles."

This "scientistic" attitude is the long-range result of philosophy's abdication from epistemology, which has left us bereft of tools to clearly determine when we know something from observation, inference, and deduction.

The fact that many law schools, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Berkeley, do not include these works in their course of study is appalling, but explains the way far too many lawyers are willing to run roughshod over the Constitution. 

The Federalist should be taught in high school as well as college, along with so many other original documents of American history and politics that have been replaced by leftist revisionism, such as Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.

How's this for a big idea?

Good article from the John W. Pope Center's Duke Cheston about a new online course, Great Big Ideas, from a for-profit online institution, The Floating University. Looks like another 'disruptor' for the higher education market.

The course assembled all-star lecturers to examine some of the deep, timeless questions. Apparently, F.U.'s founder, Adam Glick, came up with the idea when he saw how narrowly trained and unflexible his employees were, unable to think well.

Cheston makes some cogent points about the varied quality and objectivity of the content.

As I may have been harping on in this blog, assembling the best lectures for online use is valuable; helping students learn how to think about the content is another matter.

Some students may be able to hear or read content from the best thinkers and figure out how to hone their thinking abilities for themselves, just like some students can listen to a lecture and mentally engage in a question and answer session with the lecturer.

But most students won't be able to do these things themselves. The entire progress of civilization depends on those who figure out how to do things, and then help those who can't figure these things out for themselves to learn the new ideas, methods, practices. And learning thinking skills are at the root of it all.

Crumbling Higher Education Structure

And here's another article that speaks to the creative destruction going on in higher ed from The New Republic, "The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling as We Speak."

As my colleague Shawn Klein said, " I think this article makes the same mistake that so many takes on the higher Ed bubble make. Education is not merely about job training or even academic achievement. It is about learning how to be an independent, critical learner. Information can, does, and will come from many different sources, but it will only really be fruitful for those who have learned how to rationally integrate and digest the information and thereby make it knowledge."


The $64,000 question is: what are the best ways for students to learn how to think and learn well?

Strategic Pricing in College - What an idea!

It seems as if capitalist ideas are slowly seeping into the thinking about college prices as the economy squeezes the colleges. Here's a new paper about dynamic pricing of different aspects of a college education and how it could increase tuition revenue.

All I can say is: it's about time!

Self Foundation Funds Study of Montessori Education

While there've been a few scientific studies done of Montessori education (see Angeline Lillard and Kevin Rathunde's work, among others), they're not enough. Now the Self Foundation has funded Furman University for a new study.

I look forward to the results.

Hattip Mark Berger.

Peter Thiel Continues to Rattle Academia's Cage

Stanford and Arizona State have started entrepreneur programs to compete with Thiel's "20 Under 20" Fellowships - and keep their students on campus. Read here about these and other developments.

Hattip Pat Peterson.