The Real Way to Figure Out the “Best” Educational System

I would assume this was obvious, but apparently it is not. So I’m dedicating a post to the fact that Education Reformers are standing in the way of their own progress when they evaluate new educational systems with old educational paradigms.

Let’s take a look at some non-traditional educational methods that exist in the USA. Waldorf schools. Montessori schools. Uncollege. Homeschooling. Project-Based Learning. How are those systems along with many other “alternative” school systems being measured against our current system? By standardized tests. Isn’t the whole purpose of them to teach different material in a different manner than the most widespread teaching methodology? How can we measure a different system by the same yardstick?

I think if we were honest with ourselves and had a little more patience, we would recognize that the only real way to determine the “best” educational system is to see how much children who had gone through those systems emerged as happy, successful, fulfilled adults. If society doesn’t care about that, what’s the point of public education?

Before we all get riled up about how Finland’s education system is amazing and they scored so high on the PISA without drilling rote exercises into students’ heads like they do in Singapore, how about we take a minute and think about the results of that “equality over excellence” educational system. When was the last time you heard of a great company, scientific discovery, or prolific artist who came from Finland and reached International success? Not to say that there isn’t anyone, but I would argue that proportionally America has more “excellent” achievers in adult life…probably because we care about “excellent” achievers in educational life. It’s great that they could master algebra and write a properly formatted essay, but as many people try to remind us, that’s not really the purpose of education. If we are trying to foster great minds of the future, we need to take a look at what happens after the exams and diplomas.

The Future of Humanities: Part I: Get Rid of Them!

For months and perhaps years, there has been an ongoing debate about getting rid of or changing the face of Humanities majors in Higher Education, largely spawned by the volatile job market for recent graduates. One post on Thought Catalog sparked the debate amongst my college-aged peers more than Forbes or WSJ articles ever could. In a world where newly minted college graduates are becoming Starbucks baristas, the stereotype of “debt-slaves and baristas that can recite Emmanuel Kant’s passages from memory” is increasingly common.

In this post, I will explain how I agree with the author of this article, and which points I think are weaker. Generally, this post will be analyzing the anti-Humanities argument and the next will be looking at the pro-Humanities argument made by a few response articles.

First of all, as many of the response articles have stated, the author of this post uses “Liberal Arts” but probably meant to say “Humanities” instead, since he does not seem to be saying that Physics or Computer Science degrees should be abolished by any means.

Second, I wholeheartedly agree that the vast majority of students currently in college probably should not be there and don’t need to be there. Higher education used to be a luxury; four years to discuss ideas and read great books with distinguished professors in their big ivory tower. Does that sound like something a common person would have the ability to take part in? No. Why would they spend those four years discussing famous figures of the Western world when they could work at their parent’s farm or shop instead? Some time in the past century it shifted over to something that was seen as a rite of passage for America’s youth. The problem is not that lots of young people are going to college, it’s that college has not changed to fit this demographic shift.

Third, I do think there is something to be said for the idea that if someone can’t handle a STEM major they shouldn’t be in college, but only if the opposite is also considered. If you took all the STEM majors in a college and all the humanities majors and forced them to switch places for a semester or two, who would do better on average? I think that the STEM majors would do better in Humanities classes, not because they are smarter on average (though…that is a possibility) but because K-12 education has ensured that we all know how to read and write before getting to college, but has done a much worse job of making sure we can all handle fast-paced, complex math and science courses. I think this is where the issue lies; a STEM major can write a good cover letter for a job more easily than a Humanities major can calculate compound interest on their bank account. Both are simple, but I would say one is valued more than the other. Our society gives people permission to say, as an adult, “Oh my god I suck at math haha! I need my cell phone calculator, or can you just do it for me?” but doesn’t really tolerate them saying “Oh my god I’m so bad at reading! What does this sentence mean?”

Finally, the question of access to unlimited information. The internet gives you access to a lot of educational resources and so do libraries. If you want to learn the basics of any subject you can just go ahead and do it–universities are not necessary. It is much easier to self-educate in the Humanities than STEM subjects! Reading magazines, newspapers, literature, and non-fiction can teach you many things. It’s much harder to crack open a Mathematics textbook and have the tools to work through it on your own. I definitely agree that it’s much harder to gain access to expensive, rare lab materials found in University STEM departments than it is to look at a rare book or historical artifact (museums, anyone?). This is why the idea of a “research university” is important. To do research in STEM subjects, you need materials that help you make discoveries and create inventions. To do research in the Humanities, you may need to talk to many people or read many books, or even travel, but I think this research should be treated the way people treat arts projects now. It is a pet project, a personal obsession, an object of fascination that may not help advance our society (do we need another book analyzing Jane Austen or Plato?) but will add to the intellectual conversations among humans.

Learning How to Think

A common misconception is that the purpose of school is to learn concepts. Learn lots of facts, figures, equations, dates…memorize famous people’s names, faces and accomplishments…master your times tables and grammatical structure. The real value of an education is in learning processes; learning how to learn, how to construct an argument, how to break a problem into its component parts and solve it in pieces. Think about “scientific thinking”, “computational thinking”, and “design thinking”. Why are these phrases rarely used in K-12 learning? Why isn’t more attention devoted to how to learn, if that’s really the main takeaway?

I would argue it’s because educators aren’t aware that this is the most important aspect of school, and even if they are they aren’t sure how exactly to go about teaching things like the scientific method and design thinking. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of parents and students don’t think this is what school is for, even if educators are aware of it, so they stuck in the fact-crunching mentality and can’t see the forest for the trees. The student is at odds if their teacher encourages them to make mistakes and experiment, learning how to learn, but their parents is worried that they have not learned all of their state capitals and presidents’ names.

I think one of the quickest and easiest things we can do to change this is ask teachers to explain to students why they are learning the things they are in the way they are learning it, and what they expect students to take away from the experience. Students usually only hear this at the end of their K-12 education, if at all. By that time they have passed through their idealistic elementary years, conflicted middle school years, and apathetic high school years. Educators need to communicate from the very beginning (you would be surprised at what an 8-year-old understands if you explain something to them clearly and patiently) that you are trying to instill in them learning techniques, curiosity, and the desire to explore more. If this message is communicated clearly and consistently, and the lessons are in keeping with this philosophy, there will be far fewer cries of “why are we learning this?” heard anywhere.

Evaluation of Merit in the 21st Century

Faced with an impossible task — ranking and comparing the potential and/or performance of students — that may not even be worthwhile to evaluate, our educational system has developed practices that are inaccurate at best and downright dangerous at worst. Because the people developing these systems are administrators who are adults removed from the experiences of their students, their evaluation systems are stuck in old frames of thought that are hard to break out of.

What would our ideal evaluation of students look like? Would we judge them on their ability to complete exams in a prescribed way by spitting out specific facts, year after year, but then when they enter the workforce expect them to look things up rather than know them, and come up with unique creative ideas instead of regurgitated information? This is pretty much what we are doing now. Our systems of evaluation are clearly outdated, the hard task is coming up with a better alternative.

If we get to the root of the question, perhaps it is not even accurate to measure students’ performance, but instead intrinsic character traits and talents which may be more reliable predictors of potential. This would help with the issue of diversity because student performance would correlate less with the snazzy toys and tutors purchased by parents and more with key personality traits. Take a look at Paul Tough‘s list:

• Grit
• Curiosity
• Self-control
• Social intelligence
• Zest
• Optimism
• Gratitude

Why have some wildly successful geniuses and entrepreneurs fallen through the cracks of our educational system before going on to rise to the top of adult society? Does school performance actually predict success as much as our society assumes it to? It is time to accept that our evaluation systems are all wrong, and to actively try to create better ones.

Risk-Taking and Feminism: The Limited Entrepreneurial Education of Girls

I stumbled on this article about slut-shaming fatigue and a particular point stood out to me and sparked some other ideas.

Create the Same Mistake-Friendly Culture for Girls that Boys Already Enjoy.
In our culture boys — who are represented as both more obtuse and more resilient — get encouragement to make mistakes; repeated failures are the seeds of masculine success. Girls, on the other hand, get reminded that one mistakewill likely ruin their lives. “One of the biggest problems is that we imagine that for teen girls, sex is some kind of cataclysmic event that can never be recovered from,” says Ford. We make the mistake of assuming that giving girls the freedom to fuck up is really just giving them the freedom to be exploited. As Ford puts it, that’s “not exactly a flattering view of girls’ emotional intelligence.” (Jezebel)

I would venture to argue that the same culture that warns girls not to take sexual risks (lose their virginity, date or have sexual contact with a boy who may be “risky” or “unsafe”, or have “too much” sexual contact) also dissuades them from taking risks in general. Female students who are go-getters will likely start a charity or club, while boys will start a business or tech venture. This is veering into the issue of gender imbalance in STEM, but I suspect that the entrepreneurship gap is directly related to the fact that girls is discouraged from taking risks in general. Boys are rewarded for being bold and non-conformist; dropping out of school or selling illegal copies of books, burned CDs…anything they can get their hands on. Girls are constantly told not to break rules or upset the status quo; if you want to do something great you can do it within the confines of what the school and your parents tell you to do.

I think this is stifling the creativity and ingenuity of girls and preventing fruitful learning experiences from taking place. We need to cultivate a culture that tells girls to take risks just as much as it tells boys to, and reinforces the idea that a failed business or underground activity in their young years will not turn into a scary mark on their permanent record or a trip to juvie. Many of the entrepreneurs that the Western world worships (George Foreman, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Richard Branson, Simon Cowell to name a few) were rebellious risk-takers in their young years. They were also all male. The women who are prominent entrepreneurs and self-made millionaires/billionaires went through more traditional paths.

Is Ed Tech Sexy Yet?

There is plenty of buzz around Ed Tech; there is SXSW Edu, Startup Weekend Edu, and of course Sal Khan’s face plastered all over business and tech publications. But why is the field still full of horrendously designed websites, incomplete data, and generally unprofessional products?

I just saw an article highlighting Digital Wish, a website that uses the crowd-funding model we know and love from Donor’s Choose and Kickstarter, and from the write-up it sounded great but once I clicked through to the site I was stunned at how immature, unprofessional, and outdated the website looked. Why can’t Ed Tech companies find good designers and front-end developers?

This might seem like a surface complaint but I think it speaks to the industry and its values a whole. As much as Educational Tech is becoming more relevant to traditional “Tech people” it still has a long way to go before it is a respected and widely known area of technologic advances and development. We don’t need a million social networks or a billion iPhone games; we need to educate the world so that children of today can become creative leaders and innovators of tomorrow. If seen through that perspective, the world of tech will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of educational advances, so let Ed Tech into the club!

Learning Deeply, Not Shallowly

Something I’ve been thinking about is the implication of our information overload society.

What will learning look like in the future?

Will skills replace knowledge as the mark of an accomplished, interesting person?

Will “prodigy”-like behavior become more common, since more people have access to unlimited resources via the internet?

How will schools change so that they have something to offer beyond a big library and knowledge that is hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of years old?

At the moment, the most relevant conclusion I can draw given the current quality of open information and amount is that in order to take advantage of these resources, we as lifelong learners needs to go deep, not wide. Or perhaps, more specifically, become T-shaped knowledge workers. Delve deep into a small number (1-3) topics, get very good at them. All the while take advantage of the vast array of information being generated and organized all the time on the internet to have a varied, balanced perspective.

Personally, I have been going wide but not deep, since up until recently I couldn’t think of which areas I wanted to focus on. Blog posts and Wikipedia entires, Quora questions and friends’ Facebook links– all of this fed to my development of a preliminary knowledge base in topics like cooking, feminism, and comedy. The same things have contributed to my knowledge of technology, education, design, and conceptual computer science & mathematics, but now it’s time to whittle that list down and dive deep!

On Mathematics, Arts, and Mastery

This is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote 1.5 years ago, that I think is important to keep in mind:

A lot of attention in current literature about mathematics education reform has been drawn to the fact that it is unheard of for an intelligent, successful adult to proclaim that they are illiterate, but it is quite common to hear someone say they can’t do math. Many people have proclaimed that this is entirely unnecessary because everyone can do math, but our current educational structure makes it so they believe they cannot, or they fall behind, or they get stuck and never recover. I wholeheartedly agree, and programs that have been proven to improve performance of an entire classroom at varied levels should definitely get a push to be implemented in more schools (I would love to be a part of this push).

In addition, I believe that this false belief is true for the arts too. So many people say “oh I can’t draw” or “I can’t dance” but I don’t think this is something that is unimportant or something that they cannot achieve a certain level of proficiency in. People may not have the interest in practicing as often as artists do to achieve true mastery, but they can certainly be able to draw a proportional face, or have enough physical self-control to mimic a simple dance or embody a character. Many aspects of learning and executing the arts involve things that will be useful for future and for life, and in addition these subjects have been proven to be important to the “human development” of a student more than pre-career development (think of the value of great literature—very ‘human’).

My Take on the Teacher Evaluation Debate

In response to: “What Makes a Great Teacher? Finally, We’ve Got Some Answers” (Take Part)

Remember when your teacher would say “Okay someone is coming in today to observe so everyone be on your best behavior” and proceeded to act a little (or a LOT!) differently than usual? How about instead of in-person evaluations schools bought small, cheap cameras to record a few (maybe 3) lessons scattered throughout the year? The mere presence of an “observer” changes the teacher. It would take a lot of guts to show a movie for 3/4 of the class while someone was observing, but on a random school day plenty of teachers will occasionally do so in place of an actual lesson.

I’m glad about the student evaluations (Adults need to trust students! They are not clueless. When they liked a teacher who challenged them, rewarded them, and inspired them– it really is a trustworthy measure), I hope that the test score increases are measured on an accurate scale. Bringing students from 88% proficient to 92% proficient is VERY DIFFERENT than bringing them from 52% proficient to 56% proficient; hopefully these measures reflect that. It could be as simple as the following equivalencies:

1pt. gain 90-100 =

2pt. gain 80-89 =

3pt. gain 70-79 =

4pt. gain 60-69 =

5pt. gain 50-59 =

6+ pt gain 0-49

You would measure the END percentage of proficient students in a class (or the average of their test percentiles, which would be even more specific) and calibrate the system across classes to that.

Hacking Your Education is Better Than Not Learning

In response to: “Education is the Work of Teachers, Not Hackers” (The New Republic)

This sounds like the typical snobbery of a humanities devotee. Yes, humanities are worthwhile. But if we have a resource crunch and a money crunch, wouldn’t you rather educate people to learn skills they can apply to useful work, and encourage them to enjoy reading and learning on their own? Can’t they learn about life and love and humanity outside of a classroom, but devote their formal education to acquisition of skills that our society needs?

It’s pretty obnoxious to assume that if a student who can barely pay for community college has the choice between studying the humanities in a school and saving money by learning math, science, programming, design, engineering, and other in-demand disciplines online and through cheap skillshare classes that both options are equally valid. The people who write articles like this one seem to be stuck in their world of upper-middle and upper class citizens with lots of options and cushions to fall back on if their college education provided them with few skills but many ‘enlightened thoughts’.

Tell me this: If the deep study of humanities is so critical for creating an intelligent and informed citizenry, are those who have devoted more time to humanities “better” citizens? When you lament those who are unaware of history, isn’t it just as tragic when someone with little knowledge of actual science proclaims that global warming is made up and evolution isn’t real?

There is place for all subjects in an education, but for those who have opportunities to teach themselves skills and information, online resources are amazing and revolutionary. For those whose only other options are costly, or even for those are unsatisfied by the scope of the more traditional options, hacking their education is a useful and beneficial way to steer their future in a prosperous direction.