Other Paths of Education

There's been talk in the USA for years of making four years of college education as ubiquitous and expected as four years of high school education. I'm for education as much as anyone, but I'm very unconvinced that four years at a standard American college or university is what every American needs.

It's not that I think there is necessarily anything wrong with what universities offer and it's certainly not about politics. (I should point out that my dad's a tenured professor in the social sciences at a state-run university.)

And I certainly don't think the problem is that some students are smarter and some students are naturally stupider, and this is a natural truth that some people are afraid to utter because of 'political correctness'. I don't believe human intelligence can be represented along a single scale. I think different people probably have different natural aptitudes.

I don't believe this because it fits into some ideology I have. I believe it because it fits the way I perceive human beings operating.

I remember that I've always been very good at taking standardized tests, for example. What they don't tell you in school is that your success in adult life is not necessarily determined by how well you do on standardized tests.

In short, I fully agree with and endorse the ideas put forth by Sir Ken Robinson in his 2010 TED Talk.

I suppose what I'd like to see in the USA is a greatly expanded system of vocational education, for students who have no interest in going on to a traditional university. We need people who know how stuff works. We need people who can figure stuff out. And we need a system that encourages people to master skills which are useful to society, and to leverage these skills to take charge of their own lives.

And -- and this is important -- I would wave my magic wand and change society so that there wouldn't be any sense that people who had vocational training and now work in the skilled labor force are less talented or less lucky than people who went to university. Anybody who can open up and fix a machine or expertly repair leaky pipes is officially far more capable than I am in at least one area of human endeavor, and there is no reason to suppose they are less well-informed about the world or have less of a mind than I do. That's just dumb.

In short, I don't just want to see better options for people who don't do well on their SATs. I want to see these additional paths to a good career to be a serious possibility even for people who did well on all their standardized tests and could get into a good university if they wanted to. Where's the logic in considering vocational training to be second-best? I don't see it.

So that's how I'd like to change American culture.

So is there a way to express vaguely similar sentiments but within a framework of pure assholery? Yes, there is.

Read this report on Rick Santorum's comments on Obama wanting to send all American kids to college.

"Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands," Santorum began. "Some people have incredible gifts and want to work out there making things."

Then he went after the president's call for making college easier for Americans to attend.

President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob," Santorum said as the crowd howled with laughter and applause. "There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor."

Then read this bit on how and why his supporters agree that college isn't for everybody. A couple of them say things that sort of echo my concerns up above, but it turns into this:

“They try and disguise it with, you know, ‘equal opportunity’…” Stephen Clement began.

“It’s communism,” Murrow said, cutting him off. “The professors are all teaching the kids…”

“Where does the social engineering stop?” Clement jumped back in, fired up. “Does it stop after we send everybody to college, or does it stop after we set their curriculum and said, ‘these are the things you’re allowed to study?’ Does it become the Soviet Union?”

Thank you, American political discourse. Not just for redefining the word 'communist' to mean 'generic thing I don't like', which will render us without a sufficiently descriptive vocabulary if actual Communists ever become a force in American politics.

But also, thank you for taking something I actually believe and embedding it within a context I disapprove of. It's a test of my intellectual integrity to see if I still believe something after it's been thoroughly incorporated into a framework I don't agree with.

And guess what? I still believe we ought to support alternative paths of education, and not snobbishly look down on people just because they didn't go to a traditional college.

Who cares how Santorum tries to frame the issue.

Have some Wikipedia

From the Washington Post: Wikipedia goes to class:

This school year, dozens of professors from across the country gave students an unexpected assignment: Write Wikipedia entries about public policy issues.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Web site, organized the project in an effort to bulk up the decade-old online encyclopedia’s coverage of topics ranging from the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 to Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Such issues have been treated on the site in much less depth than TV shows, celebrity biographies and other elements of pop culture.

Many students involved in the project have received humbling lessons about open-source writing as their work was revised, attacked or deleted by anonymous critics with unknown credentials.

In the fall, Rochelle A. Davis, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, told undergraduates in her culture and politics course to create a Wikipedia page about a community they belonged to, then use that research to develop a thesis for an academic paper.

Very, very cool. That's the assignment I wish I'd been given when I was an undergrad (in the Late Pre-Wikipedian Age).

If I taught undergrads, I would have a strict rule: No citing Wikipedia in research papers. Violators would be severely mocked and ridiculed.

But - and this is a key distinction, one that sometimes seems lost on people - I wouldn't prohibit students from using Wikipedia as a research tool. No, I would actively encourage it. Obviously they'd be using it anyway even if I did prohibit it, but there really is no reason to forbid it.

I can hear a time traveler from 2006 complaining that anyone can edit Wikipedia, and so you have no way of knowing the veracity of any information you find. I say, we're talking about college undergrads here. If they're not yet savvy enough to (usually) tell the difference between reliable sources of information and Internet-based nonsense, then they don't need to be sheltered, they need to be made able to distinguish the good from the bad. Quickly.

And having to deal with edit wars, nitpickers, editors who have their own personal agendas, and humorless admins? Hey, that's real life. It's useful experience for those undergrads.

Khan Academy

Not long after I wrote that piece on education-oriented TED talks below, the TED website posted a video by Salman Khan, in which he talks about his project, Khan Academy.

Yes, that's Bill Gates on stage with him at the very end.

So I checked out Khan Academy, and I have to say I am very impressed. Khan's "lectures" -- I hesitate to call them lectures, though, because they're quite informal, conversational, and Khan doesn't bother to polish them up, which is probably helpful for students who feel intimidated by the material -- are engaging and hit just the right note. They don't feel dumbed-down, nor do they make unwarranted assumptions about what the student knows. Whether he's teaching advanced calculus or how to add and subtract fractions, Khan aims his lectures perfectly at the student's likely level of knowledge.

Although the lectures go all the way up to very advanced mathematics and also cover areas such as physics and finance, Khan Academy's practice modules are limited to pure mathematics. They start (literally!) with 2 + 2 = 4 and continue up through high school math. Not much calculus and other advanced math, but the site is continually creating new modules, and I think new ones may have appeared just in the past two weeks. Problems are randomly generated, and once you solve ten consecutive problems correctly, you are declared proficient in that module. Make one mistake, and you have to get another ten in a row right.

Practice modules are arranged on a knowledge map which reminds me of upgrade trees from turn-based strategy computer games. The student gets awarded various badges, for such distinctions as solving ten consecutive problems within a short span of time, or earning proficiency in a certain number of modules.

This brings me to what impresses me most about Khan Academy. Make no mistake, the site is intended primarily for schoolchildren. The video game mechanics I alluded to in the previous paragraph will appeal to kids. Khan wasn't invited to speak at TED for helping adults re-learn arithmetic they'd forgotten years earlier. But there's nothing cute or childish about the presentation. As the site's blog says, "Kids are smarter than we give them credit for." An adult can start the modules with the most basic addition exercises without feeling strange or self-conscious.

I'm working my way up through the practice modules. Right now I'm at 34 completed out of 107, but that makes my progress sound more impressive than it is. Basic arithmetic modules are behind me, while precalculus is still ahead of me.

I find that working through these modules without using a calculator brings an unexpected side benefit: I can practice focus. Like many people in this day and age, my attention span feels damaged due to easy Internet connections and mobile devices. When I let my mind wander while I'm working my way through a Khan Academy module, I make careless mistakes. If I make even one careless mistake, my streak gets reset and I have to start all over, correctly answering ten more problems in a row before I'm declared proficient in a module.

I've also downloaded Khan's finance lectures to my iPod Touch -- with all of the Taiwanese finance experts I train in English in my job, I feel I'd better have a more thorough knowledge of the field.