How long until the (first-world) classroom education model is obsolete?
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Always a niche (Score:5, Insightful)
My view is that there will always be a niche for in-person classroom instruction. I think the product that higher education should be selling is the opportunity to develop a personalized relationship with an expert. That happens very effectively in the small classrooms of liberal arts colleges.
The non-interactive lectures provided by large universities with hundreds of students in the lecture hall at a time went obsolete when video was invented.
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Agreed. Small classrooms, with face-to-face instruction are very effective. Remote classrooms do work but are less interactive and allow for more distractions.
In-person instruction is analogous in the business world to face-to-face meetings. They have been shown to be more effective than phone calls, video conferencing, etc.
However people will push for "something different," due to failures in the current system, even though those failures are not related to in-person classroom instruction, per se. Peop
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Yes, they are. But they are not the current model...
Re:Always a niche (Score:5, Funny)
The classrooms are still small, they are just packed more tightly...
Re:Always a niche (Score:5, Insightful)
But one of the MAIN components missing in the classroom methodology of old, is pretty much the most important one...the parent.
My parents, kept a constant look over my shoulder as to getting my homework done. They once grounded me for 2 weeks, until I could get my multiplication tables memorized through the 12's.
They rewarded me for good grades, and chastised me for poor ones (C's, I darned not get below that, and rarely made C's).
They knew my teacher, my principal...often as not, my Mom had much too good of a personal relationship with the principal, as that I was a bit mischeavous..and she was called in more than a couple of times about me. The school thought I was a good kid, but I often would finish my work early, and become class clown, or attempt to distract others.
I guess in today's world...they'd drug me.
But really....where are the concerned parents? We didn't need the 20 metric tons of homework every night that kids get today...enough to get the job done and my folks oversaw that. I didn't have homework every night...usually I got it done at school and had time when I got home to *gasp* go out and play in the neighborhood with the other kids I went to school with.
Parents....they are what is missing in today's classes.
No teacher should have to spend the majority of her time babysitting and shouting down kids, rather than teaching...
We'll get into the other distraction...worrying about Billy's self esteem in another thread.
Re:Always a niche (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you work in an office .... then a classroom is good training for this ..
Nothing to do with the teacher interacting with you, it is more to do with the whole class interacting with each other, vieoconferencing is all very well but a lot of the social cues are missing ...
Meetings are mostly pointless, but having wasted time on lengthy email conversations then gone and talked to the person and cleared up the whole thing in minutes, they are sometimes the best way
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I agree that teacher-student interaction and personal relationships should be more encouraged in higher education through smaller class sizes. Nevertheless, I don't think that this is currently limited to liberal arts colleges—I attend a university with a small yet excellent engineering department, in which relationships with professors have proved invaluable to my education.
Large lectures on the other hand are minimally interactive, and could be migrated to online video. The benefit of this migrati
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The instructor for my online class has an optional in class section for those that need it. Her class is the only offered at the school, so there is no choice other than online. She does this because online is for strong, independent learners. Others thrive better in a classroom setting. I'm one of those students that's either held back, or could be doing other things with my time so online is great. As for exams, I prefer the practical approach. In the business law course I took we only had a mid term and
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Some subjects or fields of research if you will, are actually best taught using a chalk and a blackboard. One such an example is mathematics. A well trained lecturer that proves theorems and solves problems on a blackboard beats any powerpoint any day of the week. In fact, math is one of the oldest
Re:Always a niche (Score:4, Funny)
Schools teach more than just the curiculum. One of the most valuable lessons people learn through attending school daily is how to act when surrounded by a pack of their peers in such a way as to be considered socially acceptable.
Many students also benefit directly from the dialog that occurs in the classroom. Until people are attending class in some kind of virtual world, students will have no real analog for the experience of learning amongst a group of other people via remote learning. Unless everyone starts working remotely, these will still be vital life skills, if only to reinforce the need for personal hygeine.
While some subjects are better suited to remote learning, more hands on topics such as trade subjects and the arts still require direct supervision and equipment.
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That depends largely on the school. My first elementary school was great, but I transferred to a blue collar school in the middle of kindergarten and it was fine at first, but in second grade a bully moved in to town, decided I was punch bait, beat the shit out of me (black eye, bloody nose) and threw me across the blacktop shredding my knees and arms and the teachers did nothing about it because they didn't see it. He then decided if you wanted to be his friend and not get beat up by him you had to beat up
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Re:Always a niche (Score:5, Interesting)
My view is that there will always be a niche for in-person classroom instruction. I think the product that higher education should be selling is the opportunity to develop a personalized relationship with an expert. That happens very effectively in the small classrooms of liberal arts colleges.
The non-interactive lectures provided by large universities with hundreds of students in the lecture hall at a time went obsolete when video was invented.
The product higher education sells isn't the education, it's the credential. There's a reason schools like MIT are perfectly comfortable making their curricula publicly available. The degree from MIT is what many people actually want. And yes, I work in higher education. You can learn things here, most people do, but make no mistake about what everyone's motivations are, they want that piece of paper.
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There's some evidence that homeschooling is more effective, for instance. Homeschooled kids apparently do tend to do slightly better than their traditionally educated counterparts in college (at least in terms of academics; by many accounts
It already is (Score:2, Insightful)
Classrooms are completely ineffective at preparing students for
(Rant)
{
living without jobs, without hope, and with a constant stream of fear, hate and/or mind-numbing garbage continuously poured into their heads from the 24 hour infonewstainment channels.
}
If you know a useful trade, take a young person under your wing and teach them that trade. If you are the parent of a young person, find someone to teach them a useful trade. I think employers understand how broken education is and would be willing to giv
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Master/apprentice relationships really are a good idea and can help lead to mastery of a particular trade skill. If the point of education is to learn the skills necessary to get employment "in the real world", the worst place would be to learn from some washed up professor who couldn't cut the pressure in the work environment and decided to go into academia instead, and furthermore hasn't actually practiced the skills of the trade they are teaching for 15-20 years.
That isn't true for all of academia, but
Re:It already is (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the huge start up investment (a post-doc) required to attempt to gain an academic job (2-3 years, insane hours, low pay), nobody would even bother unless they were committed to getting a professorship at the end of it. You don't flush out of industry and just land in academia - the people I know who have left industry to take up professorships are all renowned engineers with a reputation for excellence. They won't take you otherwise.
In my own case, I worked in industry for a year and a half after my PhD and found it so tedious and unstimulating, that I decided I enjoyed academia more. When I made the decision to leave, I switched to part time just so that I could afford to live for the 6 months or so it would require to find and land a suitable post-doc. In truth, if I had left the switch much longer, I would not have been able to go back at all, because my publication history would be too sparse (and indeed, that's hurting my career even now). In effect, I viewed getting a post-doc as preparing to assail a mountain - months of preparation up front, followed by an excruciating marathon of hard work. And success was not guaranteed - only 50% of PhDs go on to do post-docs, and it's exceptionally rare for engineers who can earn far more in industry.
Talking to other post-docs in my field, we all agreed that if we did not succeed in a bid for a junior professorship, we could always 'bail out' - that is, go back to industry. Our skills were valuable, because we were trained in desirable specialities.But we weren't in academia because we wanted to be in industry - that was the fall back position. The saying goes that there are a lot of one-way doors in academia, because once you're off the publishing treadmill for too long, it's almost impossible to come back.
So don't view academics as a safe-haven for industry drop-outs. It's simply not true. It's a hard and brutal world, without little to no financial reward, and only the best and most determined survive. In exchange, I get to choose my own course of research, supervise students, and take genuine credit for my achievements.
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If you found work "in the industry" to be boring, part of the problem is that you likely were hired by a larger firm where you have to go through the meat grinder of an apprenticeship anyway. The problem is that you got your PhD and thought that you were the king of the world due to your advanced credentials, but it turns out that means squat in terms of what these kind of businesses expect out of an employee and you weren't ready to become the apprentice again. Perhaps understandable if you went through
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In practice, the work they had to offer wasn't what was
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When you decide to work for a small start-up company, you can throw out just about all of the rules I was saying earlier. You have a much more "intimate" relationship with the company founders and personal relationship matter much more. Still, it sounds more like they hired you to be that junior engineer I was talking about. They may have treated you with respect and valued your contributions, but were you setting project goals and drawing up system architecture, making the major decisions about what pro
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Hi there - research engineer here, recently started a junior professorship at a university. The idea that academics are people who couldn't handle industry work is simply absurd. ... In my own case, I worked in industry for a year and a half after my PhD and found it so tedious and unstimulating, that I decided I enjoyed academia more. ...
I see what you did there - you used the fact that you couldn't handle industry work as proof that academics aren't people who couldn't handle industry work. Nice.
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1. Getting into academia requires great skills and dedication; it does not happen by accident.
2. It is very hard to get back into academia once you leave, but it is relatively easy to leave if you don't succeed there.
3. Despite the low pay and difficult work, academia is desirable and rewarding for the degree of autonomy it grants.
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What? you've never had discussions in a "classroom"? That is a VERY narrow definition of "classroom". Note the OP question was not "Are large, in-person didactic lectures obsolete?" I had discussion-type classes in high-school, not you? Still is classroom learning as far as I'm concerned...
To me, what the OP/OQ was really about was, Can every form of instructed learning be handled in cyberspace? Or does one need "classroom", in-person (meat-space), stu
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That was the option I was looking for.
I suspect I could have learned a lot more in my young days if it was without classrooms.
Also, teach people actual trades, not management-without-content.
Missing Option : It already is (Score:5, Insightful)
I figure that falls under 'less than 20 years' (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, minus 100 is less than 20.... ;)
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I voted for the Wikipedia option, because of verbal concordance. "Current education system will be obsolete 100 years ago" is just not a true proposition.
But yes, -100 20.
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:5, Insightful)
This poll needs a "20 years ago" option.
We can broadcast information now. We don't need a mediocre performer explaining it to a small audience. We need an excellent performer broadcasting it to a large audience, with local helpers available to answer individual questions. Mass media works. And it's the only way to bring the best quality instruction to the largest audience.
But schools are about payroll, not about quality instruction. And a mass media model doesn't maximize payroll, so schools are stuck with an information distribution model from 100 years ago.
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But schools are about payroll, not about quality instruction.
Where did you come up with this? I've never heard that a schools exist for the purpose of payrolls to its employees.
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We can broadcast information now. We don't need a mediocre performer explaining it to a small audience. We need an excellent performer broadcasting it to a large audience, with local helpers available to answer individual questions. Mass media works. And it's the only way to bring the best quality instruction to the largest audience.
That's (currently) called watching YouTube videos in class. It only works for a small percentage of students (in my experience, anyway) and across a small number of subjects. Watching an excellent performer on a screen is not even close to a substitute for interacting face-to-face with said performer.
But schools are about payroll, not about quality instruction. And a mass media model doesn't maximize payroll, so schools are stuck with an information distribution model from 100 years ago.
Where I come from it's almost impossible to find teachers at all, let alone teachers who are so much as competent in their subject area. Your suggestion seems to require *more* staff than are currently employed
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That's not necessarily a problem with classroom education but with the laws against "segregated education" existing in many countries that takes the choice of students out of the schools' hands. In a more liberal education system there is a greater diversity of schools and kids would go to the one that suits their needs.
Always has been (Score:4, Insightful)
The classroom lecture environment has never been useful in instructing students. Great teachers in antiquity engaged their students in discussions. They did not ask them to sit quietly while they talked. The western classroom itself is really a fairly recent invention, and it's never been much use for anything.
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Then the classroom model will be here forever. We'll fund killer satellites in space before we do that.
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Nope.
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Because that's the only thing you need a classroom for.
Classrooms are good for... (Score:3)
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OTOH an effective alternative way is still to be found.
Khaaaaaaan [khanacademy.org]
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It also very much depends on the level and type of education. For universities self study may be an option; for primary schools definitely not. Those kids need the motivation and control that comes with a classroom environment. Of course smaller classes are better, but there is a bottom limit: you can't teach one-on-one for the sheer number of teachers needed, and classrooms have an important social function as well.
And that's the thing for higher level education as well: if all is self study, without class
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the social aspect of the group and the personal contact with the teacher simply can not be replaced.
That's not what's meant by traditional classroom. What's meant is each child learning the same thing at the same time. The pace is set by the slowest in the class.
When I was in about grade four, there was a kid who could barely read. At least, he couldn't hold his own compared to the rest of the class. Some time later that year, we received a self paced reading comprehension program. It was a series of booklets in a rainbow of colors. Once you completed each of the ten books at one color level, you
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In most traditional settings there is at least some room for individual attention. In your case that one kid could get some extra attention for reading, or some extra homework related to this, or if nothing else works extra private tutoring. This of course breaks down if it's really getting very heterogeneous. Though in the schools I've been that's never been an issue.
The original poll, and also GP, I interpret as talking about the abolishment of class-room-style teaching altogether. And that interpretation
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>>It could be based on self-teaching assisted by the large databases that already exist
You're talking about Khan Academy, right?
It's good on some subjects, and terrible on others (like history).
I put down 20-40 years until this mode becomes feasible, but with a large injection of cash (aka Apple making a big push like it looks like they might do) I'd say maybe 10 years.
It's a fun time to be involved in education and ed tech (as my company is).
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Add me to the list agreeing. The school, 25-30 students of all ages in one room, was effective. 30-50 students per class in a school of hundreds never was. Students in a University would be the exception, IMHO, if they were adults. Too many are there to continue their social engagements with other students. Learning isn't even secondary for most of them.
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I work for a school district. The few schools that specifically don't have computers in the rooms and literally use chalk boards have better scholastic results than the vast number of schools that have technology in the classroom. The computer could be a good teaching tool if the kids didn't use it to engage the endorphins, and if software made the computer single-purpose. Right now, the computer serves as a distraction, something the kids can focus on when they don't want to pay attention to the lesson
Will education remain important? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a real question as to whether education will remain important. Getting ahead through education is a relatively modern concept. See this book from 1903 [google.com], where an author wrote to 100 prominent business men with a set of questions about whether a college education was useful in their business. (Amazingly, the author received personal answers from many top executives, including the presidents of major railroads.) Most of them were quite negative on the subject. Many felt that a college education would put someone four years behind their peers.
Industry back then needed robust people who showed up, worked hard, and didn't get sick. That's what Foxconn needs today.
The monetary payoff for a college education has declined, and with current college costs, is often negative. Coupled with this is a very strong trend towards reducing the training level needed for a job. The trend is towards having software do the thinking part, while humans do the heavy lifting.
Supermarket checkout scanners are one of the most visible examples. For an extreme example, here's learning order picking in one minute [youtube.com] with the Kiva robotics system. The human is simply the handling arm for the mobile robots. All the planning and organizing is done by the computers, with a laser pointer indicating what to pick and where to put it. Even literacy is not necessary, other than the ability to read the quantity number and count. Kiva systems picked about 10% of online orders in 2010. This is the current expression of "Machines should think. People should work."
This is moving up the organization as software becomes standardized. In the past, many organizations wanted software customized to match their organization. But new organizations are more likely to customize their organization to match the available software, which already has a work flow designed into it. Consider "Salesforce.com".
The human interaction of sales is disappearing. Between online sales and call centers, retail sales skills are becoming unnecessary. Even sales skill can be computerized. Amazon gives you better advice on what books to buy than the sales people at Barnes and Noble.
That's the future. Peonage.
Re:Will education remain important? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the closest system to Manna [marshallbrain.com] I've seen yet. The only difference is that you don't get a bluetooth headset verbally telling you what to do, you get a laser pointer and a bunch of lights, which means you don't even need workers that speak English.
Robots finally are taking over (Score:3)
That (the Kiva system) is the closest system to Manna I've seen yet.
Yes. Computers take the orders, deal with the customer, accept the payments, keep track of the inventory, decide what gets stored where in the warehouse, order more products, and use mobile robots to move the shelves in the warehouse to the order picking humans. Humans merely reach where the computer's laser pointer tells them to reach, pick up the product out of the bin, and put it in an output bin where the computer's light tells them to put it. Vision-guided robots with articulated hands that can do bin
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You don't go to school to learn a specific skill. If that's all you want, you're going to burn up a lot money and find yourself back at square zero in 10 years.
You go to school to learn how to learn. And I don't mean that philosophically. I mean, you learn how to navigate the system. Because no matter what job you get out of college, unless you're a professional like a lawyer or doctor, in 2 or 5 or 10 years your job title is going to disappear, and you're going to be forced to learn a new set of skills. An
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Well, I'm going to college to get a degree in Education. Does that mean I'll be learning to learn how to teach other people to learn how to learn?
We First Need Responsible Parents... (Score:2)
While the world is progressing too fast, and technology is entering the educational domain quickly, I doubt that we are ready to throw away the current classroom system, and do so while maintaining proper education to kids.
The classroom will advance a lot. In South Korea and Taiwan, they are already planning to remove all textbooks by 2014, but of course, they are still maintaining the classroom model.
The thing is, education is still lacking, even in the best of countries. The blame goes mainly on some pare
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Of course it would be ideal that every parent educates their child perfectly, stimulate their reflections and show them the wonders of the world, but that is wishful thinking.
The reality is right now that most parents do not have the time nor the knowledge or the ability to educate their children.
Provided that we agree on this, the role of public education is to compensate this by giving all children an appropriat
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In what sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is as poorly defined question as I've seen in a long time.
Do you mean that a model of children being taught by adults would disappear? If so - it's been the only way humanity operated for the last few thousand years. I don't see how that can change.
Do you mean that children will no longer be educated in centralized school environment? If so - it's been the only way for the last few hundred years (for those who had any education, anyway). As long as education is perceived as necessary - that's the only way it could be.
Now, if we have drastic changes in economic system - may be. For example, we could admit that majority of world population does not have anything useful to contribute to economic process or production, and somehow find a way to distribute goods and services to them without demanding "labor". If so - education will no longer be required, at least for that part of population. However, the remainder still have to learn somehow - and I don't see any viable models other than "experienced teacher teaches a child". (Well, also direct upload of knowledge into brain - but that's pure Sci Fi for now)
technology needs to move to a trades based system (Score:2)
There is a lot in technology that is very hands on and lot that you can't learn in a class room now tech schools have there short falls but college CS is even more in need of change.
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My seventh grade teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
He told me that the education system was not about education--it was about socialization.
That mentality is not something that is going away any time soon.
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What's wrong with that mentality? You think society gets anywhere by throwing a bunch of books at students and walking away? Society is built on rules, even rules about how to learn and convey knowledge. For society, the rules are far more important than the technical knowledge and skills. For society, replacing the tech at the chemical plant is far more important than nurturing an Einstein.
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It is because we have poets and theoretical physicists and mathematicians that we are who we are today. Without this ability to nurture "useless" people we would be apes, eating, fighting, shitting and fucking. that's all we "need".
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Tell him he should be getting paid minimum wage then. It takes zero skill to oversee "socialization".
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In most countries teachers tend to be badly payed, which is why it's a carreer choice of lots of morons.
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In the US, teacher pay is far higher than the average worker. And that's before you account for the fact that teachers work many fewer days in a year and receive much, much higher non-monetary compensation (benefits) than the average worker.
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Most teachers start out with a Bachelors degree and within not too many years have the equivalent of a Masters because of continuing education. The teachers I've known spend time in the summers doing that continuing education at their own expense. Most of them spend far more than 40 hours a week on their work Rather than comparing their pay to the average worker compare it to others with their level of education. I'm not saying there aren't some bad teachers out there but most of them want to do their b
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"The national average wage index for 2010 is $41,673.83" --via http://www.ssa.gov/oact/COLA/AWI.html [ssa.gov]
"The average starting salary for teachers is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession." — is $67,000. --via http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html [nytimes.com]
"We found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience, a gap o
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Case in point for one of those teacher's students: "payed" instead of "paid".
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Which is very unfortunate. People are not learning to be social on the internet. They are learning the complete opposite.
Sure, some people are complete @sshats in real life, but I still have hope that most of the people that act like @ss-clowns on the internet do not behave that way during real, live, in-person social situations.
Re:Facebook abnormal social development (Score:2)
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I wonder if you meant socialization or socialism.
In the case of the former, this is very important, particularly for children. They learn to work with others, deal with beaurocracy, and deal with rules. Hopefully also learning that some rules are easier to break than others. :) So while children are nominally learning math and reading, what they're really supposed to be learning is how to function as adults.
In the case of the latter, well, public education is, by definition, socialism. While it is very
Missing option: The faster, the better. (Score:2)
Missing option: The faster, the better. Less bullies, less textbooks to lug around, less school buildings to construct and supply, and more learning to do.
I'd prefer, though, that the old way be replaced with a government-subsidized* "traveling teacher" model in which teachers spend a bit of time in each home and take the needed (preferably free-content) books (probably just a teacher edition and one or two student editions), then the students can go to a massive central lab and gym building (or maybe the
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I'd prefer, though, that the old way be replaced with a government-subsidized* "traveling teacher" model in which teachers spend a bit of time in each home and take the needed (preferably free-content) books (probably just a teacher edition and one or two student editions), then the students can go to a massive central lab and gym building (or maybe the current anti-terror laws can be relaxed and we can get chemistry sets?) to fill those vacua
There is no way that this could ever happen without several major cultural and economical changes to this country. Changes that would make your suggestion irrelevant. Take for example heavily rural and heavily urban areas. In some rural areas you could have 40-50 miles between houses, if not more. With an hour of travel time, a teacher could realistically only visit 2-3 homes and have enough time to actually teach anything, without having to spend 20+ hours a day teaching. Also, for many urban areas fa
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While I agree that some of those things are good, I think something that we have to watch out for is creating a system where the intelligent and wealthy never get any exposure to the lower rungs of society. Without this, it's too easy to take your experience with the upper echelon and falsely generalize it to the rest of society. Some people are naturally
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How is that an enigma? There are lots of things that are publicly funded but not publicly created. They are not, because they require experts to work on it.
Homescoling (Score:5, Funny)
Homscooling si the way of the future. Lok at me, I was homscoold
Re:Homescoling (Score:5, Funny)
That's odd, because you write as though you went to public school.
The current one is mostly obsolete (Score:2)
I was lucky to get in a high school where teachers were held to a high standard in terms of knowledge in their subjects, some of them were also professors at universities and almost all of them had some professional work outside of school. With the right kind of teachers, classroom education can be done pretty well. But most of my experiences with other schools and the tales I've heard of them suggest that this is very rare. Classroom education could be done well - but the current system is mostly obsolete.
Depends on what replaces it (Score:5, Insightful)
There's the issue of social interaction. I mean in meatspace, not FaceBook. Try replacing that with an online/homeschool/whatever model. Then there's the issue of adult supervision. Some kids' parents have to work and can't just leave them at home. And then there are hands-on activities that one just can't replicate online. Like band, sports, shop class, PE (sorry nerds, get off your fat, Cheeto-munching asses).
I do think that advances in online learning will make significant inroads into the traditional education system. There will be facilities with adult supervision. But it will be possible to 'import' the services of skilled instructors from far away (like into disadvantaged neighborhoods) to augment the resident staff. And there will be more (although not complete) autonomy, particularly with students identified as being self motivated. Others will still require oversight or they'll just end up smoking in the parking lot all day.
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I also wonder how one can learn how to read and write using just on-line classes, for example.
Where's the negative option? (Score:2)
Too broad (Score:2)
Khan Academy (Score:2)
As others have said, the question is too ambiguous even by normal /. poll standards. I'm interpreting it to mean a traditional 20-25:1 student to teacher ratio K-12 classroom (although we obviously have many broken districts where an insane ratio of as high as 60-70:1 exists).
At the moment, most teachers who are provided with laptops, electronic whiteboards, digital projectors and document cameras tend to use them as analogous replacements for - or supplemental to - traditional teaching methods.
The standar
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The past as a model for the future (Score:2)
The current system is about the same as 30 years ago. Since the boarding school system used 70 years ago is obsolete now, I am going to guess 50 years is about right for obsolescence.
If the misuse of the "first-world" expression... (Score:3)
Already is. (Score:3)
Already long obsolete (Score:2)
The real question is how long before we realize that it is obsolete?
My guess, within the decade.
Face-to-Face Time is Important (Score:3)
My daughter has a MA degree in education. Her master's project involved creating a Web-based class in treating an infectious disease for the continuing education that is required for physicians to keep their medical licenses. That class was actually put into use in the Canadian province where she lives. She is now recognized as an expert in distance learning over the Internet for adult education.
One part of her research investigated how well adults learn over the Web. She found that Web-based classes are far more effective if the students meet as a group with the instructor in a classroom about once a month. Moreover, she found that learning occurred not only during such classroom time but also during informal student get-together sessions immediately after the classroom time.
A few students who were participating in the Web-based class my daughter investigated could not travel to attend these classroom sessions and the after-class get-togethers. My daughter discovered that those isolated students suffered a small degradation in their learning. Apparently the interaction of students with each other enhances learning as does the group interaction of students with instructors.
Never say Never... (Score:2)
50 years ago ... (Score:2)
We thought that teachers would be supplanted by video conferencing. Before that, the radio. It didn't work either time.
Come to think of it, we've been trying to reform the classroom from a human angle too. That didn't work either.
Whether we want to admit to it or not, there is something about those archaic practices that works. It seems like it shouldn't, but it does since the best we can do is tweak it in rather minor ways. Perhaps that is telling us something about human nature, something we don't want to
Different people have different educational needs (Score:2)
This one single educational model for everyone was broken from the start. Mostly it stifles the natural urge to learn. Children are born ridiculously curious and if you feed that, they'll learn at a rate that embarrasses the current system. But, everyone learns differently: some learn best by watching something, others by hearing, others by experimenting. Some are big-picture thinkers, others are specialists.
I think the Socratic method is the ideal teaching system, because it encourages everyone on thei
Unsustainable =/= Obsolete (Score:2)
Second Tuesday after never (Score:2)
It already is - flipped classrooms (Score:2)
A school turned lessons around. Homework was to watch video's of the lecture. Class time was for doing what is normally considered "homework" problem assignments. The teacher was able to provide lots of 1 on 1 coaching to the students to solve the problems.
Students could go through the lectures at their own pace on their own time.
This is Kahn academy style applied to the classroom.
http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture/
Re: (Score:2)
I was going to post this exact issue. The best of the best will have kids watching their instruction on youtube and the average teacher will be turned into a homework monkey. A really hope my kid (1 year old now) gets a chance to learn in a flipped classroom.
Student diversity? (Score:2)
10 years ago it would have happened quicker (Score:2)
Because back then it looked like proprietary systems were finally a thing of the past. The web promised that one could actually write a computerized lesson, and you'd still be able to read it 50 years later, by having a bunch of files interpreted by your browser. Or also systems like Squeak which promised to integrate computers into education, by actually allowing the user to conduct thought experiments with the computer.
Then came DRM and ruined that dream. Now we have computers with deliberate anti-feature
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think most women would drop their jobs and stay at home given the choice for example.
A lot of Jobs suck, but most people find (some sort of) gratification by working.
If you gave me a hundred million dollars right now, I'd probably do crazy shit for a year, but then I'd go back to doing something useful, probably start a company and work.