The Problem and Future of Education

The Problem and Future of Education(arsalanbashir.com)

5 points by imwhimsical 12 years ago | 6 comments

Teachers here are required to get Master's degrees as well. I'm staring at my useless Master of Science in Teaching right now. And delay school starting? If we had decent parents at home as a rule, we wouldn't be in the predicament we are now. School needs to start even sooner to make up for the shortcomings of parents as it is. I can't tell you how many times I called home and--if I even got a response at all--was clearly given the message that the parent/guardian did not care about the child's education _at all_.

b_emery 12 years ago | |

I'll second this. Even more so, in a world of specialization, why not have well trained, enthusiastic, highly specialized teachers spending time with the kids from an early age? There has to be some balance, young kids want to be with their parents. My kids are in preschool 2-3 days a week. The teachers (not babysitters) are amazing at getting the kids engaged, developing fine and gross motor skills, and encouraging curiosity. I even learn how to be a better parent from them. My kids will start Kindergarden with a lead over kids who haven't had similar experience. So yeah, pre-K is the way to go, I'm glad to see attention being paid to this (locally at least).

yaddayadda 12 years ago |

It's interesting to ponder the fact that the South Korean education reform was led by United States researchers

"By the late 1960's America was again in crisis. Not only was the country involved in another war, but the nation's schools were unable to elicit the achievement from learners it anticipated. Grant Venn argued that since only 19% of first graders complete a bachelor or arts degree, that the current educational system is only serving the advantaged minority of schoolchildren. To counter this trend Robert Morgan proposed to conduct an experiment with an "organic curriculum" which would to incorporate into the educational system the best instructional practices identified through research. Accepted in 1967 the proposal by the US Office of Education, the project was dubbed "Educational Systems for the 1970's", or ES'70. Morgan engaged an array of experts in the field of learning, cognition, and instructional design to contribute to the project and carried out multiple experiments in a variety of settings. Of these was Leslie Briggs, who had demonstrated that an instructionally designed course could yield up to 2:1 increase over conventionally designed courses in terms of achievement, reduction in variance, and reduction of time-to-completion – this effect was four times that of the control group which received no training. In 1970, Morgan partnered with the Florida Research and Development Advisory Board to conduct a nation-wide educational reform project in South Korea. Faced with the task of increasing the achievement of learners while at the same time reducing the cost of schooling from $41.27 per student per year Morgan applied some of the same techniques as had been piloted in the ES'70 project and achieved striking results: an increase in student achievement, a more efficient organization of instructors and course content, an increased teacher to student ratio, a reduction in salary cost, and a reduction in yearly per student cost by $9.80." (http://edutech-05.blogspot.com/2008/03/brief-history-of-inst...)

As a result, many countries continue to send students to Florida State's Instructional Systems Design program.

It's sad that our bureaucracy prevents us from benefiting from our own research.

imwhimsical 12 years ago | |

Interesting perspective. Don't you think though, that this research will lead to an increase in efficiency and perhaps subsequently a decrease in operational costs of schools? If yes, then why would educators hesitate to implement the results of this research?

yaddayadda 12 years ago | | |

<personal opinion based on many conversations> Teachers and administrators think that such changes will lead to lower salaries or outright loss of jobs.</personal opinion>

As someone in the field, I can understand their concerns from a political perspective.

From a political perspective, if technological improvements can provide an education that is comparable to current standards then there will be politicians that argue we can drastically reduce our number of teachers and administrators and save taxpayers a lot of money.

From an educational perspective, even if we were to implement all of the technological solutions that we could there will still be plenty of need for teachers. Such implementations would change the role of teachers, but not eliminate the need for them. The closest cases of such changes are "flipped classrooms". Knewton has an infographic that covers the basics - http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/

mathattack 12 years ago | |

It's a parallel to Japanese quality being led by American educators. Deming and Juran taught the quality control techniques that enabled the Japanese to beat the American auto companies.