Robert Shiller has a really bad idea

In the Times today:

Most people complete the majority of their formal education by their early 20s and expect to draw on it for the better part of a century. But a computer can learn in seconds most of the factual information that people get in high school and college, and there will be a great many generations of new computers and robots, improving at an exponential rate, before one long human lifetime has passed.

Two strains of thought seem to dominate the effort to deal with this problem. The first is that we teachers should define and provide to our students a certain kind of general, flexible, insight-bearing human learning that, we hope, cannot be replaced by computers. The second is that we need to make education more business-oriented, teaching about the real world and enabling a creative entrepreneurial process that, presumably, computers cannot duplicate. These two ideas are not necessarily in conflict.

What to Learn in College to Stay One Step Ahead of Computers by Robert J. Shiller | May 22, 2015

Number 1: General, flexible, insight-bearing human learning in the sense of "critical thinking" does not exist, and you would know this if you troubled yourself to dip into the relevant research in cognitive science before writing an op-ed for the New York Times.

Number 2: We already know what type of education produces general-flexible-insight-bearing-human-learning, and that is liberal education, precisely the kind of education Shiller is argues we should abandon because computers. Liberal education gives students a broad foundation in history, literature, science, math, and the social sciences, which they can then draw upon for a lifetime. I am living proof. I'm still using my Wellesley/Dartmouth education in psychology to write books about the brain. I learned nothing about the brain in college, but I can write about the brain today because I learned some fundamentals of biology, math, and psychology.

Number 3: New computers and robots don't invent themselves. If students don't study computer science in college and graduate school, there aren't going to be any new generations of computers and robots.

Speaking of which, Ed attended the Masters graduation ceremony at NYU last week. Every student receiving a degree in math was Asian, and all seemed to be Asian-Asian, not Asian American. Same with computer science.

Number 4: Business-oriented...real world...creative entrepreneurial process.... This is exactly what public schools have now moved on to. (In my district, Common Core has been swallowed whole by Tony Wagner, and I see the same process elsewhere.)

Why spend another four years, not to mention many thousands of dollars in tuition, room, and board, doing more of the same in college? Surely 13 years of pretend entrepreneurialism is sufficient.

Which reminds me.

C. took a marketing course this semester.

I was excited. I wanted to learn what there is to learn about marketing, too, and I figured I would.

Nope.

The course had no textbook, just case studies, which I never did manage to get my hands on. The class seems to have learned something about loss aversion, and also something about not dissing your initial contact at a hospital you're trying to sell major medical equipment to. Beyond that, nothing seems to have made much of an impression (which is not true with C.'s traditional liberal arts courses in history and literature).

As their final assignment for the course, students did a group project. C's group did theirs on tampons. (He was the only male in the group. So: tampons.)

The course did afford me one moment of joy.

C. came home and reported that the professor had given the class a marketing algorithm.

(Did I ever tell you that I taught C. to remember "algorithm" by having him recall "Al Gore has no rhythm"?)

The marketing class was mostly girls, and not one of them was having anything to do with the  algorithm. Not one. They wouldn't touch an algorithm with a 10-foot pole.

Not C.! Not only did C. deploy the algorithm--and with some alacrity, too--he was mildly scandalized by the fact that the rest of the class did not.

Also gratifying: C. seemed to have a pretty clear perception that There but for the grace of God go I. Sometimes having a mother who spends four years of her life reteaching the entire math curriculum at home comes in handy.

I've been savoring the moment ever since. My years of afterschooling didn't achieve what I wanted them to, but they did do what I needed them to. C. didn't make it to calculus (that's another whole story), but he is today a young adult who is on reasonably good terms with mathematics, and who will be able and willing to learn whatever math he needs to learn as an adult.


Other famous people with really bad ideas:
Kofi Annan
David Brooks
The Daily
Barry Eichengreen
Reed Hastings
President Obama
Larry Summers

Over and over

To recap, the list of people with really bad ideas thus far:

• Kofi Annan
• David Brooks
• The Daily
• Barry Eichengreen
• Reed Hastings
• President Obama
• Larry Summers
• Robert Shiller

It's annoying enough that policy elites have to have bad ideas, but why do they always have to have the same bad idea?

Kofi Annan has a really bad idea

re: One Laptop Per Child

"This is not just a matter of giving a laptop to each child, as if bestowing on them some magical charm. The magic lies within -- within each child, within each scientist, scholar, or just plain citizen in the making. This initiative is meant to bring it forth into the light of day."
—Kofi Annan

President Obama has a really bad idea

President Obama recently visited a school that "relies 100 percent on project-based learning." Not just visited, lauded.

Sigh.

Apparently the White House is launching a "High School Redesign" initiative, which appears to be supported by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Boards of Education:

Today's global economy requires new approaches to teaching and learning in America's high schools to foster problem solving and analysis, to support creativity and collaboration, and to connect student learning directly to the real world. Students learn best when they are engaged in complex projects and tasks aligned with their interests and when they work with others through practical examples and case studies that engage them in rigorous academics and in the application of knowledge.
Fact Sheet: Redesigning America's High Schools

Manor New Technology High School, a 100% project-based school, is cited as one of five Promising Examples of Redesigned High Schools.

From the President's speech:

• at Manor a history teacher might get together with a math teacher and develop a project about the impact of castles on world history and the engineering behind building castles
• or a group of students might be in charge of putting together a multimedia presentation about the moral dilemmas in literature as applied to WWII
• folks who use mathematical equations to build musical instruments
• tests on bungee jumping with rubber bands and weights
• robots that were being built
• all kinds of great stuff
• there's a lot of hands-on learning here
• part of what makes this place special is that there's all this integration, various subjects and actual projects, and young people doing and not just sitting there listening
• I could not be prouder of what's happening here at Manor

AND SEE:
Help Desk: Project-Based Learning
High School Redesign Gets Presidential Lift
Smartbrief on How to Make Project-Based Learning Work
Tips for Transitioning to Project-Based Learning
Manor New Technology High School

The founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

The good news

Barry Eichengreen has a really bad idea

From Barry Eichengreen, a historian of the Great Depression:

Indeed, one might question the very premise that, two decades from now, there will be textbooks as we know them. Today, introductory economics is taught using a textbook in which an eminent professor authoritatively bestows the conventional wisdom on his or her (typically, his) students. Knowledge, as encapsulated in the textbook and interpreted by the professor, is delivered from above.

This, of course, is also how newspapers traditionally delivered the news. Editors and publishers assembled and collated stories, and the newspaper that they produced was then delivered to the subscriber’s doorstep. But the last decade has seen a veritable revolution in the news business. News is now assembled and disseminated via Web sites, wikis, and the comment sections of blogs. News, in other words, is increasingly delivered from the bottom up. Rather than relying on editors, everyone is becoming their own news curator.

Something similar is likely to happen to textbooks, especially in economics,where everyone has an opinion and first-hand experience with the subject. Textbooks will be like wikis, with faculty adopters and students modifying text and contributing content. There still may be a role for the author as gatekeeper; but the textbook will know [sic] longer be the font of wisdom, and its writer will no longer control the table of contents.

The outcome will be messy. But the economics profession will also become more diverse and dynamic – and our children’s economics will be healthier as a result.

Our Children's Economics

Number one: if it's textbooks not being a source of wisdom you're after, we've got that now.

And, number two: I prefer fount.

Font of wisdom sounds dumb.

Other people who have really bad ideas

The Daily has a really bad idea

I love The Daily. Love, love, love. Read it every day.

That said, today's issue has an op-ed on the high cost of college that proposes, as a solution:

"Why not reduce undergraduate education to three years, while tacking an extra year onto high school?"^*
Josh Barro

Good God Almighty, as my father would have said.

Five years of public high school?

FIVE YEARS of Hunger Games in English and Core-Plus in math?

And here I was thinking everyone should skip senior year and go re-take algebra and English at their local community college instead.

(Is high school cheaper than community college? High school teachers here earn a great deal more than instructors in community colleges, but I don't know whether that's the case elsewhere.)

and see:
the founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

^* That's the pull. Full passage: Why not adopt the Quebec model and reduce undergraduate education to three years, while tacking an extra year onto high school? 

David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2

Ed is reading David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 1, and has just come to this part:

...Waronker says the academy has learned to get better control over students, and, on the day I visited, the school was well disciplined through the use of a bunch of subtle tricks.

For example, even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.

Ed: The children need walls, so why not give them real walls?

Right!

Right!

I hadn't quite thought of it that way!

These kids need walls, but the Harvard-ed-school / Columbia Teachers College / UFT grownups, in their collective wisdom, have declined to provide them with walls. And David Brooks approves!

Does David Brooks live in a house without walls?

Work in an office without walls?

I bet he doesn't!

Why do we have walls, anyway? Why were walls invented? Does David Brooks ask himself these questions before he writes a column extolling giant classrooms with no walls? If rooms with no walls are such an all-fire great idea, how come nobody lives in geodesic domes? Answer me that, David Brooks!

And while we're on the subject of making disadvantaged children imagine the walls they need but don't have, how about imaginary books?

Imaginary teachers?

Imaginary learning?

They've probably got all those things at the New American Academy. I wouldn't be surprised.

Ed says he visited an open classroom in California years ago. It was chaos, a din. No one could learn anything in that environment.

Of course, they hadn't hit on the idea of training the kids to pretend they were inside a room with walls.

P.S. I do like this column by David Brooks very much.

and see:
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea

"When you visit The New American Academy, an elementary school serving poor minority kids in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, you see big open rooms with 60 students and four teachers. The students are generally in three clumps in different areas working on different activities. The teachers, especially the master teacher who is floating between the clumps, are on the move, hovering over one student, then the next. It is less like a factory for learning and more like a postindustrial workshop, or even an extended family compound.

The teachers are not solitary. They are constantly interacting as an ensemble. Students can see them working together and learning from each other. The students are controlled less by uniform rules than by the constant informal nudges from the teachers all around.

[snip]

[The principal] revitalized one of the most violent junior high schools in the South Bronx and with the strong backing of both Klein and Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union, he was able to found his brainchild, The New American Academy.

[snip]

He has a grand theory to transform American education, which he developed with others at the Harvard School of Education. The American education model, he says, was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model^* designed to create docile subjects and factory workers. He wants schools to operate more like the networked collaborative world of today.

He talks fervently like a guerrilla leader up in the mountains with plans to take over the whole country."
The Relationship School By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 22, 2012

Yes, I just bet he does. Other people's children are always a tempting target of world conquest, it seems.

I wish David Brooks would stop writing about public schools. He doesn't seem to know anything about education per se, and what he thinks he knows about "the social animal" appears to have blinded him to seemingly every aspect of school apart from its social and moral elements. Learning, memory, knowledge, curriculum, the importance of deliberate practice: I've never seen David Brooks venture an opinion about the actual knowledge that does or does not get transmitted to the next generation inside a public school, or about the processes by which students do or do not acquire that knowledge.

As to classroom management, which Mary Damer once told me was the single most critical challenge facing any new teacher even if he's a Marine just coming out of the service (I agree), here is Brooks:

The New American Academy takes a different approach than the other exciting new education model, the “No Excuses” schools like Kipp Academy. New American is less structured. That was a problem at first, but Waronker says the academy has learned to get better control over students, and, on the day I visited, the school was well disciplined through the use of a bunch of subtle tricks.

For example, even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.

That, my friends, is what you call a red flag.

They put the kids in an open classroom (remember those?), chaos ensued, so they invented imaginary doorways inside the big open classroom: imaginary doorways the kids had to be trained to imagine and use. Instructional time was taken away from reading, writing, and arithmetic and redirected to teaching disadvantaged kids to pretend to walk through a doorway that isn't there -- and all because the folks at Harvard School of Education couldn't be bothered to read up on the history of the open classroom or on anything behaviorists have figured out in the past 50 years.

And Brooks approves.

The New American Academy has two big advantages as a reform model. First, instead of running against the education establishment, it grows out of it and is being embraced by the teachers’ unions and the education schools. If it works, it can spread faster.

Second, it does a tremendous job of nurturing relationships. Since people learn from people they love, education is fundamentally about the relationship between a teacher and student.

Union-slash-Teachers College charter public schools with imaginary doorways and no curriculum! Yes, that should spread like wildfire. Parents have been clamoring for no curriculum and no doorways  for years.

Brooks's own children have all attended Jewish day schools in the D.C. area.

and see:
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

Larry Summers has a really bad idea

In today's Times, Larry Summers weighs in on the question of what college students ought to learn in college.

Larry's answer: not too much, because the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog!

Larry bases his novel and highly original thesis (to wit: "factual mastery will become less and less important") on "what we now understand about how people learn."

(Does Harvard have node chairs, I wonder? Sounds like no.)

OK, I'm going to go look up calculus on the internet. I've always been interested in calculus, so now that I've received a mobile device for Christmas, I'm going to look it up. Then I'm going to collaborate with some friends who also looked up calculus on the internet to figure out what to do about the 21st century global world meltdown.

I'm going to do this because I've noticed that economists use calculus in their collaborative group papers.

[pause]

There is a reason why students must commit content to memory as opposed to looking it up on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog.

That reason has to do with working memory.

More anon.

What You (Really) Need to Know by Lawrence A. Summers

update: Why students have to memorize things
and see: Extremely fast learning & extended working memory

AND SEE:
The founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea
Barry Eichengreen has a really bad idea
President Obama has a really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

The Daily has a really bad idea

Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

As a physicist, educator and father of five, I can say that Messrs. Duncan and Hastings do not understand education or the role of computer and Internet technology in it. A well-thought-out textbook or a live classroom demonstration does a much better job of conveying understanding than anything that can be done with computer or Internet technology.

Anyone who has watched students using these technologies will recognize that they are distractions from the hard work of education.

Jonathan Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University
St. Louis

More technology isn't the answer to our educational needs
WSJ | September 24, 2011

Speaking of well-thought-out textbooks, one of the most oppressive aspects of "technology" in the schools is the replacement of textbooks by packets, which are fantastically difficult to keep track of, not just for the student but for the teacher, too. I speak as a creator of packets: I'm driving myself crazy.

It wasn't always thus. Back in the day, teachers ran off those damp, great-smelling, purple-print mimeographs. But mimeos were a limited production; teacher packeting didn't take off until the advent of the Xerox machine. I predict things are only going to get worse as people start buying personal scanners.

Add Google to photocopiers and scanners and you get all-packets-all-the-time. What a mess. Yet another rolling calamity on the horizon!

I tutor a boy in a neighboring town who doesn't appear to have a math textbook at all, and not because the school is using Terc. Last I heard, the school is using Terc, but the only book the teachers are actually using (it appears) is a test prep book from one of the test prep book companies. The teachers Xerox one-page review lessons out of the test prep book for the kids to collect in their binders. The paper-punch holes last a couple of weeks, then the sheets tear loose and slip out of the binder and down to the bottom of the backpack, where they live until the summer, when Mom goes through the crumpled wads of paper and tosses it all out.

Or, alternatively, when Mom goes through the crumpled wads of paper and discovers her child has failed two out of six units in math this year. On fractions! tofix to revise to fix torevise

Speaking of worksheets, does anyone know where to get a complete set of Prentice-Hall's fantastic grammar worksheets? (pdf file)

and see:
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

why students have to memorize things
extremely fast learning & extended working memory

The founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea

In last week's Wall Street Journal: A Digital Promise to Our Nation's Children.

Annotated.

Student achievement and educational attainment have stagnated in the U.S., and a host of our leading economic competitors are now out-educating us. [now?]

[snip]

Imagine, though, an online high-school physics course that uses videogame graphics power to teach atomic interactions, or a second-grade online math curriculum that automatically adapts to individual students' levels of knowledge.

[snip]

At its full potential, technology could personalize and accelerate instruction for students of all educational levels. [or not]

[snip]

Other countries are far ahead of us in creating 21st-century classrooms. South Korea, which has the highest college attainment rate in the world, will phase out textbooks and replace them with digital products by 2015 [note: products, not books]. Even Uruguay, a small country not known for leadership in technology, provides a computer for every student.

It is no secret that advances in educational technology have been hailed as breakthroughs in the past, only to disappoint. [true] Too often, the market for educational technology has been inefficient and fragmented. The nation's 14,000 school districts, more than a few of which have byzantine procurement systems, have been inefficient consumers and have failed to drive consistent demand. [we have to buy more technology?]

[snip]

To help remedy those gaps, the Department of Education is launching a unique public-private public-vendor partnership called Digital Promise.

Digital Promise is a bipartisan initiative that will be sustained primarily by the private sector [which will be sustained by a more efficient, less fragmented market and consistent demand] ... Federal seed money will fund the program's start-up, but it will be overseen by a board that includes business executives vendors—such as John Morgridge, the chairman emeritus of Cisco, and Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of Qualcomm—who will work with researchers, educators and other private-sector leaders vendors.

Digital Promise's aim is ambitious: to advance breakthrough technologies that transform teaching and learning in and out of the classroom, while creating a business environment that rewards innovation and entrepreneurship [for vendors].

Digital Promise can show leadership in areas such as helping build a more efficient market for [vendors of] education technology.


Arne Duncan and Reed Hastings
September 19, 2011 - WSJ
Mr. Duncan is the U.S. secretary of education. Mr. Hastings is the founder, chairman and CEO of Netflix and a former president of the California Board of Education.

One word: dismal.

and see:
speaking of technology and stagnant scores
oh brave new world!
codswallop, part 2
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

A really bad idea I hadn't heard of

In today's Wall Street Journal:

Assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, a Republican of Orange County, introduced a measure mandating that school textbooks of all subjects be authored by current or former New York schoolteachers. The bill memo says that such a law would help "provide equal and balanced learning opportunities for K-12 students" and cut down textbook costs by up to 80%.

No Elephant in the Room With These Laws
by Jacob Gershman
APRIL 25, 2011

A law that would actually make it illegal for New York school districts to adopt Singapore Math.

Or any textbook written by an actual mathematician.