Thursday, January 2, 2014

11. EDUCATION - 2013

11.1 Does investment in education lead to economic growth?
11.2 Capitalists for Preschool
11.3 When 'stress reduction' in schools fuels frustration
11.4 Education
11.5 Education ... The debate continues 

11.6 Classical liberal arts education
11.7 Physical, social, emotional and cognitive development of babies
11.8 As Education Declines, So Does Civic Culture
11.9 Midday naps help preschoolers learn 
11.10 Turning Education Upside Down


-------------
11.1  Does investment in education lead to economic growth? (5/2/2013)


Similarly, in the 20th century, in places like China, South Korea and India, the economic boom — and the policies that create it — always come first while the investments in education come later.

... Japan is now well into its third "lost decade." Over the years, it has poured money into "stimulative" infrastructure projects that have yet to stimulate and protected industries that have steadily lost their competitive edge. Economic growth has averaged less than 1% since 2000, while government debt is now more than twice its GDP. If a highly educated workforce, support for allegedly cutting-edge industries and lavish spending on infrastructure was the recipe for economic growth (and if debt didn't matter), Japan would be doing great.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg-education-growth-20130205,0,5140545.column
................

The reasoning appears counter-intuitive, but true. A corollary would be, in a booming economy you can afford to teach pupils all kinds of fancy stuff. In a depressed economy you may have teach pupils more basic survival techniques. (Am I getting it wrong?)

Selvaraj


11.2  Capitalists for Preschool (3/3/2013)

 Although some studies suggest that the positive impact decreases over time, this is mainly attributable to differences in the quality of preschool and of the schooling that follows — not a deficiency in preschool itself.
-----------------
Most people in earlier generations did not attend preschool. Now the situation is different: 

1. With both parents working, and lack of support from grandparents, there may be no other option.
2. In our time we had a healthy outdoor life. No longer possible, as you will risk getting run over by the modern 'totem pole', the motor car.
3. In large extended families older children looked after younger ones.

... I doubt however that the brain (which grows rapidly at this age) will be sharpened by preschool. The brain will be sharpened by a wider exposure and experience, and by exposure to Nature (the most complex of all entities). Most of the pre second world war generation, who built USA, would not have had pre-schooling and many would have come from rural backgrounds. 

Selvaraj


11.3  When 'stress reduction' in schools fuels frustration  (21/7/2013)
 
Taking clue from the CBSE, state boards of school education also went on a spree of ‘give them more marks’. The chairperson of a state board enlightened me: “When the CBSE is so liberal, why should my students be sufferers? We shall be more liberal than the CBSE in our evaluation pattern.” One could witness this political dimension on huge billboards put up by the Delhi government, claiming that exam success in 2013 was 99.4 per cent compared to 50 per cent when the rival political party headed the government. There are reports that specific instructions were given to teachers to show ‘good results’. Many teachers interpreted it as providing ‘support’ to examinees. Widespread prevalence of unfair practices during board examinations in large number of schools in most of the states is a stark reality.


11.4  Education (12/8/2013)

The standard for education used to be literacy — competence in math, English, geography, history, civics, and other factual knowledge. We didn’t need a test or a battery of tests to prove the result. Americans excelled in nearly everything when parents taught — or directed and chose the education — of their children.
Indeed, most children used to be home educated in America. Public/government/state funded and controlled education is a relatively recent development, and the outcomes are only now really being understood by its victims — the parents and students of these schools.
FAMOUS HOME SCHOOLERS
Scientists
·  George Washington Carver
·  Pierre Curie
·  Albert Einstein
·  Michael Faraday - electrochemist
·  Oliver Heaviside - physicist and electromagnetism researcher
·  T.H. Huxley
·  Blaise Pascal
·  Booker T. Washington
·  Erik Demaine - Popular Science Mag: One of the Most Brilliant Scientists in America


11.5  Education .. The debate continues (25/8/2013)

In the same way that an English degree suggests a number of careers rather than simply "novelist", an art degree should help you channel your creativity into a variety of weird and rewarding jobs. Rather than art school, it should be called a college of creativity. But, you know, less embarrassing.

.. This isn't just an art school thing, this is an education in 2013 thing – this is a thing that should maybe be discussed at clearing time, to widen 18-year-olds' choices. I met people with the most incredible, creative brains who have resigned themselves now to a life cold-calling strangers about their broadband providers. The benefit to this is that, as it's unlikely they'll pay off their student loans after 30 years, my peers' debts will probably be wiped. The downside? Their future is still hanging, waiting to drop.


--------------------------------

The comments to the main article are interesting. On the whole however the discussion does not tackle the main issues.

- The Americans want to improve their education system so that they can compete with everyone else economically. From the American point of view (they are the thought leaders), that's all that education needs to do.
- The comments do not address the issue, that with all their education, the students finally find employment in repetitive and monotonous software jobs (which pay higher wages).
- The issue that computerisation and automation are reducing the need for flesh and blood workers is not addressed.

WHAT EDUCATION NEEDS TO ADDRESS:

1. Create a body of highly qualified individuals who with their knowledge will be able to provide solutions to our common global problems. 
2. Provide an enlightened education so that people are more aware of their responsibilities than their rights. 
3. Everyone needs a work environment that healthy and which does not dull the senses.
(We cannot have a good educational system unless we have worthwhile objectives.)

The nature of the problem, and our current realities are such that in my view the work environment we aim for should have a duality, where:

1. We spend half our time in a conventional work environment.
2. Spend the other half in a socially motivated work environment. 

Selvaraj


11.6  Classical liberal arts education (2/9/2013)

The reality is that the new Common Core standards for reading, writing, and arithmetic are just too high for many minority children who have hitherto been reared on lenient and progressive education policies that inherently deride the virtues that cultivate well-trained minds. One cannot expect children who are encouraged to read books like Captain Underpants and the Wimpy Kids Diary well into middle school, and who at worst spend their unsupervised free time playing ultra-violent video games while listening to the lyrics of rappers like A$AP, to comprehend the writings of nineteenth century American authors such as Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, or Booker T. Washington. This is a bit of what the CCSS advocates. However, it is simply delusional.    

... In time, though, mainstream America will realize that the applause for this type of pedagogy was a mistake. The great thinkers of western civilization, from St. Augustine to Sir Isaac Newton, were not reared on a voc-tech or S.T.E.M. paradigm. They were reared on the classical liberal arts. America does not need any more students who are being educated to become socially acceptable imitators. We need students who are destined to become broad thinking innovators.
A classical liberal arts education is broad-based; and by no means does it exclude the study of mathematics or the sciences. The liberal arts continue to be based in large part on a system of study that began in classical antiquity, was continued by the Judeo- Christians of medieval Europe, and passed down to the Christian humanists and enlightenment thinkers through the eighteenth century. The seven liberal arts are grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The entire intellectual history of western civilization is rooted in the integrated study of these "freedom arts."  It was the careful consideration of these arts that led our forebears to devise the very charters that protect the rights of those who seek to deny so many down-trodden American children the type of restorative education that has the potential to liberate them from their dismal social and economic situations. 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/leading_from_behind_in_urban_education.html#ixzz2dk1poz2J 
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

11.7  Physical, social, emotional and cognitive development of babies (12/9/2013)

The role of play is being down-valued in England's nurseries. For many children today, nursery education provides their only opportunity for the active, creative and outdoor play which is recognised by psychologists as vital for physical, social, emotional and cognitive development. However, two key qualifications currently being drawn up for nursery teachers and child carers no longer require training in how children learn through play. Indeed current policy suggestions would mean that the tests and targets which dominate primary education will soon be foisted upon four-year-olds.

----------------------

Add to this the fact that our engineers have created an environment where it is impossible for a child to grow up in a healthy way. The design of our environment is car centric not child centric.

(Redesign Cities, Towns and Villages so that core areas of 1 Km x 0.5 Km exclude cars. It is quite simple to rezone existing layouts. Make separate provisions for emergency services.)

Selvaraj

11.8  As Education Declines, So Does Civic Culture  (18/9/2013)

Many employers can attest, as college instructors will too if they're being frank, that many college graduates can barely construct a coherent paragraph and many have precious little knowledge of the world—the natural world, the social world, the historical world, or the cultural world. That is a tragedy for the graduates, but also for society: Civic life suffers when people have severely limited knowledge of the world to bring to political or moral discussions.

---------------------
At least 5% of the population should be widely read. Intellectual development when one reads is very different from that obtained by watching videos. 

The television is a technological marvel but an intellectual disaster. Even pornography if it is in the form of books will enhance your language skills; in the visual form .......?

Selvaraj

11.9  Midday naps help preschoolers learn  (24/9/2013)

NEW YORK — Any parent knows that a daytime nap can help keep preschoolers from getting cranky. Now a small study suggests that it helps them learn, too.
The lesson for grown-ups: Don't cut out the naps if you try to cram more learning activities into a preschooler's day, say researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/23/midday-naps-preschoolers-learning/2856591/

----------------
Kindergartens should have provision for children to lie down. In India mats should be sufficient. This principle applies not only for children, but also for adults. There was a time when people used to have a siesta. An ideal workplace of the future I envision, will have provision for a worker to lie down for say half an hour and recoup. Slumping in a chair is not the way to relax.
Sleep will help to:
1) Remove toxins from the body.
2) Help to reconnect with the subconscious - essential for improved physical and mental performance: http://humanposure-subconsciousmind.blogspot.in/
Selvaraj
---------------------------------------------------
Power naps of less than 30 minutes—even those as brief as 6 and 10 minutes—restore wakefulness and promote performance and learning.[3][4] A University of Düsseldorf study found superior memory recall once a person had reached 6 minutes of sleep, suggesting that the onset of sleep may initiate active memory processes of consolidation which—once triggered—remains effective even if sleep is terminated.[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_nap

The siesta habit has recently been associated with a 37 percent reduction in coronary mortality, possibly due to reduced cardiovascular stress mediated by daytime sleep (Naska et al., 2007).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta


11.10  Turning Education Upside Down (10/10/2013)

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/turning-education-upside-down/

No comments:

Post a Comment