school

Five ideas to change the way you see the world

1. The idea of emergence
2. There are no secrets to success
3. School is stupid
4. There’s no such thing as a genius
5. There’s no such thing as a teenager

Here are my top five worldview convictions; ideas that I was not raised believing but came to accept through thought, observation, and communication with others.  In a sense, they are like epiphanies; for each idea there was a time I had either no idea about it or believed the opposite.  And all of them are subjects of debate; for each one of them there are plenty of people out there who vehemently disagree with my position.

The books listed are simply the best ones I’ve read on the subject.  Although certain books have certainly helped convince me of some of these things, please do not think that I believe anything blindly; there are plenty of authors I disagree with.  A book’s contents and ideas are always subject to my own observations, analysis, and judgment.

1. The idea of emergence

OK, this first one isn’t necessarily that anti-intuitive, but it’s something a lot of people still seem to have trouble understanding or accepting.

There are still ongoing debates about how exactly to define this idea of emergence, but I’ll define it like this: an emergent property is a large scale property that emerges from a bunch of small, usually simple, interactions on a small scale.

A simple example might be a rush hour traffic jam.  A bunch of people get off work and drive home at the same time.  A traffic jam emerges from a bunch of individual decisions to drive at that specific time.  A traffic jam itself is a collection of cars; one car is not traffic jam, and a traffic jam can be made up of different cars at different times.

A famous example is John Conway’s Game of Life.  Conway made a grid and came up with a few simple “breeding” rules.  A square on the grid is either living or dead, on or off.  Then the player (or, more efficiently, a computer) uses the breeding rules for each square to determine if it would be living or dead in the next iteration (or generation).  Might seem boring, but playing around with it for a while, one can easily see patterns emerge, structures that cycle through patterns, structures that cycle but move around, structures that build other structures, etc.  All from a few simple rules applied to a bunch of grid squares.  The point is that they all interact with each other, and the patterns emerge.

Another example would be life itself, and nature’s use of DNA.  When combined with the machinery of a living cell (life doesn’t just pop up around a DNA strand all by itself), DNA contains instructions on what proteins to create.  From a bunch of small physical chemical interactions, a body grows.  Hands, brains, eyes, teeth, hair, etc.  It’s all encoded in the DNA, and it all emerges with trillions of tiny chemical interactions.  It’s important to understand that a physical body is the outcome of these interactions; though it’s encoded in the DNA, it’s not actually in the DNA.  Similarly, a music file encoded in a computer is just a long string of 0’s and 1’s, but it’s not music until this sequence is interpreted by a computer, played back through speakers, and ultimately heard by ears.  We can’t just look at the string of 0’s and 1’s and know how the music would sound.

One reason emergence can be hard to grasp or agree with, especially in the context of living systems, is that we humans tend to perceive intent, even when there’s no intent.  (There might be a more technical word for this problem, but I don’t know it.)

When we seek a reason for an event (or for the existence of something), we can seek two sorts of answers: intent to be fulfilled (a purpose), or a causal reason (cause and effect).  For example, if we ask “Why does the heart pump blood?” we can give two sorts of answers: an intent to be fulfilled (“The heart pumps blood to provide the rest of the body with supplies that travel through the blood”), or a causal reason (“The heart pumps blood because the brain sends a signal to it and its muscles contract”).  We can understand both these answers, but one is wrong: the heart has no consciousness; it doesn’t care what the rest of the body needs; it doesn’t do anything on purpose.  So why is it so natural for us to give the heart the human ability of having intent?

We can simulate similar systems in which emergent properties arise on a computer using genetic algorithms.  For example, we can program a robot to roll through a maze based on simple rules.  But we can also program the robot to figure out those rules on its own.  When it’s done, the rules might seem intelligent to us, as if the robot thought about his problem and solved it with intent to solve.  But really it’s just all the outcome of the simple rule-making rules of our program. (Unless, of course, we have succeeded in programming consciousness!)

If you think about genetic algorithms, it’s not really an amazing feat.  You just have the program come up with a bunch of random rule sets, test them, and weed out that ones that don’t produce the results you want.

The same thing happens in real life.  If the rules of making a life form (as dictated by the DNA) cause the life form to die before it breeds, its rules won’t be passed on.  Duh.  So in the end all we get are rules that “passed the tests.”

Although we do not yet know the exact science of it, emergence makes it quite plausible that God is not needed to explain the emergence of life on earth, or human life specifically.  This is enough to lead some people to atheism.  But to me it seems if your belief in God is dependent on ignorance regarding the origins of life, your faith is rather thin to begin with.  This really isn’t any sort of proof that God doesn’t exist.

There are quite a few books on this subject, and many more that relate to it, or utilize it in some way.  The two best books I have read on this subject are Emergence: From Chaos To Order by John H. Holland and Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell.  (Complexity: A Guided Tour is really about the subject of complexity, obviously, but the concept of emergence is an important part of it.)

2. There are no secrets to success

If you understand the idea of emergence, this isn’t a big leap of logic: success, at least in terms of fame and money, is an emergent property.  The fame of a person or a person’s work emerges from thousands, or millions, or billions of human interactions that take place each day.

This is anti-intuitive because it’s just too complex to understand.  When something becomes popular, we want to know why, and we feel that we should have the ability to know.  So we analyze the work of art (and the perhaps the traits of the culture that made it popular) and try to pinpoint what factors must’ve made it popular.  We try to reverse engineer its success.

Ultimately, though, the system is just too complex.  There is no way to guarantee success.  There are no key factors.

And yet so many people want to analyze and analyze and analyze.  Why?

OK, this might not actually be very anti-intuitive to a lot of people.  But it implies something else, something that might be more anti-intuitive.  Eventual popularity is not inherent in anything, be it a person or a work of art or whatever.

What I mean by this is that people sometimes look at famous things and take it as an objective measurement of greatness, as if there’s something undetectable but inherent in the work that makes it have such widespread appeal.  However, by feeding into this, they are unknowingly becoming a part of the social system that makes the object famous in the first place.  For example, it’s easy to look at the popularity of Mozart’s music and claim that it’s popular because genius is simply inherent in it, even though we can’t identify what factors make it so genius.

This sort of thought has pervaded through cultures for centuries, and it’s wrong; it’s a complete misunderstanding of what exactly popularity is and how it comes about.  That is, more specifically, it’s a wrong guess about how it comes about.

You’ll notice that many of these ideas simply involve giving different, sometimes anti-intuitive (but more correct!), answers to the question “why?”

The best book about this sort of thing is The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  OK, it’s not exactly just about objective greatness and popularity in art; it deals with the bigger problem of induction in general.  But the two subjects are very related.

3. School is stupid

This really seems to get people riled up for some reason, I suppose because the idea of school being necessary is so embedded in our culture; we grew up with it and simply can’t imagine (perhaps even fear) a world without it.  It’s odd, because when people are young students, they usually fully agree that school is stupid.  But for some reason, as they get older, they change their minds.  Usually they’ll defend the necessity of school when they are no longer required to go themselves, as if that’s suddenly a more objective position from which to judge it?

Notice that I did not claim that education was stupid.  And I don’t doubt that school is about education; it just has an extremely inefficient and overall harmful way of educating.

There are quite a few reasons formal schooling is dumb, and I won’t go over all of them here (there are books on the subject, after all), but I’ll mention the big ones.

The biggest problem with school is the material taught.  School systems simply want to teach too much.  This comes from a misunderstanding of intelligence.  People seem to think (and I’ve blogged about this before if this is sounding familiar) that intelligence is merely about knowing stuff, and the more you know the better.  I suppose it’s a bit like the idea behind hoarding—it’s better to just keep everything you can in case you need to use it someday.  But hoarding makes it difficult to live, difficult to have room for the stuff you want later, etc.  True, memory doesn’t work quite like that, but the point should be obvious: knowledge that you don’t use is useless.  The time and effort spent acquiring it is wasted.

And people already know this, otherwise students would be taught to memorize phone books.  Some knowledge is clearly useless; it’s not like the concept of useless knowledge is simply foreign to educators.  They’re just bad at figuring out which knowledge is useful and which isn’t.  In fact, usually someone figures it out for them, and they’d rather not think about it or question it.  How many times is a teacher asked “When will I ever use this?” and the teacher replies something like “You’ll use it on the test!” or “You’ll use it on your homework!”?  It’s easy to say that a teacher who utters such words should be immediately fired, but the intellectual crime he is committing and that instance probably deserves worse.

Figuring out what knowledge is useful and what isn’t shouldn’t be a difficult feat, nor should it be up to the government or any collective institution to determine.  It’s very simple, you just ask yourself: will I use this knowledge?  If you are interested in the knowledge, then yes, of course, it’s automatically useful because it gives you pleasure.  If you need the knowledge to get something you want (like a job), then yes, it’s useful; you are going to use it to get something.  If it does not fit one of those categories, it is, at the moment, useless.  What if it will be useful later?  Then learn later!  That’s why people write books.  Books store knowledge.  You don’t have to know it until you need it!  Amazing, huh?!

But you might protest: “How will I know whether or not I need a piece of knowledge until I know it?”  Easy: if you find yourself asking yourself a question, then you need more knowledge.  You could be asking yourself a question because you’re just curious (“What’s the population of the USA?”), or you could have a specific goal in mind (“How do I play the piano?” or “Can I make this work I have to do easier somehow?”).

Then you must search for the answer.  It is (or should be) up to you to find it; you can’t (or shouldn’t) just sit back and hope someone will come along and tell you.

Sometimes the answer can be found through a simple search query in Google.  Sometimes you want a deeper understanding that a book can provide.  Sometimes you might need several books.  Sometimes you might be interested in talking to a professional.  Sometimes taking a well-designed school course in the subject is appropriate.

Sometimes no one really knows the answer, and you must figure out how to find it yourself (that’s why people do experiments) or get used to the disappointment of ignorance.  (We’ll never know how many hairs were on Thomas Jefferson’s head.  Too bad for us.)

The point is that you know beforehand that there’s some sort of knowledge you want to gain, and then you seek it.

You probably realize that public schools have the process almost completely backwards.  They teach (or try to teach) students things before the student has any use for them.  This is completely counterproductive.

There is only one case in which this is justified, and that is in the teaching of young children.  Children are too inexperienced to understand what they want to learn, or why they need to learn certain things.  Some things are hard to learn, and they might naturally resist.  Most parents would agree that children need to learn to use the toilet, to pack up their toys, to not throw things at the wall, to not hit their siblings, to eat their vegetables, to tie their shoes, to dress themselves, to act politely, to read, etc.  Adults naturally need to guide their children in learning these things, even if the children claim they don’t want to learn.

This is not the case with many subjects taught in school.  There is no reason to force-teach calculus, the phases of the moon, the date George Washington died, how to calculate torque, the names of the big rivers in California, etc.

How do adults figure out what should be force-taught and what doesn’t need to be?  Again, the answer is simple: do most adults use the knowledge on an everyday basis?  If not, then force-teaching anybody such knowledge is a waste of time.  (Note that just because most adults know a piece of knowledge does not make it useful.  Most adults could know that the USA has fifty states, but that does not imply that children need to be taught that specifically.  It’s not useful information; it’s just common sense trivia.  As with all common sense trivia, children will naturally pick it up eventually.)

(Sometimes people say: “I have very eclectic interests.  Sometimes I just read random books without searching for any specific answer.”  Well, that’s great; go for it.  But that’s not the same as subjecting yourself to a strict classroom setting, where tuition is paid, schedules are followed and tests and grades are given. In other words, this doesn’t justify anything; it’s irrelevant to the argument I’m making.)

So, from what I can tell, that is the biggest problem of our (the USA’s) current public education system.  I’ve met a lot of people who agree that public schools have problems, but they completely miss this point.  They argue for fewer grades, less work, better teachers, smaller classrooms, etc., but they uphold the belief that so much knowledge should be force-taught in the first place.  As long as so much is force-taught, schools will be flawed and wasteful.  You can’t solve any other problem without first answering: why are we teaching this in the first place?

The other problems do include the grading system.  While it provides numerical assessment, it is wrongly used as a motivator (“If you don’t do this, you’ll get a bad grade!”), punisher (“You got a low grade, so you must do more work!” or “You got a low grade, so no TV for a week!”), and comparing system (“Sean had the highest grade in the class, so he is the best!  No one else is as good as him!”).  All of these hinder the actual act of learning.  There are other ways to assess educational progress.  Note that if the knowledge is useless in the first place and the student knows it, there is no honest way to motivate the student to learn it.  This is an example why solving these smaller problems will not help if the previously mentioned bigger problem is not dealt with first.

Another problem is that schools are thought of as factories (they are “systems” after all).  Students go in ignorant and come out smart.  But in structuring it like a factory, students are treated like prisoners: they are split apart by age (what purpose does that serve?), they are required to sit as long as they are told, they need permission to use the bathroom, they all must work at a similar pace, they are all taught the same material at the same time, etc.

There are problems with teachers: they are underpaid (people who might be good teachers don’t become them), they cannot be fired easily, and they sometimes aren’t very good.

Creativity is not cultivated as well as it could be; it is sometimes considered a detriment.  Music programs are sometimes cut before math programs, for example.  Why is math considered inherently more important?

There are probably books on this, but I actually haven’t read any.  As I’ve said before, people, including authors, usually discuss the smaller problems, but don’t see or agree with the bigger one.

4. There is no such thing as a genius

There is such thing as one person having more skill than another.  However, the notion of “genius” comes from a human misunderstanding of where that skill comes from.  Sometimes a skill seems to come so easily to another person that we simply can’t attribute it to practice; therefore, we suppose, it must be innate, it must come from DNA, it must be a gift from God.

Sometimes intellectual fame is also considered an inevitable product of genius.  Mozart, Beethoven, Einstein, Newton, Edison, etc. are considered famous because their minds were special and the rest of the world just naturally recognized it.

But, as discussed in idea #2, their (and their works’) fame (“success”) is actually the product of our complex social interaction system.  That is, it’s an emergent property.  Mozart was not special.  Newton was not special.  Edison was not special.  Yes, they’re special in the sense that they’re famous, but they never had greater intellectual potential than anyone else.  Their status of fame is the result of both their hard work and luck. (By “luck” I don’t mean pure random chance; I simply mean it is an emergent property, a product of a system that is otherwise far too complex for us to understand.)

You, yes you, whoever you are, can play the piano and compose symphonies as well as Mozart.  But you have to put in the time, and a lot of it.  But it’s not beyond your mental abilities (though perhaps it’s beyond your time resources).  You can understand the theory of relativity, you can study quantum mechanics, you can paint a beautiful sunrise.  But you’ve got to put in a lot work and practice.  Sometimes it does seem like a skill comes to some people faster than others, but no one is ever just born with it.

Again, hard work won’t guarantee fame.  Since Mozart’s famous touring-as-a-prodigy childhood, there have been plenty of other parents of young pianists seeking the same kind of fame.  But fame was not just the product of Mozart’s skill; it was an emergent property. Mozart got lucky, not just in his time, but throughout history (at least to this day; nobody knows what people hundreds of years from now will think).

Making a breakthrough scientific discovery is a bit trickier.  Again, it comes down to luck.  We might like to think it comes down to natural genius, but once you come up with your discovery, it’s not as if you’ll be the only one who’ll ever be able to understand it (if that were the case, your discovery would be useless anyway).  It might take hard work to arrive at your theory, but there’s nothing you can do innately to guarantee that you make the discovery first.

There are a few books on this subject, such as The Genius in All of Us: New Insights into Genetics, Talent, and IQ by David Shenk and The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

5. There is no such thing as a teenager

Similar to the notion of a genius, a teenager is a purely cultural idea that emerged from a purely cultural way of raising children.  Biologically, after puberty, humans are ready to go out on their own and breed.  For some reason, culturally, we don’t accept this.  We might even think of it as disgusting and wrong for a thirteen or fourteen year old to get pregnant.  But that’s what the body is designed to do.  (Or perhaps I should say that that’s how the nature of the body emerged.) The reason it seems disgusting and wrong is cultural; we were raised in a culture that thinks of it as wrong and disgusting, so we accept the belief ourselves.

What is the basis for it?

Well, you could argue that teenagers are unruly and irresponsible.  But is it really biology that makes them that way?  I think yes and no; that is, biology indirectly makes them that way, and would make adults that way too if they were put in similar environments.  Biologically and psychologically teenagers are ready to take the reins of adulthood.  But they are not given those reins.  Parents, teachers, and lawmakers deny teenagers the reins for several more years, sometimes up to a decade longer than they should.  They exert control, sometimes giving them only more adult responsibilities without adult privileges.

The consequences of this should be apparent and predictable, and they’re exactly what we observe: teenagers resist.

Duh.

But then society makes the mistake of guessing that a teen’s troubles are due directly to biology and psychology; they conclude the teenager is in fact not ready to be treated like an adult, and the vicious cycle continues.

Does that mean parents of teenagers are bad?  Well, I wouldn’t say they’re evil.  After all, the belief is cultural; it’s natural and understandable that most parents would accept the common societal views of teenagerhood.  But they’re still wrong, and usually end up doing more harm than good.

Unfortunately this wrongness is even embedded in national law, so even if a parent wanted to treat their teenagers more like adults, there would be still be lawful limits on just how many privileges the teenagers could be given.

The best book I’ve read dealing with this subject is The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen by Robert Epstein.  However, there are still scientific papers and articles on the differences between the teenage brain and the adult brain that try to explain teenage rebellion, so this is still quite a controversial subject.

Conclusion

I hope that was interesting to some people out there!  I continue to see these ideas all over the place.  Emergence is everywhere and helps shape our world in complex (sometimes mysterious) ways.  The problem of induction leads people to false knowledge and a misunderstanding of the nature of fame and success.  Schools continue to waste so much time and effort, and the people trying to make it better often miss its main problem.  The cultural notion of genius encourages people to underestimate their own true abilities.  And what people think about teenagers leads to vicious endless cycles of strained relationships.

I was considering adding more ideas, such as compatibilism (the notion that free will and determinism are compatible) and Ayn Rand’s ideas on selfishness (I do recommend The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to everyone), but they didn’t quite make the cut.  Maybe next time.

I’m tempted to think some people get too satisfied with their convictions; they naturally resist any sort of idea that might change how they see the world. I suppose they’re afraid that if they change their outlook, it implies they’re stupid. But the opposite is true. No one is born with perfect knowledge. In fact, you’re really not born with very much knowledge at all. Most of your current knowledge came from somewhere. Your convictions should be changing as you grow older. I’m not saying they have to completely reverse every few years (that would be awful and probably would imply your stupidity), I’m simply saying one should be open and honest with himself in his judgments. Changing your mind about something is not a sign of stupidity.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Freedom to Learn by Peter Gray

I recently came across this blog: Freedom to Learn by Peter Gray.

There are a bunch of interesting articles there, and I haven’t read them all. But I really appreciate some of them; they echo what I’ve been saying all along, and it’s always nice to feed my confirmation bias.

In one article, Gray writes:

We can use all the euphemisms we want, but the literal truth is that schools, as they generally exist in the United States and other modern countries, are prisons. Human beings within a certain age range (most commonly 6 to 16) are required by law to spend a good portion of their time there, and while there they are told what they must do, and the orders are generally enforced. They have no or very little voice in forming the rules they must follow. A prison–according to the common, general definition–is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty.

I recently talked to a teacher who was complaining about the things the school system made teachers do, and I asked: “Then why do you do it?” The answer was something like: “For the hope it might get better.” I said: “That’s pathetic!” but at least it wasn’t some BS about how much the teacher loved kids and knowledge and making a difference, etc. Some teachers will make a huge point of their pure intentions, as if that somehow absolves them of any wrongdoing. The truth, however, is probably quite apparent to most of us, it’s just considered rude to talk about: most teachers became teachers because they didn’t know what else to do.

I can certainly sympathize with the plight of getting out of college and not finding any jobs available that I would actually want. But becoming a teacher, especially if you have serious disagreements about how the education institution does things, seems pretty dumb to me. What should you do instead? I must admit, I’m not sure; not going to college in the first place might help.

But don’t you think an excellent way to make our education systems change would be to help them experience a shortage of teachers? I can’t imagine you being able to change too much from the inside, after you join a labor union which doesn’t agree with your position.

In another post, Gray responds to Daniel T. Willingham’s book Why Don’t Students Like School?, a book I blogged a bit about on my Book Quotes blog. Gray writes:

Willingham’s thesis is that students don’t like school because their teachers don’t have a full understanding of certain cognitive principles and therefore don’t teach as well as they could. They don’t present material in ways that appeal best to students’ minds. Presumably, if teachers followed Willingham’s advice and used the latest information cognitive science has to offer about how the mind works, students would love school.

Talk about avoiding the elephant in the room!

Ask any schoolchild why they don’t like school and they’ll tell you. “School is prison.” They may not use those words, because they’re too polite, or maybe they’ve already been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can’t be prison. But decipher their words and the translation generally is, “School is prison.”

See? I told you so.

OK, most of Gray’s articles are not about schools being prison, but he does bring up the notion of “freedom” a lot from a psychological point of view, from the idea that a sense of freedom is an innate psychological desire for all humans, including children. And it seems right to me; I certainly have a sense of freedom and hate having to do stuff I didn’t choose to do. In fact, (and I’ve said this before) I’d say the common reason parents and teenagers clash is because the teenager is psychologically ready and thirsty for more freedom, but parents and society don’t give it.

By S P Hannifin, ago

What school should be like…

What it shouldn’t be like…

It’s easy to say what school should not be like. A lot of people agree that the current US education system is awful. So we ask: Well, why is it awful? And then we have hundreds of different answers. We don’t agree on what’s really wrong with school, what the purpose of learning truly is, or how a child or teenager should be spending his time. So our agreement that school is awful is almost meaningless. A lot of people think it should be worse than it already is!

A couple days ago I was exploring “democratic education.” (Not schools for democrats… that’s normal schools, considering how many teachers are democrats.) These are schools based on the idea that students should have more, if not the most, power in regards to what they do with their time at school. There is no mandatory curriculum, class times, grades, etc.

I came across this video. I’m not exactly sure when it was made, but I reckon some time in the early 2000’s, as the Lord of the Rings movies are referenced by a student…

(It’s a long film… it’s a documentary, after all…)

Free to Learn: A Radical Experiment in Education from Isaac Graves on Vimeo.

I certainly would have much preferred going to a school like that! But I do not see this as the ideal sort of school.

However, I think they are closer to my ideal school than most schools. A few things they get right: 1) Student directed. 2) No grades. 3) No mandatory curriculum. (Knowledge that you don’t use is useless after all.)

But there are some important things I think the school lacks. The first thing is societal support. That’s not really the school’s fault, it’s society’s, the sort of society that’s surprised and dumbfounded and scared by this sort of education. (It still boggles my mind how so many parents think that their children should be forced to learn things that the parent doesn’t remember. If the parent doesn’t know or remember it, that’s pretty good evidence that you can get along fine without it. But there still seems to be a deep fear that something will go horrible wrong with a student if they don’t learn it anyway, even though they’ll later forget it.) The school would be so much better if it had more resources: a bigger building, more technology, more books, more teachers, etc. As of now, it does seem like a poor run-down place. They need Extreme Makeover: School Edition. Again, this is not really the school’s fault, they’re probably doing the best they can with their financial limits. But it does prevent the school from being my sort of ideal school.

Secondly, I feel there does need to be a wee bit more “discipline.” They don’t need to be nearly as strict as normal schools, but I think the students do need to have some sort of deliverables, some sort of tangible product by the end of the year. They need to choose what to study and stick with it, follow through with it, actually get something concrete done. I think this could work by having the student create their own schedule / guide / list of goals for what they’re going to study and then be somehow forced, or at least highly encouraged, to follow it. As it is now, they run the risk of, you know, not learning anything. If given the chance to play all day, they run the risk of taking it. (Not that play can’t be educational, but it can certainly be less educational.)

Lastly, the “council meetings” feel very odd to me. They could be great for social development (much better than an adult saying “you do this, you do that, and a time-out for you!”), but they also seem somewhat hippy-ish, and could be a major time-waster for students not involved in the main argument.

What it should be like…

I think I agree with everything in this post. Especially what he says about grades:

Grades are demotivating for students. First, they end the learning process. Once an assignment is graded, it is no longer worth improving upon. Second, grades lead naturally to ranking of students, which leads to students self-image being hurt. Nothing is more demoralizing than recognizing that a person of authority thinks you aren’t as worthy as your peers.

Yes, thank you! Finally! Someone who agrees with me! “But then we have no way to assess…” they all say. Not buying it; grades must go.

He’s a bit vague in some parts:

The curriculum itself would be at least 50% self-directed by the students with some essentially skills taught along side completely personalized learning. Our emphasis would be on skills, not content.

I could agree or disagree with that, depending on the finer points of the curriculum. Of course, that’s something that would probably change year to year, as both teachers and students gain experience in using the school. And I think “skills, not content” is a vital point, an awesome point to make. Skills are by their very nature useful. Content may or may not be, and, in our modern schools, usually isn’t. When I say “knowledge that you don’t use is useless” I’m mostly talking about content. Of course, some skills are also more important than others. It would be silly to force all students to have cooking skills, for instance. But critical thinking skills, research skills, project management skills, social skills, etc., these are extremely important, they can be used everyday, and they naturally lead the student to the specific content they need. The Free School mentioned above seems to lack instilling these sorts of skills (at least, from what I could tell).

Again, the finer points would have to be worked out, but I would envision students (and “teachers”) taking on some sort of interesting and useful projects; research projects, science projects, art projects… whatever people are interested in. Working on the project(s) should encourage development of the aforementioned skills. (You cannot do an art project consisting of randomly splashing paint on a canvas. Sorry. You’re really just wasting time.) A student would not be free to play all day, but would have academic freedom in the sense that he could explore the areas that interested him, and ignore the subjects that didn’t (after all, working adults are allowed to do that).

Projects could, of course, be shared among students. That is, you could have a group of students all working on the same project.

Students would have to keep track of and report their project’s progress. The point is not necessarily to reach their goal, but, obviously, to learn. And other students would probably be quite interested in each other’s projects.

Students could of course switch projects, change projects, etc., as their interests shift naturally, or as projects prove to be more difficult than once thought. Projects would be like… amorphous solids… or something.

The big points are: 1) No grades. Progress reports of a sort, perhaps, but no comparable structured grading systems. 2) No mandatory curriculum, at least for the most part, content-wise. You don’t have to learn the phases of the moon or the date George Washington died, etc. And thus 3) no paper quizzes or tests or busy-work. 4) Student directed; students get to decide what particular areas to study. Making them study a little of everything is useless. (Plus it will happen to an extent naturally. A topic is infinitely more interesting if you’re studying it because you want to.) 5) Age mixing. Why do schools so often split students up by age? All ages are capable of working together. That’s what us adults do in the real world anyway. Every kind of mixing, really. 6) Flexible times. It would probably make more sense for most people to start at 10 AM or so and get off later in the evening. Getting up at 6 AM isn’t helping much.

If there existed a school like that, I would desperately want to work there. Except I’ve never been a parent or a teacher or a school administrator and I don’t have a degree in education. Will you still let me in? Heck, I’d even love to be a perpetual student there…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Is education for employment?

masseffect

A blog post I wrote back in September titled The Khan Academy is not that good suddenly made some small rounds on Twitter the past couple days, giving me a couple hundred views, spiking my otherwise modest traffic, woohoo! Many thanks tweeters! It is now the most popular blog post I’ve ever written. Which isn’t saying much, but getting comments and other people’s opinions is always nice. Although, you know, this is about education which, like religion and politics, people naturally have very strong opinions about (myself included).

One guy tweeted something like “I quit reading when he said education was about jobs” (though I’m not sure why you would tweet a link to a post you quit reading). Which is too bad, because that’s a very interesting point… I stated:

The big thing people seem to forget or ignore is that everything ultimately comes down to employment… whether or not you can do a job, and whether or not employers will recognize that you can do a job and hire you.

This is a vital point. That this made at least one person quit reading might be the source of most of our educational problems (here in the US, at least).

Firstly, I’m not sure how this view is wrong. I’m certainly not saying that one cannot pursue topics they are interested in. If the person has an ounce of intelligence, they will probably try to pursue employment in an area that interests them anyway or become a teacher. Ultimately, if you want to live, you need food, and usually shelter. You will have to pay for those. You will have to get the money from somewhere. You will, therefore, have to work for a living. How will you be able to work? You will have to learn. How will you learn? You will go to school. If there are no employment opportunities in an area that interests you, and you do not have the resources to create your own, you will have to convince an employer that you can do some task for them. You need to do this to live. If you don’t do this, you will die. Live or die, make your choice.

So, there’s student directed interest and employment needed to live. What else could education be for? I can’t think of anything else. What else is there?

But then a group of old people sitting around a table say “Hmmm… what should we make kids learn? How about the phases of the moon and the names of the local rivers? Yes. Yes, that seems good. We will be smarter than Japan in no time.”

Um… WHY? If you’re interested in the phases of the moon, you can Google it. If you’re interested in the names of the local rivers, again, Google it, bam, you’re done. (If you’re really interested, you’ll memorize such things on your own without being forced institutionally.) When are you ever going to be in a situation in which you have to know the phases of the moon or the names of the local rivers and have no way to look them up? Why is that so important to prepare kids for? Without interest from the student or a need from employers, that material is not educational. It is useless. It is Hannifin’s Supreme Law of Education: Knowledge that you don’t use is useless.

Secondly, don’t most people already agree that this is what college is for? If someone was able to get a great (and secure) job with a great salary right out of high school, what parents would still recommend going to college? Isn’t good employment the entire reason our culture makes such a huge fuss about having to go to college? About having to get a degree?

Thanks for reading!

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EDIT: I guess I should point out that I’m not trying to imply that employment needs to be thought of as separate from life, as if it has to be some institution you’re trapped in for certain times of the week instead of living your “real life.” And I’m also not trying to imply that you must have a boss. Perhaps instead of using the word “employment” I should say that education ultimately comes down to “a means to live.” And preferably “a means to live well.” Maybe that will make more sense. (Nor am I trying to imply that huge salary is the most important thing. But you will obviously need a salary of some kind.)

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EDIT: I think a lot of traffic came from this particular tweet. The tweeter, David Wees, has many other interesting tweets and an interesting blog which I hope to explore more of at David Wees’s Blog. So a thank you to Mr. Wees for the traffic.

By S P Hannifin, ago

The Khan Academy is not that good

UPDATE (March 24, 2011): The Khan Academy has changed a bit since I originally wrote this. My original post appears right below, followed by some updated observations.

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It seems there are plenty of people, both students and parents, who are unhappy with our current education system, myself included. Unfortunately everyone seems to have different ideas of what exactly is wrong with it and how to fix it.

Google had a link on their homepage to their Project 10 to the 100, in which they gave millions of dollars to organizations that won voting contests. You can see they’re giving Khan Academy $2 million. A lot of people really love Khan Academy (including Bill Gates) and think that it is a great step in the right direction. [The Khan Academy is basically a large collection of cheaply produced educational videos. Being videos, they can only teach fact-based material, like math, science, and history. They can’t teach skills that require feedback.]

I don’t think Khan Academy is bad, but it’s not a replacement for our current education system. It’s not that good. It’s not worthy of praise from Bill Gates (or maybe it is, since he seems to have completely wrong ideas about what steps the education system should take), and it’s not worthy of this $2 million gift. Khan Academy is great because it makes a lot of educational material available for free. But education is not about just knowing stuff.

The big thing people seem to forget or ignore is that everything ultimately comes down to employment… whether or not you can do a job, and whether or not employers will recognize that you can do a job and hire you. Unfortunately people seem to think education is about getting a degree. But the only reason a degree has any value is because employers give it value. It has zero value by itself.

Or people think education is just about knowing stuff, and the more you know the better. The more facts you can cram in your head, the smarter you are. But knowledge is useless if you don’t use it. Oooh, there’s a profound idea! But people don’t always seem to believe it. Going through Khan Academy’s resource is just, in the end, really not that helpful. You’re just not going to use most of it in everyday life, even when you’re employed. It’s a nice resource to have available if it turns out you do need to learn some of it someday, which is the same reason it’s nice for colleges to have libraries. But it doesn’t replace or change anything important in the education system. It’s just a nice reference resource.

Which leads us to what is wrong with our education system. It’s become thought of as separate from the life you’ll live after it, and thus has little focus. Rich people and rich organizations can throw all the millions of dollars they want at it, but until there’s a widespread fundamental shift in employers’ and educators’ and students’ attitudes towards it, things aren’t going to get much better.

The Khan Academy does plan to expand and offer more than just videos, so we’ll see what happens with it. Ultimately it’s currently just a library. A library is a great resource because it means you don’t have to learn stuff; if you ever need certain info, you can go find it in the library when you need it. The point isn’t to try to learn or memorize as much of it as possible.

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Updated comments from March 24, 2011:

(Really this is just copied from one of my comments, but I thought it was important enough to move it up here with the original post.)

Since I first posted this, I think the Khan Academy has added practicing software and coaching abilities, so it’s no longer just a bunch of videos, but does include some form of feedback. If they continue this trend, adding more features that allow more personalized feedback, I think they can certainly come pretty close to replacing the classroom experience, maybe even making it better in some ways: no more needing permission to go to the bathroom, no more disruptive paper airplanes, children can work better at their own pace, etc. There would still be a great deal of challenges (funding probably a big one), but if Khan’s goal is to replace the classroom setting with something more personalized, I think it’s definitely possible with today’s technology and we only await someone with enough tech savvy, time, and money to get it going.

But making a bad education system virtual doesn’t really help. It’s like adding new fancy fonts and pictures to a poorly written textbook.

That is, my main criticism isn’t that the Khan Academy is (or was) just a resource. The specific information is still mostly useless to most students, no matter what form they learn it in, whether it’s a physical or virtual classroom.

If you’re just learning something so you can spew it back out on a test and then forget it next year, that information is serving you no real purpose. You’re just wasting your time learning it. (I shudder to see “California Standards Test” lessons now listed at the Khan Academy.)

The Khan Academy videos seem like Mr. Khan spent some time learning the content out of a textbook and then just regurgitated the material in video form. That *can* be useful in some situations, but to me it implies that Khan, like most public education systems in general, doesn’t really question the applications of the content, doesn’t question why or how that specific content is worth the teachers’ and students’ time and effort. In many cases, it’s just not.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Stop blindly defending arts education

I’m not against people defending arts education.  I just don’t like seeing people doing it blindly.

I read this article from a link I saw on my twitter feed: Arts Education and Civilization: This Isn’t Child’s Play

[UPDATE: Please also check out the comments!  I throw around the word “snob” a lot below, but my intent is not to personally call the author of this article a snob; it is in response to the actual ideas.  Just in case you’re mad at me already.]

Now, Elizabeth King, the article’s author, isn’t being blind.  It’s people who support arts education and, in turn, support articles like these without reading them, or without reading them closely enough, just because the conclusion agrees with theirs.

About the article: I don’t like it.

The article’s author seems to suggest that arts education should be funded in public-funded schools because…

Because why?

Just because.

Because, you know, smart people think arts are good.  It’s just the “smart” thing to think.  So we all just defend it because we like it.

I’ll state my own opinion at the bottom of this blog post, but first I want to go over why this particular article annoys me.

The article starts off with two quotes, which I’ll reproduce below.  The first quote is from Doris Sommer, Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University:

Some people mistake the arts as only a vehicle for expression. That’s a very limited view. Art is a vehicle for exploration, learning, and trying things out. If people are serious about reducing violence and educating youth to become productive citizens and more satisfied in their own lives, supporting and expanding art is a major opportunity for developing intellectual capacity. All of the rhetoric about empowerment gets immediately grounded when a youth is working on an art project. This person is authoring something that didn’t exist before.

I’m guessing King quotes this because of its general support for arts education.  Of course.  But it’s a vague quote.  It doesn’t really say much beyond “youth that is creating art is good.”  But why is it good?  Well, it reduces violence.  Evidence of this?  Oh, it just does.  What else?  It educates youth to become productive citizens (whatever those are) and more satisfied in their own lives.  Again, evidence of this?  Oh, who needs evidence, these seem like truisms!  How could they be wrong?

Firstly, maybe their “art” is rapping about having gangsta wars and shooting each other.  Maybe they want to make violent films.  If expanding art education reduces crime simply because youth won’t have as much time to do crime in the first place, you could equally support sports, religion, couch-potatoness, and prison sentences for pre-crimes for the same reason.  Secondly, I’d like to say there are plenty of artists who aren’t satisfied with their own lives.  They’re miserable.  But this is probably beside the point, because “satisfaction” is not something that can be objectively measured.

The second quote is from Tim Smith from the Baltimore Sun:

… [Glen] Beck singled out cities with budget crises where they’re cutting back on police, but not slashing the funding for such things as libraries, museums and, in Baltimore, the Lyric Opera House — a.k.a. the “stupid, snotty opera house.”

Beck claimed that $750,000 was in the budget for that historic venue in our fair city, while “cops are on the chopping block. This is like my wife saying we are broke, we have to cut down our expenses on food. I turn around and say, OK, when you grocery shop, no more meats, organics, milk — we’re cutting that out. Just get Mountain Dew and Cheetos … How about we get the rich who never pay their fair share to buy their stupid snotty opera house? Would you cut the opera house or the cops? … What does your gut tell you? That everybody involved in this is moron?

I suppose this quote supports art, and that’s why King posted it.  But to me this seems to be more about “art vs. cops” and their funding.  So cities are not cutting back on funding for an opera house?  Why are they funding opera houses in the first place?

At least, that’s the message I get from this little quote.  Things are probably somewhat more complicated (read the full article).  But I do think the government can stay completely out of the arts and both the arts and the government will be just fine.  Using public funds to fund only a specific type of art is not fair to people who don’t enjoy that kind of art.  To support such a fund is to be stupid and snotty.

OK, to the article…

King writes:

Most high art…

Woah!  Hold it, hold it!  There goes my snobbish rhetoric alarm.  “High” art?  Some art is “low” and some art is “high”?  Already we must have completely different definitions of what “art” is.  Tsk, tsk!

OK, King goes on to try to define art:

Most high art—visual art, music, literature, dance, theater—intends to examine a group of people, comment on society, recount experience, investigate social norms, and challenge them, highlight them, or reinforce them.

Woah!  More snob rhetoric!  “Intends”?  You now think you know the intentions of dead artists?  Another big tsk tsk!  I disagree with this definition.  It might be true for some art, but I don’t think we can state a definition so objectively and self-contained like that.  Maybe King didn’t mean to do that, but that’s what she wrote.  You think Mozart’s 40th symphony had anything in particular to say about society?

King writes:

High art strives for better—better execution, better message. It looks for continuity between what has come before and its own sense of direction; it’s aware of its own longevity.

Ha!  You wish!  Wouldn’t that make the subject easy to understand!  But King is over-generalizing immensely, and the rhetoric is still snobbish (“high” and “better”).

After snobbishly attempting to define art, King then writes about a survey from the National Endowment of the Arts (which, ideally, does not need to exist) about how participation in snob, er, “high” art is declining:

The 2008 survey results are, at a glance, disappointing. As reported in Arts Participation 2008, a summary brochure of the survey’s findings, a smaller segment of the adult population either attended arts performances or visited art museums or galleries than in any prior survey.

Why are the results disappointing?  Why is attending arts performances or visiting art museums and galleries automatically good?  People should like and pay for this stuff, otherwise they are dumb, uncultured, uneducated fools?

The quote from the NEA goes on to try to guess at why there’s a decline, and guesses that the decline in arts education has something to do with it.

So… we should support arts education so attendance at NEA-surveyed places goes up?  Again, why would this be automatically good?

Finally, King attempts to answer this question:

When we let go of cultural traditions and inquisition, the after-effects are more than a momentary disruption— it’s not just some blip on the screen in our society. When we consistently replace cultural exploration with pop culture consumption we ultimately create a hole in our connection with each other across society. Ignoring art means breaking our bonds with each other. Truly, abandoning the arts puts us at risk for increased violence in our communities. Ultimately, if our culture is one of the defining elements of our civilization, if it propels us forward and connects the work we do now with that of the past and, even more importantly, that of the future, then to destroy that continuity and meaningful connection actually puts our society and civilization at risk.

Whew, that’s a lot.  Let’s go over this paragraph more finely.

King writes:

When we consistently replace cultural exploration with pop culture consumption we ultimately create a hole in our connection with each other across society. Ignoring art means breaking our bonds with each other.

What?  I don’t think so.  The problem here is that King has snobbishly separated art into an elite “high” art and the lowly “pop culture.”  Just because attendance at symphonies and art galleries goes down doesn’t mean that art isn’t being consumed, it’s just not the kind of art you think is “high” enough.  That “high” art is not some invisible important cultural glue keeping us all functioning properly, while “low” art does nothing.  How do we bond with each other through “high” art?  What sort of “bonds”?  That’s not a rhetorical question; answer it!

I, of course, completely disagree.  Art is something that comes natural to humans.  We will always involve ourselves in art, whether it’s taught in schools or not.  There is not some higher subset of art that keeps us all bonded nicely.

King writes:

Truly, abandoning the arts puts us at risk for increased violence in our communities.

Evidence?  No?  It’s just a truism?

And, again, not going to art galleries is not “abandoning the arts”!  If what you call “pop culture” is “high art” to someone else, then you have nothing to worry about, do you?

Ultimately, if our culture is one of the defining elements of our civilization…

Uh… OK, culture is a defining element of civilization.  But culture emerges naturally.  People don’t sit down and consciously design a culture.  “Well, we’re a great civilization, we just don’t have much culture…” No.

…if it propels us forward and connects the work we do now with that of the past…

We move forward in time because we have to.  Cultural changes do not go backwards and forwards (unless you mean in a moral sense), they just change.  Artistic trends, likewise, change; they do not “progress.”  And I have no idea what King means by “connects.”  That word is too vague.  Makes grammatical sense, seems fine if you’re reading quickly, but if you stop and think about what it means… what does it mean?  I don’t know.  I could guess, maybe that’s what King wants readers to do, but I don’t know.  The word is too imprecise.

…to destroy that continuity and meaningful connection actually puts our society and civilization at risk.

So ultimately this is all about a vague sense of “connection”?  This isn’t good enough for me.

King then gets patriotic:

The American experiment is still new. The work we’re doing to perpetuate a democracy is still, in terms of global history, extremely fresh. By abandoning the arts we are abandoning ourselves. By offering exceedingly paltry arts education we are abandoning our students now and future generations. We are abandoning the first Americans who risked their necks so we could be here. Finally, we are abandoning our potential for continuity, the creative economy, and, most fundamentally, the luxury of relative safety that we enjoy on a daily basis.

Again, King makes the snobbish assumption that art museum attendance (and such) and the cutting of art education programs are signs of the public “abandoning the arts” when in reality they’re just abandoning a certain definition of it.  King claims we are somehow thus abandoning “the first Americans who risked their necks so we could be here.”  What in the world do they have to do with it?  Saying that you’re “abandoning your parents who took their time to raise you” makes equal sense.

(Oh, and I guess art education isn’t as important for non-Americans?)

King then lists some other vague ideas we’re abandoning.  “Our potential for continuity” … what does that mean?  “The creative economy” … what does that mean?  And “the luxury of relative safety.”  Absolute safety would be more of a luxury.  But… what the?  How does safety have anything to do with this?  Oh, are you going back to the idea that crime rates go down with more arts education?

King writes:

The discussion about Arts Ed is heated, but it’s tough to talk about when so few Americans actually engage in the arts.

Well, yeah, isn’t that your problem to begin with?  That’s like saying “it’s hard to talk about why math books should be more popular when so few Americans actually read math books.”

King then makes a commitment that her blog, or website, will start talking to artists…

The vast majority of the artists we’re going to talk to are going to be full time, established artists–people you should know about.

Just had to get one last moment of rhetorical snobbery in there?  “People you should know about”?  Gee, thanks!

My own opinion

I hold the rare position of being against our whole system of public-funded education in general.  I think there are worse things to worry about, like the actual reasons behind why we even have to question whether or not to fund education about the arts.  What other things are we teaching and why are we teaching them?  What’s the point of education in the first place?  To be ranked #1 in the world and dominate it?  To stay busy?  To just learn as much as we can just in case we might use some of it someday?

If a work of art isn’t influential enough by itself to pervade the public’s consciousness on its own merit, then we don’t have to artificially extend its influence by forcing students to be conscious of it.  Works of art that were once considered “great” can be forgotten, and that is OK.  If you think that is not OK, if you think that is sad, then you are a snob.  Being conscious of works of art that used to be popular and influential does not make you “smarter” or “better.”  Just because something is helpful or interesting to you does not mean we should, as a society, force everyone to know it.

Having said all that…

In some ways, I’m playing devil’s advocate here, because I’d rather align myself with people like Elizabeth King who support arts in education rather than these stupid school officials who just want more compulsive testing.  But in some other ways, I’m very annoyed, because so many people don’t seem to have objective reasons for supporting this stuff; they just do it because they like the arts themselves.  And if that’s all that’s guiding them, they’re really not helping much.

“Support the arts in education!  A way to shove art chosen by other people down the public’s throat for its own good!”

We don’t need that.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Graduation speech and animation and stuff

Valedictorian unhappy with school – part 2

Back on August 4th I posted a link to a graduation speech in which the valedictorian went over some major criticism of the current American education system, which I mostly whole-heartedly agreed with. After all, I’ve ranted about the education system on this blog quite a few times. I said that I couldn’t verify the speech though; it was only posted on the web from a second-hand source. However, I finally came across an actual recording of the speech, which seems to have been uploaded to YouTube by the speaker herself. So, for your enjoyment, or for your frustration with young people these days, here’s the speech:

Woohoo! Yes! Indeed! That’s right!

Do you agree with this speech?

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Animation Mentor progress

Week 8 (of 72) starts today! I’m pleased with my assignment this week, though of course I can still see areas that could use some tweaking, but you only have a week, so running out of time is inevitable. I’ll upload it to YouTube tonight or tomorrow. I was hoping to revise my pendulum assignment from last week, but never got to it. (I got sick that week so didn’t spend as much time on it.) Oh well.

The transforming room

Someone on Facebook posted a link to this very interesting video:

Of course, here in America, if you have enough money to afford designing and building something like that, then you probably have enough money to just buy a more spacious place, unless I suppose there’s some squished location that you really really want to live in. It would be awesome if someone opened up apartment buildings or hotels in which every room was like this; should get some good business just for the uniqueness of it. (Probably apartments; hotels would probably need too much maintenance.)

By S P Hannifin, ago

Stuff about schools…

Valedictorian hates school…

I came across this valedictorian graduation speech yesterday. It’s quite well-written and agrees with just about all my anti-current-education-system rants that I give on this blog every now and then. It’s always nice to read a reflection of your own beliefs, especially from someone who writes a bit more formally. It’s kind of annoying that you have to be a valedictorian for certain people to listen to you, but that’s how it is. (And listening doesn’t simply lead to agreeing anyway.)

Unfortunately I can’t seem to find any more direct source of the speech. It’s pasted on the Internet in a few places, but not from any official-looking sources. I’d love to know how parents and teachers reacted. Ultimately making any real changes to the currect education system is a tough business as people get all scared that students will get too dumb if we don’t at least hold on to what we have.

Another online animation school…

In other news, someone in my Animation Mentor group mentioned iAnimate.net, a new online animation school opening up next month. From what I can tell, it looks like it’s pretty much modeled after Animation Mentor, with some slight differences. The semesters are 14 weeks (so I guess it would take an extra 6 months to get through) and the tuition is a bit less. It looks like they also have less teachers, so maybe they’ll accept less students? Maybe it will be harder to get in?

(There might be more differences; I didn’t study the site super-thoroughly…)

I wonder if Apple will sue them, though, for all this ‘i’ stuff… and I wonder what a good name for an online animation school would be… I don’t really like the name “Animation Mentor” or “iAnimate”… they kind of give off auras of online cheapiness. You need like a “International Animation Institute” or something.

And I wonder how their business will go. Besides the smaller tuition price, is there any incentive to go to their school rather than the already well-established Animation Mentor? (Is that the reason for the smaller price?) Does Animation Mentor reject people that iAnimate would take? How many prospective animation students are out there that will now have this choice, and how will they make it? I always think some competition can be healthy, so I guess we’ll see…

My real concern though is… how is the US job market for new inexperienced animators? Is it already oversaturated or is there a risk of it becoming so? Or is there plenty of room for us? How will these schools affect that?

Anyway, just an interesting development in the business of online animation schools…

By S P Hannifin, ago

One education system to rule them all

In my continued Googling for stuff about Animation Mentor (even though I’m already set to begin the first course this June), I found this interesting blog post: The Downfall of traditional education.

The blogger writes:

The UK animation industry is being taken over by Animation Mentor. I don’t have exact figures but I have the feeling that 3 out of 5 animation graduates hired in UK come from Animation Mentor. In few years, 50% of the animator in the industry will probably come from the online animation school.

Why is that?

Animation Mentor has been offering the industry, the exact kind of profile it was looking for. In 18 month, they create more job opportunities to graduates than what traditional education would provide in 4/5 years.

Of course, this mostly further excites me about doing Animation Mentor.

But I guess I also found this post interesting because of a very long and detailed discussion I’m having on Facebook about the college education system. I think I posted this opinion before, but I kinda wish most professions were taught like animation is taught at Animation Mentor: get working professionals to give personal attention to a group of students’ work, and stop teaching other stuff (general education requirements and required electives). Animation Mentor makes it quite clear that they don’t teach character rigging or special effects animation or lighting or rendering, etc. You get 1.5 years of just character animation. I think that’s awesome. (And from what I’ve heard, that’s what the big studios look for anyway: people who are great in just one area, not jacks-of-all-trades.) But I also think you could have an AM-like program for any of those other areas as well. You’re not working for grades or a degree, you’re working for a skill. You’ll never be a valedictorian, but you won’t care, because that never meant anything to you anyway.

That said, I haven’t even started Animation Mentor yet, so maybe I shouldn’t be talking.

I also thought the comments were interesting. One guy says:

at my university we’re told that after graduating we should go to AnimationMentor, Bournemouth or EscapeStudios.

Ha! “After graduating”? Why not… instead of graduating? (Really, if I’d known about Animation Mentor while I was still in college, I probably would’ve done my best to get my parents to let me drop out. (I still need their support!))

Another guy says:

My tutor told me to rate a short which had very limited animation technique but had a very anti Disney/Bluth agenda, and was thus seen as artistically superior over the Lion King and the Nightmare before Xmas(wow, I’m old!). I rated Disney last and I got the interview, which came to a real bad end when I was asked where I would like to be in a 5 years time. I said ‘well I would be happy if I was working for a big studio, working in commercials’….the interviewer pretty much convulsed and replied ‘Happy? Working for a big studio? You’re evidently not interested in making important artistic films. You’d be best having a rethink at the next university you interview at’.

This is why you have working professionals teaching. I think it tends to be hard to lure them into teaching positions (and some pros may not be very good at teaching anyway) because of the time and dedication it takes, maybe for not so much pay. But the Internet may help to change that. Having professors who are professors for a living teaching students who do not plan to be professors for a living just doesn’t seem quite right does it? (At George Mason, they did have some working professionals teach some of my night classes, and I think they were better, since they could impart some knowledge on what working in the industry is actually like. Unfortunately they were from professions I was not really interested in, like requirements analysis for military contractors.)

Anyway, I also find this academic artistic snobbery to be somewhat typical, annoying, and yet funny. I hear it in the music area a lot. You want to orchestrate like John Williams? Tonal melody stuff? Ugh! Write crappy atonal minimalist music like this instead! And then when we both stink at writing music, we can both be professors who compliment each other all the time! Good work! Fortunately it’s not like that everywhere, but it’s there. Mostly in the art categories. Writing, drawing, music, theater, etc. Professors who couldn’t make it professionally decide they have what it takes to teach.

Really: teaching should not be something you do because you can’t do anything else. Which is too often what it is. And I’m not sure adults should be doing it full-time anyway, at least not on the high school and college level. (Though a lot of college professors are also involved in research.)

OK, enough rambling about that.

I usually find that my deep interests in things last about 2 weeks, and then get taken over by something else, and may or may not come back. But with Animation Mentor looming on the horizon, I’m as excited as I’ve ever been about anything, and it hasn’t faded, so I’m really hoping that I my interest stays this high and that I do actually become good enough to animate professionally. Woohoo! Woooooo! Wooowaaaawoooowaaaaahh! Etc. etc.

Oh, someone I know also said that he concluded that Animation Mentor was a scam. A bias I can sort of understand, because most online schools are pretty scammish, and, as someone else pointed out, I’m not sure the name “Animation Mentor” sounds very prestigious.

But enough about me, what about you?

By S P Hannifin, ago

Should school days be longer?

I recently realized that Bill Gates is on Twitter.  For some reason, I find it unbelievable that he would be on Twitter; maybe it’s his personal assistant or something.  I guess I just have him on too high a pedestal.  Does one of the world’s wealthiest people really have time for Twitter?

Anyway, he posted a link to this article: The Case for Saturday School.

Firstly, I’ll say I hate the modern state of public education.  But I’m a bit skeptical that just increasing or decreasing the amount of hours or days a kid goes would do much.  I think doing either could have some very bad consequences.  I’d rather changes be made in the grading systems and the curriculum.

These are some reactions I had while reading the article:

(And please excuse any typos, because I’m going to go to bed after writing this rather than reread my writing.)

The article states:

In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance.

OK, but what exactly is “academic performance”?  Isn’t that measured by the tests the academics are giving?  If so, isn’t it obvious that such performance would benefit from increased instruction?  I mean, that’s what the instruction is for.

To me, “academic performance” seems kind of meaningless in and of itself.  We have to define how it relates to the rest of the working world.  After all, isn’t that the entire point of school?  To prepare students for the world of not going to school?  When you get out of school, when and where does “academic performance” apply?  There aren’t many objectively defined math tests in the real world.  While it may be important that you understand certain mathematical concepts for certain jobs, spending more time studying for and doing better on a math test isn’t necessarily going to increase your long term mathematical aptitude.

So I’m suspicious of “improved academic performance” being an automatically good thing.  The term is simply too vague.

Later on, the article states:

“Summer learning loss” is no joke. When they return to school in late August or early September, many children, especially the least advantaged among them, have shed a sizable portion of what they had learned by May—a full month’s worth, by most estimates, adding up to 1.3 school years by the end of high school.

No, it isn’t a joke.  And if you think forgetting stuff over the summer is bad, what about when school is over?! What about “life learning loss”?  And herein lies one of the biggest issues I have with our modern education system; they teach too many things that students just don’t use in everyday life.  There are two solutions to this “summer learning loss” problem, besides what the article is suggesting: 1) stop teaching useless stuff and 2) let students participate more in society so they have a chance to use their knowledge.  (And maybe 3) let students have more control over what they want to learn in school.)  Now, 1 is pretty simple, you just teach less.  2 would require some work to figure out.

But this is assuming that the point of school is to prepare students for the non-school world, for the world in which they’ll have to do some kind of work in exchange for money to exchange for food.  The purpose is not to try to make kids as smart as possible for as long as possible.  Or is it?  Maybe it actually is?  And if so, what is the point of that?

The article says:

The typical young American, upon turning 18, will have spent just 9% of his or her hours on this planet under the school roof (and that assumes full-day kindergarten and perfect attendance) versus 91% spent elsewhere. As for the rest of that time, the Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported that American youngsters now devote an astounding 7.5 hours per day to “using entertainment media” (including TV, Internet, cellphones and videogames). That translates to about 53 hours a week—versus 30 hours in school.

Wow.  Perhaps I was far from typical, then.  I never spent 7.5 hours a day using entertainment media.  The most I could manage was probably 2 or 3.  Then again, I’m not sure how well I can recall my elementary school days.  If I wasn’t doing homework, I was probably playing around outside.  That was probably just as noneducational as watching TV, though.  By the time I was in high school, most extra time I had was spent sleeping.  Homework took up A LOT of time; it was extremely depressing.  I mean, during the high school years, life revolved around high school.  It was horrible.

Anyway, that’s not really important, because, again, why should 91% of time spent elsewhere matter?  It’ll just end up increasing to 100% eventually.  Shouldn’t we be focusing on how to make that time spent elsewhere matter more instead of just trying to decrease it?  Shouldn’t we be focusing on how to make that time spent in school matter more, for that matter?  Since when is just more hours spent in school automatically good?  Oh, because of this “academic performance” thing?

In 1994, for example, economist Robert Margo reported that historical differences in school-year length for black and white youngsters attending segregated schools accounted for much of the gap in their adult earnings.

I’d be interested in that study; how does one conclude such a cause-and-effect?  What about the effect of the children’s home lives?  I would think that would matter just as much, if not more.

Examining the days forfeited to snow and other “unscheduled closings” in Maryland in 2002-2003, [University of Maryland analyst Dave Marcotte] concluded that two-thirds of the elementary schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” (the federal benchmark under “No Child Left Behind”) in math that year would have done so “if they had been open during all scheduled school days.”

Firstly, how in the world do you analyze what “would have” happened?  Secondly, doesn’t that sound like more of a failure of a curriculum being designed to prepare for a benchmark assessment test?

Where things start to get complicated is that time spent in school does not equal time fruitfully applied to learning basic skills and core content—a mismatch that looms larger in the U.S. than in most other places.

Yeah, that’s what I said!

Our deeper problem is the enormous amount of time that typical American schools spend on gym, recess, lunch, assembly, changing classes, homeroom, lining up to go to the art room, looking at movies, writing down homework assignments, quieting the classroom, celebrating this or that holiday, and other pursuits. It’s not all wasted time but neither are these minutes spent in ways that boost test scores…

UGH!  How many times do I have to tell you?  The education system is not about boosting test scores! And they don’t represent so simply what people want them to represent, which is how well a student knows material.  It measures other things: how well the student knows the material at the time, how well the student knows that specific material, how good the student is at taking tests, how good the student is at cramming the night before, etc… good test scores are not necessarily good.  Stop blindly being guided by them.

Over the long run, technology holds much potential to boost student learning time in flexible ways and at modest cost. We can stipulate that kids are addicted to it; that “virtual” instruction can happen at very nearly any time or place; and that well-designed distance-learning programs (and suitable hardware) enable greater individualization of learning, with each child moving at his/her own pace, diving deeper when warranted, and going back over things they didn’t quite understand the first time.

Eh… I’m not sure “kids are addicted to it.”  They might like to play computer games, but they can certainly tell the difference between a game and boring old instruction just printed on the screen instead of paper.  I think it can have just as many problems, if not more, than traditional classroom education.  The key is it being “well-designed.”

Disadvantaged youngsters really need—for their own good—the benefits of longer days, summer classes and Saturday mornings in school. But nearly every young American needs to learn more than most are learning today, both for the sake of their own prospects and on behalf of the nation’s competitiveness in a shrinking, dog-eat-dog world.

Maybe disadvantaged youngsters just need to be out of there disadvantaged homes with their not-so-intelligent disadvantaged parents.  If a school is a richer learning environment, even if time isn’t necessarily spent on strict formal lessons, they will be better off for just being around the educationally stimulating environment.  In which case, I’d actually agree that more time in school would be good.  *gasp*  But not necessarily for advantaged children with smart parents, who can create a better learning environment in their own homes.

Whew, wasn’t that fun.

Of course, I think this article is in support of this KIPP program, which Bill Gates seems fond of, either because he actually believes in it or because he’s got some kind of stake in it (or both).

By S P Hannifin, ago