Education

When discussing education, it's important to understand what that means.  Is it the same thing as training?  What is the desired outcome of education?  Are we looking for children to come out with homogenous understanding of the world, all in line with whatever the teacher at the time believed, or the writers of the textbooks?

I know that in my own family, this was considered secondary.  The primary purpose, as I came to understand it, was for the child to arrive at an ability to think for themself, to be able to communicate their ideas, hypotheses and conclusions clearly both orally and in writing.  Once a person has achieved this state of affairs, they can be introduced to any subject, and no longer need much in the way of help to achieve mastery of that subject.

Way back in the dusts of time, this was called "the three Rs": 

1)  Reading
2)  Writing
3)  Arithmetic

These fundamentals open the doors to all other fields of learning.  The strength of these skills essentially determines the likely success of a given student in a given class, once other fundamentals (outside the control of the teacher) are addressed.  Those fundamentals are well-understood if one is familiar with Maslow's heirarchy of needs, expanded to include different learning styles and possibly learning disabilities, where those are interfering.  A child who is not receiving adequate nutrition, sleep and shelter cannot be expected to have their attention  readily at the disposal of their instructors, possibly not even at their own ready control.  God forbid the abusive environment, which is another topic entirely, though it should be mentioned.

When I was in grade-school, I remember hating lecture classes, which was about 99% of the time in school.  It wasn't that I couldn't understand the instructor, it was that I had no control of the process, and felt no sense of ownership of the materials or the process of my learning.  I became a class clown to compensate, and this got me in trouble, frequently expelled from the classroom.  The great thing about being thrown out of class was that I could finally sit down and READ THE BOOK without interference from either my classmates or the instructor.  We used a system called SRA intermittently, but it wasn't integrated into our grades at school, and wasn't always available.  This was modular learning, self-directed and you couldn't move on to the next materials until you tested and showed you had understood and mastered the previous lesson.  This method finally set me free, where I wasn't comparing myself to other students, but was learning and teaching myself, so there was no authority to struggle against, no periods of lapsed attention where I missed something, etc.  I wish my entire schooling experience was SRA-based, with the possible exception of labs or technical writing.

I think that the process of education should mirror the desired product:  a person who can learn what they need to know in order to live and work in a democratic society, regardless of the quality of the media.  Do we want people who passively receive information without critical thinking and who move at the pace of their peers, or do we want active learners who take an interest in their environment and are equipped with a knowledge of how to learn, and how to discern between valid concepts and specious reasoning?

At present, our schools perform the function of babysitters.  In my opinion, they retard the progress of interested students, though there are obviously exceptional teachers and even exceptional schools where this is not the case.  What is needed is an overhaul of the model.  For an idea of how this could occur without changing the infrastructure drastically, please peruse the following materials.  The first is a talk by the founder of Khan Academy (an online resource with which I have no affiliation other than interest).  The second is a link to his website, where a person can go for self-directed learning in math and some of the core sciences.  He is expanding it to cover a wider range of subjects, but currently the most defined series is mathematics. 

http://www.khanacademy.org/

Another, similar talk building on the beginnings at Khan Academy, was tried at Stanford with great success.  This restores a classroom, assignment based method, but opens it up to unlimited numbers of students simultaneously.  

                                     

These sorts of resources revolutionize the classroom, empower the student, and free the teacher to offer much more individualized attention to students when they need troubleshooting or additional guidance.  While this is certainly useful to the existing system, it might be even more useful to the people who are home-schooling.  Quite frequently, children ask questions to which their parents have no adequate answer, and perhaps the parent doesn't have the background to properly address the answer to that question in a reasonable time-frame.  This sort of modular online resource is priceless in such situations.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and whatever others are clinging to life already heavily index their articles so that users can find what they are looking for.  This modular learning system could be expanded to include all searchable articles by simply tagging these articles with prerequisites for full comprehension.  The same could be listed on the spine of books at a library.  This sort of system would inspire children (or adults) to study subjects that they might otherwise eschew, because they don't seem to apply to anything.  An example might be a book on man's flight to the moon.  Required tags might be things like "basic literacy", "powered flight", "self-contained breathing apparatus", "ballistics", etc.  A person could know that they could read the book and enjoy it, but for full understanding, they should familiarize themselves with modules on those subjects.  This could help the self-directed student, but it could be equally helpful to a teacher or school-board planning what subjects are taught at what points.  It could also help the mobile students of today, whose parents move frequently to different locations/school-systems.  They could carry with them an online record of what modules they had covered, such that the school they were entering immediately knew if they were prepared for a given class.

I consider the SRA approach to have been ground-breaking.  There have been a number of charter and private schools that made good use of modular learning, but not so thoroughly integrated with their grading systems and with other schools, or with online resources.  I consider Khan Academy's site to be the future of education, though I am sure that there will be modifications and it's obviously a work in progress.

With that sort of modular learning approach in place, I would recommend, as well, logical training as early as possible, at whatever level the student can appreciate and use it.  Given the amount of badly reasoned positions out there, a student who simply accepts anything they are taught from figures of authority (teachers, textbook writers, school boards, parents who have adopted belief systems that prevent examination of all sides and some facts, etc.) will come out confused and full of unexamined "knowledge".  This trains them to RECEIVE information, ONLY, rendering them passive and compliant or so full of protest they'd rather not "learn"/"study", and take off after more interesting, engaging and participatory activities.  Logical analysis teaches people to examine the facts, examine the sources, do thought-experiments, come up with their own ideas; to think critically and create, participate in their own education.  The act of analysis, accompanied by rejection of some proposed "fact" is just as empowering (perhaps moreso) as the ability to parrot whatever they are taught.  As well, the learning of logic, logical operators and terminology fits in very well with learning of fundamental mathematics, and basic computer programming; all fundamental skills in modern life.  Training in spotting logical fallacies is particularly helpful, as well as possibly being a fun game.  Sitting through a TV commercial, a nightly newscast, or some more obvious form of propaganda (youtube videos can be great fodder) provide excellent opportunities to spot fallacious reasoning, and can help a child realize the value of these skills.  Our society is riddled with fountains of fallacious reasoning trapping hundreds of millions of people in prisons of ignorance that they could escape with these keys.

For help with logical fallacies, check out the Fallacy Files website, with particular attention to their taxonomy interactive graphic.  For exhaustive understanding of logic, I would recommend this youtube video on Bertrand Russell's views.  I am not familiar with introductory texts for children, but I'm sure that they exist.  Until you find one that is good for your child (or yourself, if you're a child), check out wikipedia's article on P4C "Philosophy for Children".  Some people don't think children need philosophy, but I'd argue that without it, they are helpless in the face of the overwhelming certainties and falsities that surround them.

Politics

The old saw is that our democracy is hampered or obviated by the corruption of campaign finance and vested, monied interests.

True dat.  But it's really a red herring.  The real problem is ignorance which leads to indifference and apathy.  How many voters actually researched Obama or McCain's voting records or personal histories, versus simply accepting the narrative in the popular press?  Precious few, I'll reckon.

Matt Gonzalez (pictured above), San Francisco politician and lawyer, laid down the truth of Obama's record (in part) in his prescient article The Obama Craze: Count Me Out.  That was great, but how many people read it?  How many people are even capable of reading it?

The two-headed monster distracts us, entertains us, and gives the appearance of democracy to an ignorant, illiterate and apathetic populace, but it doesn't educate us, it doesn't address critical issues relevant to individual liberty, and ultimately, it serves only the donors who have hidden themselves on Obama's watch.  The "change we can believe in" has been the ascendancy of invisible government while the pundits sell cars and anti-depressants.

"With the renewal of physical existence goes,in the case of human beings, the recreation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. The continuity of any experience, through renewing of the social group, is a literal fact. Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on." - John Dewey, "Democracy and Education: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Education", 1916

Democracy is dependent upon its citizens' education in order for it to thrive.  When the citizenry is largely illiterate, or functionally illiterate in significant proportion, it becomes a show.  A democracy which fails to educate its citizens, which considers fine speech or deep understanding a luxury, rather than a necessity, is a society either consciously or unconsciously aiming at self-destruction.  Particularly at this time in history, where technology is exploding exponentially and altering profoundly our media, the ability to rapidly learn, understand and integrate new information is fundamental.  It's a baseline, without which a citizen cannot participate intelligently and becomes dependent upon the high priests of "news" shows to gather and interpret information for them.  In itself, however, literacy is not enough.  It is a first step, after which a citizen must learn to discern the difference between the product of fallacious logic and genuine information.  Without this second skill, we end up with people espousing patently false positions based on heated rhetoric of whichever high priest appeals most to the person's cultural upbringing.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both shams, literal dog and pony shows to give the ostensible citizenry the feeling that they are participating in a democratic process while those very parties act as agents for multinational corporations, rather than as representatives of the people that they take an oath to serve.  When education is not at the very top of a nation's priorities, that nation cannot survive as a democracy.  The solution to the decline of the United States in terms of performance in the worldwide economy, continuation of technological superiority of its armed forces, halting its process towards unchecked executive power in service of multinational corporations begins with education.  Beyond that there are issues of transparency, the widening separation of classes (and disappearance of the middle class), decay of infrastructure, ballooning debt service, etc., but having those debates with ignorant and functionally illiterate people is a joke.

Who is laughing?

Getting Started

Setting this up as a place to record my thoughts, in case I have any.

Presently living in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, with my new wife Meri.  We have a harmonious, happy household.  The house itself was passed to Meri from her grandparents, and is a three-bedroom affair with a giant basement and a modest back yard.  We are the proud owners of two cats (a 27 pound orange tabby and a 10 pound Maine Coon) and three greyhounds that Meri rescued.

I moved back to Rhode Island after some expensive adventures on the West Coast, and have been astonishingly unemployed since that time.  Spent all of my life working in telecommunications and IT, and am trying hard to move into human services.  Hard to convince employers I'm willing to take the cut in pay for harder work/hours, but it's a calling.  In an ideal world, my own practice of metapsychology would take off, but I never intended that to be a primary source of income. 

I have a son named Zeb who is a mathematician studying at Cal-Tech, and a daughter named Gabby that does some modeling.  The ex-wife and I had a really bizarre divorce, which ended up with serious estrangement between myself and the kids, but my son has proved surprisingly willing to re-establish our relationship.  Hoping that my daughter will do the same, soon.  Right now, it seems life is complicated enough without worrying about repairing a relationship that she barely remembers in the first place, and I can understand that.  One day, hopefully soon, she'll realize the importance of understanding where she comes from, and until then, well...  enjoy my life with Meri.  ;)