Posts Tagged ‘Education’
A Guest Blog Post
June 8th, 2010 | Author: JBH
I am copying below a blog post from Ron Wilson of EDN. He nails it. After you read, please click on his link to show your support for it. Nothing other than going to his site, that’s all I ask.
Blowouts, elementary school, and the future of democracy
The weekend edition of the Financial Times this week carried a story that gave me pause. It was a long piece of straight reporting, mostly from inside BP’s command center in Houston, on that company’s struggle to control the discharge from their now-infamous Macondo well. The piece is detailed, well-written, and timely, as one might expect from the Financial Times. But it made me realize just how technically vacuous has been the deluge of coverage on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and how totally unprepared the citizenry of the USA is to deal with the questions today’s world thrusts before them.
For example, the general impression created by the US press is that BP has spent most of its time wringing its hands about the blowout, while consulting movie stars, letters from school children, and perhaps a psychic or two in the search for solutions, while occasionally taking a stab at some scheme or other. But the Times article suggests a reality more like the rescue of Apollo 13: hundreds of engineers, 160 companies including ExonMobile and Chevron, and some of the world’s leading sea-floor engineering contractors, driving themselves to exhaustion testing plans and directing a navy of remotely-operated submersibles.
In the litany of Web video, photos, and blurbs, and on the decrying of the evening news reports, this drama is simply missing. Where are the discussions of strategy, profiles of the leading engineers, descriptions of the ships and submersibles-even an accurate description of a blow-out preventer? Where a discussion of the communications network that links equipment, crews, and engineers with live video? The sad answer, I fear, is that all this is missing because the news providers either don’t understand it themselves, or because they assume their audiences wouldn’t understand it.
Unfortunately, on this count they are probably correct. An article in a local newspaper earlier in the week gloated that Oakland had become the only school district in California to require science classes below the high-school level. Kids who have no clear idea of science or the workings of the natural world at 14 are unlikely to become adults who can form a clear idea of a complex deep-water petroleum-engineering project, or for that matter of what is likely to be an equally complex problem in ecological engineering.
Therein lies a deeper issue. Our culture will continue to face complex choices that posit an obvious benefit-energy, health, employment-against a range of technical risks, and even more complex proposals to mitigate those risks. In our political system these challenging optimization problems will be set before the court of public opinion as emotionally-charged black-vs.-white choices. The ability of a woefully undereducated public to see through the oversimplifications into the richness of the problems, and at least not to obstruct the search for useful solutions, will influence the future of the republic. All we who have had the privilege of a technical education owe some thought to capping this gusher of technological ignorance that is poisoning not just our beaches or our wildlife, but the very bedrock of civil discourse upon which our system of government must rest.
Tzimtzum commented:
As an editorial in the latest issue of EE Times suggests, not only is the general public clueless in the scientific disciplines, Congress and the White House staff are also technically illiterate. Nonetheless, these pompous baffoons in D.C. still have the “audacity” (now where have I heard this word before) to ask idiotic, brainless, questions under the pretense of finding the truth. The fact is that the whole scenario becomes an exercise in self aggrandizing–”and Nero played on as Rome burned.”
Ron Wilson in his piece observes, “Americas solution to every problem is to declare war on it like somehow that is going to rally the foolish.” But this, too, is nothing new–it’s right out of the writing of William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” and one of the banners being held high by the Progressives now in Washington.
Has anything changed since the era of James? Hardly. Nonetheless, the current administration–just as others–will find some way to declare a struggle against something else. Currently, we have an ongoing war on poverty, fat, crime, drugs, smoking, pollution, cancer, diabetes, carbon dioxide, nuclear power, conventional power, McDonald’s Happy Meals, and of course, terrorism–and the list goes on and on.
I am not that afraid of a dumbed down public as I am of a government which attempts to manipulate the ignorant to further and to enable its own world view. Until we have elected officials who believe in following the US Consitution rather than an agenda which looks like its been penned by Geroges Sorel and Martin Heidegger, I would not expect things to improve anytime too soon.
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Nurturing creativity enhances individuality
August 20th, 2009 | Author: JBH
This is a wonderful video on the need to change the educational process.
Teaching to the Individual
May 26th, 2009 | Author: JBH
Those that favor a libertarian viewpoint to education get a bad rap. More often than not, people that favor independent school education (i.e. school choice) are labeled elitists, unwilling to spend time and effort in the public school system to fix those items found objectionable. Instead of working to make the system better, they prefer to just write a check to a private institution.
From my own experience, I think those thoughts are off the mark. Mrs. H and I are ones that have selected an independent elementary school for our offspring. There are times when I feel people look at us as though we are escaping some form of responsibility towards our community. Maybe I’m paranoid, but I get the feeling from some that if we were to choose to spend less time making money (i.e. working) and more time with our children’s public school system, we could impact the results and be a contributor to the community.
But the truth is we are not escaping our responsibility, we are embracing it. And we need to work harder in order to afford that desired responsibility. When the beautiful Mrs. H and I made the decision, our local public school was facing economic hardship and looking to cut expenses (which continues to this day). Instead of looking to the administrative departments, they went directly to reducing the teacher ranks (knowing it improves their chances of raising taxes by threatening the harshest punishment). Parents had little opportunity to resist. Some in the area even offered to teach certain classes (such as art) but the school dismissed the idea as it would go against the union contract. We, the local community, were being held hostage to the whims of the teachers’ union and the bureaucracy that has grown around our public school system.
Now, the cuts weren’t the main reason we went the independent school route. The primary advantage to an independent school education is the ability to tailor the education to the child’s needs. If you perform a web search on learning styles, you will see much research on the topic with the number of styles ranging from 3 up to at least 8. To assume that every public school can teach to every child’s strength seems highly unlikely to me. (This is especially true when public systems are increasingly making the decision to raise the student-teacher ratio, and forced to bend to the federal and state authorities with regard to standardized tests. The focus has been placed on standardizing the process (for efficiency sake) and esoteric scoring mechanisms and taken away from optimizing a child’s ability to develop their own individual thought process).
Not unique to our independent school, we have parents that have each of their children at completely different schools. It makes it hard from the standpoint of logistics, but the parents feel the effort is justified in order to get the best learning environment for each child. To judge these parents as irresponsible members of the community would be harsh and misguided.
A major issue with those against independent schools is their limited definition of community. Implicit in their comment is a desire to focus on the community as defined by a locale that was defined by politicians and bureaucrats. What makes the community defined by location any more important than the community I have with our children’s school? Most of the parents live within 15 miles of the school, which actually brings a wider perspective rather than a narrower, geographical view to the world.
And with regards to parent involvement, most independent schools couldn’t exist without the daily involvement of their parent population. In order to lower the costs, independent schools look to leverage the skills of those in the school community and have garnered high volunteer rates because of it. I would argue that we in the independent school world actually are more involve in the educational process, sitting on the various boards and committees within the school. Willing to dedicate the time because we can impact the results. Also, when times get tough, we look for all options to cut expenses with the last being anything that directly touches our children’s education. I know this from direct experience with our school during the current economic downturn.
When unions and bureaucrats get involved, the first phrase out of their mouths is ‘laying off teachers’ as they know that they can always hold us hostage for more tax dollars. And the parents have little choice but to pay what is demanded of them.
Just imagine a world where each and every local elementary school has to compete for children rather than being given a monopoly for their particular geographic location. When times get tough, do you think the administrators would be arguing about how many teachers to lay off? Do you think the parents would stand for it? I know from my limited experience, they would not.
Educating the (m)Asses
May 17th, 2009 | Author: JBH
As the Washington establishment discusses school vouchers for the district, they may want to re-read this.
These naysayers… …see vouchers as a tool to destroy the public education system. Their rhetoric and ire are largely fueled by those special-interest groups that are more dedicated to the adults working in the education system than to making certain every child is properly educated.
