Category Archives: School / Education

Seth Roberts poses a fantastic question:

I had never heard it put so clearly. We can ask if governments exist: 1. To improve the lives of the governed. 2. To employ the governors. 3. To help other governments. Similarly, we can ask if colleges exist: 1. To teach the students. 2. To employ the teachers. 3. To help businesses who will eventually employ the students (the signalling function of college).

Suppose we believe that the main function of colleges is to teach the students. How, then, should we improve colleges? By giving mini-grants to teachers (as is done at UC Berkeley, where I teach)? By giving awards to the best teachers (as is done at UC Berkeley)? Or by doing something quite different?

Reminds me of the provocative book What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?.

Bryan Caplan thinks so. Writing as an academic to whom "the education system has been quite good" I suspect his book-in-progress will be even more provocative. I’ve said before that our public education system today is one giant trainwreck. Practical or not, it’s still fun to debate "big ideas" and giant reform around education. I look forward to what Bryan prescribes. From his page one:

[T]hree decades of experience, combined with two decades of reading and reflection, have convinced me that our educational system is a big waste of time and money. Practically every politician vows to spend more on education, and as an insider, I can’t helping asking "Why? Do you want us to waste even more?"

Most people who criticize our education system complain that we aren’t spending our money in the right way, or that ideologues-in-teachers’-clothes are leading our nation’s children down a dark path. While I mildly sympathize with some of these complaints, they often contradict what I see as the real problem with our educational system: There’s simply far too much education going on. The typical student burns up thousands of hours of his time learning about things that neither raise his productivity nor enrich his life. And of course, a student can’t waste thousands of hours of his time without real estate to do it in, or experts to show him how.

Here are five problem areas that come to mind when I think of higher ed in America. Any others? Or better yet, solutions?

1. Emphasis on Knowledge Over Experiences — The system is still set up to reflect the old days when knowledge was concentrated in libraries and classrooms. Now, knowledge isn’t scarce; it’s abundant, and mostly free. Experiences which contexualize and bring to life your knowledge are more difficult to obtain.

2. Undergraduate Education in Research Universities — A friend of a friend recently transferred from Amherst College to Stanford to be closer to home. He says he is appalled at the quality of his new teachers: they are grad students. Large universities offer significant benefits, but focused undergraduate teaching usually isn’t one of them.

3. Creativity and Individuality — Two ideas here. First, as Seth Roberts of UC Berkeley recently noted, there is little personalization in the classroom. All 200 (or 800) students in the room have to learn exactly the same thing:

Forcing all of them to learn the exactly same stuff is like forcing all of them to wear exactly the same clothes. It can be done, especially if rewards and punishments (i.e., grades) are used, but it’s unwise. Just as feeding children a poor diet stunts physical growth, forcing college students to imitate their professors, instead of letting them (or even better, helping them) grow in all directions, stunts intellectual growth.

Second, our school system can squelch creativity and individual expression in the name of bureaucracy and structure.

4. Tenure — Just plain stupid incentive structure for professors.

5. Economic Diversity — This is a bigger problem than racial diversity. Simply put, elite universities and colleges are more than ever out of reach for lower-income families. At Claremont, for example, only 12% of the student body is eligible for Pell Grants (household income less than $40k), the most widely used indicator for low-income student body.

I’m fairly radical when it comes to education reform. I just think formal education as it’s known today is massively screwed up. I’m fortunate I made it out of four years of intensely rigorous and formal high school education without losing my creative / entrepreneurial / free-agent instinct. And I’m hopeful that, as education reform becomes more topical due to the hyperventilation over China, alternative approaches to education will be part of the mainstream picture and not reserved just for kids who "don’t fit in."

Edutopia has a fascinating interview with Alvin Toffler in which he thinks we should "shut down the public school system". Toffler says our current system was built for "industrial discipline" (assembly lines or farming). He paraphrases Bill Gates by saying we need to replace, not reform.

Richard Florida adds interesting thoughts worth reading slowly:

The school system we have now will not survive the transition to the Creative Age…

The Industrial Age because of its underlying logic (Marx) gave rise to large-scale vertical bureaucracy (Weber). It also suppressed human self-expression and initiative in favor of control (Freud). Our school systems, like our factories, large scale organizations, and governments are in effect structures ("prisons?)" for bureaucratic control.

The Creative Age logic requires something very different – self-expression, flexibility, and individual initiative….

Put that all together and you can see the need for a very different system for learning, one that optimizes flexibility over control, intrinsic reward over extrinsic (grading), lets talent thrive instead of squelching it, allows self-expression to flourish, challenges students, and lets them learn asynchronously, on their own time-scale and work flexibly.  The excuse is that schools are a place for "socialization" is just that – an excuse.  Most people can socialize in much more effective ways than pep rallies, ball games, the prom committee, or yearbook planning (but I digress). The community, broadly defined, can do that much better anyway ala Jane Jacobs.  It already does, as parents seek to supplement what their kids aren’t getting from schools with all sorts of extra-curricular interactions from play-dates and tutors to rock school. Most of the good stuff already happens at the margins. Gates and Dell both dropped out of college to build their companies in their dorm rooms.  Wonder why. 

Our schools are the opposite of what is needed: hierarchical, mind-numbing, creativity-squelching machines. So the need for transformation: But, what exactly comes next? Toffler is right. We need to shut the whole thing down. Let’s no longer confuse real estate, our current education factories/warehouses with learning. 

It’s hard to sketch the system out in advance, but the core principles to build around are readily apparent: a shared curriculum on a technology platform that enables flexible and asynchronous learning anywhere, anyplace, anytime;  challenge and intrinsic reward over grades (and ridiculous standardized tests); community based engagement and socialization;  and a wide range of ala carte instructional offerings. This kind of system is one that simultaneously empowers and enriches students, parents and teachers.

I guess nude-themed parties are so yesterday in American college life. Santa Clara University students, according to the L.A. Times, had a new idea: "South of the Border" party.

A "South of the Border" theme party has stirred outrage at a Jesuit university in Silicon Valley after students showed up at the bash dressed as Latino janitors, gardeners, gang members and pregnant teens…

One image shows a partygoer with a balloon stuffed under her shirt, making her appear pregnant.

In another, a woman wears pink rubber cleaning gloves and carries a feather duster.

Rest assured that the community is coming together to hold a forum to discuss diversity, tolerance, and all the other issues that animate American higher ed. What’s new?