As a former teacher I have noticed some unlucky trends in education (it may be different in different coutries), namely that it seems to slow down. On one end there is a public pressure to make schools easier for small children, like not giving them grades in the first class. On the other end there is a pressure to send everyone to university, for signalling (by having more people in universities we can pretend to be smart, even if the price is dumbing down university education) and reducing unemployment (more people in schools, less people in unemployment registry).
While I generally approve friendlier environment for small children and more opportunities for getting higher education, the result seems like shifting the education to later age. Students learn less in high schools (some people claim otherwise, but e.g. math curicullum is being reduced in recent decades) and many people think it’s ok, because they can still learn the necessary things in university, can’t they? So the result is a few “child prodigies” and a majority of students who are kept at schools only for legal or financial reasons.
Yeah, people live longer, prolong their childhoods, but their peak productivity does not shift accordingly. We feel there is enough time, but that’s because most people underestimate how much there is to learn.
It’s easy to learn something when you need it… if the inferential distance is short. Problem is, it often isn’t. Second problem, it is easy to find information, but it is more difficult to separate right and wrong information if the person has no background knowledge. Third problem, the usefullness of some things becomes obvious only after a person learns them.
I have seen smart people trying to jump across a large informational gap and fail. For example there are many people who taught themselves programming from internet tutorials and experiments. They can do many impressive things, just to fail at something rather easy later, because they have no concepts of “state automata” or “context-free grammar” or “halting problem”—the things that may seem like a useless academic knowledge at university, but they allow to quickly classify groups of problems into categories with already known rather easy solutions (or in the last case: known to be generally unsolvable). Lack of proper abstractions slows them at learning, they invent their own bad analogies. In theory, there are enough materials online that would allow them to learn everything properly, but that would take a lot of time and someone’s guidance. And that’s exactly what schools are for: they select materials, offer guidance, and connect you with other people studying the same topic.
In my opinion, a good “general education” is one that makes inferential distances shorter on average. Mathematics is very important, because it takes good basic knowledge to understand statistics, and without statistics you can’t understand scientific results in many fields. A recent example: in a local Mensa group there was a discussion on web whether IQ tests are really necessary, because most people know what their IQ is. I dropped them a link to an article saying that the correlation between self-reported IQ and measured value is less than 0.3. I thought that would solve the problem. Well, it did, kind of… because the discussion switched to whether “correlation 0.3″ means “0.3%” or “30%”. I couldn’t make this up. IMHO a good education should prevent such things from happening.
Though I agree that a conversion from “knowledge” to “money” is overestimated, or at least it is not very straightforward.
You are advocating a strategically devised network of knowledge which would always offer you a support from the nearest base, when you are wandering on a previously unknown land. “Here comes the marines”—you can always count on that.
Well, in science you can’t. You must fight the marines as the enemies sometimes, and you are often so far out, that nobody even knows for you. You are on your own and all the heavy equipment is both useless and to expensive to carry.
This is the situation when the stakes are high, when it really matters. When it doesn’t, it doesn’t anyway.
As a former teacher I have noticed some unlucky trends in education (it may be different in different coutries), namely that it seems to slow down. On one end there is a public pressure to make schools easier for small children, like not giving them grades in the first class. On the other end there is a pressure to send everyone to university, for signalling (by having more people in universities we can pretend to be smart, even if the price is dumbing down university education) and reducing unemployment (more people in schools, less people in unemployment registry).
While I generally approve friendlier environment for small children and more opportunities for getting higher education, the result seems like shifting the education to later age. Students learn less in high schools (some people claim otherwise, but e.g. math curicullum is being reduced in recent decades) and many people think it’s ok, because they can still learn the necessary things in university, can’t they? So the result is a few “child prodigies” and a majority of students who are kept at schools only for legal or financial reasons.
Yeah, people live longer, prolong their childhoods, but their peak productivity does not shift accordingly. We feel there is enough time, but that’s because most people underestimate how much there is to learn.
OTOH there is a saying—just learn where and how to get the information you need.
And it’s a big truth in that. It is easier every day to learn something (anything) when you need it.
Knowledge market value could be easily grossly overestimated.
It’s easy to learn something when you need it… if the inferential distance is short. Problem is, it often isn’t. Second problem, it is easy to find information, but it is more difficult to separate right and wrong information if the person has no background knowledge. Third problem, the usefullness of some things becomes obvious only after a person learns them.
I have seen smart people trying to jump across a large informational gap and fail. For example there are many people who taught themselves programming from internet tutorials and experiments. They can do many impressive things, just to fail at something rather easy later, because they have no concepts of “state automata” or “context-free grammar” or “halting problem”—the things that may seem like a useless academic knowledge at university, but they allow to quickly classify groups of problems into categories with already known rather easy solutions (or in the last case: known to be generally unsolvable). Lack of proper abstractions slows them at learning, they invent their own bad analogies. In theory, there are enough materials online that would allow them to learn everything properly, but that would take a lot of time and someone’s guidance. And that’s exactly what schools are for: they select materials, offer guidance, and connect you with other people studying the same topic.
In my opinion, a good “general education” is one that makes inferential distances shorter on average. Mathematics is very important, because it takes good basic knowledge to understand statistics, and without statistics you can’t understand scientific results in many fields. A recent example: in a local Mensa group there was a discussion on web whether IQ tests are really necessary, because most people know what their IQ is. I dropped them a link to an article saying that the correlation between self-reported IQ and measured value is less than 0.3. I thought that would solve the problem. Well, it did, kind of… because the discussion switched to whether “correlation 0.3″ means “0.3%” or “30%”. I couldn’t make this up. IMHO a good education should prevent such things from happening.
Though I agree that a conversion from “knowledge” to “money” is overestimated, or at least it is not very straightforward.
You are advocating a strategically devised network of knowledge which would always offer you a support from the nearest base, when you are wandering on a previously unknown land. “Here comes the marines”—you can always count on that.
Well, in science you can’t. You must fight the marines as the enemies sometimes, and you are often so far out, that nobody even knows for you. You are on your own and all the heavy equipment is both useless and to expensive to carry.
This is the situation when the stakes are high, when it really matters. When it doesn’t, it doesn’t anyway.