The Future of Education

From Rate Your Students, of all places:

The ongoing deterioration of high school. High schools no longer teach many basic skills. The expectation is that they shouldn't. Why? I have no idea. You can pick from two dozen AP courses designed to get you into college, but in most schools you can't get basic hands-on time with power tools or engines, can't learn how to balance a checkbook, build a budget, get a mortgage or manage a home.You can take a class requiring detailed discussion of the history of modern Europe, but not one in the basic requirements of informed citizenship. It's disgraceful. High school aren't "high" -- they're low-rent college prep, or a way to mark time on your journey to service-sector job hell.

True, False, Both, Neither?

Discuss.

Must be that time of the year

Courtesy of Jill at Feministe (I think), this commencement speech given by Samantha Power. My favorite bit:

Fourth, find friends who have your back. Last weekend I attended a conference in honor of a Nobel Prize winning Princeton psychologist named Danny Kahneman. Kahneman is a remarkable scholar who has done groundbreaking experiments which showed the ways in which humans are not as rational as had long been assumed. At the conference, which celebrated his retirement, lawyers, economists, and psychologists got up to present work that had been galvanized or influenced by his theories. The day was a tour de force, a monument to the kind of impact one man and his ideas can have on the world. At the end of the day Kahneman was asked what he was most likely to be remembered for. The audience hushed in anticipation. Here Kahneman would elevate one of his many theories above the rest. Posterity would record which experimental research the great Kahneman himself thought most landmark. "The one thing that I'm sure of," he said, "is that I'll be forgotten." But he was next asked the source of his nearly unrivalled professional success. Again the scholars in the room waited expectantly. This time, he gave them a response they could take home, answering, "my choice of friends."

The beauty of this is that, while much in this life is beyond our control, all of us hold the power to choose our friends. We can each be a Nobel prize winner at friendship. None of us are perfect friends always, but one way to think about friendship is in terms of carefulness. Be careful with those you love. And surround yourself with people who are careful with you. A good friend of mine devised a rather taxing standard for love and friendship - and a grim one too - "who would you want to become a refugee with?" If your neighborhood were hit by Hurricane Katrina, or Cyclone Nargis, who would have your back? Look around you today. Your parents have your back, your siblings have your back, your closest friends have your back. Keep it that way. And be sure they know you have theirs.

[Hegemony] The U.S.'s Slow-Motion Swan Dive

From the New York Times, some good Sunday reading:

Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It’s as if the first decade of the 21st century didn’t happen — and almost as if history itself doesn’t happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren’t we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America’s image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little. Condoleezza Rice has said America has no “permanent enemies,” but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America’s armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and “asymmetric” weapons like suicide bombers. America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

I've been predicting a long, slow decline in US power along these lines for some time. Parag Khanna, the author, doesn't get at resource scarcity (which makes US military interventions more likely, which could change the equation), but I think Khanna is essentially correct: The US is a lumbering behemoth in the slow, painful process of crashing to the ground due to its own ignorance. (The epistemology of the Master-Slave dialectic seems ripe for application here.)

The only thing that prevents me from saying "it's about time" is the prospect that the US won't go quietly, and instead we're going to see lots more Iraq-style resource appropriation adventures/attempts at maintaining control in the near- to medium-future. You know, the kind that cause hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians to be killed or displaced. Blech.

A Dour Prediction

From Digby - and I should say that I agree with the plausability of this prediction. It's not a happy one, but I think there's a disturbingly large likelihood of it coming true:

What Atrios says here is absolutely true. A Democratic president, no matter who it is, is going to pay for the Republicans' sins. But it won't be just because the Republicans and Blue Dogs in congress suddenly "realize" they have co-equal power. I predict that the right wing noise machine will shout far and wide that the election was stolen (probably with the help of "illegal aliens.") The new president will not be allowed to weed out even one right wing plant anywhere in the executive branch without being accused of politicizing it. There will be no executive privilege as the courts rediscover their "responsibilities." Scientists and experts will all be accused of being shills for the liberal special interests. The president will be accused of violating Americans' civil liberties and destroying the constitution. There will be widespread accusations of fraud and corruption and non-stop investigations.

In other words the Republicans are going to accuse the Democratic president of everything we know the Bush administration did.

A less charitable interpretation of her prediction is a bit of goalpost shifting... or simply bringing up the possibility so that people will recognize it when (and if) it happens.

Did You Know: Predicting Future Statistics - Youtube Video

Update: A reader writes in with this nifty little site, which has more information on the video.

I am usually pretty skeptical of predictions about the future that sound impossible, especially regarding technology (I am less skeptical of those predictions that deal with human population demographics).

This video makes plenty of both. I really liked it except for the stuff between the five and six minute marks.

It was found via this DH article on a presentation the LCSD D.O. staff gave to the Lebanon Chamber of Commerce. Smart - now if someone would just show it to teachers and students, I'd be happier.



In a nutshell, I think the video suggests that what students should be focusing on is not so much the retention of facts, but the acquisition and mastery of skills like creative thinking, problem solving, how to collaborate effectively and how to communicate information across multiple media platforms.

The Future of Academia

Or, at least, one little piece of that puzzle:

What I think I share with Bitch and Oso, even granting our obvious differences, is a strong sense that the traditional rules just don't work anymore. Unfortunately, the folks at the top of the pecking order are the ones most vested in those traditional rules, and therefore most blind to their failures. The “opinion leaders” are far behind reality.

My words of wisdom, such as they are: go ahead and break the rules. There isn't much payoff in playing by them anymore, and they certainly don't make sense intrinsically. Cross disciplinary boundaries; blog; select topics that are interesting to you; have a kid; have a life; move into and out of administration; contradict or ignore your advisor when he's wrong. The old rules about what you're supposed to do were developed in a world that doesn't exist anymore, and that isn't coming back.

I've heard this a lot in the last several years, and not just about academia.

1) It might be a function of globalization.

2) People are saying something like this all the time.

3) Neither of the first two mean that it's not true. In fact, I think it's pretty true - systems change constantly over time.

In the case of Dean Dad's take, I can only heartily agree with his advice on what to do. It's what I'd do even if the system was static.

A Digital Future

Swiped from BoingBoing, a long series of blog posts from 2017:

The US should do what the Japanese do: track every foreigner's mobile. If he does anything freaky, jump on him.

"But Mr. Feldspar, suppose this international criminal doesn't carry a mobile?" demanded representative Chuck Kingston (R-Alabama). It would have been rude to point out the obvious. So I didn't. But look, just between you and me: Anybody without a mobile is not any kind of danger to society. He's a pitiful derelict. Because he's got no phone. Duh.

He also has no email, voicemail, pager, chat client, or gaming platform. And probably no maps, guidebooks, Web browser, video player, music player, or radio. No transit tickets, payment system, biometric ID, environmental safety sensor, or Breathalyzer. No alarm clock, camera, laser scanner, navigator, pedometer, flashlight, remote control, or hi-def projector. No house key, office key, car key... Are you still with me? If you don't have a mobile, the modern world is a seething jungle crisscrossed by electric fences crowned with barbed wire. A guy without a mobile is beyond derelict. He's a nonperson.

I didn't say any of that to the politicians. They don't want to be taught things by bloggers in public. They consider it an act of enmity.

Exactly of half of me is totally entranced by the vision of the future.

The other half is terrified, I think because these stories of a future saturated with technology suggest that real human contact has become far more limited...and that it will be a good thing when it happens. Not cool.