Let me echo what some people are saying .... training and education. Duh.
166 karma · joined May 27, 2009
We always need to remember that there are subtle ways that students get sorted into "smart" and "not-smart", even when we are trying to be objective:
Then we won't have a goddam brain drain -- it is an embarrassment to the American people that we can't educate ourselves.
1. There is an overall trend to more bureaucratization, and bureaucracies often evaluate their officers based on formal certification, especially when there is no structure to measure output. So I support wide spread standardized testing ....
2. The public educational system is designed to enculturate the entire population, including a big proportion of folks that are needed to provide working class labor and reproduction of more working class laborers. So if 80% of the country get a crappy education due to a certification system that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence, then the system has succeeded.
3. Good education hurts. Not be Nietszchean (sp?) or anything, but most people are taught that fun and ease are the highest ideals in life -- how can you really teach if you, your administrators, the kids, and the parents all believe that you should maximize personal pleasure rather than maximize personal accomplishment?
I apologize for the rant, but the unbelievably bad education in the US is probably the issue that most infuriates me.
... But if we did that, who would drink Coors and drive forklift for Walmart and not complain about it?
So I think that a huge function of the educational system is to educate a large part of the population badly. I think that the teacher training system serves this is as well, by selecting for mediocre teachers and then making them more mediocre via training. Additionally, in the schools themselves a lot of effort is made to classify young people into dumb and smart categories, usually unfairly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect), and this classification stamps them for the rest of their lives and creates a population of hopeless lower class workers.
If there are SOME good teachers in the system like btilly, then SOME kids go on to get out of their class, which is perfect in that (1) we need to claim that it is possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and (2) we need to recruit SOME kids to grow up to fill management positions, but not too many that they all can't find careers. Historically, underemployed educated people are the people who become union leaders.
The beauty of it is that the people who fail think it is their fault!
(Sorry to rant about the educational / class system in general, rather than the topic of how to teach advanced math, but I couldn't stop myself.)
Call me paranoid, but there you go.
I agree that on #1, online learning is probably better than classroom. I was just saying that classroom usually provides it today.
WRT #2, I disagree that people can easily absorb it on their own, otherwise there wouldn't be so many lonely socially awkward people in the world. And yes, if you have real trouble, college won't help. But if you are sort of graceful when you arrive though, college can help polish that gracefulness even more, with very real benefits in the real world.
I disagree that #3 is evil. Again, my point is that people need it, so if we shift away from conventional universities we need to provide it somehow.
I DO agree that #4 is evil. I just wanted to call it like I see it, and explain some of the resistance to really opening up education.
WRT #5, I wish the OP would refrain from using words like "nonsense", which seems a little antagonistic. I think my point still holds. Part of my point though is that efficiency is changing, especially with shifts from print to electronics.
1. Impart knowledge. And when it comes to teaching grammar or differential equations, online education is probably a more effective delivery agent than classrooms ... sorry guys.
2. Train people in face-to-face social skills. Much important work is done in an educational environment by teaching people how to behave in their later professional careers. This goes FAR beyond technical skill, into things like how to make appropriate jokes, how to drop names, how to socialize off work, how to dress at what occasion, how not to expose the fact that you came from a poor background, etc, etc. I think high level centralized education is probably pretty good at this; some of this can be done online, but online interaction doesn't give you practice at face work.
3. Grow social networks with a high level of emotional charge. One goes to Yale largely so that one can become a Yale Alumn and mobilize those networks. This network building doesn't work without an emotional attachment to the university, though, and this is probably more easily cultivated when people are there in person, lose their virginity on campus, go to rituals together, etc.
4. Control the flow of people into various levels of the elite. I think there are a lot more capable people in the world than there are open positions, so education partly serves to withhold training and entitlement by imposing fairly arbitrary cutoffs for admission and by making people feel personally responsible for their prior lack of training (a lack which is generally due to their bad luck in being born into a less fortunate segment of society). Better to have unemployed pissed off illiterate peasants than unemployed pissed off educated folks -- the latter organize and execute revolutions while the former just break windows and make a lot of noise. This categorizing based on supposed talent begins at a very young age -- google "Pygmalion effect". Choking off the flow of talented people who might make trouble will be harder if education escapes its current stranglehold by the academy.
5. Provide physical equipment. If you need to provide access to lab equipment and libraries, it is more efficient to put them in one place and share them. This is obviously changing rapidly, with central libraries becoming obsolescent in many ways (not all though -- browsing the shelves is a good thing and impossible to do in the same way online).
So, if we are discuss the pros and cons of online versus offline education, I think we should do it broken down more, either my way or some other.
Two more comments -- it is pretty funny to hear professors going on about cheapening the value of a degree from Fort Whatever in Kansas. And as far as I am concerned, the sooner the internet bomb goes off in academia, the better.
I think we "do" free will rarely, with most of our lives running automatically. When we hit trouble -- a turning point, a fork in the road so to speak, where it is no longer obvious what to do -- THAT is when we have to "do" some free will. But most of our lives aren't driven by free will or conscious choosing, but rather by skills we develop when we are enculturated into our society, skills that get trained into us so deeply we don't ever think about them (automatically getting saying thank you, etc). (When we have to consciously choose too much of daily life, we call that autism...)
At those turning points, I think we need language. First, language (words either in our head or in conversation) clarifies the options by giving them names. Second, language enable us to arbitrarily choose one of the options and stick to it. Finally, language enables us to imagine the negation of a situation once we have named it, and thus open us to creativity. Without language, we can only do what we feel like instaneously.
So, while that was an interesting article, the debate is framed subconsciously makes in a way that makes it impossible to get a good answer. Also, none of these ideas are mine -- I am regurgitating the original thoughts of Heidegger, Peirce, and Bourdieu.
1) There are lots of unifying themes and grounds of meaning besides God -- the motherland, the continuity of the family, evolution, personal actualization, etc.
2) I disagree with most statements to the effect that "everything is different now", though the OP has a couple of interesting points. First -- disconnectedness has been a theme in the arts since the turn of the century (Dada, Sartre, etc). Second, I think that folks sitting around the campfire in the Kalahari probably like drama just as much as we do, they just that their media are different -- stories, songs, and low tech ritual versus TV; but I think the charge of meaning is the same, even if the amount of color and noise is vastly different.
I think because high stakes and high drama processes DO happen in real life, we simulate them with vicarious experiences of narrative so we can be ready mentally. If we don't digest stories beforehand, we won't have a model for when we discover we have cancer, risk losing a job or a deal, court a loved one, try to get accepted to an ivy league school, etc.
And if there isn't SOME drama in your life with real stakes and real risks, you probably need to go out and take on some challenges. Such a desire for drama is hardly pathetic or dysfunctional. That is, unless you stay at home and only satisfy it vicariously with HBO, or create needless challenges without any real stakes like driving too fast...
I must admit that he wasn't on my radar until now, though I read his guide to Ruby, but now I love him.
One approach is to make all your denormalizations populated by triggers -- that way to you can still think about the DB in "clean" terms in your code when modifying data, but get your denormalized tables for queries, too.