[quote=briansd1]Very interesting opinion in WaPo about the future of education.
Since education is getting so expensive, maybe we can cut the cost of education by using the Internet to distribute and replay content.
Today, the Khan Academy Web site boasts 2,300 separate math tutorials, from simple addition to vector calculus, that have been viewed more than 50 million times by more than 2 million students and are in active use in more than a thousand classrooms across the country.
I do agree that we need to seriously assess the way in which we are providing education to our students. In reality, the age-old “learn from reading a book” method has really not changed at all, despite the massive changes in media and communication methods. There has always been a reluctance on the part of people (students and adult workers) to read, and their skills in this area have progressively worsened to the point that a significant number of *college* graduates are leaving school with marked literacy deficits.
What we’ve done is to simply reduce the level of difficulty of the material we are teaching, and, when that isn’t enough, we “adjust” students’ grades to mask the lack of achievement.
The second article I linked to above is about a teacher who managed to mask his illiteracy for many years. He was a successful teacher because he took the time to create a visual and oral learning environment. I don’t endorse his deceptions, but I admire what came out of it. While reading is extremely important, all learning in school should not be based on it. I don’t say this because I think that we have to make things easier for students but because I believe that we could successfully teach so much more information to so many more students. And teach them in a way that would stay with them, and help them add to their existing body of knowledge when they were away from the classroom. The fact that we are still limiting our teaching largely to “read it/memorize it” is staggering to me, especially in light of the technology that has already been developed and is readily available.
However, an ESSENTIAL aspect of education that has been largely ignored is parental involvement. If parents don’t involve themselves in their child’s education by enforcing study and homework completion, by meeting with his/her teachers, and, most important, raising their children to be well-behaved and respectful in the classroom environment, no technology change will help. Education should be a privilege, not an automatic right, and way too many parents are using the schools as a babysitter, expecting the staff to teach a child that the parents, themselves, can’t control. If their parents don’t give a damn, the students won’t either.
