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Growing up, I always thought that school would be more fun if it was about playing video and computer games instead of listening to boring lectures. If school was about playing games instead of listening to lectures, then no child would be left behind because they'd always want to be at school "playing".
Playing computer games has a lot more to teach children than just what they get at home or at school, but it's just a matter of having them "play" or experiment with the right stuff.
That being said, the whole US public school system is bunk and needs to be reformed. It is entirely possible for kids to be designing computer programs, building excel spreadsheets, solving complex equations, and designing 3D models on Solidworks by their teenage years. This goal is easily obtainable by having them "play" with advanced computer games when they are in school.
Perhaps the schools of the future should hold competitions whereby children will compete against each other to be the very best at what they do, like player VS. player arcade mode, but with science and math games.
In my opinion, this is not only a good idea, but it also seems to be completely necessary as the world has many problems that need to be solved by the next generation of youngling’s in order to stave off the consequences of human ignorance of the past.
If we technologize our children properly now, then 2 things will occur: 1) No child will be left working at fast food chains because those will be all automated and 2) global warming and other big problems may most likely be solved before it's too late.
Will Wikipedia replace overpriced textbooks someday?
http://www.physorg..../news116259817.html
[quantum_flux, Dec 07 2007]
1800 Free Online Courses from MIT
http://ocw.mit.edu/...s/courses/index.htm
[quantum_flux, Dec 20 2007, last modified Dec 21 2007]
Annotation:
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//It is entirely possible for kids to be
designing computer programs, building
excel spreadsheets, solving complex
equations, and designing 3D models on
Solidworks by their teenage years. This
goal is easily obtainable// |
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This thinking is wrong. First, you've
thrown "solving complex equations" in
there, which is sort of distinct from the
other items, so let's take that first.
Average mathematicians need to be
taught. A very small minority - who
actually go on to make a contribution -
succeed regardless of the school
system, but they still need some
mentoring. Look at Ramanujan - a
brilliant natural mathematician who
realized only a fraction of his potential
because he had no formal education
(according to both Hardy and to
Ramanujan himself). |
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Now, take your other objectives:
programming, using spreadsheets, and
designing models in Solidworks. Are
these really challenging goals to be
aiming at? Come off it! No disrespect
to people who do those things - there
are artists in all fields. But using Excel
hardly embrace the full breadth of
human abilities. |
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There are two basic problems (OK,
speaking from my limited perspective).
One: a lot of teachers are crap, and a
lot of education is crap. Two: some
schooling is boring and/or hard work
(even when it's taught properly). The
solution to *neither* of these problems
is to scrap schools and say "hey,
whatever - just go figure things out for
yourself". The solution is to improve
education, and to accept that fact that
children won't necessarily enjoy all of it,
but will enjoy most of it if it's
challenging. |
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Is this official school-bashing week, or is it just my imagination running riot? |
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No, I checked my calendar and it is official
school-bashing week in the UK and US. In
Canada it's next week, apparently. |
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This was inspired by the other "school bashing" ideas, I suppose. Modern schools are highly time inefficient, and would only benefit from an upgrade in educational philosophy. |
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[MaxwellB], I'll have you know that attacking a problem from the back may be harder and more time consuming than attacking it from the front, metaphorically speaking. There are many different paths that can be taken in students learning new material, and it's often more efficient to stimulate as many sensory inputs as possible when teaching students. I believe that technology is up to the task of doing this. |
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If the goal in the US is to get our children to the top of the information mountain before the rest of the world does, then why should children climb the mountain the hard way when they can take a technological ski lift!? |
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Well, OK. My theory is that if you have
"boring lectures" in school, then the
problem is the lecturer. Smart students
will do all this technology stuff anyway
for themselves - it's fun, it's not
difficult, and they can do it at home
after school. |
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Teaching is a skill, one of the highest
arts
there is. Just because it's often done
very
badly, and just because some kids don't
think it's sufficiently "fun", does not
mean
that you can replace good teaching with
google. |
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Doesn't it? I'll bet Bill Gates would disagree with you on this! |
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Mwahahahaha! That guy can do whatever he wants to do, including reforming our schools so as to produce future Microsoft employees, or at least he can instruct them to become competitors with whom he can steal proprietary information from. |
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//with whom he can steal proprietary
information from// Now, master Flux, you
will write one hundred times "I will not
write sentences of which the grammar
does not make sense from." |
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//First, you've thrown "solving complex equations" in there, which is sort of distinct from the other items// |
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TI-92 Calculators can perform this task, it's just a matter of learning math syntax. That goes right along with computer programming. |
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I have this terrible suspicion [quantum_flux] is a Turing machine, learning English. |
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If I'm a turing machine, then why do my ideas stink? |
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I went to a really good school. Cool teachers, cool students and all that. But I hated it. I wil never forget how much I hated it. Don't put your kids in front of a computer, take them outside. Let them sniff nature. Please. Have them sit under a tree and discuss what they want to, not what you think is good for them. The learning we can get from trees alone is worth more than a thousand schoolyears. Leave computers out of it, please, I mean come on. |
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That's what recess is for though :) |
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I'm not saying to eliminate recess and PE here. People need excercise, good nutrition, and fresh air in order to function properly. Plus, kids need more dodgeball and competitive sports as well, in order to learn how to survive better in the real world. Getting rid of this is yet another thing that modern education has done wrong. Or maybe golf, billiards, and bowling if a kid actively chooses not to participate in competition, but those passive aggressive types need not make the rest suffer. |
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Mark Twain got it right: "Work is anything a body is required to do; play is anything a body is not required to do." Children naturally don't want to do things, simply because they are required to do them. On that basis, replacing teaching with edutainment (remember that term? urgh) will have less of an impact than one might hope. |
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I object strongly to this idea. Employers need students to leave education able to work hard on mundane and boring tasks unflinchingly, day in and day out if required. Being able to do that is the minimum requirement for any job. Being creative and imaginative is only a secondary requirement. |
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Kids who have great imaginations but who need constant challenge, praise and fun make very very bad employees indeed. Even in highly creative areas such as design jobs, the creativity is only a small part of the work - most of the time is spend on mundane detailing, specification and documentation. |
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//it's just a matter of learning math
syntax.// Ah, OK. I was thinking you
meant mathematics rather than
arithmetic. The problem is that all of
your objectives seem to be very low. |
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I maintain: teaching is an art. It's often
done very badly, but the solution is to
strive for better teaching, not to strive
for the feral learning of computer
technology and spreadsheet skills. |
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I find it cruel and ironic that educators are spending a lot of time and effort trying to teach kids to be creative when there is an increasing and dire need for people who can do mundane tasks well and willingly, in most developed countries. |
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I think you are both tryng to get to the root issue from two different directions. The root issue in teaching is motivating learning. To learn something teachers need to relate that thing to our interests or parents have to fill that role. Kids/everyone want to now why we learn something. Everyone needs to understand math, but why? The why for one kid may be to do baseball statistics, or science or 3-D modeling. The challenge of teaching is do do that individual connection to large groups of people at once. I think many of the "good" teachers that I hope we all had, just loved the topic so much, we were interested just to know something that could get someone else so excited. If this doesn't work they need to find another general link between the students and the subject. Computers can help. They provide the ability to teach the same subject a dozen different ways to a dozen students, which could mean just pace changes or varying teaching games or whatever. Computers are just another tool, a flexible tool, that can be used to make that connection. Teachers need to decide when it is the right tool. |
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Parents are also one of the big missing pieces from most kids education. Parents can provide that link to make learning fun if they take the time. As much as they hate to admit it, kids are preprogrammed to care about their parents opinions, so it is much easier for parents to make some connections. A lot of times parents aren't interested so why should the kid be? |
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//Kids/everyone want to now why we learn something.//
And therein lies the first mistake. For a pupil, the purpose of learning something in school should be because that is what has been prescribed for learning. The idea that educational tasks must be related to the pupil is what finally killed mandated Latin and Greek; in turn
cursing us with the present generation of intellectually clumsy and very poorly read young adults. (Do you realise that many politicians, lawyers and doctors today are unable to read the classical greek philosophy which underpins their professions or make sense of the latin terms which characterise them?) |
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Is it really necessary to have read Plato to understand that people want fair laws; property has an equity value or that human life is important to others? |
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I would suggest that many societies have flourished longer and stronger than those priding themselves upon a history based in Greek Philosophy. The Chinese spring to mind. |
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In the future, we'll replace school with a pill that youngsters will take to absorb all knowledge. |
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Can a telephone answering machine be classified as a Turing machine? |
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//Kids/everyone want to now why we learn something.//
///And therein lies the first mistake. For a pupil, the purpose of learning something in school should be because that is what has been prescribed for learning./// |
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Then why did you just go and give a perfectly valid and reasonable reason for teaching Latin or Greek? |
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Sadly it doesn't relate to me as I am not a lawyer, but even though I am an atheist, I would like to read the Bible in the "original" formats, so I agree that root language teaching is important. I'm not saying you have to explain the reason for everything, that would take more time than the lesson. I'm saying that they should get a hint at the application of the knowledge to motivate them to want to learn it and the rest they will have to rely on what we tell them to do. |
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//Can a telephone answering machine be
classified as a Turing machine?// Only if it
can Tur. |
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The basic operating principle of pre-university public schools is a process whereby every September a young person is fed into one end of the school-year, and every June that same person is spit out, with hopefully a better grasp on the essential tools required to be adult, as well as those that separate us from the animal and vegetable kingdoms: |
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Arithmetic to expand counting past 10; |
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Mathematics and Science to keep everyday occurences from being subconsciously labelled "Magic" and treated as such; |
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The study of a person's native language, to enable them to convey ideas; |
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The study of the world as a hunk of dirt, circling a bright light and how the natural laws and processes fit together; |
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The study of how that hunk of dirt is split up into various types and maturites of societies, and their interactions over the course of recorded history; |
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Our society's structure and history: why we are the way we are, with a little of why various theys are the way they are; |
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Improved co-operative and independent working abilities; |
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And I do *not* apologize in believing that "Computer Science" courses whose content consists of learning to use poorly designed, self-effacing, commercial so-called "tools" is in *any* way a viable course of study... at best an adjunct to a Typing course, and about as complicated, really, as learning to click the ball-point pen or refill the ink bottle and whittle the goose-quill. |
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...Informatics theory ? yes, certainly; Microsoft Works ? no, certainly not. |
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Consider even those tools which can be considered "useful"; a spreadsheet package for instance... why would you have a person who has no concept of matrices or (basic) data managemement skills, use one ? It's just a convenience... hell, if you have a speech>text converter you don't even have to be able to write, right ?... or read, given a text>speech program. Why teach basics of colour matching, perspective, and many other things (which I have no clue about) when the handy-dandy computer has a Paint program to produce flashy results ? Why not substitute "Guitar Hero" (a popular video game) for the years of mental and physical training necessary to actually *play* a guitar ?... to say nothing of composition. |
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// If the goal in the US is to get our children to the top of the information mountain before the rest of the world does, then why should children climb the mountain the hard way when they can take a technological ski lift!? // |
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Because that's entirely NOT the goal. Next question? |
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There's no reason NOT to challenge your kids. If they're not being challenged, then you're not doing it right and they're missing out on their potential. If we're given educational ski lifts, then the kids should learn how to climb out on the ropes of the lifts and go hand-over-hand towards whatever direction the lift is going, or better, learn how to tear apart the ski lift and build it up a different mountain entirely. Kids don't need a lot of pre-programming, they simply need to learn how to think. |
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[RayfordSteele], I think you missed something there: |
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//Perhaps the schools of the future should hold competitions whereby children will compete against each other to be the very best at what they do, like player VS. player arcade mode, but with science and math games.// |
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Kids love intellectual challenges, that is not the problem. I loved playing any good video game on any good console growing up peerly because it was a challenge to beat the game. However, modern video games are so easy to beat that it's not even a challenge to anyone. Kids need challenging video games, about math and science, in school! Also, they need to listen to classical music, like Tchaikovsky was the theme for Tetris, but playing games more mathematically orientated than that. |
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The HB is the most challenging place I know of for playing wordgames. As for maths... they're not a lot of use for anyone but astronomers, engineers and hardware designers. Unless you count the maths used by accountants and carpenters, which is simple in nature. |
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Darn, I missed 2 School-Bashing Weeks! |
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