How long until the (first-world) classroom education model is obsolete?
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Always a niche (Score:5, Insightful)
My view is that there will always be a niche for in-person classroom instruction. I think the product that higher education should be selling is the opportunity to develop a personalized relationship with an expert. That happens very effectively in the small classrooms of liberal arts colleges.
The non-interactive lectures provided by large universities with hundreds of students in the lecture hall at a time went obsolete when video was invented.
Re:Always a niche (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. Small classrooms, with face-to-face instruction are very effective. Remote classrooms do work but are less interactive and allow for more distractions.
In-person instruction is analogous in the business world to face-to-face meetings. They have been shown to be more effective than phone calls, video conferencing, etc.
However people will push for "something different," due to failures in the current system, even though those failures are not related to in-person classroom instruction, per se. People frequently throw out the baby with the bath water, so I believe in-person classrooms will be "obsoleted" by people reacting to current failures. (See public schools).
Re:Always a niche (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they are. But they are not the current model...
Re:Always a niche (Score:5, Funny)
The classrooms are still small, they are just packed more tightly...
Re:Always a niche (Score:5, Insightful)
But one of the MAIN components missing in the classroom methodology of old, is pretty much the most important one...the parent.
My parents, kept a constant look over my shoulder as to getting my homework done. They once grounded me for 2 weeks, until I could get my multiplication tables memorized through the 12's.
They rewarded me for good grades, and chastised me for poor ones (C's, I darned not get below that, and rarely made C's).
They knew my teacher, my principal...often as not, my Mom had much too good of a personal relationship with the principal, as that I was a bit mischeavous..and she was called in more than a couple of times about me. The school thought I was a good kid, but I often would finish my work early, and become class clown, or attempt to distract others.
I guess in today's world...they'd drug me.
But really....where are the concerned parents? We didn't need the 20 metric tons of homework every night that kids get today...enough to get the job done and my folks oversaw that. I didn't have homework every night...usually I got it done at school and had time when I got home to *gasp* go out and play in the neighborhood with the other kids I went to school with.
Parents....they are what is missing in today's classes.
No teacher should have to spend the majority of her time babysitting and shouting down kids, rather than teaching...
We'll get into the other distraction...worrying about Billy's self esteem in another thread.
Re:Always a niche (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you work in an office .... then a classroom is good training for this ..
Nothing to do with the teacher interacting with you, it is more to do with the whole class interacting with each other, vieoconferencing is all very well but a lot of the social cues are missing ...
Meetings are mostly pointless, but having wasted time on lengthy email conversations then gone and talked to the person and cleared up the whole thing in minutes, they are sometimes the best way
Re:Always a niche (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that teacher-student interaction and personal relationships should be more encouraged in higher education through smaller class sizes. Nevertheless, I don't think that this is currently limited to liberal arts colleges—I attend a university with a small yet excellent engineering department, in which relationships with professors have proved invaluable to my education.
Large lectures on the other hand are minimally interactive, and could be migrated to online video. The benefit of this migration is that professors who held large lectures in the past would be available to teach smaller classes, providing more opportunities for one-on-one interaction. The hard decision is which classes to offer as online lectures and which to offer with small class sizes, as different courses seem to lend themselves to different teaching styles.
Re:Always a niche (Score:3)
The instructor for my online class has an optional in class section for those that need it. Her class is the only offered at the school, so there is no choice other than online. She does this because online is for strong, independent learners. Others thrive better in a classroom setting. I'm one of those students that's either held back, or could be doing other things with my time so online is great. As for exams, I prefer the practical approach. In the business law course I took we only had a mid term and a final. Each had ten cases we were presented with, and had to argue based on the facts. There was no right or wrong position, so long as you stuck to one side, and was based on the facts and the law. A good management class I took used purely essay based questions for the tests. You had to write out short answers, and essays. The same for a history class I took. Other than those I felt multiple choice and true false were useless measurements. A student could just guess on some too easily.
Perhaps requiring a series of papers written at home on the subject would be better then?
It would be a way of examining a students knowledge and understanding. Otherwise you only test the ability to cram at the last minute.
*poll topic*
In general I think the text book model is inefficient in it's current form. Instead of one or two huge books, the system should go back to the six volume series type of books. Such as an academic history book you would find at Barnes and Noble in a format easy to hold in your hand. Textbooks always annoyed me because you just can't hold them comfortably or take them anywhere. My accounting text wasn't offered digitally, so I need to carry around a huge book that has 1,500 pages in it. Heck, it would save the textbook companies money. As I have seen the older accounting texts that were in a traditional format, and all in black and white. Most of the pages are way too busy, and there is no need for all of the color on them. With accounting all of the examples are simple tables. Journal entries and income statements don't need fancy colors.
Re:Always a niche (Score:2)
Some subjects or fields of research if you will, are actually best taught using a chalk and a blackboard. One such an example is mathematics. A well trained lecturer that proves theorems and solves problems on a blackboard beats any powerpoint any day of the week. In fact, math is one of the oldest subjects there is that is taught and the so called didactics (the science of teaching and instruction or pedagogics) behind it has evolved over several hundred years and it is well understood. At least at the university level, high school math is a joke as far as I can tell, at least the math that has been taught there during the past 3-4 decades or so.
I've also been to business schools/universities where the blackboard has been replaced with a whiteboard and the lecturer is using powerpoints and I can tell right away that more efficient ways to ruin teaching are hard to come by! To put it simply, a subject such as math should never ever never ever be taught with powerpoint slides and a whiteboard!
So the bottom line is that don't dismiss the good old ways that have been developed and refined for centuries!
But carefully note that there are a lot of "new" subjects that have not yet found a good (consensus) way to be taught, examples of such subjects involve; computer science, economics, finance, operations management, logistics,
Also note that the average skills among people in math and language have steadily declined during the past 3-4 decades at least in the western world so I would say that at large, the educational system has rather devolved than evolved in spite of computers and the whatnot. I would even dare say that computers and all the gadgets around us have dumbed people down quite a bit. We don't need to be able to read and interpret maps anymore, we don't even need to be able to spell properly as spell checkers take care of that. Fact is that computers and the technical means available do more and more of the thinking for us and we should be careful about it as these means can do more harm than good as we can grow to become too dependent of them.
Re:Always a niche (Score:4, Funny)
Schools teach more than just the curiculum. One of the most valuable lessons people learn through attending school daily is how to act when surrounded by a pack of their peers in such a way as to be considered socially acceptable.
Many students also benefit directly from the dialog that occurs in the classroom. Until people are attending class in some kind of virtual world, students will have no real analog for the experience of learning amongst a group of other people via remote learning. Unless everyone starts working remotely, these will still be vital life skills, if only to reinforce the need for personal hygeine.
While some subjects are better suited to remote learning, more hands on topics such as trade subjects and the arts still require direct supervision and equipment.
Re:Always a niche (Score:3)
That depends largely on the school. My first elementary school was great, but I transferred to a blue collar school in the middle of kindergarten and it was fine at first, but in second grade a bully moved in to town, decided I was punch bait, beat the shit out of me (black eye, bloody nose) and threw me across the blacktop shredding my knees and arms and the teachers did nothing about it because they didn't see it. He then decided if you wanted to be his friend and not get beat up by him you had to beat up one of three kids, and I was one of them. To make a long story short, my mom pulled me out of that school after complaining three times and not seeing any action, but I feel really bad for those other kids because I don't think anything changed for them after I left.
I then went to a very different public school... no grades, courses were 1-2 weeks long and done at your own pace (they were divvied into chunks like "fractions" or "long division" or "spelling 2" or "grammar 3" and you needed to at least keep pace with what you'd do in a normal school), they fixed a number of things my previous school had broken (namely spelling - they used a phonetic based system that wrecks spelling in favor of pronunciation - every kid I know that went there can't spell) and I went from a kid on a normal learning pace to one on an accelerated learning pace. I really disliked not having the hands on attention at first, I will admit, but it was like taking off the training wheels and what really kick started my motivation was trying to keep up with a really smart friend (eventually got a doctorate from MIT if that says anything). The thing is, the way that school was run I could completely do it at home with short classroom time today (real or virtual), so I'm kind of torn - I could do it at home, but the kids I met in the classes motivated me... but that only works in a self paced system, not a conventional classroom, and Jr High and High School were a step backwards with conventional classrooms (not to mention lack of computers - got my love for computers in the Apple ][ lab we could go to if we finished our objectives - another motivating factor, and we had 1 IBM PC in the library for library use only in Jr High, and the High School lab could only be used by kids taking basic computer classes, which I was way beyond in elementary school - in fact, I could write in assembler what they wrote in BASIC by then, even on a PC).
Re:Always a niche (Score:3)
Re:Always a niche (Score:2)
It is the governments obligation to provide the opportunity to learn. It is the parent and child's responsibility to take advantage at it. Those who abdicate that responsibility to the school system get exactly what they deserve
I'm not too worried about it, McDonald's always needs people with low skills to do low paying jobs so they can keep the cost of their food low. If a parent isn't willing to put forth the effort to motivate their child to learn, they are the one's responsible for their child having to work there. Meanwhile, parents that do care will continue to get involved in their child's education and help them prepare a better life.
Re:Always a niche (Score:5, Interesting)
My view is that there will always be a niche for in-person classroom instruction. I think the product that higher education should be selling is the opportunity to develop a personalized relationship with an expert. That happens very effectively in the small classrooms of liberal arts colleges.
The non-interactive lectures provided by large universities with hundreds of students in the lecture hall at a time went obsolete when video was invented.
The product higher education sells isn't the education, it's the credential. There's a reason schools like MIT are perfectly comfortable making their curricula publicly available. The degree from MIT is what many people actually want. And yes, I work in higher education. You can learn things here, most people do, but make no mistake about what everyone's motivations are, they want that piece of paper.
Re:Always a niche (Score:3)
There's some evidence that homeschooling is more effective, for instance. Homeschooled kids apparently do tend to do slightly better than their traditionally educated counterparts in college (at least in terms of academics; by many accounts they also tend to be less well-adjusted socially). Assuming that's true does suggest that the traditional model can be improved upon. But on the other hand, it suggests that the answer isn't less personal interaction, it's *more* personal interaction. Effectively, a parent who homeschools their kid is creating an environment with an extremely high student-teacher ratio (1:1 for one kid, 2:1 for two children, 3:1 for three, etc.). They're getting far more time from a teacher than kids in a conventional environment. Similarly, kids who are going to elite private boarding schools (the ones that tend to contribute disproportionately to top colleges and universities) tend to have average class sizes of around a dozen students and student:teacher ratios of anywhere from 8:1 to 5:1.
There was another recent study, written up in the New York times, that looked at the effect of outstanding (top 5%) teachers on their students. They found that these high-performing teachers created high-performing students. The students were more likely to go to college, made more money, and were less likely to be teenage mothers. The effect was dramatic- a single year with such a teacher increased the average lifetime earnings of a student by $50,000 http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html [harvard.edu].
So the evidence seems pretty clear. The answer isn't less human interaction, it's more human interaction, and better teachers.
It already is (Score:2, Insightful)
Classrooms are completely ineffective at preparing students for
(Rant)
{
living without jobs, without hope, and with a constant stream of fear, hate and/or mind-numbing garbage continuously poured into their heads from the 24 hour infonewstainment channels.
}
If you know a useful trade, take a young person under your wing and teach them that trade. If you are the parent of a young person, find someone to teach them a useful trade. I think employers understand how broken education is and would be willing to give someone with "Four years apprenticeship with (good coder), while he was working at (good company)" on their resume a try over "B.A. in Computer Science."
Re:It already is (Score:3, Interesting)
Master/apprentice relationships really are a good idea and can help lead to mastery of a particular trade skill. If the point of education is to learn the skills necessary to get employment "in the real world", the worst place would be to learn from some washed up professor who couldn't cut the pressure in the work environment and decided to go into academia instead, and furthermore hasn't actually practiced the skills of the trade they are teaching for 15-20 years.
That isn't true for all of academia, but often engineering colleges are that way. If there is some genuine engineering research going on at a university that is pushing the limits of the technology in very new ways, perhaps there is a point to having those researchers.... but that isn't what most people are going to be doing when they enter the profession. Those I've learned the most from for engineering classes I've taken were adjunct professors who had a full-time job and did teaching as a side hobby for some pizza money and to stay in touch with future graduates (usually as a recruiting tool I might add).
Re:It already is (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the huge start up investment (a post-doc) required to attempt to gain an academic job (2-3 years, insane hours, low pay), nobody would even bother unless they were committed to getting a professorship at the end of it. You don't flush out of industry and just land in academia - the people I know who have left industry to take up professorships are all renowned engineers with a reputation for excellence. They won't take you otherwise.
In my own case, I worked in industry for a year and a half after my PhD and found it so tedious and unstimulating, that I decided I enjoyed academia more. When I made the decision to leave, I switched to part time just so that I could afford to live for the 6 months or so it would require to find and land a suitable post-doc. In truth, if I had left the switch much longer, I would not have been able to go back at all, because my publication history would be too sparse (and indeed, that's hurting my career even now). In effect, I viewed getting a post-doc as preparing to assail a mountain - months of preparation up front, followed by an excruciating marathon of hard work. And success was not guaranteed - only 50% of PhDs go on to do post-docs, and it's exceptionally rare for engineers who can earn far more in industry.
Talking to other post-docs in my field, we all agreed that if we did not succeed in a bid for a junior professorship, we could always 'bail out' - that is, go back to industry. Our skills were valuable, because we were trained in desirable specialities.But we weren't in academia because we wanted to be in industry - that was the fall back position. The saying goes that there are a lot of one-way doors in academia, because once you're off the publishing treadmill for too long, it's almost impossible to come back.
So don't view academics as a safe-haven for industry drop-outs. It's simply not true. It's a hard and brutal world, without little to no financial reward, and only the best and most determined survive. In exchange, I get to choose my own course of research, supervise students, and take genuine credit for my achievements.
Re:It already is (Score:3, Insightful)
If you found work "in the industry" to be boring, part of the problem is that you likely were hired by a larger firm where you have to go through the meat grinder of an apprenticeship anyway. The problem is that you got your PhD and thought that you were the king of the world due to your advanced credentials, but it turns out that means squat in terms of what these kind of businesses expect out of an employee and you weren't ready to become the apprentice again. Perhaps understandable if you went through the grind of getting your PhD trying to prove yourself to your professors.
For those "in the industry", you typically aren't given any sort of real project until you have been working for awhile and have a proven track record... usually about 10 years of going through the grind as a junior engineer doing all of the busy work that the senior engineers also find boring. If you found it to be tedious and unstimulating that is likely the reason: your credentials didn't matter and you had to prove yourself all over again in a completely different hierarchy.
My point is more along undergraduate programs that are oriented towards being engineering diploma mills (often by state government officials trying to "streamline" the education system in a mistaken notion of saving tax dollars) and the professors who teach those kind of courses. If you are doing post-doc work and climbing the academic ladder, you have in effect chosen a completely different career path. I'll also point out that there is no need for a hundred thousand new engineering PhDs doing bleeding edge engineering research, but there is a huge need for that many new engineering in industry. It is also sort of the distinction between pure and applied science.
Re:It already is (Score:2)
In practice, the work they had to offer wasn't what was advertised - rather than doing electronic hardware systems research and development, they had me making block diagrams of the system they had already built. They hired me in the expectation that the market would move one way, necessitating exciting new products, and instead it moved in another which required greater back-room support and documentation. Not really their fault, but it wasn't going to keep me around.
My boss there treated me like an equal, despite years of experience on me - we learned things from each other, and our daily chats made the doldrums of documentation bearable. On the rare occasion when I did get to whip out my control theory expertise, I nailed the problem so hard that the managers couldn't believe it was possible. They all respected me and treated me well, even if they couldn't pay me like it. I was never the disrespected 'noob' and to this day I have excellent relationships with people still in the company.
Re:It already is (Score:2)
When you decide to work for a small start-up company, you can throw out just about all of the rules I was saying earlier. You have a much more "intimate" relationship with the company founders and personal relationship matter much more. Still, it sounds more like they hired you to be that junior engineer I was talking about. They may have treated you with respect and valued your contributions, but were you setting project goals and drawing up system architecture, making the major decisions about what projects you were going to do next? I'm not talking day to day task setting, but making key strategic decisions for the direction of the company? That is the difference between a junior and senior engineer.
Documentation is critical but admittedly a boring task. It also sounds like the position you got in this particular situation wasn't exactly what it is that
Most of my experience has been working with small start-up companies, and I find the experience to be exciting (but dangerous from a professional standpoint... you can get burned by them too). Larger companies on the other hand offer (usually) job security and some experienced people to associate with that know the industry, but there most definitely is a pecking order where the experienced engineers run the show... and it isn't necessarily the people with the fancy titles that are "really" in charge. I'm just saying it is a different hierarchy that you are dealing with than the one you are accustomed to working with in academia.
Re:It already is (Score:3)
Hi there - research engineer here, recently started a junior professorship at a university. The idea that academics are people who couldn't handle industry work is simply absurd. ... In my own case, I worked in industry for a year and a half after my PhD and found it so tedious and unstimulating, that I decided I enjoyed academia more. ...
I see what you did there - you used the fact that you couldn't handle industry work as proof that academics aren't people who couldn't handle industry work. Nice.
Re:It already is (Score:3)
1. Getting into academia requires great skills and dedication; it does not happen by accident.
2. It is very hard to get back into academia once you leave, but it is relatively easy to leave if you don't succeed there.
3. Despite the low pay and difficult work, academia is desirable and rewarding for the degree of autonomy it grants.
Re:It already is (Score:2)
What? you've never had discussions in a "classroom"? That is a VERY narrow definition of "classroom". Note the OP question was not "Are large, in-person didactic lectures obsolete?" I had discussion-type classes in high-school, not you? Still is classroom learning as far as I'm concerned...
To me, what the OP/OQ was really about was, Can every form of instructed learning be handled in cyberspace? Or does one need "classroom", in-person (meat-space), student/instructor interaction...
Re:It already is (Score:2)
Re:It already is (Score:2)
That was the option I was looking for.
I suspect I could have learned a lot more in my young days if it was without classrooms.
Also, teach people actual trades, not management-without-content.
Missing Option : It already is (Score:5, Insightful)
I figure that falls under 'less than 20 years' (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, minus 100 is less than 20.... ;)
Re:I figure that falls under 'less than 20 years' (Score:2)
I voted for the Wikipedia option, because of verbal concordance. "Current education system will be obsolete 100 years ago" is just not a true proposition.
But yes, -100 20.
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:5, Insightful)
This poll needs a "20 years ago" option.
We can broadcast information now. We don't need a mediocre performer explaining it to a small audience. We need an excellent performer broadcasting it to a large audience, with local helpers available to answer individual questions. Mass media works. And it's the only way to bring the best quality instruction to the largest audience.
But schools are about payroll, not about quality instruction. And a mass media model doesn't maximize payroll, so schools are stuck with an information distribution model from 100 years ago.
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
But schools are about payroll, not about quality instruction.
Where did you come up with this? I've never heard that a schools exist for the purpose of payrolls to its employees.
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
We can broadcast information now. We don't need a mediocre performer explaining it to a small audience. We need an excellent performer broadcasting it to a large audience, with local helpers available to answer individual questions. Mass media works. And it's the only way to bring the best quality instruction to the largest audience.
That's (currently) called watching YouTube videos in class. It only works for a small percentage of students (in my experience, anyway) and across a small number of subjects. Watching an excellent performer on a screen is not even close to a substitute for interacting face-to-face with said performer.
But schools are about payroll, not about quality instruction. And a mass media model doesn't maximize payroll, so schools are stuck with an information distribution model from 100 years ago.
Where I come from it's almost impossible to find teachers at all, let alone teachers who are so much as competent in their subject area. Your suggestion seems to require *more* staff than are currently employed in delivering information by having a bunch of teachers and production staff to create the instructional material in addition to the current classroom teachers who will probably be performing more-or-less the same role (answering questions, setting assessment and grading assessment).
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:3)
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:3)
That's not necessarily a problem with classroom education but with the laws against "segregated education" existing in many countries that takes the choice of students out of the schools' hands. In a more liberal education system there is a greater diversity of schools and kids would go to the one that suits their needs.
Always has been (Score:4, Insightful)
The classroom lecture environment has never been useful in instructing students. Great teachers in antiquity engaged their students in discussions. They did not ask them to sit quietly while they talked. The western classroom itself is really a fairly recent invention, and it's never been much use for anything.
Re:Always has been (Score:2)
Then the classroom model will be here forever. We'll fund killer satellites in space before we do that.
Re:Always has been (Score:2)
Nope.
Re:Always has been (Score:2)
Re:Always has been (Score:2)
Because that's the only thing you need a classroom for.
Classrooms are good for... (Score:3)
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
OTOH an effective alternative way is still to be found.
Khaaaaaaan [khanacademy.org]
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:3)
It also very much depends on the level and type of education. For universities self study may be an option; for primary schools definitely not. Those kids need the motivation and control that comes with a classroom environment. Of course smaller classes are better, but there is a bottom limit: you can't teach one-on-one for the sheer number of teachers needed, and classrooms have an important social function as well.
And that's the thing for higher level education as well: if all is self study, without classrooms, without the need to gather at a certain location to attend a lecture or so, the whole social aspect is gone. And that's also a very important part of education as students learn a lot from each other, by discussing homework etc. And I for one have learned a lot from questions asked in class by other students, as well.
And that is why I vote "never obsolete". There are alternatives, which may be used more and more, but the social aspect of the group and the personal contact with the teacher simply can not be replaced.
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
the social aspect of the group and the personal contact with the teacher simply can not be replaced.
That's not what's meant by traditional classroom. What's meant is each child learning the same thing at the same time. The pace is set by the slowest in the class.
When I was in about grade four, there was a kid who could barely read. At least, he couldn't hold his own compared to the rest of the class. Some time later that year, we received a self paced reading comprehension program. It was a series of booklets in a rainbow of colors. Once you completed each of the ten books at one color level, you moved to the next color level (and you marked the computer bubble sheet with a pencil crayon of the same color, if I recall correctly). Anyways, it was non-traditional. It allowed each person in the class to work at their own pace, and reach levels of competence that we couldn't have reached if we'd all stayed at Johnny's pace.
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
In most traditional settings there is at least some room for individual attention. In your case that one kid could get some extra attention for reading, or some extra homework related to this, or if nothing else works extra private tutoring. This of course breaks down if it's really getting very heterogeneous. Though in the schools I've been that's never been an issue.
The original poll, and also GP, I interpret as talking about the abolishment of class-room-style teaching altogether. And that interpretation I also see in many other posts that argue for just dropping classrooms, and switch to self-study methods.
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
>>It could be based on self-teaching assisted by the large databases that already exist
You're talking about Khan Academy, right?
It's good on some subjects, and terrible on others (like history).
I put down 20-40 years until this mode becomes feasible, but with a large injection of cash (aka Apple making a big push like it looks like they might do) I'd say maybe 10 years.
It's a fun time to be involved in education and ed tech (as my company is).
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
Add me to the list agreeing. The school, 25-30 students of all ages in one room, was effective. 30-50 students per class in a school of hundreds never was. Students in a University would be the exception, IMHO, if they were adults. Too many are there to continue their social engagements with other students. Learning isn't even secondary for most of them.
Re:Missing Option : It already is (Score:2)
I work for a school district. The few schools that specifically don't have computers in the rooms and literally use chalk boards have better scholastic results than the vast number of schools that have technology in the classroom. The computer could be a good teaching tool if the kids didn't use it to engage the endorphins, and if software made the computer single-purpose. Right now, the computer serves as a distraction, something the kids can focus on when they don't want to pay attention to the lesson at hand.
Will education remain important? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a real question as to whether education will remain important. Getting ahead through education is a relatively modern concept. See this book from 1903 [google.com], where an author wrote to 100 prominent business men with a set of questions about whether a college education was useful in their business. (Amazingly, the author received personal answers from many top executives, including the presidents of major railroads.) Most of them were quite negative on the subject. Many felt that a college education would put someone four years behind their peers.
Industry back then needed robust people who showed up, worked hard, and didn't get sick. That's what Foxconn needs today.
The monetary payoff for a college education has declined, and with current college costs, is often negative. Coupled with this is a very strong trend towards reducing the training level needed for a job. The trend is towards having software do the thinking part, while humans do the heavy lifting.
Supermarket checkout scanners are one of the most visible examples. For an extreme example, here's learning order picking in one minute [youtube.com] with the Kiva robotics system. The human is simply the handling arm for the mobile robots. All the planning and organizing is done by the computers, with a laser pointer indicating what to pick and where to put it. Even literacy is not necessary, other than the ability to read the quantity number and count. Kiva systems picked about 10% of online orders in 2010. This is the current expression of "Machines should think. People should work."
This is moving up the organization as software becomes standardized. In the past, many organizations wanted software customized to match their organization. But new organizations are more likely to customize their organization to match the available software, which already has a work flow designed into it. Consider "Salesforce.com".
The human interaction of sales is disappearing. Between online sales and call centers, retail sales skills are becoming unnecessary. Even sales skill can be computerized. Amazon gives you better advice on what books to buy than the sales people at Barnes and Noble.
That's the future. Peonage.
Re:Will education remain important? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the closest system to Manna [marshallbrain.com] I've seen yet. The only difference is that you don't get a bluetooth headset verbally telling you what to do, you get a laser pointer and a bunch of lights, which means you don't even need workers that speak English.
Robots finally are taking over (Score:3)
That (the Kiva system) is the closest system to Manna I've seen yet.
Yes. Computers take the orders, deal with the customer, accept the payments, keep track of the inventory, decide what gets stored where in the warehouse, order more products, and use mobile robots to move the shelves in the warehouse to the order picking humans. Humans merely reach where the computer's laser pointer tells them to reach, pick up the product out of the bin, and put it in an output bin where the computer's light tells them to put it. Vision-guided robots with articulated hands that can do bin-picking still cost too much to automate that last step.
Understand that this is how e-commerce works now. Kiva systems are used by Staples, Toys-R-Us, Soap.com, Pets.com. Timberland, Acumen Brands (CountryOutfitter) etc. About 10% of web-based commerce in tangible objects uses Kiva, and it's growing steadily. There will probably never be more people involved in the physical end of e-commerce than there are now. Only less.
And no, people won't have jobs making the robots. Kiva itself has only 240 employees.
There's been talk of robots taking over jobs since the 1950s, but it took a long time. Now it's happening.
Re:Will education remain important? (Score:2, Informative)
You don't go to school to learn a specific skill. If that's all you want, you're going to burn up a lot money and find yourself back at square zero in 10 years.
You go to school to learn how to learn. And I don't mean that philosophically. I mean, you learn how to navigate the system. Because no matter what job you get out of college, unless you're a professional like a lawyer or doctor, in 2 or 5 or 10 years your job title is going to disappear, and you're going to be forced to learn a new set of skills. And if you can't do that efficiently and confidently, then you're screwed.
Re:Will education remain important? (Score:2)
Well, I'm going to college to get a degree in Education. Does that mean I'll be learning to learn how to teach other people to learn how to learn?
We First Need Responsible Parents... (Score:2)
While the world is progressing too fast, and technology is entering the educational domain quickly, I doubt that we are ready to throw away the current classroom system, and do so while maintaining proper education to kids.
The classroom will advance a lot. In South Korea and Taiwan, they are already planning to remove all textbooks by 2014, but of course, they are still maintaining the classroom model.
The thing is, education is still lacking, even in the best of countries. The blame goes mainly on some parents, and on inappropriate teaching methods/teachers/schools, and of course, lack of appropriate funding in most times.
So how can we change that model, and yet maintain high educational levels? We first need to maintain high quality *parents*, and well... governments that are willing to spend more on education. It requires a new state of mind, a thought revolution. Countries like Japan are already very close to such a state, when people put their education, their work, their contribution to the community (local and global) above all else, only then, can we rely on people to take the right decisions, and we'll be able to move on, into cheaper and more robust educational models, that can include government-designed study-yourself or study-with-parent-help downloadable programs, along with exams, and all.
Considering how much each of these will need to develop, I doubt we'll be ready before some 40 years from now.
Your comments are most welcome, and I am truly curious to know what others think of what I just wrote, and what you agree and don't agree upon.
Re:We First Need Responsible Parents... (Score:3)
Of course it would be ideal that every parent educates their child perfectly, stimulate their reflections and show them the wonders of the world, but that is wishful thinking.
The reality is right now that most parents do not have the time nor the knowledge or the ability to educate their children.
Provided that we agree on this, the role of public education is to compensate this by giving all children an appropriate background to learn and think about the world on their own, and participate actively in public life.
You create high quality parents, like you say, by providing high quality public education to the childrens of today who will become the parents of tomorrow. You can't start by postulating that we need to "maintain high quality parents" because right now a huge majority of parents are incapable of providing education to their children.
Yes we need to help today's parents educate their children but for that we have to give them time, knowledge, support, and financial security.
Comment removed (Score:2)
In what sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is as poorly defined question as I've seen in a long time.
Do you mean that a model of children being taught by adults would disappear? If so - it's been the only way humanity operated for the last few thousand years. I don't see how that can change.
Do you mean that children will no longer be educated in centralized school environment? If so - it's been the only way for the last few hundred years (for those who had any education, anyway). As long as education is perceived as necessary - that's the only way it could be.
Now, if we have drastic changes in economic system - may be. For example, we could admit that majority of world population does not have anything useful to contribute to economic process or production, and somehow find a way to distribute goods and services to them without demanding "labor". If so - education will no longer be required, at least for that part of population. However, the remainder still have to learn somehow - and I don't see any viable models other than "experienced teacher teaches a child". (Well, also direct upload of knowledge into brain - but that's pure Sci Fi for now)
technology needs to move to a trades based system (Score:2)
There is a lot in technology that is very hands on and lot that you can't learn in a class room now tech schools have there short falls but college CS is even more in need of change.
Re:technology needs to move to a trades based syst (Score:2)
My seventh grade teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
He told me that the education system was not about education--it was about socialization.
That mentality is not something that is going away any time soon.
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:3, Insightful)
What's wrong with that mentality? You think society gets anywhere by throwing a bunch of books at students and walking away? Society is built on rules, even rules about how to learn and convey knowledge. For society, the rules are far more important than the technical knowledge and skills. For society, replacing the tech at the chemical plant is far more important than nurturing an Einstein.
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:3)
It is because we have poets and theoretical physicists and mathematicians that we are who we are today. Without this ability to nurture "useless" people we would be apes, eating, fighting, shitting and fucking. that's all we "need".
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:3)
Tell him he should be getting paid minimum wage then. It takes zero skill to oversee "socialization".
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:2)
In most countries teachers tend to be badly payed, which is why it's a carreer choice of lots of morons.
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:3)
In the US, teacher pay is far higher than the average worker. And that's before you account for the fact that teachers work many fewer days in a year and receive much, much higher non-monetary compensation (benefits) than the average worker.
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:2)
Most teachers start out with a Bachelors degree and within not too many years have the equivalent of a Masters because of continuing education. The teachers I've known spend time in the summers doing that continuing education at their own expense. Most of them spend far more than 40 hours a week on their work Rather than comparing their pay to the average worker compare it to others with their level of education. I'm not saying there aren't some bad teachers out there but most of them want to do their best for the kids.
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:3)
"The national average wage index for 2010 is $41,673.83" --via http://www.ssa.gov/oact/COLA/AWI.html [ssa.gov]
"The average starting salary for teachers is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession." — is $67,000. --via http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html [nytimes.com]
"We found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience, a gap only minimally offset by the better nonwage benefits in teaching. Teacher earnings have fallen below that of the average college graduate in recent decades, losing considerable ground during the late 1990s, as earnings of college graduates grew 11% relative to the much lower 0.8% growth in teacher earnings." --via http://www.epi.org/publication/the_teaching_penalty_an_update_through_2010/ [epi.org]
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:2)
Case in point for one of those teacher's students: "payed" instead of "paid".
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:2)
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:3)
Which is very unfortunate. People are not learning to be social on the internet. They are learning the complete opposite.
Sure, some people are complete @sshats in real life, but I still have hope that most of the people that act like @ss-clowns on the internet do not behave that way during real, live, in-person social situations.
Re:Facebook abnormal social development (Score:2)
Re:My seventh grade teacher (Score:2)
I wonder if you meant socialization or socialism.
In the case of the former, this is very important, particularly for children. They learn to work with others, deal with beaurocracy, and deal with rules. Hopefully also learning that some rules are easier to break than others. :) So while children are nominally learning math and reading, what they're really supposed to be learning is how to function as adults.
In the case of the latter, well, public education is, by definition, socialism. While it is very much in the public interest to educate children, I see no reason why schools should be run by the government or that a child should be assigned to a school strictly based upon their address. By having "free" government schools, we've destroyed the market for private schools such that the only ones that exist are religious schools, expensive elite acadamies and a few stray specialty schools.
Missing option: The faster, the better. (Score:2)
Missing option: The faster, the better. Less bullies, less textbooks to lug around, less school buildings to construct and supply, and more learning to do.
I'd prefer, though, that the old way be replaced with a government-subsidized* "traveling teacher" model in which teachers spend a bit of time in each home and take the needed (preferably free-content) books (probably just a teacher edition and one or two student editions), then the students can go to a massive central lab and gym building (or maybe the current anti-terror laws can be relaxed and we can get chemistry sets?) to fill those vacua; not by the proprietary iBooks crap that's set to take firm root.
*Government, because the private and parochial sectors are too easily swayed by revenue and religion. So is the government, but that's probably nothing active civic participation and time can't fix.
Re:Missing option: The faster, the better. (Score:2)
I'd prefer, though, that the old way be replaced with a government-subsidized* "traveling teacher" model in which teachers spend a bit of time in each home and take the needed (preferably free-content) books (probably just a teacher edition and one or two student editions), then the students can go to a massive central lab and gym building (or maybe the current anti-terror laws can be relaxed and we can get chemistry sets?) to fill those vacua
There is no way that this could ever happen without several major cultural and economical changes to this country. Changes that would make your suggestion irrelevant. Take for example heavily rural and heavily urban areas. In some rural areas you could have 40-50 miles between houses, if not more. With an hour of travel time, a teacher could realistically only visit 2-3 homes and have enough time to actually teach anything, without having to spend 20+ hours a day teaching. Also, for many urban areas families are so packed together that you would need 10-15 teachers just to service one apartment building. We already have a teacher shortage in this country. Your suggestion would only exacerbate the problem. And then there's the safety concerns surrounding urban education. This is one of the main reasons why urban schools have problems finding teachers, and they're teaching in schools surrounded by many other teachers/administrators. How much harder do you think it would be to find a large number of people willing to go by themselves into gang-controlled, high crime areas to teach children, while carrying a laptop/tablet that would make them a prime target for mugging? If we actually got to the point where these areas were safe enough, then a lot of the problems plaguing our current educational system would be gone, and our current system would be effective.
Re:Missing option: The faster, the better. (Score:2)
While I agree that some of those things are good, I think something that we have to watch out for is creating a system where the intelligent and wealthy never get any exposure to the lower rungs of society. Without this, it's too easy to take your experience with the upper echelon and falsely generalize it to the rest of society. Some people are naturally stupid and no amount of education will change that. Some people are naturally violent and only the fear of violence will curb their actions. It helps to have some contact with them in person to understand this on a gut level.
When the upper classes take their experience with themselves and generalize it, the result is bad policy. If the policy is bad enough it will come back to bite those who implement it, no matter how cloistered they think they are.
Re:Missing option: The faster, the better. (Score:2)
How is that an enigma? There are lots of things that are publicly funded but not publicly created. They are not, because they require experts to work on it.
Homescoling (Score:5, Funny)
Homscooling si the way of the future. Lok at me, I was homscoold
Re:Homescoling (Score:5, Funny)
That's odd, because you write as though you went to public school.
The current one is mostly obsolete (Score:2)
I was lucky to get in a high school where teachers were held to a high standard in terms of knowledge in their subjects, some of them were also professors at universities and almost all of them had some professional work outside of school. With the right kind of teachers, classroom education can be done pretty well. But most of my experiences with other schools and the tales I've heard of them suggest that this is very rare. Classroom education could be done well - but the current system is mostly obsolete.
Depends on what replaces it (Score:5, Insightful)
There's the issue of social interaction. I mean in meatspace, not FaceBook. Try replacing that with an online/homeschool/whatever model. Then there's the issue of adult supervision. Some kids' parents have to work and can't just leave them at home. And then there are hands-on activities that one just can't replicate online. Like band, sports, shop class, PE (sorry nerds, get off your fat, Cheeto-munching asses).
I do think that advances in online learning will make significant inroads into the traditional education system. There will be facilities with adult supervision. But it will be possible to 'import' the services of skilled instructors from far away (like into disadvantaged neighborhoods) to augment the resident staff. And there will be more (although not complete) autonomy, particularly with students identified as being self motivated. Others will still require oversight or they'll just end up smoking in the parking lot all day.
Re:Depends on what replaces it (Score:2)
I also wonder how one can learn how to read and write using just on-line classes, for example.
Where's the negative option? (Score:2)
Too broad (Score:2)
Khan Academy (Score:2)
As others have said, the question is too ambiguous even by normal /. poll standards. I'm interpreting it to mean a traditional 20-25:1 student to teacher ratio K-12 classroom (although we obviously have many broken districts where an insane ratio of as high as 60-70:1 exists).
At the moment, most teachers who are provided with laptops, electronic whiteboards, digital projectors and document cameras tend to use them as analogous replacements for - or supplemental to - traditional teaching methods.
The standardized curriculum enforced in most public school districts according to state and federal guidelines haven't changed much in the last fifty years, except to become more restrictive in the material that has to be covered and the manner in which it is covered. When teachers are forced to cover all of this material in preparation for the multitude of standardized tests their students have to take each year, they have little time to learn new technology or how to employ it in creative and fruitful ways. Exceptional teachers can always shine, even under the current system, but from my experience they see these curriculum guidelines and all of the attendant bullshit as obstacles to overcome in teaching their students.
I'm fascinated by the Khan Academy's approach, as in the example of the Los Altos, CA district that is experimenting with using the KA website and software (http://www.khanacademy.org/video/the-gates-notes--teachers-in-los-altos?topic=talks-and-interviews). Their idea was to have the students be given accounts on the website, and to largely replace in class instruction by the teacher with assigned videos as homework. The students would then be able to perform practice problems on the website in the classroom with the aid and supervision of a teacher, and learn new concepts at home. In this way, every student becomes more directly responsible for their own education, working at their own pace. In a more traditional teaching model, students who fell behind remained behind, as the teacher could not hold up the pace of instruction for them, and the students who easily grasped the material would be bored with nothing to do. Under this system, the teacher can easily see where each student is, helping the ones with problems on certain concepts while everyone else moves ahead according to their own abilities.
To my mind, this solves two of the major problems under the current system. It removes the pandering to the lowest common denominator, where instruction is aimed at a fairly low level for every student in the classroom, still missing those who really need help and holding back the rest who are easily capable of more challenging material. It also allows for extremely detailed analysis of where each student's capabilities currently lie, which is largely the function standardized testing purports to serve, but grossly fails at. A teacher can look on the classroom reporting suite, and see at a glance where the trouble spots are, how far the advanced students have gotten, and detailed breakdowns of practice sessions, such as how many minutes were spent on which videos, how many practice problems were answered correctly or incorrectly, how many times the student asked for hints, etc. With standardized testing, you only get a hazy snapshot of a students abilities at a given moment, influenced by how alert they are at the time they took the test (are they well fed and rested?) and how seriously they take the test (which is hard to do when they take as many as 20-30 a year). With the Khan Academy, the badges, points and awards offer an almost MMO achievement/leveling feel of entertainment and addiction, and a report at any given time exactly reflects a student's participation,
The problems are obvious.
Not all students have ready access to devices for viewing the videos outside of school, though many districts have adopted the one laptop per child initiative, and I think in the near future we'll easily be able to provide each child with a cheap tablet ty
Re:Khan Academy (Score:2)
The past as a model for the future (Score:2)
The current system is about the same as 30 years ago. Since the boarding school system used 70 years ago is obsolete now, I am going to guess 50 years is about right for obsolescence.
If the misuse of the "first-world" expression... (Score:3)
Already is. (Score:3)
Already long obsolete (Score:2)
The real question is how long before we realize that it is obsolete?
My guess, within the decade.
Face-to-Face Time is Important (Score:3)
My daughter has a MA degree in education. Her master's project involved creating a Web-based class in treating an infectious disease for the continuing education that is required for physicians to keep their medical licenses. That class was actually put into use in the Canadian province where she lives. She is now recognized as an expert in distance learning over the Internet for adult education.
One part of her research investigated how well adults learn over the Web. She found that Web-based classes are far more effective if the students meet as a group with the instructor in a classroom about once a month. Moreover, she found that learning occurred not only during such classroom time but also during informal student get-together sessions immediately after the classroom time.
A few students who were participating in the Web-based class my daughter investigated could not travel to attend these classroom sessions and the after-class get-togethers. My daughter discovered that those isolated students suffered a small degradation in their learning. Apparently the interaction of students with each other enhances learning as does the group interaction of students with instructors.
Never say Never... (Score:2)
50 years ago ... (Score:2)
We thought that teachers would be supplanted by video conferencing. Before that, the radio. It didn't work either time.
Come to think of it, we've been trying to reform the classroom from a human angle too. That didn't work either.
Whether we want to admit to it or not, there is something about those archaic practices that works. It seems like it shouldn't, but it does since the best we can do is tweak it in rather minor ways. Perhaps that is telling us something about human nature, something we don't want to hear because it conflicts with our imaginings of ourselves.
Different people have different educational needs (Score:2)
This one single educational model for everyone was broken from the start. Mostly it stifles the natural urge to learn. Children are born ridiculously curious and if you feed that, they'll learn at a rate that embarrasses the current system. But, everyone learns differently: some learn best by watching something, others by hearing, others by experimenting. Some are big-picture thinkers, others are specialists.
I think the Socratic method is the ideal teaching system, because it encourages everyone on their own path.
Unsustainable =/= Obsolete (Score:2)
Second Tuesday after never (Score:2)
It already is - flipped classrooms (Score:2)
A school turned lessons around. Homework was to watch video's of the lecture. Class time was for doing what is normally considered "homework" problem assignments. The teacher was able to provide lots of 1 on 1 coaching to the students to solve the problems.
Students could go through the lectures at their own pace on their own time.
This is Kahn academy style applied to the classroom.
http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture/
Re:It already is - flipped classrooms (Score:2)
I was going to post this exact issue. The best of the best will have kids watching their instruction on youtube and the average teacher will be turned into a homework monkey. A really hope my kid (1 year old now) gets a chance to learn in a flipped classroom.
Student diversity? (Score:2)
10 years ago it would have happened quicker (Score:2)
Because back then it looked like proprietary systems were finally a thing of the past. The web promised that one could actually write a computerized lesson, and you'd still be able to read it 50 years later, by having a bunch of files interpreted by your browser. Or also systems like Squeak which promised to integrate computers into education, by actually allowing the user to conduct thought experiments with the computer.
Then came DRM and ruined that dream. Now we have computers with deliberate anti-features turning them into stupid content consumption boxes with no value for education. You suddenly turn a device which takes as many resources to make as a whole library, and only use it as a primitive replacement for a few books.
Re:Changing my vote (Score:2)
I don't think most women would drop their jobs and stay at home given the choice for example.
A lot of Jobs suck, but most people find (some sort of) gratification by working.
If you gave me a hundred million dollars right now, I'd probably do crazy shit for a year, but then I'd go back to doing something useful, probably start a company and work.