Andrew Delbanco:

The more one ponders the statistics, the more murky their meaning becomes.

Whatever the merits of this or that testing regime or this or that curriculum, the only way to break up the impasse would be for governments and philanthropies to put in place real incentives and rewards for talented, well-educated, passionately committed teachers -- on whom, as everyone knows, everything finally depends.

Have you seen The Class?

Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about.

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.

Tom Friedman:

The best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who inspire.

Charles McGrath:

In practically all the foxhole memoirs there is a common villain: standardized testing, which the authors agree has been so overemphasized that it is now an obstacle to the very education it was supposed to measure.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Dorothy Sayers (via Alan Jacobs):

However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number -- perhaps the majority -- of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out our research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits -- yes, and who educate our young people -- have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning -- the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane -- that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or "looks to the end of the work."

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the clos... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Dreams of Better Schools

Christopher J. Ferguson:

Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Multiple intelligences provides a kind of cover to preserve that fable. "OK, little Jimmie may not be a rocket scientist, but he can dance real well. Shouldn't that count equally in school and life?" No. The great dancers of the Pleistocene foxtrotted their way into the stomach of a saber-tooth tiger.

That is the root of the matter. Too many people have chosen to believe in what they wish to be true rather than in what is true.

Michael Tomasello:

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals.

Kurt Schwenk, via Carl Zimmer:

I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you’d be somewhat still and quiet for a bit, at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

From TED:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius

Don Tapscott:

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

Marge:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

J. Peder Zane:

Upon graduation, we must devote ever more energy to mastering the floods of information that might help us keep our wobbly jobs. Crunched, we have little time to learn about far-flung subjects.

The narrowcasting of our lives is writ large in our culture. The Internet slices and dices it all into highly specialized niches that provide mountainous details about the slightest molehills.

When people only care about what they care about, their desire to know something more, something new, evaporates like the morning dew.

The notion of an aspirational culture, in which one endeavors to learn what is right, proper and important in order to make something more of himself, is past.

The Impending Demise of the University

Jonathan Pfeiffer:

I have come to imagine the classical university as being a prototypical T.E.D. conference, a place where the power of an idea was carried not only by its intellectual content, but also by the theatricality of its presentation.

Fast forward to the present in Santa Barbara, California, where I am a graduate student. Are people filled with a spirit of learning at the university? The answer is yes only if by the word, "spirit," one really and cynically means, "weariness."

Some of the most capable people in the post-graduate ranks feel uninspired or disempowered. They may enter graduate school full of creativity and find that after about a year, the light within them no longer burns as brightly as it once did.

Knowing exactly why this happens is difficult, but one cannot help but suspect that it has something to do with academic culture.

Perhaps someday I will speak as well as Demosthenes. But if I do, then it will be a skill I will not have learned in graduate school.

Mark C. Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

Peter Drucker:

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."

Warren Buffett:

Do what you love, or your boss will decide for you.

Reforming Graduate Education

Mark C. Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

Nanochick:

Defending my thesis ... on May day! W00t!

Marge:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Chris Anderson:

When I was at The Economist, there was a policy to rotate everyone every three years. The idea was that fresh eyes were more important than experience. "Foreign everywhere" was the mantra.

Jonah Lehrer:

The baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation -- they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.

Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives.

Richard Sennett:

It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a skilled carpenter or musician -- but what makes a true master?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Anyone can become an expert in anything by practicing for 10,000 hours.

End the University as We Know It

Neil Gershenfeld:

Today's advanced research and education institutions are essential to tackling the grand challenges facing our planet, but they've been based on an implicit assumption of technological scarcity — advances in those technologies now allow these activities to expand far beyond the boundaries of a campus.

Research requires funding, facilities, and people; I came to MIT to get access to all of these. State-of-the-art research infrastructure, large library collections, and world-class faculty are all expensive resources that limit admission slots, classroom space, and research positions. But what would happen if these things were no longer scarce?

Recently, Bernardo Huberman:

Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Seth Godin:

One day, you may be lucky enough to have a scarcity problem.

David Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

David Isenberg:

The shift from scarcity to plenty is often the harbinger of new value propositions.

Finally:

Courtesy of CIBC World Markets, you too can peer ahead into The Age of Scarcity!

Is MIT Obsolete?

If you read this:

The evidence themselves suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Then you might be encouraged by this:

When nonengineers think about engineering, it’s usually because something has gone wrong. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored.

Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher ... too much note-taking in the classroom and not enough hands-on ...

Richard Miller says, "I think those days are over."

Constance Bowe, an emeritus professor at UC Davis, says: “We need to be teaching them how to learn, as opposed to teaching them a whole lot of facts.” She sees Olin as trying “to create more of a stem cell” — the kind of cell that can become any other kind of cell.

In some companies, the freethinking products of Olin might have trouble fitting in. “Does industry want people like that? I think that’s a very good question, but I think this goes beyond what industry wants,” he said. “This is the right thing to do — this is what industry needs. If the country had more people like this, we’d be in a much better situation.”

This is promising.

Re-Engineering Engineering

Connexions is:

a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

* authors create and collaborate
* instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
* learners find and explore content

Connexions - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities

5. How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web page?

This URL is not loading at the present time, but you can read it in the Google cache.

Then think of poor Douglas Rushkoff.

Being Human: 10 Questions about the future of the humanities in America

Dave Eggers is funny.

Are you a parent? Are you thirsty? Too many of us allow our infant sons and daughters to lay about idly: napping, drinking milk, and sometimes "turning over." Why not have them mix you a cocktail?

Tots will be entranced by the shapes and colors, all the while learning how to write a check. An essential purchase for expectant parents, harried mothers, hungry fathers, and overly involved grandparents.

Baby Mix Me A Drink