The dichotomy between STEM and liberal arts isn't real. For some reason we declare some kids math-oriented and some art-oriented, but it's bullshit. I have a nephew who loves computers and reads three grades higher than he should, and a nephew who is two grades higher at math and can't use them at all. The one wants to be a programmer, the other a veterinarian. To them, there is no STEM/liberal-arts dichotomy--they will be taught that by some well-meaning adult idiot. Kids don't emerge from the womb as STEM or liberal arts; they have a variety of strengths and can learn any subject with enough time and energy.
The idea that you can appreciate a complex metaphor in a poem or a complex philosophical concept but not solve for x is absurd. It's fashionable to be bad at math and lots of people indulge in the fashion. The proper tool to address this problem is shame coupled with better education. When your niece tries to be cute by saying she's too pretty for math, you give her the disdainful disappointed look that says this shit won't fly and then ask her what she's having trouble with.
Teaching and learning are hard. We keep looking for a simple way out of doing it. Maybe if we teach less of this and more of that, remove this requirement, write this software, etc, it'll be easy. In reality, it's just like diet and exercise. In America, we want a magic pill, but the truth is that some things are just hard. The sooner we stop complaining and start doing, the better off we'll be.
Do you have any data to back up your claim that there is no difference between STEM and liberal arts skills from a source other than your two nephews? This is a huge area of research in education with a long history of detailed study - your anecdote doesn't carry much weight, and your assertions don't align our current understanding. Although the idea of "multiple intelligences" no longer has the influence it used to, there are still very clear distinctions between, for example, quantitative and analogical reasoning, and inductive and deductive logic, and some people grasp certain kinds of concepts more quickly than others. This is reality. One of your points seems to be that kids shouldn't be taught in a way that only focuses on their strengths, and I fully agree with that, but it's important to understand that there are real distinctions among cognitive skills.
> The sooner we stop complaining and start doing...
Start doing what? Just in the US, there are over 7 million teachers heavily involved in "doing" education as best they can, and tens of thousands of researchers and policymakers that are trying to structure education effectively. I agree that the author of the posted article is also not making an informed contribution to the field, but it's important to recognize that there are many people who are making real contributions, and many others who are too eager to change things based on their own intuitive (and frequently incorrect) impressions of how to teach.
My point is that we shouldn't continue to allow people to turn "I have an advantage in math" into "I'm terrible at spelling and won't bother trying to get better." My nephews illustrate that advantages don't have to become liabilities in other areas, which is how this dichotomy is presented in the OP and the article it was responding to. The scientific evidence can certainly illustrate advantages and disadvantages in different areas; getting from there to "some kids are terrible at English and the rest are terrible at math" is a huge, unwarranted leap.
One of the highest truth/word comments I've read in a long time. The real issue with education in America is that everyone a) thinks it is someone else's problem and b) thinks if they just change x we will rocket to the top.
We don't actually spend all that much money on public education relative to GDP. Many people consider it reasonable to spend more money on their child's collage degree than the full cost the cost of a K-12 at a public school which depending on the state can be as low as 80k.
We also still spend a lot of money on the students who least need it. Due to the influence of property values on education spending often the most affluent areas spend the most per student. We also spend a lot on 'special needs' students who have a limited capability to be educated. But, what matters most is how well the average student is educated and we don't spend a lot of money on that.
That's a silly measure, since the US's GDP is comparatively enormous. In terms of inflation adjusted or PPP dollars, the US spends a crap-ton on education, and has been spending more and more (per student) over the years, with little to show for it.
Some, US public schools are huge successes that provide a world class education at reasonable cost. Others have below 25% graduation rates...
Inflation adjusted dollars and PPP attempts to balance housing, food, and healthcare costs. But schools need to compete with the rest of the economy so it's balanced not on how expensive food is, but how much janitor's / teachers / middle managers could make working somewhere else. R&D has reduced the amount of man hours required to produce a hammer, it has not reduced the amount of man hours required to teach subtraction.
This is a convenient dichotomy for that part of all of us that wishes to think ourselves “critical thinkers”, but not at the cost of looking carefully at the meaning of words. Math and Science are the two fields whose understanding requires this. This is the first and most important of the requirements of Math and Science: know, as precisely and accurately as you can, what you mean. Simple to express, but difficult to achieve in practice. It takes unrelenting effort. I know that for myself, all my instincts conspire against it. It is much easier for me to think I am a “critical thinker” because I can criticize what some other people think, without the discomfort of examining my own preconceptions and assumptions, or even getting a clear idea of what they are. And it is all the more easy with legions of academic departments willing and even eager to train me and support me in the practice of trading verbal tokens with my colleagues, and affirming my own notions about the folly of the notions of others. I suspect that is much of what happens with the liberal arts.
I have some experience with the teachings in math education. Here, the liberal art of teaching and the hard science of mathematics meet. In my experience, the hardness of hard science is always softened in the service of “education”; “education”, which is split into factions with zealous supporters, wins by force.
Here's how this plays out: someone observes that, say, arithmetic with integers can be modeled with, say, tiles with different colors on each side. They create a lesson to help students get a conceptual understanding, using integers of small absolute value, to get avoid unnecessary details in the computations. Than an educator “realizes”: “hey, as long as they ‘get the idea’, well, why continue with practice in difficult computations when they already ‘get it’ with the tiles, and the tiles are so much FUN?” Training and practice in more involved computations is dropped, along with practice in a lot of the trickier details of this new kind of computation. They can use calculators, anyway. The learning becomes, at best, almost exclusively qualitative, and those students who complain that the class is become boring and unchallenging are labeled malcontents---err, “resistant to modern teaching methods”. Later, high school algebra students need calculators to calculate “-3 * 4”, and a high school algebra teacher must reteach arithmetic, perhaps doing some “conceptual” lessons of his own, and the progress of learning is retarded.
Students abandon this “math” in frustration. The DOE demands more money to solve the education crisis in America. Rinse. Repeat.
Whoever teaches them the "STEM/liberal-arts dichotomy" that he claims does not exist, presumably in the interests of making them feel less bad about being crap at one or the other.
I nominate your last paragraph to the "Best of HN" (which does not exist).
So true and yet so difficult to understand for many as comments show.
Also sad to see that many think that throwing technology at something will fix problems which have nothing to do with technology. Yes, we are hackers but we should know better than "if the only tool you have is a hammer you tend to see every problem like a nail".
Math and science are taught extremely poorly in our schools. It's mostly a matter of memorization (often of trivia rather than fundamentals), plug-and-chug, and rote busywork.
Funny, that we have movements like Where's The Math lamenting that math education is collapsing because classes are doing "discovery math" (AKA goofing off and chit-chatting), instead learning fundamentals and practicing to memorize basic skills.
The big problem with the liberal arts is the subjectivity of grading.
The algorithm that works best in the liberal arts is "guess what the teacher wants to hear and say it."
The horrible truth is that this is an unreasonably effective algorithm for functioning in management. At worst, it's used by scam artists like Madoff and Ken Lay. Many executives have left a trail of destruction, moving from one company to another just before reality sets in.
If there's any attribute that will cause mankind to end up like the dinosaurs, it's like this. It's got everything to do with our inability to deal with problems like global warming and it drives the everyday mediocrity that drags us down.
Back in college I remember some of the humanities profs were known to be liberal and others were conservative. Students who had different politics frequently believed they weren't graded fairly.
The mediocracy hates STEM and has waged a war against math because, often, we can say results in STEM are objectively right or wrong.
For instance, one time I pointed out an error that a math prof made on the board and he was happy to be corrected -- it's a bit of evidence that he's succeeding at his job. But after class, a student told me he was shocked that I'd been arrogant enough to think the teacher was wrong!
On the other hand, if you don't agree with what a humanist says about Shakespeare, for instance, she might reply that "different people can believe different things" or she can be bullheaded and not admit the subjective element.
I remember having a English teacher in high school who was the most respected, but I couldn't get better than a "D" in her class because she thought I couldn't write.
A few years later I had a strech when I got most of my income from writing and copy editing so there.
> The big problem with the liberal arts is the subjectivity of grading.
I think you are doing it some disservice. Critically analyzing a piece of literature is similar to deconstruction a programming puzzle. It involves finding patterns & relations between characters and events. It involves summarizing and breaking your ideas in sections.
Even for something as ridiculously subjective as art, you can still have a formalized course. Ask students to set a goals or make a proposal of what they want to accomplish, then grade them on how well they accomplished that.
> Back in college I remember some of the humanities profs were known to be liberal and others were conservative.
In my American college (certainly a mediocre school, not a fancy shmancy Ivy League) I had most professors behave rationally. Even the super liberal feminist professors graded fairly those that wrote well research and well-thought out paper. So that is mostly about bad professors than it is necessarily about some fundamental flaw in the subjects.
On anther level I agree. There are too many students going into those fields expecting to eventually get jobs in that field. That will just not happen. I think someone needs to sit down and have a chat with them.
On the "different people can believe different things", I think this is very valid, but is misapplied early on in education to mean "everyone is right/special". Really, if you can present a different opinion on something and can provide evidence for your reasoning, that's great. If you want to claim that Hamlet is really about aliens because you like getting laughs from your friends, I really hope the teacher calls you on your bullshit.
One thing we did in my high school literature class was start a class room discussion with some absord assumption (IE. Hamlet is an alien), and see where that takes us. More often than not, re-raming the text to fit revealed the deeper elements and actually felt a lot like the same type of thinking that goes on in math.
I just finished a summer Composition course. Turned in a paper which was nitpicked down to an 85 percent. The next stage of the assignment was to expand this paper with more sources and roughly 500 more words. I changed nothing which was nitpicked, added my sources, and the added sources accounted for the additional word count so I called it done, since I was so sick of this instructor.
The final paper grade was a 98 percent and labelled one of the best papers he had ever seen, despite the fact that all my so-called errors, which had previously annoyed him, were still in the paper.
Even though I am pursuing a BS, I had always thought the STEM / Liberal Arts dichotomy was silly. Humanities professors, including this Composition instructor, are quickly changing my mind. I'm sure my luck will run out eventually, but every science and math course so far has been mostly objective and whatever score I get (all A's so far) is purely dependent upon my efforts. Based on the Composition instructor, as well as other humanities professors I've had, my grade is partially based on effort and partially a matter of what he had for breakfast that day. Really makes me want to write off entire departments as completely worthless.
My girlfriend is from Poland, and the educational system there is different, compared to the USA. When she went to college, she did a 5 year program that left her with a degree that is normally translated into the USA system as a masters degree. Her focus was Polish literature.
When she got to the USA, she did a 2nd degree, this time in marketing. She was surprised by the USA system, in particular, the number of courses that she had to take that had nothing to do with marketing. She tells me that in Poland general purpose "learn a little bit about everything" classes end with high school. Once you go to college, the assumption is that you are becoming a specialist in a particular field, and all of your education goes to that specialty. Computer programmers are not forced to take literature classes, nor are those studying literature forced to take math classes.
I have the impression that in the USA, the universities are used to fix what's often seen as a broken K-12 educational system. We know that many young people arrive at college with educational deficiencies, therefore we load up the next 4 years with all the stuff they should have learned during their K-12 years. If they want to become specialists in something, well, that is what graduate school is for, after they turn 21.
I am generally impressed with what comes out of the Polish system. I've had a chance to work with Polish programmers, and they were very good, at very young ages. And, likewise, those who study Polish literature seem to understand it deeply, having spent 5 years reading all the classics (without the distraction of having to take unrelated classes).
I think the USA would be wise to fix its K-12 system, and then allow colleges to be places where people can specialize in what they want.
FWIW, Poland and the USA get very similar results from their K-12 systems, both rank quite well compared to the average OECD country: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/46643496.pdf
For some reason there is a perception that American schools are failing, but I don't see it in the data.
"For some reason there is a perception that American schools are failing, but I don't see it in the data."
It's been a linchpin to the ultra-conservative and libertarian arguments for "free market"-izing education in the US. The opinion being "well, school sucks when I grew up and/or for my child currently, and it's because government is involved". They point to other countries and their educational superiority (erroneously thinking that the countries' respective governments are somehow not at all involved in education when, in fact, the top-achieving systems have similar if not identical systems as the US).
Let's not even discuss how little they care for teacher's unions, how much teachers get paid (way too much is the current sentiment), and how all teachers are as lazy as unionized NYC construction workers on their lunch break because schools have summer breaks.
They point to a combination private schools and vouchers for the poor as the ultimate solution to our educational woes, some even going so far as saying let the dumbest, poorest, and difficult kids opt out of school by not making K-12 school mandatory.
Time out, I am the post author here and I never inferred anything about free market anything. In fact, I have written extensively on this topic and have stated on many occasions that education needs to remain public in order to provide fair opportunities for all.
However, that does not mean that US public schools are without problems. Teachers actually should receive higher salaries, but they also need to be better qualified. Unions are not an evil that diminishes educational outcomes for students, but they do need to recognize that teacher standards have steadily eroded over the past few decades instead of protecting the status quo. I could go on with statistics and such, but you can read the full post here: http://birch.co/post/10127535253/the-us-education-conundrum
I'm fairly sure the reference points matter here. Business leaders, and policy makers, in the USA look at Germany and Japan as reference points. They don't look at Greece or Italy or Spain. Opinion makers in the USA tend to think that the USA should strive to be the best at everything. For them, being slightly better than the OECD average is a failure, not a triumph. Policy makers in the USA tend to worry about the trade deficit, and they wonder why the USA seems less competitive in international trade than Germany or Japan. This anxiety manifests in various ways, and one of those ways is the attitude toward the schools.
The perception is vis-a-vis the perception of economic, social and political status.
Continuing with the pun on the title, everyone expects more from America and America in turn also expects more from itself. When they hear "FWIW, Poland and the USA get very similar results from their K-12 systems" they can say "Oh good for Poland. This used to be a communist country and now it is as good as US in Education" or they can also say "Holy crap. America is now on par with an Eastern European country that was ruled by communists just couple of decades ago, how sad, we could do some much better".
Now, note, I don't endorse this binary view. I want all the countries to have good education, especially my country.
Also, I grew up in Eastern Europe and can also say that my high-school education there emphasized math, physics, literature and English (or other foreign language) a lot more than my American high-school (I also went to an American high-school for a one year btw, so I can compare a bit). I came to US in the 10th grade and was taking math courses along with high-school seniors and tutoring them. I was only above average at home in those subjects.
Overall, what I think works well for US high-schools:
* Kids have a choice already to specialize because they can each take an individualized curriculum. Some took more literature and English some took more physics. That's great.
* Frequent and objective testing. A lot of objective testing and quizzes. Keeps you on pace.
* More approachable and more informal teachers. Teachers that care seem to be really good. Yeah there are the ones that don't. But I noticed in my other high school even teachers that cared acted pretty un-approachable and just showed their care by signing you up for math and physics contests (Olympiads) we call them.
What doesn't work well for US high-schools:
* Too many what I see pointless after-school activities, too much emphasis on sports. Are all these kids going to become professional athletes. So why are they spending all afternoons bumping into each other at high speeds and getting injured.
* Social scene is fucked up and detracts from learning. Because there are so many activities and so much individualized choice on what classes to take. People form cliques and end up being not very approachable. There isn't a group of people you get to know and spend your whole day and years with. There was just less drama and mental effort spent on who is friends with whom and who cheated on whom.
* Too much emphasis on passive media aids (video) for teaching. There was a lot of "here watch this video kids".
* Too much emphasis on group projects. On a certain meta level they are great because it teaches everyone how group function and don't function. How to take advantage of others and how others get to take advantage of you. There were very few times when groups are evenly matched and everyone puts a fair share of work and end up with a great result.
What doesn't work well for East European high-schools:
* Corruption to the core. Everyone cheats. Teachers take bribes. Principles take bigger bribes. Kids cheat from each other. Those that don't cheat get left behind because those that cheat make the exams and test look like a piece of cake, so those get harder and harder ("Oh so it looks like everyone in this 10th grade knows about derivatives so well. Let's bring on the double integrals then!")
I find it odd that you've decided to equate communism with poor education. The Soviets put the first man in space, I'd say they must have been doing something right (edit: I should add they were still doing plenty wrong elsewhere but we're only talking education here). Having the resources to apply that education is a whole other matter of course.
Having said that, Poland is hardly a typical example of an ex-communist country here, they always tended to have fairly high education standards. Of the former communist states in the OECD stats linked by parent, they lead the pack with only Estonia slightly ahead.
I am not personally equating it. If you actually read my post you'll see that science and math were emphasized more in a Soviet-influenced area. What I was talking about is perceptions. That is how people in America (mostly) see that part of the world.
Both the US and Poland are ahead of countries like Sweden, Germany, France, Denmark, and the UK. And all of those countries are still above the OECD average.
And if you're willing to get more politically incorrect (but possibly more statistically correct) http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou... "The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded."
I suspect a lot of these issues have a deeper cause and one that might be summarised rather simply: there is an assumption teenagers are incapable of contributing to society. This is not an original idea but I wonder if it gets enough notice. I would argue this problem is worse in the West (at least this seems to be in line with my own experience).
It doesn't take much to put together the pieces. With increasing affluence, parents were given a greater opportunity to protect their children from the realities of life. It is clear that children are not always capable of facing real life challenges. However, the age for just when they are ready for many of them, seemed to gradually shift further and further. (Something that was no doubt encouraged by the longer periods of time required to complete the education for many vocations.)
Until we arrive at the present day. Teenagers are more or less assumed to be parasites on society, incapable of true contribution to it. Until, that is, they are magically transformed at the arbitrarily chosen 18 year mark into full fledged members of society.
I would argue that all this impacts how we teach kids in schools today. Instead of introducing them to truely independently useful skills, there is an uspoken rule that they aren't actually capable of anything useful just yet. Instead we play pretend, teach them some ideas that might one day lead to something useful, and expect they'll be satisfied with the experience. Highschools often cram kids' heads full of mundane method after mundane method, with little explanation as to how they work or why they are relevant. There is a litany of seemingly random factoids to be memorised. Abstract thinking is a lofty skill reserved for the adults and we needn't waste our time trying to evoke anything of the sort with these kids.
So yes, in a way I think our expectations of what our kids are capable of, do need to change. Not only on a superficial level where we just get them to work harder within the existing broken system. But a new approach is required where their full potential can be challenged.
It's easy to make such grandiose sweeping statements of course, but I maintain one of the keys is not stopping short with purely theoretical methods but extending them to practical realities. Yes, that is more challenging. Let's stop assuming that the challenge is out of grasp for these young people.
That's really interesting, I had never really thought about it like that before. Can you elaborate a little more about your in experience in the West versus somewhere else?
While I do agree this is an issue, how would you actually go about solving it? I mean, what useful contribution can someone make in math without having learned algebra first? You need to start with the fundamentals before you can do actually important things. In fact, it seems that the ability to suck it up and "just do it" without any immediate gratification is what sets other cultures apart with respect to education.
One area where I think young people can do potentially important things is with computers, especially with programming. With only a small base of knowledge, it is possible to do many original and useful things. When I was 15, I wrote apps that were used by hundreds on thousands of people, and I don't think it requires any special talent.
They don't necessarily need to do something productive for society, but they can still 'create'. For example, my early math classes were designed around questions. When we came into the room we would break up into groups, and spend the first half of (the 90 minute) class trying to answer between 1 and 5 problems, after which their was a class discussion on the problems and any tangents they lead to, and they teacher may, or may not, point out things we missed.
A newspaper or blog post is probably the wrong medium for this question. It's one I explored in detail when I was evaluating an opportunity in the education space between September and January. There are a variety of big problems in the education space, most of which centre around the problems of bureaucracy. Here the fundamental issue is that it's extremely difficult for school boards that are offering the same salary scale to everyone regardless of skills/subjects (which is the norm in Canada and much of the U.S.) to get similar levels of teaching talent for subjects that are highly in demand. This tends to lead to a notion of progress that involves reducing the math curriculum to the point where the "math" teachers you have can actually teach it well. This is often spun as giving everyone more opportunity for success or presented as innovation to curriculum, and many buy into that spin. The answer of teaching better is the best solution when it's actually possible, but the combination of convincing government to spend it, and convincing the unions to allow it to be spent well is nearly impossible. The net result is something similar to the system we have. Perhaps worst of all, entrepreneurs get scared away from the space because there isn't anything worse than dealing with enterprise style sales processes for sales numbers that simply are not.
The biggest hurdle in U.S. and western education that I see, especially with maths and engineering is this strange culture of nerd stereotype and 'too pretty for math/homework' etc... I just can't figure it out. I'lived in other eastern countries where these stereotypes are non-existent and not so surprisingly, over there, you see many pretty girls who are exceptional mathematicians and programmers and they aren't considered strange or special.
This entire post seems to be predicated on an invalid premise: Math is hard and liberal arts is easy. There are certainly some liberal arts majors that are easy blowoff majors. But there are also plenty of very challenging liberal arts majors.
Rather than make this a simplistic question of "Should we challenge our kids or not?", we should be asking the question "What should we challenge our kids with?". And it's not clear to me that every liberal arts major needs a good algebra foundation. So why not replace it with something equally challenging that will be more useful to the students?
> Rather than make this a simplistic question of "Should we challenge our kids or not?", we should be asking the question "What should we challenge our kids with?". And it's not clear to me that every liberal arts major needs a good algebra foundation.
It doesn't have to be algebra specifically, though algebra is probably the most immediately applicable and simplest set of mathematical concepts to teach. It's a more general sense, that those who are comfortable with mathematical concepts are better at constructing abstract ideas that are rigorous and consistent, which is generally a positive virtue in liberal arts. For instance, this is what distinguishes the logic-driven analytic school of philosophy from the hand wavy and largely meaningless wasteland of continental philosophy whence postmodernism was born.
Liberal arts is indeed challenging--if you do it right. Not doing it right is the problem though, and it arises from from letting bullshitters pass themselves off as people making an honest attempt. This goes all the way from the top down in some fields, but less so in others.
Both articles are wrong. One makes the point that art should scaled down and math should be scaled up, while the other argues that math is holding back art and should be scaled the opposite direction.
Both are wrong. Math and art are one and the same. Yes, this article in the link was correct that the problem lies in our education system, but there is no distinction between math and art. Our math just isn't applied enough or taught correctly, so students miss out on a true understanding of how math works. Look at da Vinci, that is a man who made no distinction between math and art.
Saying there is no distinction between art and math is like saying there is no distinction between art and sculptury. Yes it is a type of art, but is is a highly distinct skill set from painting.
Of course the way math is taught is about as much art as a coloring book, with a well defined key.
I don't agree that we need "less liberal arts degrees" but having more stringent STEM courses that push students to excel is never a bad thing. Bill Gates used to say "smart people go where the money is" and so if by the author's assertion that the new economy needs people who are good at math, then the market will reward those people and the system will change to focus on math skills. This does not mean that liberal arts degrees are useless as the best innovations usually come at the intersection of liberal arts and STEM fields.
> Our schools are not failing students because they are too hard. They fail because few schools expect anything from their students and shy away from challenging their minds.
I think this is close to the mark, albeit vague. Challenging their minds in what way? Such a statement could be misinterpreted as, "We need more rigorous test standards!" or some other specific solution that does not necessarily meet the goal.
From personal experience, for classes other than upper-level math at my college, people would constantly ask questions like, "Is this going to be on the test?"
And I was always annoyed by that. It seemed indicative of the meaninglessness of our education, and I can see why math classes are so difficult for people who learn this pattern rather than the subjects. I don't know how different it is at Ivy League or other schools perceived as high in quality, but when the majority of testing is multiple-choice, true-false, or fill-in-the-blank, it becomes easy to look at everything you learn as a task of rote memorization. It's like that saying: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The difference with math that makes it so "hard" is you often can't rely on rote memorization. You have to actually learn the material (or understand algorithms and memorize steps to finding solutions with different initial conditions). People get discouraged (probably early on) by the fact that the skills they use for academic success elsewhere do not always work with math, and I think they associate those negative emotions with "math is hard."
I don't know the solution, but I think people need to at least realize that rote memorization is not indicative of learning. It's an uncomfortable realization because so many of our metrics for academic success rely on the assumption that memorization equals learning or understanding.
Of course, that's unlikely. The status quo is always easier. Why do we expect so little from adults?
I think what many fail to see is that the problem does not necessarily begin with the education system. It begins with the popular culture.
In those countries where doing well in school is almost certainly the difference between a decent life and a really bad life, there is a different mentality at play than in America, where even if one goes to a middle tier college, they can probably still lead a relatively comfortable life.
The second issue is that everyone in our society is encouraged to become a scholar and intellectual. While noble in its intent, society may very well be better off with a system like Germany, where many attend vocational schools and learn a craft that can have a real effect on the economy.
"What creates wide gaps in achievement in math (and many other subjects) in minority students is lower expectations for success."
I found this sentence frustrating. It was simple-minded to an extreme, neatly finding a solution to fit all minorities.
Minorities in the middle class, e.g., may have a completely separate set of problems from minorities in poverty circumstances. Recent immigrant minorities may face a different set of circumstances from second, third, fourth, etc. generation minorities.
The author's message is essentially "try harder, think positive". Unfortunately it does not address the different nuances of being a minority.
But to attribute the entire discrepancy to lower expectations baffles me. How is it that so many people are so confident in their various contradictory theories surrounding educational outcomes?
I remember poignantly an argument I had with my cousins about education. They themselves are teachers, two elementary and one specializes teaching kids with special needs. All of them are extremely dedicated and very passionate (to the point of tears) about learning and teaching. They love their jobs and the kids they work with.
The argument I had was that it wasn't teachers that were the problem. It was the institution of education that allows the problems we see. Unfortunately for my cousins and I that I was too inarticulate in showing them they weren't the problem.
Ken Robinson did my thoughts far more justice in his TED video about education paradigms [1]. To summarize, why do we educate our children along a yearly conveyor belt with compartmentalized subjects and standardized testing? The whole system mimics the factory assembly lines, complete with specializations and quality assurance.
We allow process to educate children instead of people. We can effectively replace any teacher with another and our expectations and the system itself doesn't change in any meaningful way. We squash the organic and relational learning with rote memorization and rigid structure. We don't foster curiosity or exploration. We value conformity to structure and authority. There isn't any opportunity for kids to "scratch their itch" unless it falls within the existing structure.
I do have hope for the future. Places like Khan and Wikipedia allow for the curious exploration of subjects, and the Internet allows for participation and dialog that weren't available a few decades ago. I believe we are waking up to a different paradigm of learning that has the ability to transform education from it's Industrial Revolution roots. I also believe this will give passionate teachers, like my cousins, the freedom from the rigid structure that allows them to foster the natural interests of their pupils.
If we allow this form of organic learning, then Standardization is effectively impossible. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This gives more flexibility to tailor the education to the kids' interests. However this means we will have to accept that some people will want to grow their kids in ways that are hard to swallow. Creationism comes to mind. I don't have a good idea how to counter this.
The idea that you can appreciate a complex metaphor in a poem or a complex philosophical concept but not solve for x is absurd. It's fashionable to be bad at math and lots of people indulge in the fashion. The proper tool to address this problem is shame coupled with better education. When your niece tries to be cute by saying she's too pretty for math, you give her the disdainful disappointed look that says this shit won't fly and then ask her what she's having trouble with.
Teaching and learning are hard. We keep looking for a simple way out of doing it. Maybe if we teach less of this and more of that, remove this requirement, write this software, etc, it'll be easy. In reality, it's just like diet and exercise. In America, we want a magic pill, but the truth is that some things are just hard. The sooner we stop complaining and start doing, the better off we'll be.