Educational Resources for Children
When I think of the reasons I became interested in science in the first place, the first thing that comes to mind are children books. I speak Russian, and the Soviet era has left quite a few children science books of amazing quality. I'm not sure such books exist in any other language. I probably started reading these books when I was about 6. Obviously books for such small children have to be written in their native language.
Modern technologies provide alternatives to books. A website would be more efficient than a book because:
- The parents don't have to buy the book for the child. The child can find the website by just browsing in the Internet. Of course if the parents show her the website it's even better.
- A website can make use of more means than books: hypertext, multimedia, forums where you can ask questions... A website can have multiple contributors.
As far as I know, there is no body advising parents on such resources, at least in Israel. I think it is important parents are made to realize their children's education begins before school, and outside of school. It begins at home and they are responsible for it. It is also important someone will give them good advice on how to do it.
Too many times I heard parents that think children should "enjoy their childhood" and therefore shouldn't study too hard. These parents are forgetting that the best opportunity to learn anything is during childhood, while the brain is still developing. It will be much harder later, up to the point of impossible. I'm also against the perception that childhood is the good part of life while adulthood is the bad part. This view appears to me to be an unnatural product of the modern era. Childhood is preparation for life, and adulthood is the real life. You should spend this preparation period actually preparing. Only as an adult do you get the chance to transform your hopes and dreams into reality. But in order to have this ability you should work towards it during your childhood.
Rewards
Education in school relies much more on punishment than on reward. I think this is a fundamental mistake. This serves to create the feeling that school is a prison, where the pupils are prisoners and the teachers are jailers. The result: children hate school and hate their teachers. They begin to despise everything they are made to do in school, in particular learning. They also don't think much of successful pupils: nobody likes the jailer's favorite prisoner. On the contrary, pupils who "rebel against the system" become heroes.
What alternative am I suggesting? How should we "tempt" children into learning? My opinion: by money! More specifically, money paid by the school (whether private or governmental) to the parents (since children cannot own money directly). What? Money?! Adults use money, what do children need money for? Well, for many things: toys, gadgets, bicycles, you name it. Or, simply for adding it into the family budget. What's important here is less the actual material benefit and more the psychological impact: the child is spending her time in school for a reason. She's actually helping to support her family! Think how proud it would make the child feel. School is no longer humiliation. School is work. Work?! Since when should children work? Well, it was not unusual for children to work throughout history. In the old days, a son would often serve as an apprentice for his craftsman father. I'm not suggesting children should be put to hard labor. On the contrary, school should be fun. But accustoming the child to responsibility will serve her well as an adult.
Asynchronous Multidimensional Progress
The accepted arrangement in schools is divisions of pupils into grades by age. The implicit assumption here is that all pupils progress in all subjects in the same rate. In reality, the potential speed of progress of pupil X in subject Y strongly depends both on X and Y.
Another related issue, at least in Israeli schools, is that there appears to be no clear understanding of what should be taught in grades 1 - 6. The later grades increasingly focus on the Bagrut (I guess the US equivalent is GED). The Bagrut serves as a country-wide standard for the pupil's knowledge at the end of high-school, whereas there is no similarly rigid standard for the lower grades.
It is also striking how the grade system is applied to the study of history. history is taught chronologically, from lower to higher grades. It of course makes sense to study it chronologically, but not on such large time-scales. Obviously pupils in the 1st grade cannot study history on the same level as pupils in the 12th grade. This doesn't mean ancient history should be taught by an order of magnitude more poorly than modern history. The reasonable approach would be to go over the entire history several times, with increasing "resolution". Of course, the way history is taught in Israel has many other flaws: there is no feeling of context, no big picture, no knowledge of geography to back it up...
A better system would be dividing the pupils not by age but by knowledge/skill. The level of knowledge/skill would be determined by country-wide standard exams. Of course, this level is not a single parameter, it is a vector of levels in different subjects (physics, mathematics, history...) Therefore the grades form a sort of multi-dimensional lattice, instead of a linear progression. This allows different pupils to progress at their own rate in different subjects. It also removes the need for Bagrut or any equivalent: acceptance into higher education facilities would be based on the "levels".
Open Problem: Investing in Education
One of the difficulties with education, especially lower education, is that it is disconnected from the free market. Governmental education relies on the government (which is usually a bad idea). Private education relies on the parents (motivation-wise, that is, the parents are the clients). This is better, but
- Parents are not always able to judge the quality of education.
- Often the parents cannot afford expensive private education.
Therefore it should be profitable to invest in education, since it eventually produces actual economic gain for society. On the other hand, there is no mechanism which would allow the natural "clients", the companies which would hire those professionals, to invest in education.
18 comments:
First of all, you say that
"Governmental education relies on the government (which is usually a bad idea)."
And you base this on... what? Gut instinct?
There are great examples of good public education (Germany, France as well, if I'm not mistaken - and probably many other filthy socialist Western European countries), and there's a great example of your kind of bias leading to a very expensive private education system gnawing away at public education, until it nearly collapses (the US).
As for the corporate education idea....
I'm not sure I've fully understood the system - the child basically gets an interest-free loan and a promise of a job, and the corporation gets... what? The possibility that the that person is gullible enough to keep working for their low wages even after his debt is paid in full?
That is, what keeps people from taking the scholarship and then going to work for someone else?
It's pretty obvious that a non-compete clause would be both immoral and unenforceable in this case.
Btw,
"Of course, the way history is taught in Israel has many other flaws: there is no feeling of context, no big picture, no knowledge of geography to back it up..."
How would you know?
Neither of us actually studied history in high school. All we had is a condensed history+civics course. The bare minimum, if not much less.
If anything, the problem is that History or Geography are not mandatory subjects, and sometimes not available at all.
Dear Nidarus,
My and other people's experience with government institutions is that of horrendous inefficiency which wouldn't be tolerated in any profit organization.
I don't know much about education in France and Germany, though.
One of the problems that stand out in Israel is the low wages and the resulting low quality of teachers. This is so in spite the Ministry of Education having the second largest budget after the Ministry of Defense.
About expensive private education, the whole idea is creating high budget education which is cheap for the parents.
About my proposal, it works on a similar principle as the "Atidim" program, the main difference is that my program starts from school rather than from university. Z gains the time the person works there. There is nothing to stop Y from working, say, three years in Z and then switching to its competitor W. However:
1. Even if we assume that the probability for Y to remain in Z is the same as the probability to switch to W, Z still has that 3 year advantage over W in average.
2. Y will probably be inclined to remain in Z since its more convenient for her to continue pursuing her career in a familiar place where she have already "grown roots".
About history, you have a point there. However:
1. History should be taught throughout school, not only in high school.
2. You are right that the availability of history is geography is very poor. Moreover, if a pupil's history lessons in elementary school weren't impressing, she won't be inclined to pursue a history course in high school.
There's a lot of research on money (extrinsic motivation) as a reward. The criticism is usually that it replaces the intrinsic motivation (which is really what you want) over time, which is even worse.
I really like the idea of iterating over history with increased resolution. Sounds wonderful (and also web-like, btw. think hyperlinks).
I think there are very good examples of government education. It's easy to blame the government, but a more precise criticism is needed. btw, the guy that wrote "Outliers" (Malcolm Gladwell) had a neat idea on how to improve teaching.
About "investing in educating kids": you don't have to do a Japanese/Hamas solution of selling your kids to the company. ;) This whole area of causing the market to invest in the public good is known as externalities (or externality tax).
So parents sell their children into indentured servitude in exchange for their education. I don't know Israeli contract law, but I hope that that would be unenforceable!
PS: You are the same Squark that I knew from sci.physics.research, right?
I admit that I like the general direction of your thinking. That is, you seem to try to think way out of the common-knowledge box for improving the education.
In my opinion, the perception of education (at least in case of State of Israel) has to change. The present conditions are well known and there is no need to repeat them here. I do believe however that education should be one of those things where the State is the exclusive investor. The State has to understand that the better the education of its citizens the better is everything for that State. It is a very long term investment with very uncertain outcome as it involves at least 15 years on average until fruits can be collected. However, I think that's the only reasonable way.
As for your X,Y,Z proposal. I think it is wrong, pardon my being blunt. I remember when I was a kid my answer as to whom I'll be when I grow up changed probably half dozen times. It already changed at least once with my 7.5 years old daughter. You cannot expect any commitment to a specific field of knowledge from a young boy or a girl when their parents sign the contract. On the other hand, it is very unlikely that such companies would have truly broad spectrum of "educations" to offer to their children clients.
Indeed, I once was let known that Israel is way towards the top of the charts with respect to total amount of money being poured into educational system. However, Israel is also very much towards the bottom of the charts when counting the actual investment that reaches a single pupil.
Your idea about zoomable history is quite brilliant and should probably be applied to other sciences as well.
Squark: What I meant was, what keeps Y from ever going to Z instead of going to W? According to your plan, the maximum "fine" for leaving Z is the tuition for 12+ years of education. Now, W's paycheck has to be higher, if only because Z has to recoup its losses somehow. So, instead of paying back the debt by working for Z, Y can just work for W, and pay off his debt to Z with his higher paycheck.
And speaking of that debt - it's not the child's debt anyway, it's the parents'. After all, they're the one who have a duty to provide education for their children. Transferring that debt to the child amounts to billing children for the expense of raising them.
Now, the child could feel sorry for his parents, and pay it, but he could equally (and rightly) say that all they did is save themselves money at his expense, so they don't deserve anything.
And I'm pretty sure that the Atidim program relies on the fact that the person is an adult and:
1. Can enter contracts
2. Is expected to pay for his own college tuition (even if some parents choose to pay that as well, they have no obligation, social or legal, to do so)
Regarding the "everything the government does is bad" idea - that Reaganistic/Thatcheristic line of thought is more or less dead now (with the current financial crisis putting the last nail in its coffin).
There are many horrific examples of both government monopolies and privatized institutions. Just compare the privatized medicine in the US (the most expensive, inadequate and unjust medical insurance in the industrialized world, AFAIK) with the socialized medicine in the rest of the Western world - even in Israel. Or how about the (American, obviously...) judges who were bribed by a private juvenile detention center and now are standing trial for indicting thousands of innocent kids?
And as for the zoomable history idea: What I'd really like is some input from somebody who studied a higher-level (5-point?) general history course in an Israeli high school, to compare this with the current program. Is there even such a thing? I couldn't find any "general history" tests on the net.
btw, a related HaAretz article (I don't see a date, but from what I could find it's from ~2005)
Grr I meant, what MAKES Y ever work for Z, instead of going to W from the get-go
Assaf:
You are right that ideally we would like teachers that are so good that they would keep the students interested in the subject due to "intrinsic" motivation only. However, I'm not sure this ideal is achievable. If we are to use some means for creating motivation which is other than "intrinsic", rewards should be better than punishments, which is what is used today.
It is indeed important to speak more about precise criticism, and maybe I will sometime. However, this is not the point I'm making here. I'm not "blaming" the government. I'm just saying that it is very difficult for the government to achieve the same level of efficiency available in the private sector. Part of the problem are the low wages of the teachers. The result is that most of the teachers are people who can't do anything else (e.g. work in hi-tech). However, high wages by themselves wouldn't suffice: we need to create a mechanism which would tell the good teachers apart from the bad ones. Again, I'm not saying this is impossible in a governmental organization, it would simply be much easier and natural in an organization whose profit actually depends on the quality of the teachers.
I'm not sure how would you apply externalty tax to this situation. Maybe I'm missing something.
Toby:
You are right, what I'm suggesting is illegal in Israel and probably in all developed countries. One solution is charge the parents in case the child decides to avoid the contract, as Nidarus suggests. However, I'm not sure adapting the law to this case is unjustifiable. It is true, in this way the parents decide the fate of the child for a certain time period. This poses an ethical dilemma. However, they already do that for 18 years of his life, another couple of years may be not that principal. Moreover, it is possible that efficient education would produce BSc-level professionals at the age of 18.
And, yes, I'm the same Squark.
Boris,
The private education system I'm advocating is meant to be as flexible and versatile as any healthy education system. The same is true about existing private education systems.
Your remark financing only strengthens my point of the inefficiency of governmental management.
Eli,
Z doesn't risk much, since worst case is having its money back.
About the Atidim program and child/parent debt, you are right, but see my reply to Toby.
About government. Firstly, I didn't say everything the government does is bad. It it was, we would be in much worse shape than we are. I'm just saying that if there's a way to make the private sector take a certain function from the government, and perform it in a competitive environment, where the profit of the private body depends on the quality of its performance, it will usually be done better.
About the financial crisis, I don't want to go there since my understanding of the subject is very poor, but to my knowledge there are different opinions, see for instance http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/03/some-common-sense-for-current-crisis.html
About US health insurance, it is certainly expensive but is it inadequate? My system seeks to transfer the financial burden from the parents to the market.
About bribes, I don't think it's a typical example. The working assumption should be we are living in a law state, where such things can only be exceptions, not the rule. Otherwise we can't do anything.
Squark,
Z has a lot to risk. They're giving an interest-free loan to people who almost by definition have no means to pay it back. And what do they get in return? The chance of training their competition.
So, the very plausible worst case scenario is: the parents declare personal bankruptcy, Z don't get any of their money back (which includes the money they could have made by investing the money, or lending this money to someone else at a normal interest), and Z's competition gets a new, highly trained employee without taking any risk.
In other words, being W is a much better idea than being Z.
Your idea doesn't transfer the debt from the parents to the free market. It transfers to debt to the children, while screwing over some gullible players in the free market. I have no idea why you think laws should be changed to allow that.
Now, about:
"I'm just saying that if there's a way to make the private sector take a certain function from the government, and perform it in a competitive environment, where the profit of the private body depends on the quality of its performance, it will usually be done better."
That's more or less a classic Reaganistic/Thatcheristic POV. The problem with this, is it assumes that the corporations' interests are perfectly aligned with the consumers', and that's simply not the case.
First of all, the free market has no interest in providing an adequate service for those who normally couldn't afford it. Now, when it comes to public transport or cell phones, it's not a problem, because even poor people can pay 100nis a month, so they're a valuable customer. But when it comes to inherently expensive things, such as education or healthcare, it breaks down. What's more, if private service is the only option available, then it means worse, and more expensive service for everyone but the very rich.
Why? Because the rich will pay more and get a better service. In the welfare-state system, the rich still pay more, but get the same service as everybody else - which becomes better on average. Now, an extreme economic conservative would object to that on principle (why are you taking money from those poor billionaires, and giving it to the minimum-wage scum?!) but that's another debate altogether.
Anyway, that's what happened to US health insurance. And yes, if an middle-class American is refused medical procedures that an Israeli homeless person gets (there are many examples - just google "HMO refused"), and that's while the American pays a fortune, I consider the system inadequate.
Aside from that, there are cases where the interests of the corporations are not aligned at all with the people they're supposed to care of, and in some cases, they're in direct opposition. This is the case in a privatized prison system.
The problem with my detention center example wasn't simply that bribes were paid. The problem was that a for-profit organization had a strong motive to increase the number of kids in jail! Even if they acted in legal ways, this organization is still incredibly harmful, since their goals are to increase crime, and to lock up more innocent people.
Your claim about a lawful state is true, but it's also naive. If you give a motive for people to do awful things, you can be sure that some people would do those awful things. Laws are just one kind of motive. Thinking it's the only one is childishly simplistic.
Eli,
Z is not giving the loan. Z is paying to X for the contract of Y. If Y doesn't want to proceed with the contract, she would have to return Z its money.
The reason I want to change the law to allow transfering the debt to Y instead of its parents, is for the following reason. If the debt would remain with the parents then as you justly remark, the parents would be able to declare bankruptcy and Z would remain with nothing. Since Z would forsee that hapenning, it wouldn't pay for the contract in the first place. Since X would forsee that hapenning, it wouldn't provide the service to begin with. Thus the whole system collapses. On the other hand, if we change the law then we allow the system to exist providing quality education for all including people who wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise. The downside is the ethical issue with charging Y in this fashion, but I think it is tolerable reasons I already mentioned.
You are right that the free market does the job only if its interest is aligned with the interest of the job. That's why I wrote the profit of the private body has to depend on the quality of its performance for this to work.
About US health insurance, I have already realized you are troubled by it being expensive for the "simple folk". This is exactly what I'm trying to avoid with my system.
Prisons are a different issue, and probably deserve a separate discussion. Maybe we can create a system of private prisons which are paid by the government on the basis of parametes such as the amount of violence in the prison, the released convicts not returning to crime etc. This requires additional thought but this is not the subject of this entry.
You are right that we should be careful of giving people a motive to do bad things. And vice versa, we should think of ways how to give people a motive to do good things.
Overall, I think we should try to focus all further discussion on the proposal at hand since we're in danger of diverging to other (albeit interesting) subjects.
We are already required to give 3+ years to the army and you want us also to be slaves of some stupid company for a few more years? This is going to be terrible! Huge conflict with personal freedom and initiative.
I know that free market is a good mechanism in general, but not the implementation you suggested. I think a better way to encourage the self-improvement of the system is by ranking the different schools by various criteria (such as the achievements of their students) and giving more freedom to parents in choosing the school for their child (not limited to their neighborhood school etc.) and allowing the schools to admit students based on competitive criteria.
Remember also that the ultimate government-controlled education system, namely the Soviet one, was probably the best in the world.
Genya, Eli, everyone.
You convinced me my "corporate education" proposal has certain problems, therefore I removed it and left it as an open problem. I might write about some different but related idea soon.
P.S.
Thx everyone for the discussion!
Hey everyone,
An interesting proposal and discussion! I won't add to the mainline (not even by expressing my own personal opinion), as quite a bit has been said already and as the discussion seems to have somewhat concluded for the time being.
I would like, however, to challenge the claims about the Soviet education system: what are the criteria according to which it "was probably the best in the world", and how does one measure that? (Also, was it "the [_the_] ultimate government-controlled education system"? I know very little of such matters, but I imagine there are a few other examples of an "ultimate government-controlled education system".)
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