Re: [unrev-II] Improving education (why are we doing what?)

From: Eric Armstrong (eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com)
Date: Sun Feb 20 2000 - 17:50:19 PST


From: Eric Armstrong <eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com>

My comment on the situation you observed, resulting from
"a don't-rock-the-boat career administration sandwiched
between a government bureaucracy and unionized teaching
staff":
    THAT SUCKS!!

It just absolutely grates my gizzard that the most
important parts of the subject to understand can't be
explained in the proper sequence, in order to conform to
some predefined, century old curriculum -- and that the
curriculum is held in place by the available textbooks,
all of which are constrained to conform to the curriculum!!

Does that need solving, or what?

It strikes me that one would get a better general education
in chemisty by reading "popular" science books (like The
Selfish Gene -- Dawkins appears to have taken the torch
from Azimov, in that regard).

With any luck, the knowledge repository will be a base-
system on which really good educational materials can
be built, complete with presentations and interactive
programs.

In 10 years, we may be able to start turning out better-
educated people through KR-interactions than those
churned out by the "educational" system.

In FACT...

Maybe a stated long-term for the DKR should be the support
for home-learning. That provides an income proposition
(home learners dial in to central server for latest course
content, for example). It provides people who want to keep
their kids out of the "Lord of the Flies" societies that
our educational institutions have become with the option to
do so, even if they don't know enough to do the teaching
themselves. And it makes "event-driven" instruction possible
(you go on to Calc 3 when you've learned Calc 2) instead
of "time-driven" (you go on to Calc 3 after 12 weeks, even
if your "C" indicates that you only got part of the material.)

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