Category: education

Unschooling

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Home schooling has a new name, or at least a new variety: unschooling, notable for the absence of textbooks.

When the conference [about unschooling] is over, Ms. Laricchia will return to collaborating on building an online business with her son, Michael, 13. Her daughter, Lissy, 16, is a photographer who was recently invited to participate in a show in New York. The oldest child, Joseph, has turned 18 and is no longer being actively unschooled. His mom happily admits that the change has had almost no effect on his day-to-day life.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Casey Manion and Anne Weiss

A University President Defends Research Universities

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Steven Knapp is president of George Washington University in Washington, D. C. It was inevitable he wouldn’t like a book attacking the current structure of higher education but it wasn’t inevitable that he would write this:

A similar point could be made about the educational value of working at the frontier of discovery in one of the research centers that Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus [the book authors] decry. Have they spoken with undergraduates who have enjoyed the privilege of assisting a top investigator in an active, federally financed laboratory? In my own anecdotal experience, the best of those students, far from shutting themselves away in a narrow specialization, are very likely spending their time outside the lab in life-expanding service activities that, again, were quite beyond the ken of undergraduates in earlier generations.

At UC Berkeley, I spoke to many undergraduates like that. Most of them, perhaps 90%, were working in a lab because they thought it would help them get into medical school. Almost none were interested in a research career. All of them were being supervised by graduate students and had little or no contact with the “top investigator”. Because of the mismatch between what working in the lab could teach (what research was actually like) and what the students wanted to do (which wasn’t research) the “educational value” was slight. Knapp fails to understand this basic point about education: It matters what the student wants. Almost none of them, even at UC Berkeley, want to be scientists.

Yes, outside the lab they did do “life-expanding service activities” — volunteer for the Red Cross, work on a suicide hotline, and so on. By making them take lots of classes in which they were assigned lots of homework, the university made such outside activities more difficult.

Before he became university president, Knapp was an English professor — where he no doubt claimed he taught his students how to think. His thinking, in this review, consists of banalities that don’t bear examination. At least this is merely an unwittingly revealing book review instead of an entire delusional book.

Web Alternative to Peer Review

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal [“the prestigious Shakespeare Quarterly”] posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts . . . were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

The NY Times article never says how many of the four posted essays were published. If all of them made the cut, then perhaps the web stuff was just for show. And if any of them didn’t make the cut, the public embarrassment would be great. Perhaps too great. I suspect that all of them made the cut and the whole thing was closer to a publicity stunt than something that you could plausibly do again and again. If the probability of acceptance given that your essay is posted is 100%, what matters is getting posted. Peer review wasn’t replaced by web review; it was replaced by behind-closed-doors review.

Another instance of academics outwitting this particular journalist:

To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”

Haha! Poor poor professors! Caught in the middle! I was under the impression that professors = expert scholarship. Anything to distract attention from the real change: The more education you can get from the Web, the less you need to get from professors. The more evaluation you can get from the Web (e.g., by reading someone’s blog), the less you need to get from professors. The less professors are needed, the fewer of them there will be.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Beijing Students at Berkeley

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In downtown Berkeley I met a group of Chinese students from Beijing. They were entering freshmen at UC Berkeley.

They said there were 40 students like them — from Beijing, entering UC Berkeley. (At Tsinghua, there will be 400 entering freshmen from Beijing.) In all of China, 13 students were admitted to Harvard, about the same number to Yale and Princeton. One of them said she’d wanted to go to Northwestern but hadn’t gotten in. Had she gone to college in China, she might have gone to Renmin University, perhaps the #3 university in China.

Surely their parents were wealthy, yes. But they preferred an American college to a Chinese one for two main reasons: 1. They can choose whatever major they want. At Chinese universities students are often forced into a major they don’t want if their scores are high enough to get into a prestigious university but not high enough to get into the major they want at that university. 2. They believe that if they graduate from an American university they will have more opportunities. Where did they get the idea of coming to Berkeley? I asked. Online, they said. Their English was really good.

The “more opportunities” may not be as simple as they think. In Beijing I know a Chinese businesswoman who hired a recent college graduate. She’d gone to college in England, indicating that her parents were wealthy. The new worker turned out to be irresponsible and had to be fired. Perhaps her parents had spoiled her. In this businesswoman’s eyes, an overseas education may now be a negative.

The Irony of What Works

Seth Roberts5 Comments

After posting about Doug Lemov, I ordered Teach Like a Champion. It arrived yesterday. Leafing through it, I came across a section titled “The Irony of What Works,” which begins:

One of the biggest ironies I hope you will take away from reading this book is that many of the tools likely to yield the strongest classroom results remain essentially beneath the notice of our theories and theorists of education.

Lemov continues with an example: Teaching students how to distribute classroom materials, such as handouts. This can save a lot of time. Then he adds:

Unfortunately this dizzyingly efficient technique — so efficient it is all but a moral imperative for teachers to use it — remains beneath the notice of our avatars of educational theory. There isn’t a school of education that would stoop to teach its aspiring teachers how to train their students to pass out papers.

The last chapter of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class is about just this — the importance that professors (like everyone else) place on status display and how this interferes with their effectiveness. The connection with self-experimentation is that no matter how effective it is, no psychology department would stoop to teach it. Or, at least, that’s the current state of affairs.

The book’s index doesn’t include Veblen, although it does include Richard Thaler.

“A World Suppressing the Uniqueness Inside Each of Us”

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I liked Erica Goldson’s graduation speech very much partly because she says the same things I say here. To me, the core of her message is that her high school was

a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us

That’s what I tried to say here. Goldson summed it up better than I did. One of the things that pushed me toward that conclusion happened in an undergraduate seminar about depression that I taught at Berkeley. For a final project, the students could do almost anything related to depression, so long as it was off campus and did not involve library research. One student chose to give a talk to a high school class. Not a rare choice — several other students did the same thing. But her final paper blew me away. She wrote about how hard it had been. She had/has severe stage fright. Every step of the project was very hard for her. But she did it. “I learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.

Her performance on the week-to-week assignments (writing comments on the reading) had been mediocre. But now I saw another side of her: She was courageous. My assignments, like practically all college assignments, required no courage. So I never noticed how courageous any of my students were. I remember sitting at my desk after reading her paper and thinking how badly I had undervalued her. I had noticed this only because I’d given a highly unusual assignment. I could see that there was a gigantic amount of undervaluing going on. And undervaluation leads to suppression. Students have unique or unusual strengths that fail to develop because their high school or college teachers don’t value them.

Thanks to Tucker Max.

Jane Jacobs and Traffic

Seth Roberts10 Comments

This excellent post by Alex Tabarrok about the effect of removing traffic lights — traffic improves — reminds me of how I discovered the work of Jane Jacobs. Browsing in the Transportation Library at UC Berkeley, I came across The Economy of Cities.

That order arising from below (from individual drivers and pedestrians) can be much better than order imposed from above (by traffic engineers) was a point Jacobs made often. The details in Alex’s post and the video he embeds don’t just suggest that traffic lights in thousands of places could be profitably removed, they also support more radical thinking:

  • Traffic engineers were completely wrong in all these cases. Trying to improve something, they made it worse. How did we get to a world where this is possible? Surely it isn’t just traffic engineers.
  • What would happen if students were given more power to control their own education? Perhaps we would need far few professors. I gave my students much more control and found (a) my job got easier and (b) my students learned much more.
  • What would happen if all of us were given more power to control our own health, rather than rely on gatekeepers, such as doctors? Perhaps we would need far fewer doctors.

The essence of my self-experimentation is that I took control of my health. Rather than seeing a doctor about my early awakening, or waiting for sleep researchers to find a solution, I found a solution.

A Smug Professor

Seth Roberts23 Comments

The Chronicle of Higher Education website has a blog about “ideas, culture, and the arts [that] features some of the best minds in academic and policy circles”. One of the bloggers — Gina Barreca, a professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut and a humorist — wrote about being older than her students:

I think about the fact that my students and I no longer listen to same music or revere the same actors; I wonder about the implications of the fact that even some of the smart ones like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

I pointed this out to Tucker Max (author of I Hope . . . ). He replied:

I like how she implies that some of her students are stupid. Great prof.

I thought that was a great point. I asked if I could use it on this blog. He agreed, and added:

The other thing about her statement is that she implicitly scoffs at the notion that someone smart could–gasp–DISAGREE with her. It doesn’t even occur to her that she might be wrong, that her worldview might be the one that needs examining. To her, nothing legitimate can exist outside of her prejudices and opinions. Even the idea that it could is rejected out of hand.

I replied:

Yeah, she hasn’t read your book but it must be ridiculous. Of course. I praised the film Gladiator (pre-Oscar) to someone I knew and she said, to a friend, that this made me an inferior person. Because Gladiator was popular, it must be bad. If I liked it, there was something wrong with me.

Tucker replied:

Exactly–the idea that THEY might be wrong doesn’t even occur to them. Like it’s not even in the realm of possibility.

These are the same people that Nassim Taleb rails against, and the same people who read Socrates, and completely miss the point, but still praise it because they think they’re supposed to. And these are the people that the internet/the age of connectivity is destroying. Because you can’t hide behind status anymore. Results are measurable, and everyone is on the playing field now.

I agree.