There is something terribly wrong with our education system. It is not just that our best and brightest are no longer able to compete in the world's marketplace, it is that the souls of all of the rest are being crushed by the system. Our education system is creating more failures than it is successes.
Education is the most important way for any civilization to advance that society, yet during this time of recession, when our society needs more creativity, more innovation, and more trained professionals to run the engine of society, we are cutting back on education.
We are laying off teachers, shortening the school year, and asking students to bring toilet paper because we can no longer afford the basics. To get our society going again we should be doing the opposite.
I predict that in the next ten years there will be a revolution in education and that at the end of this revolution the school system will be nearly unrecognizable. I predict that within ten years education will cost less, will produce smarter better adjusted happier students, and will extend to include life long learning.
To explain how this enormous change will come about I need to do a series on education because there is just too much information to cram into one Rant or Rave, so I'll begin with how technology can reduce the cost of education and make it more effective.
Bill Gates recently said, "In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web". There are already several colleges that are entirely on line. This is good news for people who are working, have families, or who just need more flexible hours. You can do your course work and study whenever it is convenient.
http://diverseeducation.com/article/7181...On line courses are actually in their infancy. "Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools."
"The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more "learning by doing," which many students find more engaging and useful."
Even though they are just barely learning the best way to do it, a report based on 99 studies over a 12 year span found that students taking the same course work online had tested performance in the 59th percentile compared to 50th percentile for conventional education. This is bound to get better once interactive software can constantly monitor a student's knowledge, skills, and abilities and constantly challenge them to learn more.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19...Technology will also allow us to cut the cost of education. On line courses will be much cheaper than having to hire a teacher to do the same. In addition many if not most teachers are not as effective or as entertaining as they should be. In the future the best lectures from the best teachers will be videotaped and accessible to all on line.
The same is true for textbooks. The average price for a textbook is $45. Young students threaten their backs by having to carry around 5-6 of these heavy tomes in backpacks, because most schools no longer have lockers. A friend of mine recently started nursing school and had to purchase $1,100 worth of textbooks for the first semester. The average cost of college textbooks is now about $500 per semester.
Once again all of these textbooks are not as effective, or up to date, or as fun to read as they should be. The Texas State Board of Education review committee, determines which textbooks are used in most of the nation. That 15 member board is stacked with 10 conservative evangelicals with a radical agenda.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/19...Textbooks should be based upon their factual content and not on political bias. A committee of the best teachers in each area of expertise should determine which are the best texts, (perhaps with student input) and those texts should be digitized, constantly updated to reflect the latest in research, and the e-books should be available on line so every teacher can give their students access to the best and the latest books for each topic.
E-books cost only a fraction of what the actual hard copy textbooks cost, and the savings would more than pay for getting each student their own computer to read those texts, that they can also take home to do their homework.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/compu...An ideal teaching environment would provide the same amount of money for each student adjusted for regional cost of living with extra for high poverty areas. The best way to do that is with all federal funding of schools, but that won't happen for a while, however the federal government would help cash strapped states a lot by insuring inexpensive access to e-books and by insuring that national standards are competitive on the international levels.
Once all of the students have access to computers it would be possible to utilize on line learning programs. Programs like Rosetta Stone are the easiest and quickest way to learn a new language (other than going there). Why can't we expand the use of computer assisted learning for all other areas of learning?