I like this video, as it describes a lot of the problems in our educational system. There definitely a problem with educational systems of all countries, and it's a fundamental one. This speaker is not the first to propose the view that the traditional way of doing education is wrong. However, while he's full of metaphors and nice examples of what's wrong with education today, his advice on what to do about solving it is very vague and not particularly practical.
- The whole idea of unleashing creativity in kids, and liberating their minds is all fine and dandy in theory, but what does it really MEAN and what would it really TAKE, to make that happen?
- The production-line model of education is easy to criticise, but if we agree that we have to put EVERYONE thru school, then we surely have to put students in SOME kind of boxes.
- Standardized testing is too easy of a target.
- It's easily succeptible to the robot / machine / factory production line metaphor, it's easy to criticise for being dehumanizing, and not fostering the students' creative drive
- But the truth is, standardized testing is also a fantastic tool, because it allows us to catch students who are falling thru the cracks, and figure out which regions / schools need more help with the basics, and which could use resources to not bore the more advanced students.
- For not boring the more advanced students, almost every country has specialized or "magnet" schools. Those usually have better teachers and help take care of the problem of some kids having more potential than others.
Raising the quality of education requires good teachers. Overall that's difficult to get, since teachers come from the general population and aren't not always the cream of the crop (see, for example Future education majors score below state average ). So it's a problem of the chicken and the egg. It's always possible to attract good teachers with higher pay to this or that particular school. Better teachers tend to go to private schools, or higher education, so we have a brain drain of good teachers out of the public school system. How do we ensure that EVERY student has access to better teachers. This is a VERY expensive solution, because this requires both attracting better quality teachers into the public education system, AND making sure that the teachers that are already in place are trained to be better. Oh, and by the way, who is going to train them? Who is going to make sure that a poor physics teacher knows his or her material and can challenge his or her students? Who is going to do quality control on their teaching? There's not enough people in this world to police the educational system, and make sure that
- The right material is being taught
- The right teaching techniques are used
- The children are learning and enjoying the process
One of these days, I would like to see a solution that is practical enough to be implemented on a large scale (at least a small country or a state), which would address the problems with the educational system the speaker has pointed out.
