Yodabunny wrote:
I had to teach my teenager some linear equation math he didn't understand yesterday and my wife was all "I don't know how to do that, what would you even use that for" so I explained that no, you probably won't use this but you'll use the concepts you learn from this to do other things and provided some examples.
This x1000. Far too much of our education is about rote memorization and regurgitation. Knowing why something works the way it does is often much more useful than memorizing how it does. Anyone can learn how to do something. But if you know why, then you can adopt that to any work you do. Very hard to teach this though. And unfortunately, nearly impossible to test for (testing can often go too far the other way, in fact).
I honestly think that on some level, the problem is that many people (especially those in the education profession themselves), just don't trust a system that appears to be indirect. They don't trust individuals in a system to have the freedom to make their own choices, and they don't trust that the system can and will weed out those who make poor ones while keeping those who make good ones. In the business world, we trust the "invisible hand". So while it's hard, for example, to say precisely how much workerAs work contributed to the bottom line of the company, attempting to objectively codify what makes workerA a "good worker" is almost always going to fail. What works is allowing workerA's supervisor to make that assessment. And his supervisor does the same for him. And so on. Ultimately, you can look at a business and see the big patterns of success and failure, and make small adjustments from the top, that will ripple through the organization in the form of process changes at each level. Of course, this isn't perfect, and only works if you can actually make pay, bonus, promotion, and firing decisions in this context.
Education (and most government work in fact) doesn't trust that individuals can make those choices. So it instead uses strict pay scales (to ensure fairness), and places huge obstacles on firings. I think this is the root of the problem though. Since you can't trust the principle of a school to decide that their program isn't working (or even trust him to implement one on his own), you can't trust the department heads to pass the information about where the problem is to that principle, and you can't make raises available faster to those who do well versus those who do poorly (or even *gasp* fire them), you are required to eternally attempt to find some kind of objective measurement of success. Which has lead us through a series of methods of standardized testing using various methodologies. None of which work. And all of which basically result in "teaching to the test", in one form or another.
It's a far more radical change than most would propose, but I'd change the structure of K-12 education so that the schools each compete for education dollars (yeah, still paid for publicly though, so there's that). Yes, I'm talking vouchers. But don't be afraid to let the system "float". Let the market decide which schools are good and which are bad. Let that same market force schools that are under performing to have to change, and let them have the power to make those changes. And yeah, this means some schools will teach to a trade school path. Some will teach to a university path. Some will teach more science. Some more art. I don't think that's a bad thing. But as long as we keep trying to set strict objective rules to decide what works and what doesn't, we're most likely just going to end up with things that don't. If we allow those students future success to flow back to the schools naturally, I think it will work. And I think we'll get more teachers willing and able to teach the "why" rather than the "how". Because no one's standing over them watching to make sure that they teach enough "how" for kids to pass a test. They're looking at how well the teacher teaches, using their own subjective abilities, which are honed by the same fact that if they make consistently bad assessments, they'll be replaced by someone else who can make better ones.
That kind of system does work. You just have to trust it to do so. But most people in government don't trust people.