On education and reforms Comments Off

If you have no patience to read though it all, the bare bones idea of the post is that I think that the reforms of the educational system that most governments undertake are utterly useless. It does not matter how you grade and how many years of school are mandatory. Only two things matter: how good the teachers are and how good is the material they teach.

That was the idea, the rest of the post is a rant, let it be known! A good rant, I believe, but a rant nevertheless. This latest outburst against our glorious education system came to me while sitting on the toilet and reading the latest news from the free newspaper we get at the subway. Free is the only price I’m willing to pay for most newspapers that are published these days and the toilet seems the most fitting place to read it, since it’s full of crap anyway.

While reading the latest and greatest conquests of our glorious political leaders there was a small article in a corner about the new education law. Should I say the annual education reform? Or is it the semi-annual, there are so many I keep forgetting. Anyway, in this last example of pure genius, somebody thought that it would be a good idea to force kids go to school starting with the age of six and to move the 9th grade from high school to elementary school. Also, there were two minor changes that the rector of a university cannot have a political position and a rule against nepotism.

Now, guess which of the changes caused an outrage with academia? What? The 9th grade thing? No, you are wrong, the nepotism and political position rules. And these guys are supposed to shape the minds of the young generation.

Beyond that, please, if anybody can explain, I beg of you, tell me what is so important in starting school at the age of 6 instead of 7 and how does it help to move the 9th grade to elementary school? And yes, I understand that at least with 9 grades, if kids drop-out, they will have some kind of education, and yes, I understand that there is a theory kids are more advanced these days, but what’s the point? This is completely useless, a waste of time, money effort and I’m sure, some sort of a diversion and a way for politicians to point out they didn’t just sat on their asses idle for a year.

I think I’m entitled to rant about education and to have an opinion about it. I’ve been and still am a faithful customer of the education system for more than 20 years of my life, and counting (hopefully for only a few more months). I’ve gone through all levels, learned in 4 countries and changed education institutions 7 times. I’ve studied in systems that had grades from 1 to 5, from 1 to 6, from 1 to 10 and the winner of most useless, from 1 to 12. I’ve studied in countries where I was the older in class because only kids that were really falling behind did the 4th grade, the rest just jumped to the 5th and I was coming from a system where the 4th grade was for everybody. I graduated elementary school after the 9th grade, as our leaders wants us to change the system to, and graduated high school after the 11th grade, because there was no 12th grade.

And in all these schools and systems only one thing was important, how good the teachers were and how good the textbooks were, the rest was unimportant, from start to finish. You can be inspired sitting in a warn-out bench and be born out of your mind sitting behind a state of the art computer.

If it was my choice I would freeze all these useless reforms and focus on getting the best people this country has to offer to want to be teachers, be rewarded to be teachers, be proud to be teachers and let them be teachers and shape the minds of the young. Let them write clear and good textbooks, the kind you will cherish and be inspired by when you read it, the kinds that open kids eyes. And let the teachers tell stories, inspire and show how kids can use their knowledge to build the things they are dreaming off.

But no, let us argue for half a year about a law against nepotism, because that’s what ruined the education system. I’m glad I’m out of school and sad for all the 6 year olds.

One of my previous rants about education is here (in romanian).

On education and the factory Comments Off

If you think about how a modern school/college/university is organized you’ll freak out how much like a factory it sounds. There are these products (children) that are supplied in batches every year (at the beginning of the school year), go through a series of sections (classes like math, physics, grammar) repeatedly for a period of time and are shipped out in batches (promotions). The only criteria by which the kids are grouped together is the manufacturing date (date of birth).

Sounds very poetic, doesn’t it? But horrifyingly it seems that the whole education process is thought of as to prepare future generations of workers to do well in factories (or cubicle farms) by dulling their imagination and initiative and rewarding discipline and doing things only one way –  the “right way”.

Smarter people than me have though about this and have proposed solutions too. One of these people is a person I greatly admire, Sir Ken Robinson. Below is an excellent animation done by RSA on one of his speeches. Here is the post where I heard about the animation.

Here is also Sir Ken Robinson’s hugely popular TED talk

The Formula That Made Everything Clear Comments Off

I was doing some research for an article a few days ago and I came across some papers that were explaining different aspects of pay-per-action models and contextual advertising  and things like this. And at one point it struck me how much math was in there. Formulas here and there and model X and Y explaining problem Z. Models for explaining how advertisers bid in an auction how publishers make the auction and so on and so forth.

Although I respect very much people who have the gift to see mathematical relationships in every aspect of life, I must say – come on people, take a brake, go pet the dog or something, look out the window. It doesn’t even matter what they were trying to prove in that article, the idea is that too many are forgetting that modern economics was built by guys like Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. Smith was  philosopher! If you need to turn to science for explaining at how people are bidding in an ad auction look at psychology first, not math. You are talking about people. Model their behaviour as much as you like that still won’t make you understand things completely.

My take is that among academia too many people are so busy of building “something new”, some “new model” that too easily people jump into making their own little mathematical model that no one understands because it’s new and it will get published. I don’t say these are not useful sometimes but economics and anything else that has to deal with humans is Powered by the People™.  If you want to find out what effect a badly designed pop-up has on a sites users look at any talk show. Pop-ups are like that annoying guy that doesn’t let anybody else talk. Pop-ups are interruptions that don’t let you do what you came for. Wasn’t that easy? And I figured that out without building a mathematical model for it.