How to improve education
After posting about how education needs to be about learning, the value of education, and technology in education, it is at last time to talk about improving education.
Like most of our societal ills, a big problem is our lack of a proper social safety net in the United States. There are numerous reasons we should take better care of people. But focussing on education: if students didn’t need to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, they could focus more on learning. If they weren’t worried about having a roof over their head, if they weren’t about the costs of their education, they wouldn’t be in as a hurry to graduate and they wouldn’t be as laser focused on classes that they only see for being helpful for getting a job. If instructors weren’t so underpaid, they wouldn’t have to teach so many classes or have their time divided by finding additional work. If schools were better funded, teachers wouldn’t have to crowd fund class materials. The list goes on and on.
In addition to a lack of a social safety net, we massively underfund education. Pre K, K-12, colleges and universities all need better funding. I also strongly think that when that funding comes, we need to do better to make sure it is used properly. Too often when money does go to education it ends up in the pockets of administrators who, as previously noted in the last few posts, are often less concerned about learning than they are with graduation rates or cutting spending at the university. Infuriatingly each of the presidents of the California State Universities recently got salary bumps to five hundred thousand dollars a year. The argument is that they could make more in the private sector. Allow me to retort: Let them fuck off to the private sector then. I am certain that there are qualified people willing to do the work for far less because they care about quality public education. The corporate model of over paying the people at the top while dismantling the services rendered being used in the public sector is insane. Any time money goes to education there are hires made in the administrative staff, often even as instructors are laid off and classes are canceled or class sizes swell.
What should happen with education funding starts with hiring more instructors and reducing class sizes. And I’m talking about a lot of instructors. Like I’m talking about dramatically shifting our economy to being education first and hiring so many teachers we need more college professors to train them all. If instructors had smaller class sizes the students would benefit from the personal care. Instead of shuffling students along instructors could help provide the support students need.
Let students learn to fail and try again. The focus on graduating everyone often means that students are being passed along even though they haven’t learned the skills and content of a class. Also the focus on Grade Point Average means that they feel like they have to be perfect, and when people are valuing flawlessness above all else, they rarely take risks or try things that are challenging. One of the parts of learning should be failing and doing better next time. People should be encouraged to try things outside of their comfort zone. Some might find that they’re actually good at other things, others will learn to be good at other things, and at worse all will benefit cognitively from learning things outside their normal day-to-day lives.
Reverse the trend of trying to get students to graduate quickly. There may be a benefit to AP classes, but generally I think they should be dumped. Too often these are just more classes in how to pass a test. To this day I’m thankful that in the 10th grade I took Honors History instead of the AP class. Instead of learning to take a test, we wrote a four-page paper every week. It was painful at first, but soon I was able to do it quickly. I learned to analyze what I read and construct an argument and then bang out that paper in a couple hours. It’s better for the students to learn skills and content than to learn to take a test on that content. Financial costs aside, it is better for learning for them to spend more time doing their general education and to get the collegiate version of classes rather than learn to take a test to skip those classes.
We need more arts and music in schools. In addition to these being the things that make humanity interesting, participating in the arts and music is good for cognitive growth. We need to focus more on the humanities and the importance of analyzing and citing sources. We need more focus on critical thinking skills. We need science classes that foster curiosity instead of crushing it. We need math classes that allow students to see the beauty in math and the importance of proofs. In short we need to rethink and dramatically change the course we’ve been on, because the way things are going we’re in a downward spiral with people learning less and less.
While incremental change and partial solutions are better than nothing, I don’t think they’re that much better than nothing. If we want to affect positive lasting change in our country we need to fix our education system. And I believe that it needs big swing fixes. We need to refocus the public education system to be on learning. We need to refocus our economic thinking to create a robust set of social safety nets in general, but with a massive funding increase for education. That funding needs to be directed properly so it supports learning, supports STEM but also the Arts and Humanities. We need smaller class sizes so that instructors can work with students and avoid the pitfalls of the one size fits all approach to education. Technology, while important, needs to be servicing the user, in this case being a tool for instruction, instead of servicing a few tech CEOs to create dullwitted serfs.
With that we can get a lasting improvement not just to education but to the country as a whole and contribute to bettering the situation and understanding of humanity.
