How long tail learning ends the underclass trap
So often when one argues for using online content in learning the argument is raised: Oh, but you have to have nurture and teaching. Of course. This 7-week old Pallas’ Cat kittens make the point that youngsters of all sorts need the skill and patience of faithful adults.
Thanks to ZooBorns, where you can see lots more of the kittens.
Education is a deeply entrenched sector of liberal, government, progressive, public — whatever word you like — control and management. Federal control of this sector is increasing, and that is doubling down on debacles in the sector. The preceding statement is not speculation. An article in today’s Political gives background and details: The Democrats’ education debacle. It begins:
Education for Democrats these days is an education itself — a lesson in how dysfunctional this White House and Congress can be on domestic policy. [Lots of details follow.]
So if you are a kid now school age, what do you do as schooling debacles bring chaos to your education? Increasingly, there is a really good answer to that question. What you do is take your schooling into your own hands. Get what you can from the school you are in, but do not expect a good education to be forced on you. Learn to be a consumer of the useful debris instead of folding your arms and demanding an entitlement from the dysfunctional folks in government.
In your hands schooling
If you are in preschool or the early grades, learn the 3Rs on your own from computer toys and children’s mobile computers. Get yourself a reading device into which you can download books — and read, read, read!
Once you are into learning subjects like history, sciences, arts, and the rest, get your own mobile browser for the internet. You can learn anything you want to online, either by connecting directly to knowledge itself, or working with subject tutorials.
Education powered by government will fizzle during your school years. Take schooling into your own hands where you can double down on true learning.
The Gulf education fiscal government role in the availability of Western top university branches is described in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, that says in part:
Michigan State University is canceling all undergraduate programs at its branch campus in Dubai, effectively reducing what was meant to be the university’s beachhead in the Middle East to a mere office. . . .
What set Michigan State’s Dubai campus apart from the branch campuses that many other prominent Western universities have opened in the Persian Gulf region was that the campus was eventually required to break even: Student tuition had to cover its operating costs.
For Western universities that have opened branch campuses in much wealthier locales than Dubai—New York University in Abu Dhabi or Texas A&M University in Qatar, for example—local governments underwrite everything from the cost of campus construction to faculty salaries to research. Student tuition is almost a bonus.
Not so in Dubai, which has minimal oil reserves and a local government that is unable to simply underwrite the costs of first-class higher education.
It is interesting to note that the rich locales in the Persian Gulf is where Western universities are viable. Why? Because the local government has the money to do it it: government pays the bills.
So what about the university-age population who are not in the locales where the money is? Many go abroad to study, if they have their own money or get the funding. The Chronicle article does not give the facts on who attends native higher institutions in the Gulf. Wikipedia reports that about 10% of the population of Dubai have higher education degrees.
The operative role of higher education money from rich governments — and rich people — is obvious. How long will the riches last is unknowable. Yet the bigger question is: what about all the other inquiring young minds among the 90% without money in Dubai. They, as well as the millions of educationally underserved of poorer countries are increasing able to access the knowledge the want to learn online. For example, Michigan State Universities Libraries have an extensive Middle Eastern Studies collection. Let us hope that soon this collection will be opened for use by students worldwide. All Dubai students, for example, could use the university’s virtual beachhead to enter superb knowledge venues. Instead the university was trying to raise enough from the tuition of less than 500 students in Dubai which allow just them to use the Michigan State University Libraries from on-site in Dubai.
Education at Hogwarts was shaken to the core by the murder of Albus P. W. B. Dumbledore the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts had ever seen. He was killed at the age of 116 years by Severus Snape, his friend. On the above video you can watch his scheduled death, memories and mourners.
Among the mourners seen in the video is Dumbledore’s phoenix bird Fawkes. Tears come to his eyes. He then catches fire and burns down — a mystical capacity of the phoenix species.
In education of our time, there are forces both old and new that are killing old time educational institutions and practices. These forces include friendly changes in the digital area and destructive influences of welfare statism, unionists, and prodigal spending that is running governments out of money that could be used for schools.
The happy (real or imagined) days of our Dumbledore Hogwarts schools are over. We cannot go back.
Fawkes reminds us that the future can be new, fresh, and exciting. We can move on from Hogwarts to something completely reborn. To get that done, we need to focus not on rebuilding Hogwarts — but on the concept of a new Fawkes. Is this a negative and frightening path? Quite the contrary. The bright new pheonix of 21st century learning — already stirring and peeping — will provide young wizards of the future with a global commons of knowledge and learning — plus a new generation of teaching Dumbledores who do not have to watch their back for bureaucrats casting negative spells.
The setting of the same median goal for all students levels individuals into masses. Sure, you can say you hope many students will do more than pass the minimum standard. Will they? Do they?
Their is an illuminating bit of trivia about all this in an obituary today in the New York Times. The quote that follows begins with the obit’s headline and lede, then a sample of the deceased’s liberal stripes, and concludes with a paragraph (in red) noting the fact that he supported George W. Bush’s education initiative.
William Taylor, Vigorous Rights Defender, Dies at 78
William L. Taylor, who as a lawyer, lobbyist and government official for more than a half century had significant roles in pressing important civil rights cases and in drafting and defending civil rights legislation, died Monday in Bethesda, Md. He was 78 and lived in Washington.
Mr. Taylor is also credited with helping to devise a strategy by liberals to defeat President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, partly by recruiting well-known law professors to criticize him.
Mr. Taylor could sometimes be unpredictable, as when he openly supported President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law to overhaul education. Liberal critics called the measure punitive, poorly financed and too oriented toward standardized tests.
Yet Taylor was not convinced. As he probably foresaw, standardized educational tests do not lift all students to an equal and meaningful level of excellence. Instead the forced sameness of learning to the tests tends to settled more and more kids into the same level of mediocrity. Senator Ted Kennedy, who was a visceral and relentless liberal and leveler, is another example, like Taylor, who pushed the Bush vision called No Child Left Behind.
Showing his deep leftist core, Obama has not abandoned No Child Left Behind. Instead he is spending billions of dollars on what he calls Race to the Top. The name of that program belies its actual structure and goal. This, Obama’s major education initiative so far, is trying only to boost “failing schools.” He is building a welfare state of public education where youngsters are promoted with low grades, while billions are spent to push children’ scores a bit higher at the worst schools. The effect is not only to lock in a median mass — but to almost ignore education policy that would reward individual achievement. Assessment is made equal for all, while opportunity to learn settles into a media that gets lower and lower.
Beware of the educator with a level in his hand.
As Barack Obama is now completing only the second half of the second year of his Presidency it is clear: American education will breaking apart during your K-20 years. You may have learned an old rhyme. It describes precisely what will be happening as you go through your years of kindergarten, grammar, middle, and high school, and college.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Because of the year you happened to have been born, you are going to find yourself in the middle of this mess. It will happen to you soon. You are only two years away from the big “K” of kindergarten!
What then are you to do about your own learning in your K-20 years — while the kings horses and men scurry around trying to put something together that is broken beyond repair? Your learning will be strongly affected while Obama pushes socialist education until it breaks what is left of public schooling and cobs onto the education sector for the feds.
If Obama is re-elected in 2012, you will just beginning the first grade. That would mean while you are in the early years of grammar school, there will be four more years of expanding the power of the federal government to mess with school policy at the local level. Big money from taxpayers — flowing through Washington — will set up a national curriculum. As a third-grader, for example, all you will required to learn at school is the same minimum stuff that federal experts have approved for every third-grader in American public schools. You will have to learn what they tell you in order to get into the fourth grade. (Actually, you will only have to learn about 50-60% of the stuff to move to the next grade. You will not learn much.)
Between now and 2020, when you are middle-school age, you will have experienced a decade of orchestrated crisis in American education. President Obama has set the goal for 2020 of having “the best educated, most competitive workforce in the world.” Billions of federal tax dollars have already flowed into states and local districts for education. Yet there is not enough money even to support schools as they are — much less to lavish on grandiose programs that are somehow supposed to elevate our workforce to the best in the world.
During your school years, American education is not only very likely to remain stalled back in the 20th century. It is has already entered a time of chaos and collapse that is part of the Obama-Alinsky modus of governance. It is based on: “The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.”
What could be a more obviously impossible demand of America’s public schools than this one by Obama: to have “the best educated, most competitive workforce in the world” by 2020? Gosh, the college class of 2020 is already in middle school — and perhaps half of those kids now in public schools will not even graduate from high school. Many of those who do get a high school diploma will not qualify for college entrance. Either the Obama promise is an empty one, or it is meant to nudge the Humpty Dumpty of education off the wall.
Even a best case scenario will not help you because of the year you happened to have been born.
You will begin the first grade in 2013, the year after the next Presidential election. If Obama has been defeated and the next President is an educational genius, it will nonetheless not be possible for all of his (or her) horses and all of the best men and women to put effective education together to give you then — or for a lot of years after 2013. Yet these will be your best years for learning — as they will be for all children who were born in the first decade of the 21st century. The loss from immersing your generation in orchestrated educational chaos is going be incalculable for you and for America.
The bottom line for you is not to expect education to be given to you by any government. You must take your own learning into your own hands. Once you do that, the 21st century offers you a global learning feast. When you use your opportunity to learn as an individual at the bountiful virtual table of human knowledge you will lift yourself from educational chaos. You will be in the vanguard who enter and help to shape the global golden age of learning.
