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.
