For the last dozen years, Steve Sailer has been listening to Bill Gates on improving education:
First, it was small learning communities (which he now says the Gates Foundation wasted $2 billion upon), then it was making everybody pass Algebra II to graduate from high school, then it was something else, now it’s giving the best teachers bigger classes (see Gates’s latest op-ed: “How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools”).
The weird thing is that the Way to Fix the Schools has basically never been, according to Gates, about the main way the rest of economy gets more productive — and also the one thing Bill Gates definitely knows a lot about: information technology.
And yet, common sense says that information technology offers the main hope of us ever being able to afford on a mass scale the one educational tool that works more often than anything else, especially with math: individualized tutoring. It often doesn’t work, but over thousands of years it’s tended to work enough that that’s what rich people get for their kids. And it’s a lot more likely to work than the latest fad.
Unfortunately, assigning one human tutor with patience, insight, and communications skills per student is mind-bogglingly expensive.
So, the standard Ed School solution is “differentiated instruction:” i.e., the teacher should be every student’s personal tutor. The teacher is supposed to walk around the classroom instantly diagnosing why each individual student is screwing up and giving the exact help he or she needs. Thus, the need for Superman.
Yet, assigning one computer per student is getting cheaper all the time. And computers have all the patience in the world. It’s easy for a program like Aleks to generate math problems adapted on the fly to the exact level of the student — if you miss a question, the next one is easier, if you get it right, the next one is harder. That’s how big tests like the GRE and the ASVAB work today.
What’s harder is getting the computer to figure out why the student gets wrong a problem at his appropriate level. Yet, that’s not an impossible task in math, where there are a finite number of ways to screw up.
Folks, it’s 2011. Way back in 1998, my Palm Pilot could humiliate me in chess. We’re not talking about beating Gary Kasparov or Ken Jennings here, we’re talking about reminding a kid who thinks that -3 times -3 equals -9 that a negative number times a negative number is a positive number.
So, what would have happened if instead of investing billions naively chasing social theory fads, Bill Gates had invested billions over the last 12 years in something he knows about: software.
As a veteran of the IT industry, I’ve never seen any sign that Bill Gates knows anything about software either.
With apologies for not reading past the first paragraph. You should probably not waste a further second on an ignorant comment, but, here goes: Is someone still saying the solution to education is more IT? A WATSON for every budding Sherlock?
We are truly in the End Times. Ray Kurzweil, I surrender: Take me. I am ready for assimilation into The Singularity.
(Whispering: Maybe, just maybe, the problem is not how quickly we acquire and exchange data, but how well and deeply we develop and share wisdom? And, last time I checked, “there’s not an App for that.” Put that in your Funk & Wagnalls.)
All Gates really needed to know was that getting the Goliath of the mature mainframe market to hand over the nascent microcomputer software market was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Certainly classroom IT projects have been appallingly bad up to this point, but most of us here have been using the Net for self-education to an amazing degree.
Isegoria, I agree with your comment. The key word is self. The second key word is us. What we do and how we manage education as adults is quite a bit different than what I’d want sprayed on pre- and elementary schoolers.
What I mean to say is that while the InterTubes are really almost a miracle and I am thankful every time I use it, I also still recall a time where actual research, thought, growth, creativity, etc. all happened successfully without it.
I would have a hard time, as an adult, trading away the Instant Answer-O-Meter that is the InterTubes. At the same time, I would never raise a kid to value clicking for data over experimenting, observing, wool-gathering, hypthesizing, and discussing in person.