education

Pick a perspective. Not permanently.

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The Common Problem . . .

is that people see qualitative vs. quantitative reasoning as a permanent choice. The reality is that both are necessary tools to be an effective thinker. Yes, there is a need for quantitative analysis. Balancing a checkbook, analyzing business opportunities, ranking athletes and sports teams, these all require using numbers to find the answer. For optimizing, for organizing, for defining the details of a problem. What the purity of numbers giveth, it also taketh away. Numbers lack context. The classic math homework of reading problems is all about the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Before you do the math, you must decide what numbers are important. You finish the problem by using quantitative analysis to address the details.

Many people will argue that everything must be measured, numbered, and counted because of computers. Computers work in numbers, after all. Yet the Holy Grail of computer science for the last 20 years has been to equal the human mind in qualitative analysis. Boolean logic, the foundation of computer science, organizes relationships between values according to 5 criteria: and; or; not; not and; not or. These relationships are defined by whether or not they are true; by how large a margin is immaterial. Most software code is organized into statements of Boolean logic; computer hardware, from the fastest video card to the $5 thumb drive in your pocket, is built from logic gates that operate according to Boolean relationships. What Western society has skipped for the last century or more is the qualitative analysis to start the problem. Select the desired outcome, then define how to reach it.

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are tools. People need to know which one is appropriate to the answer they are trying to find. The problem comes when one or the other becomes someone’s worldview. Qualitative analysis is rooted in Platonic philosophy, the study of the ideal and abstract; quantitative analysis arises from Aristotelian reasoning, reaching a specific conclusion on the basis of the empirical and concrete. Concrete observational is an intermediate stage in cognitive development. Continued progress requires moving beyond that stage. After 2000 years of practice, Western society should have some margin of superiority over the ancients in terms of how to use information.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Education is Free. You get what you pay for.

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The Common Problem . . .

Is that back-to-school time in many of the largest urban school districts represents more harm than good. What is the point of requiring students to attend in a school district where the pregnancy rate is higher than the literacy rate? What is the point of forcing young people into an environment where they are more likely to witness a violent crime than to graduate? As a nation, we spend more time discussing refugees from failed states than we devote to providing refuge from failed schools.

Ignore test scores. Look at graduation rates, at literacy rates in high schools. Compare them to the crime rates for the same demographics. Identify the schools that have failed for years, for generations in some cases. They have failed their student populations. They have failed the neighborhoods they are supposed to serve. They have failed to deliver on the resources spent to build and run them. These kids would learn better math skills making change at a burger joint. They already do get more practice in literacy skills via social media than they do via school. Letting good kids get out of bad schools and build a work history earlier only adds options for the working poor in the urban core.

Every school would be a more productive learning environment if certain students didn’t show up. For the schools in worst trouble, make that an option. Don’t waste resources forcing kids into an environment where they deliberately interrupt someone else’s opportunity to learn, to have better options in life. If the school population was made up of only students who had someone at home emphasizing the importance of education, how much more time would teachers have to teach? How many frustrated students who drop out with a GPA in the “C-” or “D” range would instead graduate?

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Free public education is supposed to be universal in industrialized societies. In the cases where it is very public that education is not happening, give people the option of a free education for their children, and the freedom to enroll them in the school of hard knocks.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

High-Level Thinking To Solve High-Priority Problems

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The Common Problem . . .

is that people have become dependent on precise knowledge. There is an epidemic of “analysis paralysis,” where everything must be numbered off, measured, and calculated. There is a lack of abstract thinking, being able to address the “big picture” of conceptual knowledge and high-level thinking skills such as analysis and synthesis. For the entire 20th century, the pattern has been to teach skills and facts, and that trend toward limited thinking skills has only strengthened in recent years. Skills-based education was displaced by a focus on STEM subjects, Science, Technology, Education, and Math. Yes, student performance in these areas has collapsed over the past few decades, but focusing only on those subjects is a failure to address the bigger problem.

Anyone who learns algebra just for the math skills is missing out on the logic skills, learning to rearrange the terms of the problem into a more tractable form. History and literature teach not only reading comprehension, but also the higher-level thinking skills. They provide invaluable practice in understanding something that one has not directly experienced. What people need is formal training in how to think big, how to understand and analyze something from a conceptual standpoint, how to step back and step up to abstract thinking and other high-level cognitive functions. Most of these functions depend on qualitative learning. Qualitative understanding is more than knowing the definition and description of something, it is knowing why something is the way it is. Cause-and-effect is a good way to start critical thinking, but it needs to go more than one level deep to aid understanding. Those second and third order thinking skills are what contribute to understanding the whole picture, rather than getting mired in unconnected details. Numbers are good tools, but they must have context to have any meaning.


The Uncommon Solution . . .

Don’t limit teaching to skills, to STEM. People need to learn analytical skills, abstract reasoning, how to comprehend the whole, not just details.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Educational Reform Formed By Educators

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The Common Problem . . .

With education in the U.S. is that the final decisions are made by people who are too far removed from students. Too many student teaching supervisors have not worked with the same student body on a daily basis since the students were born. Federal funding from the Department of Education is controlled by bureaucrats who are six degrees of separation from the classroom. By the time you account for students and teachers in the classroom, principals, superintendents, school boards, and state-level Departments of Education, the federal bureaucrats are no more connected to the students than any random person in society is going to be.

If we expect educational reform that is going to make a difference in student performance, then it makes sense that educational professionals who work directly with students on a daily basis ought to be involved. If the U.S. Department of Education wanted to get serious about improving educational outcomes, it would fund a study group made up of past winners of state-level Teacher of the Year, including territories which want to participate. Get all the winners in the past decade, and you have a knowledge base of 500 recognized experts in classroom teaching. Have them meet two summers in a row. The first summer, have them identify actions and priorities which are common to many of the teachers, especially teachers in different age ranges. The second summer, focus on what successful teachers do differently, why they continue to do it that way, and why it still works.

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Identify what successful teachers do in common, and why what they do differently still works.

 

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis