A Few Words on Conventional Education from Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky is a renowned MIT professor of artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive science. He is the author of a number of publications on cognitive science, including The Society of Mind, and The Emotion Machine (Intro).

Here are some of Minsky's thoughts on "The Concept of a General Education" from his MIT webpage:

§2.6 of The Emotion Machine: The “playfulness” of childhood is the most demanding teacher that one could have; it makes us explore our world to see what's there, to try to explain what all those structures are, and to imagine what else could possibly be. Exploring, explaining and learning must be among a child’s most obstinate drives—and never again in those children’s lives will anything push them to work so hard. [1]

Indeed, some children focus so much on their hobbies that their parents fear that this will conflict with their education—and try to find ways to discourage them. However, this essay will propose, instead, to postpone “broad” education until each child has had some experience at becoming an expert in some specialty.

So here we’ll propose to re-aim our schools toward encouraging children to pursue more focused hobbies and specialties—to provide them with more time for (and earlier experience with) developing more powerful sets of mental skills, which they later can extend to more academic activities. These issues are important because our children today are growing up in increasingly complex and dangerous worlds—while our institutions are failing to teach correspondingly better ways to think. The result has been a global pandemic of adults who lack effective ways to deal with increasingly challenging situations.

Conjecture: once a child builds a cognitive tower that works well in some particular realm, that child will thereafter be better equipped to develop proficiencies that can be used in other domains.

The idea is that it seems plausible that the first few such developments could have a major effect on the qualities of that child’s future ones—because those will the child’s first experiments with organizing such ‘vertical’ structures. If so, then this would imply that our children’s early education should focus on activities, hobbies, and specialties that have the ‘desirable’ kinds of such qualities. Of course, this also implies that we’ll need good theories of which such qualities would be desirable’and what kinds of curriculums could help to promote them.

To what extent can a child’s mind spontaneously ‘self-organize’ its higher levels, without any external guidance? To what extent can we help children to learn how and when to make higher-level abstractions or to resort to self-reflection? I’ve never seen much discussion of this; instead, we assume that such developments happen spontaneously if we just expose a child to the proper kind of curriculum, that child’s mind will somehow construct appropriate systems of processes to represent those experiences. Then, when we come to recognize that some children excel at doing such things, we simply assume that those children are ‘brighter’ than the rest—instead of trying to find out what’s happening. _Marvin Minsky

Minsky seems to have come to conclusions about early childhood education which parallel some of the approaches taken in The Dangerous Child Method. Children do need to become self-directed and self-motivated. They do need to develop relative mastery over a number of skills quite early in life.

Where the professor errs is in his pragmatic and overly conventional assumption that this more optimal approach to the education of children would be neatly folded into conventional education. But anyone who is familiar with modern conventional education -- particularly government schools -- would immediately see the impossibility of this approach, in most cases.

There has never been a greater need for Dangerous Children.

Designing Your Own Free Education Online

When designing a course of independent study, some of the most useful tools available can be found online. When you design your own education, you can tailor the content to your needs -- rather than the needs of an institution, a government accreditation agency, or a "society."

Online, you can select from individual tutorials, or you can take an entire course online -- for credit or not for credit. You can even combine different courses to obtain an online certification in a field of study.

Many organisations provide free access to educational materials from K-12 through university graduate study level. Here are a few examples:

540 Free Online Courses from Top Universities

Alison.com -- over free 400 courses in over 10 different categories

Open Courseware Consortium

Coursera.org -- Free online courses from 33 top universities

EdX.org -- Free courses from MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, and the U. Texas system

All of those sites and more offer free online access to a wide selection of courses from fine institutions. But not everyone is ready to take maximum advantage of these valuable courses -- many of which can be very difficult if one is not prepared ahead of time.

Take college mathematics, for example. Higher mathematics is the cornerstone of the modern technical professions and sciences. An inability to understand the basics of higher mathematics can make the difference between a successful career in science, engineering, computer science, or a technical profession -- and perhaps having to settle for less than one may have wanted.

Khan Academy can be helpful in working through difficult mathematical concepts, and filling in missing holes in one's technical background. But another -- and often more fundamentally useful -- website for helping a person to wrap his mind around difficult maths concepts is Better Explained.

Preparing ahead of time is generally the best approach. But sometimes one must be satisfied with "better late than never." Higher mathematics should be learned intuitively, rather than by rote learning of application of formulas. A rote learner is limited in how far he can go, whereas one who takes an intuitive approach can often advance his field of study, or one that is related.

One interesting website approach to teaching intuitive maths to younger students is "Visual Math Learning." The site uses visual animations to assist a student in learning foundational ideas in basic maths, so that he can go on to more difficult things.

Merlot.org provides a number of unique learning aids in maths and a large number of other subject areas. It is a site well worth browsing -- time and again.

You will have to start with what you can find, and adapt it to your needs, and the needs of your children. Cultivate the special skills and knowledge of family members, acquaintances, and other persons in your community. You never know who will be in possession of a skill, trick, shortcut, or secret that will make all the difference in learning a particular subject.

Remember, there is no safer place to be than in close proximity to a Dangerous Child. It is never too late to have a dangerous childhood.

Using Games to Teach Reading Skills to 4 Year Olds

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have devised teaching games that are capable of teaching Swedish children as young as 4 years of age early reading skills. It is likely that such an approach could lead to even earlier learning of reading skills, in some children.

Previous research has shown that children’s reading development can be stimulated with structured and playful language games from the age of six. In a current three-year study, researchers at the University of Gothenburg are exploring the effects of having children as young as four participate in such games. The hypothesis is that young children who are actively stimulated in their development of so-called linguistic and phonological awareness end up better prepared for dealing with written language.

...The preliminary findings indicate that the phonological training had an effect immediately following the training, and that the effect can be observed one year later as well. ‘The children in the intervention group had a higher level of phonological awareness. They were for example able to identify and manipulate speech sounds. Rhyming is one example of this. The ability to recognise the form of the language is something that researchers know is important for early reading development,’ says Senior Lecturer Ulrika Wolff, who is heading the project together with Professor Jan-Eric Gustafsson. Since the studied children are still in pre-school, they are not yet being taught the art of reading. The researchers are planning to follow the same group of children for a few years once they start school in order to investigate the more long-term effects of early intervention on the development of reading and writing skills. Doing so will show whether or not the children who have not received the training are able to catch up with the intervention group. _UGothenburg

The more headstarts you can give your child in terms of skills acquisition, the more dangerous he can ultimately become. Reading allows one to acquire knowledge independently, without another person supervising or dictating the terms of learning.

The Swedish researchers once again point out the importance of game play in early childhood learning. Infants and young children are attracted to play, and are able to focus better in a play-captive state. This relationship of play and learning can remain in effect throughout childhood and into adulthood, although the "play" of adults can be harder to recognise as such.

Human brains develop according to a schedule, which is determined by the interaction of the child's genetic complement and the child's lifetime history from conception, and earlier (congenital factors affecting gametes and gestational environment).

As critical periods come and go, brain plasticity occurs at variably optimal levels. If parents have not prepared the child's environment for specific critical periods, much of the potential can be lost. A better prepared environment will boost the child's plasticity during particular windows of development, giving the child a head start -- and thus an extended lifetime with regard to specific skills and competencies.

Multi-competent children become multi-competent adults. And that is very dangerous to the powers that be, unless the powers that be happen to closely resemble the original writers of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. But in the modern world, that is most unlikely.

Train your children to be powerful and dangerous. But prepare them for the backlash which is likely to be ginned up by the status quo. H/T Science Direct

What Leo Babauta Has Learned about Learning

Leo Babauta is an author and proprietor of Zenhabits, and other websites. He helps his wife homeschool his children in San Francisco, and describes his current views on learning:

When teachers succeeded in getting me to learn, it was only because they made something seem so interesting that I started to care about it. But then I learned on my own, either in class while ignoring everyone else, or more likely after class in the library or at home.

That’s because someone walking you through the steps of learning something doesn’t work — you aren’t learning when you’re just listening to someone tell you how something works. You’re learning when you try to do that something — putting it into action. That’s when the real learning begins and the superficial learning ends — when you try something and fail, and adjust and try again, and solve countless little problems as you do so.

The best teachers know this, and so they inspire, and help you to put the learning into action. As an adult, I’ve learned a lot on my own. The stuff I’ve just read, I’ve mostly forgotten. But the stuff I’ve put into action by playing with it, by practicing, by creating and sharing with others — that stuff has stuck with me. I truly learned it.

How to Learn (or Teach)

The teacher’s job, really, is to fascinate the student. Fascination is the key to learning. Then help the student put the fascination into action.

It follows then, that if you’re teaching yourself, your job is exactly the same.

Here’s how to learn:

• Get fascinated. As a teacher, you should fascinate the student by rediscovering with her all the things that originally fascinated you about the topic. If you can’t get fascinated, you won’t care enough to really learn something. You’ll just go through the motions. How do you get fascinated? Often doing something with or for other people helps to motivate me to look more deeply into something, and reading about other people who have been successful/legendary at it also fascinates me.
• Pour yourself into it. I will read every website and book I can get my hands on. Google and the library are my first stops. They’re free. The used bookstore will be next. There are always an amazing amount of online resources to learn anything. If there isn’t, create one.
• Do it, in small steps. Actually doing whatever you want to do will be scary. You can learn as much Spanish vocabulary as you like, but until you start having conversations, you won’t really know it. You can read as much about chess as you like, but you have to put the problems into action, and play games. You can read about how to program, but you won’t know it until you actually code. Start with small, non-scary steps, with as little risk as possible, focusing on fun, easy skills.
• Play. Learning isn’t work. It’s fun. If you’re learning because you think you should, not because you’re having fun with it, you will not really stick with it for long, or you’ll hate it and not care about it. So make it play. Make games out of it. Sing and dance while you do it. Show off your new skills to people, with a smile on your face. Do it with others. I believe most learning is done on your own, but doing it with others makes it fun. I like to work out with my friends and with Eva. I like to bake bread for my family. I like to play chess with my kids. That motivates me to learn, because I want to do well when I do it with others.
• Feel free to move around. I will dive into something for a couple weeks, and then move on to something else. That’s OK. That’s how passion for a topic often works. Sometimes it will last for a long time, sometimes it’s a short intense burst. You can’t control it. Allow yourself to wander if that’s where things lead you.
• Test yourself. You can learn a lot of information quickly by studying something, testing yourself, studying again to fill in the holes in your knowledge, testing again, and repeating until you have it by heart. That’s not always the most fun way to learn, but it can work well. Alternatively, you can learn by playing, and when you play, allow that to be your test.
• Disagree. Don’t just agree that everything you’re reading or hearing from others on a topic is correct, even if they are foremost experts. First, experts are often wrong, and it’s not until they are challenged that new knowledge is found. Second, even if they are right and you are wrong by disagreeing, you learn by disagreeing. By disagreeing, you have already not only considered what you’ve been given, but formulated an alternative theory. Then you have to try to test to see which is right, and even if you find that the first information or theory was right and you were wrong, now you know that much better than if you just agreed. I’m not saying to disagree with everything, but the more you do, the better you’ll learn. Don’t disagree in a disagreeable way, and don’t hold onto your theories too tightly and be defensive about them.
• Teach it. There is no better way to cement your knowledge than to teach it to others. It’s OK if you don’t really know it that well — as long as you’re honest about that when you’re teaching it to someone. For example, I’m a beginner at chess, but I will learn something about it and teach it to my kids — they know I’m not a tournament contender, let alone a master, and yet I’m still teaching them something they don’t know. And when I do, I begin to really understand it, because to teach you have to take what you’ve absorbed, reflect upon it, find a way to organize it so that you can communicate it to someone else clearly enough for them to understand it, see their mistakes and help correct them, see where the holes in your knowledge are, and more.
• Reflect on your learning by blogging. You soak up a ton of information and patterns, and you can put that into action, but when you sit down and reflect on what you’ve learned, and try to share that with others (as I’m doing right now), you force yourself to think deeply, to synthesize the knowledge and to organize it, much as you do when you teach it to others. Blogging is a great tool for reflection and sharing what you’ve learned, even if you don’t hope to make a living at it. And it’s free.

_Zenhabits

Leo's emphasis appears to be more on didactic learning and minimal skills learning. And in general, Leo is right that one has to teach oneself, rather than to be taught by a teacher. If you recall, Doctor Arthur Robinson said much the same thing about his own experiences homeschooling his 6 children as a single parent.

If one wants to assist in creating dangerous children, of course, one will need to dive more deeply into more complex skills learning. For that, a certain amount of master : apprentice learning may be required, since many things that should be learned cannot be obtained from textbooks, the internet, learning videos, or wandering and blundering around on one's own. Some things have to be learned from someone else who put in the hard work and hard knocks to learn that special, rare knowledge -- whatever it might be.

Dangerous children will learn core skills at a relatively early age, then push that special knowledge beyond what they were taught. This will require special types of teacher : student arrangements which are not typical of today's conventional factory style, cookie cutter government education.

But learning should be fun, for it to become self-sustaining. It should begin very early in life, and it should last as long as life. And for it to be effective, it needs to be very, very dangerous.

Peter Thiel's Avalanche Effect on College Education

Peter Thiel is a successful entrepreneur, visionary, and venture capitalist. One of his recent investments involves sponsoring youth under the age of 20 years old, in the starting of their own enterprises. The young people must forego a college education during the time that they are engaged in their intensive entrepreneurial training and startup experience.

Interestingly, one of Thiel's young hopefuls -- 19 year old Dale J. Stephens -- has embarked on an entrepreneurial campaign in opposition of the phenomenon of excessive college education. The excerpt below is taken from Stephens' article in CNN: College is a waste of time:

I have been awarded a golden ticket to the heart of Silicon Valley: the Thiel Fellowship. The catch? For two years, I cannot be enrolled as a full-time student at an academic institution. For me, that's not an issue; I believe higher education is broken.

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

...College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. In the book "Academically Adrift," sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college. Student loan debt in the United States, unforgivable in the case of bankruptcy, outpaced credit card debt in 2010 and will top $1 trillion in 2011.

... Learning by doing -- in life, not classrooms -- is the best way to turn constant iteration into true innovation. We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions.

... We who take our education outside and beyond the classroom understand how actions build a better world. We will change the world regardless of the letters after our names. _College is a waste of time

Brave words, which will need to be backed up by braver actions. Stephens will receive $100,000 and access to expert advice and assistance in reaching his entrepreneurial goals. Stephens has already been signed by Penguin Press to write his first book, "Hacking Your Education."

What is most interesting about this phenomenon is that Thiel's initial investment is spurring a downstream expansion in interest in entrepreneurial alternatives to mainstream college education. And this downstream expansion is likely to spawn further downstream expansion, and so on etc. . . .

Wise people understand that school is not the education. Life is the education. The efforts of modern society to place emphasis on the educational effect of schools at the expense of the educational effect of life, has led to a society of Peter Pans and Cinderellas, perpetual incompetent adolescents of the psychologically neotenate variety.

Peter Thiel aims to change that emphasis back, in an effort to help save at least a few youth from wasting their time and lives. Peter Thiel aims to misbehave. And he is hoping that the attitude will be catching.

The Dangerous Child Curricula: Part VIII

What makes a child dangerous? A dangerous child is disruptive, in the same sense that a breakthrough or innovative technology is disruptive. Disruptive technologies and dangerous children both affect and change the world in which they exist.

But disruptive technologies are developed by inventors and engineers, whereas dangerous children are created by themselves. If a child cannot teach himself to be dangerous, there is no way that anyone else can do so. You can get an inkling of this idea from Art Robinson, PhD, who homeschooled his six children on his own, after the tragic death of his wife.

Learning is not a team sport. Learning is an activity that involves solely the student and the knowledge. Everything or everyone else that may become involved in this process is essentially superfluous—and is potentially harmful as a distraction from the fundamental process.

In the adult world this is, of course, self-evident. Adults ordinarily do not have special teaching aids and dedicated teachers available to hold their hands when they need to acquire new knowledge. Usually, they have only books. When the knowledge comes directly from other repositories such as computers, people, or other sources, that knowledge is seldom tailored for spoon-feeding to an unprepared mind.

...Consider, for example, the teaching of math and science. Many homeschools use Saxon Math. Although produced with teachers and classrooms in mind, this series of math books is so well-written that it can be mastered by most students entirely on their own without any teacher intervention whatever. This self-mastery usually does not happen automatically, but it can be learned by almost any student with correct study rules and a good study environment.

While the subject matter, can be mastered with or without a teacher, the student who masters it without a teacher learns something more. He learns to teach himself. Then, when he continues into physics, chemistry, and biology— which are studied in their own special language, the language of mathematics—he is able to teach these subjects to himself regardless of whether or not a teacher with the necessary specialized knowledge is present. Also, he is able to make use of much higher-quality texts – texts written for adults.

Besides the great advantage of developing good study habits and thinking ability, self-teaching also has immediate practical advantages. Many children should be able, through Advanced Placement examinations, to skip over one or more years of college. The great saving in time and expense from this is self-evident. These and other comparable accomplishments await most children who learn to self-teach and then apply this skill to their home education.

Even children of lesser ability can, by means of self-teaching and good study habits, achieve far more than they otherwise would have accomplished by the more ordinary techniques. _Teach Them to Teach Themselves, Art Robinson

Much more at the link.

It is clear that the world will not adapt itself to the child, and children should not be given the impression that it would or should do. Instead, children should be given the tools for self-teaching from the earliest age, along with a number of basic options and directions of self study -- including an important core of learning which makes most other learning possible.

When a child is liberated to teach himself in this manner -- which includes making sure the child has good study habits from an early age and sticks to them -- it is obvious that the child is indeed creating himself, and making himself dangerously self-reliant.

There is much more to childhood development than book learning of course. The six Robinson children were raised by a widowed father on his ranch, and each had definite responsibilities.

...each one of them, spontaneously and without suggestion or demand from me, took over an essential aspect of our farm and personal lives. They did all work with the cattle and sheep, they did all laundry, cooking, and housework, and they were working beside me as Laurelee used to do in the scientific research and civil defense work that is our ministry and our professional life.One by one, my tasks just disappeared as the children assumed them.

In general, they preferred to work independently. They tended not to share tasks and did not divided them as one might expect. For example, at 11 years old Joshua was the cook – and already a better cook then than I. Zachary did all work with the cattle (about 30) and the chickens; Arynne cared for the sheep (about 100); Noah was in charge of all farm and laboratory repairs; and Bethany did the washing and taught Matthew to read. Some tasks were shared such as house cleaning, sheep shearing, and watching over Matthew.

This sort of extracurricular work is especially valuable as reinforcement for the home school.

While self confidence can be built somewhat in sports or other “activities”, the self confidence that comes to a child from the knowledge that he is independently carrying on an activity that is essential to the survival of the family is valuable indeed. _How the Robinson Children Fare

Some parents might abuse the budding competence of children and adolescents, using them as unpaid servants. Robinson warns against doing this, explaining that the years of childhood are gone too quickly, and too often the excitement, energy, and trust of youth are fleeting as well.

But children must learn to competently work, produce, and improvise, as well as learn concepts and facts. If learning is not put to use, it tends to be forgotten.

Children first learn to walk in order to walk. They learn to talk so as to get their intent across to the controlling outer world. They learn to ride a bicycle in order to ride, and so on. Children are quite motivated to learn in such circumstances, and the same can be true for a wide range of other situations -- if the opportunity is presented.

Neither Art Robinson nor John David Garcia devised their curricula as a way of making children dangerous. But if the children approach the curricula with the same dedicated abandon with which they learned to walk, talk, or ride a bicycle, they are almost certain to make themselves into very dangerous children indeed.

If they learn to teach themselves such broad and powerful methods of thinking and learning, they will naturally acquire an intellectual self-reliance that makes them an immediate threat to any persons or institutions that seek to control them or use them against their own interests.

That is why the approaches to the dangerous child curricula are so different from the way "education" is administered in government schools. Public education is meant to tame the wild child so as to make him more manipulable by society. That is not necessarily how things turn out, particularly in inner city schools, but certain proportions of delinquent dropouts are certainly a predictable outcome of the government system. As to those who graduate and go to college, the exploding growth of remedial education for new university students speaks for itself.

But don't think that homeschooling is the same thing as the raising of a dangerous child. It is possible to adapt the dangerous child approach to learning even to a child who attends government schools. But it involves a great deal of work, as well as a huge amount of "unlearning" of dysfunctional ideology with which the child is burdened by the public system.

If the child is to make himself truly dangerous, he will choose his own path which is likely to eventually diverge widely from any traditional institutional path of development. Eventually, once the child has developed the momentum to chart his own course and make it stick. Examples: College dropout billionaires

It is not necessary for a dangerous child to become a billionaire in order to shape the environment around him for the better. But it is necessary for him to be self-reliant, and be willing and able to teach himself what he needs to know, in order to move ahead.

Revolutions in Learning: A Better Reinforcement Schedule?

Researchers of learning have been looking into schedules for reinforcement and learning for quite some time. Now, U. Texas scientists led by John H. Byrne have returned to the Aplysia sea slug to write a new lesson in optimal reinforcement schedules of learning.

Byrne's team deployed a computer to model 10,000 permutations of intervals between pulses to try to coordinate activation of enzymes and to maximize their interaction. The optimal protocol, it turned out, was not the usual, even-spaced one, but an irregular series of two serotonin pulses emitted 10 minutes apart, then one five minutes later, with a final spritz 30 minutes afterward. With this regimen, interaction between the two enzymes rose by 50 percent—an indication that the learning process was operating more efficiently.

So should you be studying Riemann sums every other day for two weeks and then take a month off before going back to them? Too early to say. The timing protocol Byrne found may be the slugs' adaptation to lobster claws crunching their tails. Studying integral calculus might be a bit different. But the implication of Byrne's work is that the best way to learn may not occur in simple time chunks—and that leaves a meaty set of new research questions for neuroscientists to pursue. "The dream of cognitive neuroscience is going from molecules to behavior by way of the brain," says Gary Marcus, a psychologist at New York University, and author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. "This is a terrific step in that direction."

For their part, Byrne and company will now use these same techniques to try to optimize other aspects of the memory formation process in sea slugs. If that proves successful, they may eventually move on to humans. Motor skills would probably be the first target—throwing a baseball, doing the high jump, or helping a stroke victim to walk again. Science homework will have to wait. Researchers know more about the brain circuits in the cerebellum, involved with movement, than in the hippocampus, a locus for initiating the type of factual memories needed for organic chemistry.

Better ways to learn based on brain science would have enormous ramifications for educational practices. "It's not going to be an easy direction to follow because it means a lot of painstaking and detailed work to understand the biochemistry of learning," Byrne says. "But I think what it demonstrates is that if you have that information you may be able to make some big advancements in improving learning abilities by being in sync with the underlying molecular dynamics. Rather than taking cognitive enhancement drugs, you could have better training procedures." _SciAm

A sea slug is not a human, and yet an incredible amount of information about neural processes in sea slugs has proved applicable to higher animals, including humans.

This is how some revolutions begin: Lowly and slowly, then picking up speed and rising in general awareness and scale of application. These developments could eventually overturn the way that sclerotic and ineffective educational institutions operate -- which might just save the world.

The Importance of a Citizenry Possessing Practical Skills

For decades, the emphasis in US secondary education has been to prepare every student for college. As a result, dropout rates have soared, too many incapable HS graduates are attending college (and dropping out with huge debts), and vocational and technical skills have languished and US industry has found it difficult to field a skilled workforce.

The National Association of Manufacturers found that 81 percent of the manufacturing companies surveyed reported that they were facing a moderate to severe shortage of qualified workers; 53 percent of manufacturers reported that at least 10 percent of their total positions where unfilled simply because they were unable to find people with the skills to do the jobs. Part of the story was the general tightness in the labor market around 2005. Fully 39 percent of the companies were having trouble hiring enough unskilled workers. But the real problem was finding skilled tradesmen—electricians, glaziers, cement masons, sheet-metal workers, and the like. Of the manufacturers surveyed, 90 percent reported that they could not find enough skilled workers to fill their needs.

The trend is seen throughout the skilled trades. Case in point: welding. A study by the American Welding Society and the Edison Welding Institute reports that in 2000, there were 594,000 welders working in America. By 2005, that number had dropped to 576,000. By 2009, according to the Department of Labor, the number was 358,000. The average age of a welder today is in the mid-50s. In 2006, 50,000 welders retired, but fewer than 25,000 new welders entered the field. Those trends have continued diverging, resulting in a current shortage of almost 200,000 welders.

A big part of the problem—as the case of welders shows—is simple demographics. Baby Boomers are heading into retirement. By 2020, the number of people over 55 will increase by 73 percent, while the number of younger workers will increase by only 25 percent. This squeeze will leave America with a shortfall of 10 million skilled workers by 2012. And the squeeze only gets tighter. Some 70 million Baby Boomers will exit the labor force over the next 18 years, but only 40 million workers will enter it.

Another aspect of the problem is educational. Vocational education, once a staple of American secondary schools, seems to have undergone a general decline for decades. Take the state of California, for example. Prior to 1980, nearly every public high school in the state offered a comprehensive industrial arts program. By the late 1990s, according to the California Industrial and Technology Education Association, 75 percent of these programs were gone. What happened? As guidance counselors and administrators focused relentlessly on college admissions, the industrial arts became an afterthought. When shop class teachers retired, they were never replaced. Once the teachers were gone, the specialized classrooms were converted to weight training rooms, study halls, or computer labs. _Much more at Philanthropy

Intel's Andy Grove has some very strong feelings about this topic as well, and aims to do something about it:

Can you tell me about your efforts to make vocational or school-to-career education more available and more attractive?
MR. GROVE: We fund scholarships for students at community colleges and in other vocational programs. The value of the scholarships ranges from $500 to $5,000 per year, depending on the type of training and needs of the student. The people for whom we provide support are not those who intend to transfer to four-year universities. Rather, we are funding scholarships for those students who intend to enter a career immediately upon completion of their studies. Our program has changed over time but we have been giving these kinds of scholarships for more than a decade, and have typically given more than 100 scholarships per year. _Andy Grove Interview

Not as much as is needed, but it helps.

This profile of a 2 year vocational boarding school in Pennsylvania gives an idea of how dedicated some remarkable men are to the concept of American vocational training.

A society must have an ample complement of persons with practical and technical skills, or it will slowly collapse from neglect of its infrastructure. This is what has happened to some extent, in many otherwise affluent (or formerly affluent) parts of the US. Shortsighted planners, educators, politicians, and bureaucrats have shortchanged practical training in exchange for more politically correct funding policies which pleased more feminised political power groups.

While vocational programs are primarily oriented toward men -- who are the ones primarily interested in vocational skills -- the political power structure has become far more oriented toward the needs of women, at the expense of men. And so society as a whole tends to suffer from the neglect of a key part of its essential human infrastructure. And the repercussions reverberate throughout society.

More on this topic later.

Brave New Baby: Genius Training for Infants

Image Source
We have heard of the "better baby" and even the "superbaby." But those approaches to creating the "brave new baby" have been around for a while, and yet, here we are. Still looking for workable ways of training smarter, more cognitively capable children.

University of London researchers have come up with a new approach, beginning with 11 month old infants:

The researchers trained 11-month-old infants to direct their gaze toward images they observed on a computer screen. For example, in one task, a butterfly flew only as long as the babies kept their eyes on it while other distracting elements appeared on screen. Infants visited the lab five times over the course of 15 days. Half of the 42 babies took part in training, while the other half watched TV. Each child was tested for cognitive abilities at the beginning and end of the study.

Trained infants rapidly improved their ability to focus their attention for longer periods and to shift their attention from one point to another. They also showed improvements in their ability to spot patterns and small but significant changes in their spontaneous looking behavior while playing with toys.

"Our results appeared to show an improved ability to alter the frequency of eye movements in response to context," Wass said. "In the real world, sometimes we want to be able to focus on one object of interest and ignore distractions, and sometimes we want to be able to shift the focus of our attention rapidly around a room -- for example, for language learning in social situations. This flexibility in the allocation of attention appeared to improve after training."

The fact that the babies' improvements in concentration transferred to a range of tasks supports the notion that there is greater plasticity in the unspecialized infant brain.

...The findings reported online on Sept. 1 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, are in contrast to reports in adults showing that training at one task generally doesn't translate into improved performance on other, substantially different tasks. _ScienceDaily

Study abstract from Science Direct

This type of research is likely to continue and intensify -- particularly in parts of the world with more authoritarian government control. It is likely to continue because it is quite probable that infant brains can eventually be functionally shaped to approximate a preconceived "ideal." Infant brains are highly plastic, and experience incredibly rapid shaping and re-shaping of local neuronal assemblies and white matter pathways.

Of course there are ethical approaches to this type of research, which should be freely carried out in more open societies. And of course individual parents are free to incorporate elements of such research into their child's overall, well-rounded upbringing. It is likely that there are easily devised "games" which the baby would enjoy playing, which could lead to a faster-thinking, more imaginative child. Perhaps even a child capable of multi-tasking in many ways.

But experimenting parents should beware. The super-baby which you raise may rapidly grow beyond your ability to comprehend and control. Children are essentially amoral creatures who are capable of incredible destruction if given too much power too soon, without superb training in executive function.

It is not wise to train a child in particular areas of genius without incorporating safeguards, executive function training, and ethical training in the overall program. This training should resemble an assortment of games and engaging interactional narratives to the very young child.

At the Al Fin Institute for the Brave New Baby, we are concerned about current trends toward a dumbed-down future. We will share the results of our research into brave new babies as it becomes available.

Improving Higher Education in the US

Many universities, and not a few colleges, have come to resemble Fortune 500 companies with their layers of highly paid executives presiding over complex empires that contain semi-professional athletic programs, medical and business schools, and expensive research programs along with the traditional academic departments charged with providing instruction to undergraduate students. Like other industries, higher education has its own trade magazines and newspapers, influential lobbying groups in Washington, and paid advertising agents reminding the public of how important their enterprise is to the national welfare. In contrast to corporate businesses, whose members generally agree on their overall purpose, colleges and universities have great difficulty defining what their enterprise is for. What is a college education? On just about any campus, at any given time, one can find faculty members in intense debate about what a college education entails and what the mission of their institution should be. Few businesses would dare to offer a highly expensive product that they are incapable of defining for the inquiring consumer. Yet this is what colleges and universities have done at least since the 1960s, and they have done so with surprising success. _NewCriterion

James Piereson has published an incisive review of US higher education -- and of recently published scholarly books which examine US higher education. He summarises some key reforms which should bring about critical improvements in relatively short order:

(1) Shelve the utopian idea that every young person should attend college and also the notion that the nation’s prosperity depends upon universal college attendance. Many youngsters are not prepared or motivated for college. Let them prepare for a vocation. The attempt to push them through college is weakening the enterprise for everyone else.


(2) Terminate most Ph.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences. There is little point in training able people in research programs when they have no prospect of gaining employment afterwards. The research enterprise has also corrupted all of these fields, particularly in the humanities.

(3) Develop programs in these fields that will allow students to earn graduate degrees based upon teaching rather than research. Such programs will be intellectually broad rather than specialized and will equip graduates to teach in several fields in the humanities. This will strengthen teaching in the liberal arts and perhaps even revive the field from its current condition.

(4) Reverse the expansion of administrative layers, especially those offices and programs created to satisfy campus pressure groups. If campus groups want their own administrative offices, they should pay for them themselves, rather than asking other students (and their parents) to do so. Colleges and universities should make it a practice to hire at least three new faculty members for every new administrator hired.

(5) Bring back general education requirements and core curricula to ensure that every student is exposed to the important ideas in the sciences and humanities that have shaped our civilization. There are many ways of doing this. Columbia University has always done it through a “great books” approach; other institutions do it through a series of survey courses in the sciences and liberal arts. How it is done matters less than that it is done. _NewCriterion

Al Fin education specialists assert that these reforms should be seen as a bare beginning. US higher education is in need of a thorough overhaul, which is only likely to happen in the lee of some very unfortunate events for society as a whole. Much of the dead weight in the staff and faculty of US colleges will be ejected as a result of upcoming economic difficulties occurring in both the private and public sectors of the US economy.

Dead weight government programs which affect education, such as affirmative action, Title IX, etc. will cling to existence for as long as possible -- to the detriment of affected institutions and society at large. Eventually, they too will have to fall by the wayside.

Wikimedia: Dumbing Down the Idiocracy?

NYT
Several areas of commerce, enterprise, and science remain the province of mainly-male participation. Physics, mathematics, advanced computer science, technical engineering, math-intensive sciences, aircraft test pilots and combat pilots, commercial sea captains, and so on. Most informed people understand that research is dominated by males, but few people realise that technical information intensive areas -- such as highly demanding reference information providers -- are also dominated by males. A lot of politically involved feminists would like to change that situation, but is there a danger in moving too forcefully from the top down when changes may adversely affect critically important services?

...surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of [Wikipedia's] hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

...The notion that a collaborative, written project open to all is so skewed to men may be surprising. After all, there is no male-dominated executive team favoring men over women, as there can be in the corporate world; Wikipedia is not a software project, but more a writing experiment — an “exquisite corpse,” or game where each player adds to a larger work.

...The public is increasingly going to Wikipedia as a research source: According to a recent Pew survey, the percentage of all American adults who use the site to look for information increased to 42 percent in May 2010, from 25 percent in February 2007. This translates to 53 percent of adults who regularly use the Internet.

Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?” said Ms. Margolis, a senior researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles.

...Ms. Gardner said that for now she was trying to use subtle persuasion and outreach through her foundation to welcome all newcomers to Wikipedia, rather than advocate for women-specific remedies like recruitment or quotas.

“Gender is a huge hot-button issue for lots of people who feel strongly about it,” she said. “I am not interested in triggering those strong feelings.”

Kat Walsh, a policy analyst and longtime Wikipedia contributor who was elected to the Wikimedia board, agreed that indirect initiatives would cause less unease in the Wikipedia community than more overt efforts.

But she acknowledged the hurdles: “The big problem is that the current Wikipedia community is what came about by letting things develop naturally — trying to influence it in another direction is no longer the easiest path, and requires conscious effort to change.” _NYT

The Wikipedia world is indeed a rough and tumble world of competitive edits and re-writes. If a person cannot withstand criticism and competition, they will not likely last long in that world.

The male hormone testosterone shapes the human brain in multiple ways not yet fully comprehended by science or society at large. Much of what science has learned about the influence of hormones such as testosterone on the gender differences so prevalent in society, is considered not politically correct -- and thus essentially unmentionable in left-leaning tabloids such as the New York Times, quoted above. Testosterone makes males more interested in objects than people, more competitive, have generally superior spatial and higher math skills, physically larger and stronger with greater stamina, tending to greater independence, and generally more logically determined and less emotional in the face of distractions.

Charles Murray's fascinating book, Human Accomplishment, provides a historical reflection of the phenomenon that Wikimedia's executives and critics are struggling with. Males have tended to achieve the lion's share of discoveries, inventions, and masterpieces of art, music, and literature as far back as history can tell.

A population shrinkage is occurring among the more intelligent people of the world -- Europeans and Northeast Asians -- while an explosive growth of population is occurring among the less intelligent people of the world. The average intelligence of the human population is inexorably dropping from near 90 points of IQ, downward -- close to the mid-80s and below. That qualifies as an Idiocracy.

In order to dumb down the Idiocracy, one must institute foolish rules of arbitrary and counter-productive governance, while educating the populace to accept dumbed-down groupthink rather than to think for themselves. It is easier than you might think. What Wikimedia is contemplating -- and what many western governments have done, and called affirmative action -- is an excellent example.

Tuition-Free "University of the People" Now Open

Brainchild of Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef -- who has donated $1 million of his own money to the effort -- the UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) sponsored University of the People opened for business the first of May, 2009 with programs of instruction in business and computers. The institution is "online only" and opened with 200 students from some 52 countries -- but it needs 15,000 students and $6 million to continue operating.

Admission opened just over two weeks ago and without any promotion some 200 students from 52 countries have already registered, with a high school diploma and a sufficient level of English as entry requirements.

Students will be placed in classes of 20, after which they can log on to a weekly lecture, discuss its themes with their peers and take a test all online. There are voluntary professors, post-graduate students and students in other classes who can also offer advice and consultation.

The only charge to students is a $15 to $50 admission fee, depending on their country of origin, and a processing fee for every test ranging from $10 to $100. For the University to sustain its operation, it needs 15,000 students and $6 million, of which Mr. Reshef has donated $1 million of his own money. _UN

It sounds as if the infrastructure is still being assembled, and the May 2009 opening is actually something of a trial period shakeout cruise. More about Shai Reshef:

Mr. Reshef hopes to build enrollment to 10,000 over five years, the level at which he said the enterprise should be self-sustaining. Startup costs would be about $5 million, Mr. Reshef said, of which he plans to provide $1 million.

For all the uncertainties, Mr. Reshef is probably as well positioned as anyone for such an enterprise.

Starting in 1989, he served as chairman of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation company, which he sold in 2005 to Kaplan, one of the world’s largest education companies. While chairman of Kidum, he built an online university affiliated with the University of Liverpool, enrolling students from more than 100 countries; that business was sold to Laureate, another large for-profit education company, in 2004.

Mr. Reshef is now chairman of Cramster.com, an online study community offering homework help to college students.

“Cramster has thousands of students helping other students,” said Mr. Reshef, who lives in Pasadena, Calif., where both Cramster and the new university are based. “These become strong social communities. With these new social networks, where young people now like to spend their lives, we can bring college degrees to students all over the world, third-world students who would be unable to study otherwise. I haven’t found even one person who says it’s a bad idea.” _NYT

As long as the university is run far, far away from the UN and its kleptocratic bureaucracy, it may well succeed. No doubt some palms are being greased at GAID to allow the use of the UN's name in marketing the concept. But if the behind-the-scenes hands-on managers of the UOP can run things without interference from the Palace of Thieves on Turtle Bay, they may actually create something good that benefits a lot of people.

"Pre-Learning" Online: Priming the Learner

If you have ever been curious about how biological research is carried out -- or if you are considering entering a bio-medical research field yourself -- you should take a look at the research videos at the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE). By JOVE, you can see for yourself how various key procedures are carried out. If you are still in high school, or earlier, you can get a definite jump on the competition by learning many of the basic, intermediate, and advanced methods of biological research.

If you are an educator or homeschooler, you will find some worthwhile teaching materials, and some tips on basic experiments you may wish to set up in your teaching environment.

JOVE is a good example of what today's web can offer to self-starting learners, and to teachers and homeschoolers.

Bonus: From the Online College Blog -- a blog for students of all ages who are seeking an online education -- here is an article looking at 100 useful tools for digging down into the deeper levels of the web than Google will usually take you. From "meta-search" to "semantic engines" to special database search tools to academic /scientific / and custom search engines, this list of tools has something for everyone.

Smart young cookies can find their way out to some quite rarefied reaches of knowledge, quite on their own. Of course it helps to have a tutor and a bit of healthy competition, along with other gentle spurs to progress.

Many people believe that the biggest deficiency of home or solitary web learning is the lack of socialisation, but that is not a big problem unless one spends all one's time at the computer. As long as the web learning is guided by a reasonable structure and sequence, the biggest shortcoming is the lack of hands-on practical doing, to accompany the mental "knowledge." Computer simulations can only go so far toward building practical competencies.

That is why bricks and mortar schools still have some life left, at least for science, engineering, biomedical, and other technical subjects that require practical hands-on competencies.

For the other topics such as philosophy, math, sociology, history, literature, and liberal arts in general, their days are numbered for on-site educational institutions. A good thing too, since other than math, those are the subjects that have been taken over by the neo-aristocracy indoctrinators. Overpaid, over pampered, cretins of the academy, whose time has just about run out.

As virtual reality improves, and as distributed technical simulation centers grow up to take the place of many failed institutions of higher learning indoctrination, the ability to train an incredibly wide range of competencies will find its way farther and farther out into the boondocks, where anyone with a mind to do so can become competent at just about anything.

Previously published on Al Fin blog