Obama asks CEOs to help; This CEO responds...

President Obama: "As we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America. Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers, to support the American economy, and to invest in this nation."

This statement was meant for CEOs of businesses, of which I am one (albeit of a small business) so I thought I would answer the President.

Here are some things I can (and do) do:

I hire American workers. I particularly like to hire American Ph.D.'s (in Russian Literature, History of Medicine and Archeology to name three recent hires of mine.) I like to hire people like that because they are very smart individuals who have bought the stuff that colleges sell and wound up unemployable because of it. I like how smart they are. I have no use for what they learned in their PhD programs however.

I hire American workers. I also like to hire women who have small children who want to work from home. I am happy to let them work the hours that suit them and in most cases I have never met them. I need them to be able to write and think well. Despite the ridiculous education system we have, it doesn't seem to make everyone a bad writer and thinker. Fortunately for me, such workers are in plentiful supply. Why? Because in this country nearly everyone has to work in a office and the skills of writing and thinking are way undervalued. Since my company builds school and training courses you might think I would hire people who had degrees in education. I don’t. Those degrees don’t teach much worth knowing.

I support the American economy by building learning by doing project-based courses and degree programs that teach people how to do things rather than listen and memorize things. Oh wait. That was the Spanish economy since I built those courses for Spain (and for Peru and soon for some other developing countries.) Why don’t I build them for the U.S.? I did initially, but our universities think that what matters most is the brand name of their degree and not the quality of the education entailed in that degree. The best universities in the U.S. are controlled by very conservative faculty who have no incentive to change the system in any way.

I also build high school courses and elementary school courses that would radically change the U.S. economy if they were ever deployed here. They teach students to do things and they concentrate on doing things that would make them sought after in the marketplace. But here again, they are more likely to be deployed in other countries which have some flexibility about what they can offer. Here, in the U.S., in a testing dominated school system that you have both inherited and made worse, no real change can occur. Is it any wonder then that my services are sought after in many countries around the world but rarely in the U.S.? Here we can’t fix the school system because the testing companies and the book publishers have the country in a stranglehold which you seem incapable of fighting.

I want to help this country. I really do. I want to help students live their lives better, make better decisions, learn what it interests them to learn, and learn things that will make them employable. But you have made it very difficult to do that. The schools teach so many subjects that were determined in 1892 and can never be eliminated from the curriculum, that there is no room for change. I want change. The students want change. The teachers want change. But your government stifles change at every opportunity.

The good news is that I can help and have been helping American businesses teach their own employees how to do their jobs better. I can do this because, for the most part, no government regulations prevent it. (When the government does step in and demands certain training, that training is always done in an absurd fashion that copies the school system because in those cases there are government mandated tests as well.) Our big corporations want and need their employees to think better and act better and they do invest in that. Since the graduates they hire don’t know much and can’t do much this has become a lucrative business for us. So, you might think I would really like our graduates to remain dumb so that the corporations we work for will continue to need us. But I don’t. I want change. It is all too sad really.

If it makes you feel any better, most every country in the world is as stupid as we are about education. But that will change soon. Other countries will soon step up and lead in educational change, and their economies will thrive. That will take some time and you won’t be President when it happens, so its not your problem really.

Milo, Obama, and science fairs

Milo was asked, as were all his Kindergarten classmates, to build a simple boat and bring it in to school to see whose boat did best in the water. Milo's boat sank. He was very mad at his mother. She had built a bad boat. The kid who won had a father who built a very good boat.

As long as there have been school competitions there have been underlying parent competitions. Lately, President Obama has been touting the wonder of science fairs. He thinks that science fair winners will go on to become great scientists and that science fair winners should be lauded in the same way as great athletes.

This is so absurd, it is hard to figure out where to start.

There probably is the occasional science fair project that had no parental involvement at all. In fact, I judged a science fair not so long ago. I was asked to help because some kids had done computer stuff and the judges needed help. But, the truth is that I wasn't really competent to judge the only real issue -- which was originality. I saw some things that looked interesting and made it clear that the kids involved had learned a lot about computers, but it looked like obvious stuff to me. I couldn't be sure because I actually don't know everything that has ever been done with computers.

The winners were, of course, those who had built the glitziest displays, ones that had really attracted attention for one reason or another.

Far from the idea that the winners were likely to go on to become great scientists, I would guess that the kids who won had a better future in public relations or advertising because that is what they were clearly good at.

I have known many great scientists in my life. I don't know if any of them ever won a science fair, but I feel pretty sure that most never even entered. The personality of a scientist is hard to make generalizations about, but outgoing and artistic, with a need to make really great displays with the help of their parents, doesn't exactly come to my mind when I think of the scientists I have known.

President Obama is on a science kick lately. I really don't know why. If he wants the country to become more competitive, we might think about teaching kids about business, and encouraging them to become more inventive, allowing them to do more things on their own initiative and worry less about what the school says they must learn.

Of course, the President doesn't know how to do that and doesn't ask for help.

Instead he says "science" a lot.

Obama's State of the Union remarks on education: a response

President Obama made clear in his State of the Union address that he is completely clueless about education. This is a very sad state of affairs indeed, since all the teachers that I talk to are well aware that things in school are getting worse all the time.

Let me discuss some points the President made:

1. The President said: Over the next 10 years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school education.

Let us remember that a high school education means: algebra, geometry, history, literature, physics, chemistry, economics etc. And it means memorizing facts about these subjects and passing tests. How would this qualify anyone for a job? Of course new jobs require more education that that. It is however possible to change the high school curriculum and teach things that make one employable. The only companies that hire high school graduates are those who intend to re-train them on the job like fast food outlets, or construction companies, or hotels, or airlines. We could fix this very easily Mr. President. Change what is taught in high school!

1. The President said: as many as a quarter of our students aren't even finishing high school.

And right they are to quit. Unless you intend to go college a high school education is useless and most students realize that.

1. The President said: The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations.

Perhaps, but why should we care? First you are talking about test scores again. I assure you Mr. President that you couldn’t pass any of the science and math tests. today. They are just about temporary memorization and you have forgotten it as well you should have. So others nations memorize better. So what?

1. The President said: America has fallen to ninth in the proportion of young people with a college degree.

Why, Mr. President do you think that college degrees are so important? Is it because you know that high school is useless? Or is it because you really want people to know more about literature and history? Or, are you under the illusion that colleges teach people how to get jobs or how to think? I assure you Mr. Present as a veteran of 35 years of professoring, college teaches students how to game the system, how to party, and how to figure out how to graduate. Thinking isn’t really taught all that well and job skills are almost never taught.

1. The President said: We launched a competition called Race to the Top. To all 50 states, we said, "If you show us the most innovative plans to improve teacher quality and student achievement, we'll show you the money."

Sounds good Mr. President. But “Race to the Top” is all about test scores and it is driving responsible teachers, principals, and superintendents mad. Have you talked to people about the effect of Race to the Top? Most professional educators agree that it is a disaster.

1. The President said: And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.

There you go again about science and math. What is this fixation about? I know plenty of unemployed PhDs in Physics and Math. We have plenty of scientists. And this country does just fine in producing great science in any case. Do you really think that we need more scientists? What for? Who would employ them? If you think learning science and math makes you more innovative you would have to work hard to prove that. If you think that doing well in science and math courses means you can build a business or create competitive advantages for the US economy, which must be what you think, I find it hard to agree.

You might Mr. President, start thinking about how we can teach our citizens to think clearly and to do things that matter. School does not teach doing or thinking. It teaches memorizing facts, in part due to the so called reforms you and your predecessor have put in place.

Our schools are a mess because the curriculum they offer is mostly useless information that comes up only on tests. Stop with the testing and start teaching kids to do things, and to think clearly, and innovation will follow.

"To really learn take a test." The Times pushes its testing agenda again.

The New York Times, as part of its ever increasing drum beat for testing, printed an article on its front page called: "To really learn, quit studying and take a test." The article reports a paper published in the journal Science that says that students retained more information after being tested than they retained from studying. In the Times' logic this means, "yea tests!"

They asked various authorities in Cognitive Science to comment and somehow managed to get people (Marcia Linn and Howard Gardner) who I know are anti-testing, to sound as if they were astounded by this study.

Let me make it simple for the Times: Learning is not actually about the retention of information. Of course, in school it is, but that is because school was designed to create mindless factory workers not thinkers. Real learning involves trying things and failing, and learning from one's failures. Real learning involves having a goal and figuring out how to achieve it, and learning from the experience. Real learning is about the modification of behavior and the modification of ideas.

School is about the retention of knowledge. But school is broken. Most students are miserable and could not possibly pass the tests they passed a few years after school is finished.

The New York Times has an agenda. It constantly promotes testing. I have a question for the Times' editors. Did you learn to run a newspaper in school? Or did it takes years of practice? Or does one just take a multiple choice test to become an editor at the Times?

Teachers can't take it any more

I get a lot of letters from people who hear me speak. Here is an excerpt from one that I received recently which I especially liked:

I listened with rapt attention to your talk. I was frustrated that it was difficult to listen and process everything you were saying at the same time. I didn’t want to miss a word so I was relieved when I checked out your website which helps immensely in filling in the blanks.

I am a former classroom teacher. One of my most major gripes is that we are not allowed to teach individually relevant curriculum (even to students who have Individual Education Plans) therefore we CREATE a host of behavior problems because students know that most of what they are learning is CRAP.

I also agree that the system is not going to kill itself. I lobby on behalf of changing public education at the local, state and federal levels and ran for public office for the first time this past fall. I didn’t win, but didn’t do too bad for a first timer with a lot of common sense reform oriented ideas. The current political climate is not much in favor of this. J

There was a time not so long ago when teachers didn't like my talks. But the last two U.S. Presidents have made sure taht taht is no longer the case.

The New York Times is Schizophrenic on Education

Sunday there was an amazing case of the New York Times not even reading their own newspaper and drawing the obvious conclusions about education. Kristof was writing his usual nonsense of how the Chinese education system is better than ours and why. (They score higher than the US does on tests and we should all worry, is now the mantra of New York Times apparently.)

But, in a different section there was an article about Amy Chua, the so-called “tiger mother” who wrote a book about how Chinese parents get their kids to do well at tests. As she is an American, a Yale graduate, and she mothers like her parents did, which means she forced her kids to do well in school. Americans are officially horrified by this book, while at the same time extolling the Chinese for doing so well on tests. Do we want nice parenting or parents who are into test prep? The Times is on both sides of this one.

In yet another section of Sunday's Times there is an Op-Ed piece on how Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, which uses a very bad word (one which wasn’t so bad in 1880) should now be taught in college as opposed to teaching it in high school and deleting the bad word. The idea that it should be taught at all is never discussed. Why shouldn’t it be taught at all? Because of the bad word? No, because novels shouldn’t be taught. What is the reason for teaching novels? Are we trying to create a culture of literary critics? I love Mark Twain but hated him in high school. I hated any book I was forced to read. Why do we force kids to read books that don’t interest them?

Maybe it is because they will be on the tests? How about if only Chinese students were to read them since they like tests so much?

Chinese do better on tests than Americans! Oh my God, what will we do?

Recently, we have been subjected to yet another round of fright about our education system because the Chinese have scored better than the U.S. on the PISA test. Arne Duncan tweeted “PISA results show that America needs to ... accelerate student learning to remain competitive." The New York Times ran its usual scare article. “The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.”

I even heard a man who should know better state that these tests were actually meaningful since they were problem solving tests. Nothing would convince me that the tests were meaningful in any way, but just for fun I took a look at some sample questions anyway. Here are four of them (chosen because they were shorter than the others.):

A result of global warming is that the ice of some glaciers is melting. Twelve years after the ice disappears,

tiny plants, called lichen, start to grow on the rocks.

Each lichen grows approximately in the shape of a circle.

The relationship between the diameter of this circle and the age of the lichen can be approximated with

the formula:

d=7.0× t−12

( ) for t ≥12

where d represents the diameter of the lichen in millimetres, and t represents the number of years after

the ice has disappeared.

Question 27.1

Using the formula, calculate the diameter of the lichen, 16 years after the ice disappeared.

Show your calculation.

Question 48.1

For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100 m by 50 m was reserved for the audience. The concert

was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing.

Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending

the concert?

A.2 000

B. 5 000

C. 20 000

D. 50 000

E. 100 000

Question 7.1

The temperature in the Grand Canyon ranges from below 0 oC to over 40 oC. Although it is a desert

area, cracks in the rocks sometimes contain water. How do these temperature changes and the water in

rock cracks help to speed up the breakdown of rocks?

A. Freezing water dissolves warm rocks.

B. Water cements rocks together.

C. Ice smoothes the surface of rocks.

D. Freezing water expands in the rock cracks.

Question 7.2

There are many fossils of marine animals, such as clams, fish and corals, in the Limestone A layer of the

Grand Canyon. What happened millions of years ago that explains why such fossils are found there?

A In ancient times, people brought seafood to the area from the ocean.

B Oceans were once much rougher and sea life washed inland on giant waves.

C An ocean covered this area at that time and then receded later.

D Some sea animals once lived on land before migrating to the sea.

Whether or not you know the answers to these questions I think it is important to think about what it means to be good or bad at such questions. As someone who studied mathematics and who considers himself a scientist, I can tell you that these questions are both simple and irrelevant to the average human being. One can lead a prosperous and fulfilling life without knowing the answer to any of them. Why then are test makers, newspapers, and Secretaries of Education, hysterical that the Chinese are better at them than their U.S counterparts?

One answer is that every nation needs scientists and that knowing the answer to these questions is on the critical path to becoming a scientist. I can assure you that that is simply false.

Whether or not a nation needs scientists, it surely doesn’t need very many of them. In any case, while scientists I know would know the answers to these questions, that has nothing to with the reason they have been successful as scientists. More relevant would be a personality test that sought to find out how creative you were or how receptive you were to new ideas or how willing you were to entertain odd hypotheses. Having been a professor who supervised PhD students from many different countries, I can assure you that Chinese students are very good at learning what the teacher said and telling it back to him. Of course they do well on tests if they come from a culture where that is valued. In the U.S., questioning the teacher is valued and most U.S. scientists have stories about how they fought with their teachers on one occasion or another. If we need scientists why not find out what characteristics successful scientists actually have? Memorizing answers is probably not one of them. You don’t win Nobel Prizes, something the U.S. is still quite good at, by memorizing answers.

But, of course, the problem with the U.S. education system is not in any way our lack of ability to produce scientists. We are very good at it actually.

Our problem is that a large proportion of the population can’t reason all that well. We don’t teach them to reason after all. What we do is teach them mathematics and science they will never need and then pronounce them to be failures and encourage them, one way or another, to drop out of school. Brilliant. We also to paraphrase President John Adams, don’t “teach them how to live or how to make a living.”

As usual, neither Arne Duncan nor the new media has a clue about the real issue in education. To paraphrase President Clinton “ It’s the curriculum, stupid.”