Education: System is out of Sync

Sir Ken Robinson touched on a number of points that I think are important in terms of revolutionizing education. One is that the current education paradigm was conceived in a different age. In his talk about changing education paradigms, he shows a chart of instances of prescriptions given for ADHD by state in the United States. According to the chart, you are more likely to have ADHD the farther East you live.

At the same time this "medical fashion" is taking shape and spreading, kids are growing up in the "information age". They have had cell phones, the internets, youtube, social media, netflix, cable tv packages, video games and a million other interactive, personally significant sources of information and we expect them to sit still and in silence while a teacher tries to lecture them abstract, intangible subjects.

Our kids are living in an age that no one could fathom even 10 years ago, yet we are still trying to teach them in the same manner as our grandparents and their grandparents were taught. The system of eduction was conceived during the industrial revolution to meet the demands of growing job markets. It came to be in a time when a people rarely travelled more than 20 miles from home their life times; when  if you wanted to talk with some one, you had to find them or write them a letter; when the closest thing to avoiding reality was reading a book or the newspaper.

People were use to long conversations and taking time to be entertained. They had to be patient because nothing was immediate. There was no central source of information available to everyone everywhere all the time, so people had to swap books, stories, and gossip, and if information had to reach the masses, the masses had to find a central location to be reached.

Now, the wealth of the world's information is in each kids pockets and at their fingertips at every moment of the day. If they want to know something, kill time, organize a get together, find a location, go out to eat, or anything else, they just pull out their phones. Furthermore, they do not have to spend an hour getting lectured. They can find a reliable source of information and get a succinct description or watch an informational video/tutorial.

Today, we are using the "technologies" (really, the methodologies) of past ages and penalizing kids for not conforming to it while outside of the classroom, students live in a different culture.

IDL

Up until recently, pretty much all of my programming experience has been in IDL. I decided to finally buckle down and learn how to do things that I always use other people's routines for. In doing so, I realized how stupid IDL can be. I wound up fighting more against the language than against my own stupid programming skills.

Take, for instance, the TV and TVSCL commands. They take an image and plot them on the display. If you want to put them within a plot window, however, you cannot just use the same position vector that you used to make the plot axes because the bottom and left axes are drawn within the plot window. You have to reduce the size of the image by 1 pixel in each dimension and offset it up and to the right by one pixel.

Ok, so fine. I can do that... But then I want to save the image to PostScript. You would think that, everything having turned out well on the display, that it would look good saved to a file, right? Wrong. The image still covers the axes and I have yet to figure out how to fix it myself. So now I am using Coyote Graphics, which is pretty much the awesomest thing to happen to IDL, and the best resource anyone can ever get. The guy who runs the company, David Fanning, also has a Google group where he and others answer IDL questions.

But then I asked myself, What the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is a PostScript file anyway? Turns out it is an archaic printing language that helped computers output to printers. PDF is its modern replacement. I never really used PS to begin with. I just saved as .ps as an intermediate step before saving it as a .pdf, .jpg, .tiff. .png, etc. Now I know about the X buffer and TVRD. Things are going to change. Big time.

But that gets me back to my original rant. IDL should just work. I should not have to worry about scalable pixel sizes, make separate contingencies for the device I am using, which operating system I have, which decomposed state I am in, etc. IDL should know these things and just do what I want it to do.

After the aforementioned instance of recently, I started using Python. Nuff said.

Changing Education

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I feel education needs to be changed. This not a new unique sentiment that few others share. I hear about it all the time. One person who feels this way is Sir Ken Robinson [1], [2], [3], an international advisor on education in the arts. He says that change is not enough. We do not need the system to evolve. If the foundation and fundamentals of the system are broken, then the evolved system will still be fundamentally broken. What we need is a revolution.

The problem is that despite all of the people that are passionate about educational reform, very little is taking place, especially at the college and post-graduate levels. The change within the sciences is even slower because a scientist wants to see scientific results that one set of educational methodologies is better than another. It is sort of a Catch-22. Where is the scientific method here?

So, my plan is to highlight education programs that are doing something new, reaching out to a larger audience, concerned with social and global issues, etc., as well as platforms for education, creative and new ideas, and outreach programs -- because education should not only be better, it should be available at a high quality to everyone, regardless of geographic, economic, and demographic factors.

Just as a start, I already partially introduced TED.com and their "ideas worth spreading" with the Sir Robinson videos above. TED is a conference that tries to feature people with great ideas and inventions. They oublish new videos weekly on their website.

Additionally, there is the Studio School, a new type of school for 14-19 year olds in England that turns the classroom into a hands-on environment in an attempt to bridge the gap between classroom skills and workplace skills.