Social discussion of CS in K-12

[Charles Schultz <sacrophyte AT gmail.com>]

Okie dokie, I have copied the list on this response. If anyone wants to read back a couple emails to catch up, feel free.

I jumped ahead to near the end of the book and found some gold nuggets. Specifically, from pages 260-261:

"To develop the kind of human beings who will be equipped to maintain and improve our free society will require hard intellectual work, especially in the secondary schools."

"The future of our free society requires that our schools be centers of learning and not factories or playgrounds. To make them so will require educators who are students and scholars, not accountants or public relations men."

Here is what I see happening in our society; we are, by greater and greater degrees, less free. Our government tells us what we teach in schools, how we raise our children, what we eat, etc, and there is the absolute barest level of accountability for all that power. At all levels of politics, the voice of the people is drowned out by lobbyists and corporate representatives that wield greater political capital, and "we the people" have let it happen because we do not know better. Why do we not know better? Because we learn as children to not question authority. As children, we are sculpted and molded into little worker ants that best suits the needs of the government. Does this sound like any other political powers from world history class?

Do we truly want a free society? Is that our main priority? If so, we have a lot of "hard intellectual work" ahead of us.

I had one teacher tell me that he/she is considering retirement because he/she is no longer able to teach for the love of teaching. That just breaks my heart. What have we come to?

We don't need education reform - we need societal reform. And in my opinion, education is where that happens. That is the big lesson I learned from Malala Yousafzai. It is not about learning grammar and numbers, but how to be "a people" and to throw off oppressors. As she quotes from her mother (who was summarizing a lesson from the Quran), "falsehood must die, truth must progress forward."

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 12:09 PM, Reese, George Clifford <reese AT illinois.edu> wrote:

Hi Charles,

I do think it’s appropriate for the CTRL-Shift list. Cc to them if you like.

 

I think there is a reason why the Mission Hill video resonates with our group. It’s because we DO believe there many vital components of school that are not measured and that the effort to measure them does more harm than good.

 

I think the authors of the PARCC third grade PBA that I looked at yesterday have no intention of doing harm, and yet I think they are doing damage. A third grader who feels anxious and sad after taking that test has not been helped. They certainly haven’t been better educated except in the arbitrariness of school assessments.

 

The lesson I took from Callahan book is that this dream of managing education is getting close to a hundred and twenty years old. It has not helped.  Just the opposite.

Deborah Meier: "The whole point of an education is to help you learn how to exercise judgment. And you can't do that if the expert adults in your school are not allowed to exercise theirs."

 

-George

 

 

 

 

George Reese

Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education (MSTE)

505 East Green St.
Suite 102

Champaign, IL 61820

217-333-6604

 

From: Charles Schultz [mailto:sacrophyte AT gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2015 7:24 PM
To: Reese, George Clifford
Subject: more thoughts about "cult of efficiency"

 

Good evening, George!

 

At various times, I am able to peck away at Callahan's book; in some ways, I am finding it quite dry (maybe the style of writing?), but in other ways, there are some powerful things in there that are not hard to uncover.

 

Here is my latest "big thought" after quickly going through the first four chapters; efficiency aims to reduce waste. Either I missed it, or have not yet gotten to the part where Callahan explains, in the eyes of the "efficiency experts", what exactly waste is. And I think this is a very big question to answer. The adage "one man's trash is another man's treasure" can certainly be applied here. There are some other related "big questions" like "what is public education" and "what is the purpose of public schools", which are questions I think we need to ask frequently and wrestle with.

 

My fear is that there is not an absolute answer to those questions. Thus the myriad of "educational reforms" and approaches to teaching (whether it be pedagogy or applied educational theory). But if we assume there is an absolute, objective answer, what would it be?

 

We can say, off the cuff, that the sole purpose of public schools is to put kids in college, thus one measure of "efficiency" is to calculate the ratio of either dollars or hours spent getting x number of kids into college. But what if that is not the sole purpose of public schools? Then the efficiency formula is inaccurate because it measures the wrong thing.

 

I would lean towards a view that says the purpose of education is to equip learners to succeed at life and society (not one or the other, but both). But how does one measure that? Surely accountability is necessary, right? Or maybe accountability is built-in, just annoyingly slow; if this kind of education is not done well, you end up with "bad" citizens. Talk about high-stakes!!

 

I wasn't sure if this was appropriate for the CTRL-Shift email list or not. I was tempted to send this email to the list, but first wanted to test the waters with you, since you loaned me the book. :)

 

Happy thoughts for the rest of the week,

 

 

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Charles Schultz

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Charles Schultz