Conventional wisdom in education
Mark sent the following link http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/
Here are some of the conventional wisdom which are being challenged in education -
- Is the return on higher education worth the investment?
- What are the right trade-off’s for having lower teacher-student ratio?
- Can we have a meaningful dialog about how to improve education without articulating the goals of the education system? One possible goal is that taxpayers need to care about creating a work-force which will maximize GDP in their most productive years. Of course, that has a direct benefit to the current tax-payers because that means higher tax base to continue the social safety net, etc. But then why all this discussion about need for arts in school? There is certainly a predominant thought that maybe schools need to have goals beyond satisfying the societal need for a productive work-force.
- If you believe that everyone has their own individual optimal learning process, are “schools” even the right structure when discussing education? Schools immediately mean certain constraints that a student is limited to learn from a fixed set of teachers, with a fixed set of fellow students, in often a fixed physical environment. Maybe all that was essential a few thousand years ago!
