I am touting the worldwide-reach online educational institution ALISON (ALISON.com) based in London, UK, which offers certificates of completion on some classes and diplomas on its course programs (diploma, or degree, programs), or courses of study, free of charge; however, its site and learning modules are attended with a disorienting clutter of ads, that can disrupt one's concentration and considerably slow one's learning, but that can be opted out of for a modest fee. I am also touting EdX (edX.org) based in Boston, MA, US, sponsored by Harvard University and MIT, another highly regarded free online higher-educational institution, or service, offering certificates of completion on some of its classes. I’m enrolled in both and began taking courses April 30, 2014, electing for science, math, financial and history classes.
Other reportedly highly regarded online institutions of
higher education are Coursera, coursera.org; Khan Academy, khanacademy.org; and
Udacity, udacity.com.
Why I post this writing is because we live in a new,
constantly changing and technically and technologically evolving economy and
society in which, except in elite-knowledge-and-skills technical occupations,
employee benefits are being scaled down and eliminated and job security and
lifetime employment in the private sector are no longer a commitment on the
part of employers in general and are no longer the norm. Workers must be
prepared with employment-market in-demand credentialed knowledge and skills to
compete for the next nonsubsistence-paying or nonpoverty-wage job, following
economy- and company-budget-dictated layoffs — there will always be downturns,
busts, recessions, crimped company demand and revenues, and business
bankruptcies and failures, in our up-and-down-cycling,
in-determinative-dynamics, complex capitalist economy.
(ALISON.com, based in London, UK, is an international online
school that offers a broad variety of credentialed science, cyber-tech, tech,
business and vocational education programs. Also, an updated education in
in-demand knowledge and skills, and the certificates and credentials that go
with it, can increase one’s employment value to one’s employer, being one’s
retention value, and advance one in occupation and income on the job.
ALISON.com offers other certificate courses as well. You can also get from
ALISON.com the education you need to go into business for yourself and be
securely self employed, while paying into your Social Security retirement
insurance and investing in a private or multiple private, tax-privileged
retirement plans or funds. The other schools listed above are also outstanding
schools, based on the reviews and endorsements of them by reputable media
figures and news media, including, in instances, Bill Gates and Google.)
Business is, and, as a direct consequence, employment and
layoffs are, driven by the bottom line of the business profit-and-loss
statement (P&L), or its equivalent for nonprofit organizations, in which
the bottom line reports the net business profit, and profit size, or net
business loss, and loss size, for the year, but also quarterly, as relates to company quarterly earnings reports, for internal
financial monitoring and decision-making purposes, to a business. If the bottom
line is a small profit or a loss number, overhead (which includes staff,
usually the most cost-efficient expense to cut) will be strategically cut and
lowest performing functions or facilities will be reduced or closed, or be
relocated, exported or contracted to minimal-expense locations or contractors,
etc. Executives, in most instances, will do all they can to boost the bottom
line, in order to satisfy the stockholders (especially large-share-owner,
voting stockholders) and board of directors, who in large measure receive dividends
and other compensation from the bottom-line profit and profit margin, and whose
stock values are significantly based on the P&L bottom line, the stock of
which they may trade, in calculated measure (buy low and sell high), ultimately
for capital-gain income based on appreciation in the stock value. Executives
who fall short in satisfying the stockholders and board of directors, with
regard to the profit status of the bottom line of the company’s P&L, will
lose bonuses or their jobs.
I’m enthusiastic about online education because it’s
generally self-paced and step-by-step, learner-engaged, hands-on,
workbook-style education, not largely passive, dependent on lectures and note
taking and doing reading at home, where the reading should be done on the job —
that is, in the classroom — with learning exercised and tested in workbook
exercises. I am an advocate for both online and classroom education in which
the student is the primary focus and actor and is thoroughly
learning-labor-engaged, with students in classrooms learning primarily from
workbooks, paper or digital (computer programs, including of interactive
audio-visual learning games and virtual-reality instructional movies of all
kinds on all academic subject matter and brain exercises, new, and old, like
crossword puzzles and anagrams), with the instructor and teaching assistants
(TAs) mainly standing by and being called on by students to answer questions
and assist students in getting successfully through their classwork (including
individual and group class projects), being their in-class homework. Lectures
and whiteboard instruction should be treated as ancillary and supplemental to
on-the-job — in-the-classroom, that is — reading and workbook reading and
learning exercises and practice.
(Abstracts on studies on the effectiveness of instruction by
lecture that I have read consistently report that students retain little memory
of the lecture content new to them unless the lecture is followed up by
classroom discussion of the lecture content, which tends to modestly increase
student memory retention of the lecture content. In either case they report
memory of lecture content rapidly fades to a small percentage in retained
memory of content within two weeks — findings were obtained from memory tests
of, and not self reports from, students. A major problem found accounting for
the inefficiency of learning from lectures is that overall student attention
focus in lecture instruction tends to wane after 15 minutes into the onset of a
lecture, that attention is spotty [attention tuning in and tuning out]
throughout the lecture for some students and that general inattention to the
lecture is indicated for some students, suggesting that students may not have
voluntary control over their informational-oriented or information-extractive,
viewer attention spans, in which they are learning-activity disengaged, without
a specialized science and pedagogy of attention-span training and development
for high-efficacy viewer, audio-visual lecture and lecture-board learning. When
students are reading, writing, performing mathematical operations or drawing,
sculpturing or constructing or assembling something, or playing a musical
instrument, etc., they can return again and again to the point at which they
lost attention, became confused or made a mistake and try again to comprehend
or understand, or correct or improve themselves, or remember or memorize,
without having to interrupt the teacher-lecturer or having the teacher-lecturer
repeat the missed or misunderstood lecture information or the lesson on the
lecture board, requests made for help to the possible inconvenience, impatience
and annoyance of the teacher-lecturer and some advanced students in the class
if one or a series of students sequentially need/s a repeat or reiteration
[perhaps multiples of this in varied re-phrasings in order for individual
students or clusters of students to get a clear understanding] of the lecture
information or whiteboard lesson.
I am not asserting that the school or classroom lecture is a
worthless instrument of instruction, as it often can be a valuable source of
intellectual stimulation, entertainment and inspiration, and is designed to
contain valuable academic learning content for student assimilation and
intended to deliver it as a matter of course, but too often to modest effect
and inconsequentially, for the reasons explicated in the foregoing. Most of the time it does carry out its
central purpose — that is, to instruct, to inform, to teach, to educate —
lustrously but with the pervading and enduring critical flaw of reaping an
initially modest, then tapering, and finally net low, learning harvest in the
short term for its recipient student-learner audience, a flaw that can be
remedied by integrating it into a computer software application or e-technology
that can make its learning results a high learning yield to student learners.
This can be achieved by instructors making home audio-video, or strictly audio,
recordings of their lectures on their home computers that they can edit to
perfection on their home computers to be classroom, or virtual classroom,
ready, and incorporating into them a control-panel software application that
provides an on-screen media-player control panel within the video recording, or
blank video feed for audio-only recordings, that students can computer-mouse or
computer-keyboard click on, or touch-screen tap, to operate, or use a
remote-controller to operate, to customize the volume, speed [including slow
motion], and playback, and looped-playback, of any part or multiple parts of
the lecture. The computer’s desktop-window-loaded or on-screen media-player
control panel would have the standard audio or audio-video media player
operating functions of play, stop, pause, fast forward, reverse and mute but
should also feature a rate-of-speed function [i.e., for a play or playback
choice of one percent to one-hundred percent of the original speed of the
lecture as recorded by the instructor], a tag function for marking the
beginning to end of each portion of the recorded audio-video, or audio, lecture
[for making audio-video clips or audio-only clips] the student may want to
playback or loop-playback and a function permitting students to direct the
media-player control panel to automate conversion of lectures from voice to
written text and making voice-to-word-processor typed-text files, based on the
software principles of Dragon-Voice-Recognition software for taking speech
dictation and converting it to typed-text word-processor files.
The tagged parts of the instructor’s recorded lecture [the
parts of special interest to and tagged by the student] could simultaneously be
played back as an informationally self-customized audio-video, or audio,
lecture presentation for any particular student for his or her self-decided
precision education [aggregated and streamed audio-video, or audio, verbatim
notes on or of the lecture] and a written document of the same information in
the student’s computer word-processor text files — a special word-processor
software update needs to come to market that converts written-text word-processor
files to voice playback at the click-on request for this by computer owners or
users for them to be heard by the computer owners or users. This software- or e-technology would empower
instructors to upload and post their lectures on their personal page, or
account, or a specialized, no-cost, public-service audio-video page for
educators, with a podcast or webcast internet service provider or on YouTube or
Facebook, or other web-place social media, for students to view on their
computer tote pads, laptops, computer desktop windows or their cell phones, or
for download of lectures onto a student’s computer.
Most importantly, the knowledge-harvest drawbacks of the
traditional lecture method of classroom teaching and learning could be overcome
in large measure when lectures can be self delivered in customized
instructional fashion by students, in which each individual student can set the
speed of the lecture presentation to his or her preference or comfort in tempo
[attention-perception and memory-work mental-input speed and stamina] as wells
as set for playback or looping-playback, via the control panel of the media
player, for any number of times and at any choice of speed compatible with the
individual’s comfort in following or tracking the lecture, any part of the
lecture the individual may want to dwell on and repeat, thereby conforming the
audio-video or audio-only lecture to the individual student’s chosen tempo of
learning and allowing the individual student to focus in on, at his or her discretion,
parts of the lecture the particular individual may need to revisit and
carefully and intensively, or drill, review in order to learn them with a full
comprehension and lasting memory of their perhaps elusive or initially mentally
not-registering learning content being communicated in the lecture.
In brief summary, with this e-technology students could set
the media-player software control panel of instructors’ audio-video, or
audio-only, recorded lectures — uploaded to the internet for click-on, or the
like, streaming — to automatically or systematically fast forward to and slow
play or slowly loop-playback the tagged parts, only, of a lecture either online
or on the student’s computer for the student’s listening, while simultaneously
making word-processor text and audio files on the student’s computer, all of
service for significantly enhancing student memory of and significantly
increasing student learning yields from instructor lectures. Ideally, students
should also have market access to affordable wireless or computer-plug-in
audio-video headset goggles, with a handheld media-player remote controller, by
which they can listen to and watch on or via their computers the instructors’
audio-video, or audio-only, online lecture recordings, with one or both ears
and/or eyes while lying in bed, eating at the dining table, or sipping coffee
or tea at a Starbuck’s or Peet’s coffee shop.)
I have no affiliation with either of the above-named
institutions other than as a student enrollee. I am touting both institutions
because I have examined their sites and been impressed by what I viewed and am
a believer in student labor-engaged learning over student learning by
instructor lectures and whiteboard instruction, that is followed up with
directed home reading and homework assignments, which may not be done or may be
problematically and haphazardly done by very many students (who, frustrated,
may shun homework in getting stumped on problems and stuck in understanding
concepts at home without being able to consult a competent instructor or TA at
home for help), with the consequence of politicians and parents blaming the
poor or failed student academic performance on the student, often unsupervised,
and, by nature, immature and emotionally, mentally and intellectually
undisciplined children, and blaming teachers carrying out their tradition-based
structured roles of lecture, sermon and lecture-board write and diagram that
are not compatible with the learning situation of many students and don’t
optimally engage their attention and imprint on their memory-learning process.
Also, evolving and ongoing tweak-improved online education
will make higher education affordable to so many young people priced out of and
facing debt enslavement by the traditional system, forcing the traditional
system, of both public and private schools, to change its ways by doing a
significantly better job of educating and in lowering the cost of education, or
keeping it affordable and reasonable, at all grade and institutional levels.
Voucher private school education, transferring public tax money to private
schools to educate public school children opting out of the public school
system, will not help the bulk of poorly performing public school students, as
not only will the tax-voucher private schools take the taxpayer public’s money
but also the already good and best performing and behaving students, from the
public schools, from which they can cherry pick admission, rejection and
expulsion of students. The further consequence of the aforementioned inevitable
consequence of unloading public school funding and academically premium and
good-conduct students on voucher private schools will be to worsen the
competitive educational profile of public schools, disposing and exposing the
public school system overall to harsher criticism and attacks by politicians
and parents upon their becoming the largely refractory reservoir of primarily
the problematic-learner and bad-behavior student populations, while drawing
down (diminishing) the financial and academic-student-body strength of the
public schools. What the latter means, in other words, is that the tax-transfer
payments and ongoing outgo of and rejection of public school education by
otherwise prized public-school-students in preference for and opting for
tax-voucher-funded private schools, with admission-screened high-achiever and
congenial student populations, would result in a funding and prime-achiever
student, at a minimum, decapitalization of public schools, with fixed and
increasing facilities operating costs remaining for the public schools even if
public schools cut administrative and teaching staff and administrative and
teaching-staff costs, commensurate with the loss of academically premium
students, inclining whole local public school systems to financial and academic
breakdown and insolvency (this situation being the tax-voucher private-school
robbery of the financial and student-achiever value of the public schools,
resulting in the ruin of public school systems).
Online education should be promptly made available in
juvenile detention centers, jails and prisons. It may be a brain changer, for
the better, with regard to the individual and society, on the populations in
these places.
Free and low-cost online higher education will mean
negligible or possibly much-avoided educational debt for most of its graduates
and lower pressure on those of them entering the medical, legal, financial and
engineering professions — who have taken online-qualified courses integral to
their professional campus education — to charge extreme fees for their
services, extreme fees they would otherwise need to amortize their otherwise
large educational debts. Such
educational debt avoidance would free or unencumber their incomes, early in
their adult years, and allow for them to have a comfortable personal and family
life, with all of the reasonable amenities and assets that go with these
(having and adequately supporting children, having a nice home, furniture, car,
clothes and modest jewelry, entertainment, travel, savings, investments, etc.),
benefiting the economy broadly, rather than the niche debt industry, and
affording them early-in-life good financial grounding and peace of mind.
(As a matter of reality, most young students with healthy,
high-acuity, physically symmetrical and functionally coordinated and orderly
working learning-conduit visual and audio sensory systems [perceptual systems],
and a such tactile-digital sensory system for art, music-instrument and
braille-reading-dependent blind students, along with an overall healthy, normal
brain, a good attention span and sufficient memory power [metaphorically
speaking, good attention and memory muscle power], should, for the most part,
be ready and able to learn well academically and make for good-learner
students. This is especially so if parents have routinely told and read their
children stories as post-infant children [in having done this, parents would
have nurtured the development of the child's ability to listen,
mentally-imaginatively focus and pay attention at length while the child's
fresh brain was in rapid growth in the rapid-growth stage of the brain for a
human], if they have encouraged their children’s learning by having nurtured
their reading and proper speech [in having supported, personally modeled, or
established and enforced, proper-speech standards], if they have nurtured in
their children positive-social-bonding “social” singing [choir, folk songs,
spirituals, and other genres of songs for sing along and sing together] and
dancing and other positive interpersonal and social skills [as contrasted with
negative social bonding as exemplified in the formation of packs and gangs and
their antisocial, bad behavior, like rat-pack and gang fighting, gang rape,
bullying, coercing, extorting, robbing, etc.], and if they or family members
have given their children learning and creativity-exercising toys and games,
including musical instruments, bicycles, skates, skateboards and social or
team–sports play gear, or have enrolled their children in early start, private
music, art or reading, writing and counting or arithmetic school. However,
since humans are highly emotional beings, and functionally complex and quirky,
despite their biologically-indicated normal, structurally and functionally sound,
learning capability, they may have an aversion, lack of confidence, aspiration
or motivation, or the three of the latter, or other psychological block, for
whatever reason, for learning something or somethings they theoretically should
be able to learn with normal effort or ease or learn well. Furthermore, a diet
high in junk food, including junk-food beverages, can undermine the competent
cognitive, as well as general psychological, functioning of both youth and
adults of all ages. In addition, personal genetics may have some influence in
cognitive-educational dysfunction, but an influence that is not necessarily
immutable.
Also, we must never abandon, neglect or minimize art
education, as the art skills are the origin and foundation of uniquely grandiose
human creativity and cognitive endeavors and accomplishments, transcendent in
comparison to the creativity and cognitive products of the other creatures of
our planet — ingenuity is a version of creativity that is generally viewed as
strategic and technical and associated with problem solving, innovation and
informal and formal engineering. They are the foundation of design, writing,
reading, math, manuscripts and books, education, architecture, building
construction, engineering, science and technology, all of the fine and high
arts and commercial arts [including poetry and chef and gourmet cooking],
civilized society, and our advanced industry and economies. It all started with
communally- or tribally-based regularized self stimulation of the brain [sensory-neurocortical
self stimulation, with the term "neurocortical" referring to the
neuronal cerebral-cortex and neocortex structures of the brain in which the
advanced mental processes are based and in which they arise] via drawing,
rock-art and cave, etc., drawing and picture painting, body-art painting and
adornment, including with jewelry and fabrics [those fashioned and animal
skins, furs, feathers, etc.], wood and stone carvings and sculptures and such
fashioned musical instruments; handicrafts, primitive weapons and tool making;
communal storytelling, deity worship, drum beating, singing and dancing, and
dramatic, contest and other entertainment performances, very often around the
tribal-communal campfire or fire pit [one can safely bet a fortune on the
tenability of the claim that altars and candles in traditional houses of
worship descended from this prehistorical background]. If there was no drawing
[advanced-art mental process, with drawing exceeding the object-art, or
tangibles-art, mental process of our closest primate cousins the Neanderthals]
to start, we would have no alphabets, numbers, writing, reading, math,
manuscripts, libraries, advanced education, ad infinitum, and advanced society
on Earth, nor the cumulative, literacy-based, collective creativity and genius
and technical knowledge and skills on which advanced society, or civilization,
was and is built.
At the gate of the Bohemian village of post-apes [but with
hunters, and susceptible to combat]: Indeed, I propose that the earliest uniquely
human societies of our lineage of human were strongly populated by artisans and
artists and aficionados and consumer-users of the gamut of arts and crafts
[also including all varieties of smithing, masonry, primitive manufacturing and
the early trades] and that the greatest innovation, or invention, of our
species, along with human language, was and is the innovation, or invention, of
education, being the teaching and learning relationship, or the mentor and
protege relationship, that has greatly evolved, for preserving, dispersing,
accumulating, improving and disseminating collective human knowledge, know-how
[socially and institutionally nurtured and cultivated purposeful and applied
intuition and improvisational ability as familiarly seen in music, the arts,
sports and science and engineering projects] and skills and innovations and
inventions from generations to generations of successive humans of, in net
effect, comparatively advancing and advanced societies. Seemingly, the presence
of human language [thinking and speaking communication, interpersonally or
internally, in words, basic pictorial symbols [informational imagery] for
words, or word strings, and syntactical sentences via voice, gestures or
gestural signs, writing, braille, graphics or graphs, etc.] and the teaching
and learning relationship [education] weaned our species from being driven in
our behavior predominately by our instincts, impulses and reflexes and made our
species substantially a learning-based and learning-directed species [highly
reliant on individual and communal acquisition, sharing and the generational
conveyance of information, knowledge and skills for the competitive survival
and thriving of our species -- also for the competitively advantaged survival
and thriving of human communities in competition with each other], more than
any other species on our planet; nevertheless, our species dependency on
learning has certainly made our species more reflective and deliberative, or
premeditative [goal and/or agenda conscious and focused, calculating,
strategic, tactical, planful, etc.], in our actions, sometimes to our folly, as
when our learning that directs us is mainly information, as opposed to actual
knowledge, and can be misinformative fiction or fantasy posed as truth and
knowledge, as in the information forms of deceit, myth, superstition, ideology,
doctrine, dogma and propaganda.
Knowledge and skills learning, conveyed in the informal and
formal teacher-student relationship [education], combined with knowledge
extracting analytical intellect [learning by discernment: decoding the rules of nature and deriving
insights into the structures, qualities, mechanics and dynamics of nature, or
the way nature works, by reckoning or figuring things out, in the course of
observing, pondering, probing and tinkering with nature [[studying nature]],
for the purpose of manipulating nature and rising above feral animal nature and
exercising power over nature] is a shortcut human species mechanism or species
meta-strategy, astronomically outpacing in speed and so outperforming in
effectiveness the rigidity and limitations of instincts, impulses and reflexes
and the hypo-glacially slow and creeping natural-selection, bio-evolutionary morphological
somatic responses of the other animal species, for adapting to species, and individual,
life-challenging or existence-threatening environmental conditions and
competitive circumstances, routinely resulting in species extinctions, and
epidemical and mass-interspecies-competitive mortality. Such learning makes a species or creature behaviorally
and strategically highly flexible and quickly able to affirmatively and
effectively respond in the short term to challenges, threats and competition. For instance, with such learning and
knowledge conveyance [education] humans can liberate themselves from depending
on foraging and hunting for food by our resorting to agriculture, aquaculture
and herding [including bee keeping for agricultural crops’ pollination and
making honey for human consumption], or livestock and chicken ranching, to
raise, or grow, our food and from
undergoing millions of years of creeping somatic morphology in order to compete
with apex predators such as tigers, lions, leopards, hyenas, crocodiles, boa
constrictors, poisonous animals, bears, wolves, etc., on the animal weapons and
defenses level [of large fangs and sharp, long, thick, hard claws and
super-strength limbs for quick killing, mauling and maiming or such powerful
limbs for running at extreme animal speeds, or of evolving wings or biological
body armor, to better escape predators] by stockpiling pelting rocks, and making
fire, thrusting and throwing spears, clubs, flora- and soil-camouflaged trenches
[sometimes fitted with carved wooden spikes, for both capturing and tripping and injuring prey and
predatory animals], nets, ropes, poisonous darts, knives, bow and arrows, sling
shots and swords and guns, and keeping, breeding and deploying martyrous guard
and fighting dogs, to defeat the apex predator animals and by using these as well
as grenades, bombs and missiles, etc., to combat rival populations and
individuals of our own species. Notably,
we can also raise herds of animals such as horses, donkeys, camels and
elephants for our long-distance and extreme-temperature-environments means of
transportation for travel and migration, commerce and combat as well as make
rafts, boats and wind-sail ships, and land, water and air motor vehicles for
the same purpose rather than be geographically limited or impeded by our own, basically
humble, biological locomotion, like the other animals are, and for hugely
increasing our freight and resources carrying capacity.
Caveat emptor! If a professor from Stanford University or a
curriculum teacher-administrator from Arizona has come to public attention in the
interview mass media with a book, backed up by and citing statistics, asserting
that homework [content or performance practice and drill exercises for
learning] do not establish, reinforce, improve or increase learning or that
conversational and written intellectual introspecting, subjectivizing, opining,
querying and discoursing, under the leadership and supervision of the guru
teacher-lecturer [largely the Socratic method of pedagogy good for developing
contemplation, or philosophical thinking, and thoughtfulness for or in writing,
but differing with the Socratic method by sprinkling it with academically
embedded self-esteem- and confidence-building talk therapy features of
psychotherapy, which may act to improve the attitude of some students and motivate
them to compete and work academically], is a revolutionary, new method of
pedagogy that will change student performance and achievement results on tests
in all disciplines of learning, don’t believe them! Do not believe them because
their pretense- or shabby-science assertions and data contradict the worldwide
laboratory facts on learning and cognition established in a virtual infinity of
hard-science knowledge accumulated from neurobiology, neuropsychology,
psychophysiology, psychopharmacology and other sensory-motor ["motor"
refers to the neural-muscular, or neural-muscular-skeletal, response system
involved in bodily and body movement, inclusive of both visceral and striated
muscle] and brain science-disciplines related to learning and cognition. If these
assertions, arguments and statistics contradict replicated, peer-reviewed and
-tested, mechanistic, laboratory studies, whose results are forever repeatable
using the same, competent research procedure, those assertions, arguments and
statistics are wrong and worthless, and those authoring and advancing them are
likely making wishful-thinking, if not financially predatory, claims [delusion-
and hope-baited fish hooks for anxious parents and the public discontented with
the extent of the ineffectiveness of the educational system], offering simple,
nonsense solutions to large-scale educational ineffectiveness in pursuit of
sensational book sales, big, easy wealth and short-term fame. Even an honest
lightning-speed-learning genius student will acknowledge that he or she
variously needs to study, practice, rehearse and review the subject-matter
content, procedures and actions, or performances, of math operations and the
branches of math, science disciplines, foreign languages, musical instruments,
etc., the learning media, new to him or her for learning. Whereas response
generalization is an established fact in learning science, it has been
demonstrated to occur for similar kinds of learning behavior, such as in prior
training in piano playing particularly facilitating the learning of organ
playing or other finger-played musical instruments and not so much or as much
the learning of highly skilled drawing or equipment assembly, and not or little
for distinctly different learning behavior.
Operationally speaking, learning fundamentally, but
complexly in humans, is in major part the product of, in psychobabble,
classical and operant stimulus-response conditioning, response reinforcement
through reward and penalty [internal and external, that are direct, indirect or
vicarious], information feedback and response repetition and optimization
[honing and shaping, or maximizing and hardening], together with mainly, in
academia, the learner’s visual, auditory and tactile-digital sensory systems
[the perceptual, or perceiving, systems involved in academic learning] and his
or her cognitive processes of attention-perception, concentration,
visualization, language, thinking-reasoning and “input and output memory work,”
and the resulting formation of neurocognitive, new-learning cell networks in
the brain (referred to as neurocortical wiring or rewiring, leading to memory
consolidation or hardened learning]. Motivation and effort on the part of the
individual also importantly figure into learning success and quality. [Ultimately,
in a socially intellectual regard, without a direct reference to biology,
memory is mentally stored perceptions, aggregated perceptions or experience of
external or internal stimuli [[including information, knowledge, thoughts,
ideas, feelings, emotions, plus]], of physical or imaginative origin, and our
language is the external, as well as a mentally internal, “repository” of that
accumulated memory or memorialized perception and experience [[including
behavior and skills, plus]] and a means for recalling content from it, thinking
about and communicating from its content, discussing its content and adding to
its content.]
Furthermore, if a teacher proposes that “remembering what
one is taught is unnecessary nowadays because we can now look up everything we
want to know on the internet,” that person is not fit for “any” job outside of
ivory-tower academia, or in it, as any job requires the worker to have an agile
memory of the job’s actions, and often of its information set [job knowledge],
and a prompt behavioral execution all of the actions and recall of its
information set [the job knowledge], on reflex or self command, in the routine,
repetitive, cost-effective performance of that job — I actually heard an
articulate teacher say the former on radio, to my consternation. If teachers or
school administrators, or their unions, argue against teaching to the test,
they are arguing against a standard set of information, knowledge and skills
for all students to acquire and possess in and from the educational process,
preparing them to be employment-test ready and on-the-job trainable, based on
what work they qualify for and are hired to do, or higher-education test-score
competent and ready for higher education, and for informed civic participation.
In so arguing, they are in large part arguing against students being job-market
ready or higher-educational-market ready, whether for a vocational,
professional or conventionally academic education, in a standard set of
academic information, knowledge and skills to be so ready. However, if the set
of standards is overwhelming for a significant percentage of students, to the
dismay of teachers and school administrators, and thus are unrealistic, based
on test feedback results, then the set of standards must be made practical and
adjusted down.)
Students in K through 12 education should have learning
workstations, instead of mere desks, that are equipped with an instructional
computer, such computer devices, headsets and teaching-learning computer
programs and all schools should be Wi-Fi connected and there should be large
computer screens on the front wall and on the two sides walls of classrooms.
Students also should have carry-around and use workbooks. If the public
schools, K through 12, through colleges and universities, do not embark full
force with their own aggressive and achievement-competitive
student-labor-engaged workbook-style online educational programs immediately,
they will become behind-the-times, antiquated educational institutions in the
learning achievement results of their students, including their best,
collectively, for very many courses, if not many diploma and degree programs,
compared to the learning achievement results of the students of the current
online educational institutions with an early start and that are already well
established, and are evolving and improving continually in their
instructional-programs’ and learning-results’ effectiveness, some current
online educational institutions of which are likely to broaden the reach of
their instruction across the spectrum of educational levels. Even professional
educational programs involving much actual hands-on work and lab work or
workshops, such as the medical, engineering and law profession programs, will
be better served with many of their courses being completed online by their
students.
This new model of education will likely discomfort the
center-of-education guru teacher-lecturer or professor, of the traditional
mainstream model of education, for whom the glamorous and power-figure role of
lecturing and whiteboard instruction will be supplemental and subordinate to
student-centered learning by workbook-style laboring, in which instructors and
TAs become servants, coaches and facilitators of student labor-engaged or task
learning, as well as become classroom supervisors and student-discussion
supervisors and referees — all classes should have at least one weekly
discussion period, led by a different student each week, on a rotating basis,
including under-performing students, permitted to fumble, persevere and
improve.
Because some stalwarts for the highly ineffective status-quo
model of education may disparage the dawning new model of education as a “Shut
up, sit-down, [do] and learn!” model is no reason to concede to their
self-interested prejudice toward it and back away from the new model’s
inevitably superior results in educating students outside of their educational
turf, the educational turf they control – a new model whose early performance
results will be at a reliable, telling level within probably three to five
years, which I expect will objectively show the new model already to have
outperformed the overall product of the traditionalist-model of education. The traditionalists may be able to undermine
and discredit the product of this new model and defeat it on their own turf but
not so outside of their turf, at which point online education and classroom,
student labor-engaged learning and education would necessarily make the
compelling case, in view of its competitively advantaged results with all
stripes of students, for competing for taxpayer dollars to non-discriminatorily
far better educate students of all stripes and from all walks of life. These traditionalist pedagogic Luddites should
consider how new-model educators outside of their turf may describe their
model: “Shut up, sit down and listen to
and watch me, and follow my orchestration, and learn! (for the few of you who
can adequately and durably learn this way, probably with the assistance of
educated parents or such a parent who can help you at and prepare you from home
for class).” Traditional, but always
improving, methods of teacher-student interactive, student-labor-engaged
education, especially in early grades, foundational knowledge and skills
classroom education will remain valuable if not indispensable to formal, basic
education – these need more emphasis in educating. For instance, instructors can have groups of
young students go to the whiteboard in waves and have individuals in the groups
work on individual math operations and problems, or on write (construct) and
understand correct sentences (analyze sentences and identify parts of speech
and component sentence structures within them, as well as practice thinking and
speaking in correct, or proper, sentences, and analyzing, syllabicating and
understanding how to properly spell and interpret the meaning of words and on
how to conjugate irregular versus regular verbs -- word and sentence
dissection, using circles, double circles, underlines, double underlines, connecting
overarching curved lines, obliques or back splashes, rectangles, with name
labels for parts of speech and sentence structures, as opposed to the often
befuddling diagramming of sentences), or assembling geographic or astronomy
puzzles at their desks, or on their computers or in teamwork with respect to a
classroom computer screen on a wall, or on other tasks that are labor-engaged
learning, meaning students need not learn primarily by computers but can do all
sorts of learning and academic training things in class, that hold them to task
and actively engaged in learning and academic work (including taking turns
making very brief, skeletal book, chapter, biography or concept reports, etc.)
and hold them learning accountable in the classroom.
(All students, regardless of I.Q. and academic achievement
levels, should be accorded a sense of belonging, equal human value, membership
and relevance, and be treated with equal respect and accorded equal opportunity
to participate and serve in class activities and roles, and to grow
intellectually and academically, by instructors, as well as be treated as
student peers by instructors and fellow students alike. All children, including
those organically retarded, have the potential for neurocognitive growth and
appreciable intellectual and talent improvement and have their own individual
rates and trajectories of psychological and cognitive or intellectual
development and capacities for growth [individual differences], contingent on
and subject to nurturing, cultivation and optimization by learning engagement
and experiences, and training and education. Because an individual starts off
smart [as more learning, thinking, creativity and performance enabled or with
overall or institutionally-key greater learning, thinking, creative and
performance facility] or not smart does not mean that individual will remain
that way, in either case; however, if that individual persists in engaging and
working his or her brain and abilities, he or she can stay smart or become
smart or smarter, in most instances. Schools should foster the educational and
cognitive development of all of their students with equal commitment and not
fixate on the evident, presently smart ones to the marginalization or exclusion
in any way of the cognitively or intellectually in appearance less endowed
ones, by refraining from the common practice of concentrating leadership and
academic responsibilities and privileges in those presently academically more
capable or ahead [in the acquisition and exercise of knowledge and skills, and
ease of or facility for such, and demonstrated higher levels of knowledge and
skill], and largely limiting them to these early bloomer, in-smarts, students.
Human neural/neuronal plasticity [ability for significant or
dramatic positive change in abilities through sustained mental exertion:
effort-based mental stimulation, being neurocortical stimulation, by the
mentally laboring individual, or cognitive work, being primarily learning,
thinking and performance work] is an established fact, as is latent learning
and are late bloomers in high-level cognitive and intellectual development and
achievement — engagement in reading, writing, math, informational-listening, or
music or other art work is neurocortical self-stimulation activity or work or
largely literacy thinking and learning work. The larger, or higher, an
individual’s stimulus threshold for learning a particular subject matter [item,
body or field of knowledge or information] or particular skill, the less
facility or knack an individual has for that learning and the more the
individual will have to cognitively work or train [required learning-work
baseline] to learn [activate, establish or acquire, or a mix of these] the
particular knowledge, information or skill, or achieve a desired level and
precision of knowledge or skill, as in an individual’s knowledge quotient and
mastery for a given subject matter or skill level for a particular type,
instrument or tool of performance or task]. The more work required of an
individual for him or her to learn will require more motivation, both internal
and external, especially in youth, of him or her to do the required greater
amount of learning work. Levels of ability aptitudes [degree of knack or
inaptitude, or ineptitude, for knowledge, information and skill acquisition or
learning], subject to development and improvement by learning and education,
may vary in an individual and change on their own, by circumstances or through
work on the part of and for the same individual. Individuals may also have
different aptitudes for contemplative-, reasoning-content/process-dominate
learning versus rote–content/process-dominate learning. At root, learning is
automatically or willfully recallable memory, and often its deployment, of
information, knowledge, skills or performance, the latter two of which are most
synonymous with externalized acquired behavior [or externalized learned
behavior].
Incidentally, three famously familiar intellectual
late-bloomer, apex achievers in academics and science are 19th Century's field biologist and pioneer of evolutionary science Charles Darwin, author of 'On the Origin of Species' and 'The Descent of Man,' 20th Century’s Nobel
laureate Albert Einstein, professor of theoretical physics and author of the
theoretical physics treatise on the general and special theories of relativity,
and our 21st Century’s Craig Venter, professor of biology and pharmacology, the
lead and directing scientist in the private-enterprise
decoding-of-the-human-genome project and pioneer scientist in synthetic
biology.)
In addition to providing students with a forum for
discussing topics of the week and sharing and exchanging their learning
insights and gratifying solutions to especially challenging problems, as well
as for airing their lingering unsolved problems with their learning and
inviting peer, and, as necessary, instructor, guidance to their solutions,
these discussion periods would ingrain in students mutually civil and
respectful informal debating skills and good conversational, interpersonal and
democratic-society responsibility-sharing and power-sharing skills. They would
be a vehicle for the positive, democratic-society socialization of youth. I
assert that much of the bully and dominance-based disrespect and violence by
individuals and groups of students toward, and negative stereotyping,
devaluation and dehumanization of, one another, carried over to adulthood,
stems from a lack of democratic civility and tolerance for different and, many
times, more vulnerable, others that results from a lack of socialization in
democratic-society values and social skills.
I also favor that all testing and grading be done online or
by computer and annually test-certified subject-matter-expert testing, grading
and improvement-performance-feedback personnel (Ph.D.s) anonymous to students
and teaching staff. We must not fear and obstruct digital and student-direct
labor-engaged and oriented education, in all of its incarnations, for it will
be, with its refinement in the short term, the highly beneficial, en masse,
results changer and equalizer in education. The student comes first, as well as
the taxpaying citizens’ efficient investment.
Non-profit (NP), free online educational institutions can
permanently offer free education and simultaneously expand by adopting the
existing NP funding model utilized by some NP corporations or organizations of
enlisting a supportership of financial patron donors (sustained or lifelong or
long-term supporters donating annually for voluntary tiered donor amounts,
based on the comfort of the individual or entity), donors who are dedicated to
and in support of free online education, and its accreditation by government
and acceptance [of its course-certificate and degree-vested students] by
business, and of anytime, discretionary special and convenience-paying donors,
and by offering as gifts for donations, or for sale in support of the NP,
downloadable and hard-media educational software programs and other recordings,
such as educational movies and documentaries, and lectures by or interviews
with accomplished or celebrity intellectuals hosted by themselves or others, as
well as by conducting special fundraising campaigns and accepting ads at their
websites from paying advertisers not interfering with their
intellectual-integrity-based educational mission and service/s (especially ads
and ad-money and support donations from educational-content and
intellectual-media advertisers, such as brain-exercise media like Lumosity,
learning-oriented toy makers and vendors, the bookstores Barnes & Noble and
Amazon, the publications National Geographic, Nature, New Scientist, Psychology
Today, Scientific American, Smithsonian, etc., while declining ads and ad money
and support donations from political, distinctly ideological, violence-related
and unsavory-enterprise or -source advertisers).
