Looking beyond evidences

Scientific evidence certainly helps us in achieving the stated goal but often times we get so caught up in them that we forget to look at all the other possible outcomes. We stop looking beyond the evidences. In this context, I liked a dialog from Patch Adams (must watch if you haven't!) -

Arthur: How many fingers do you see?

Patch: There are four fingers, Arthur.

Arthur: [You are just] another idiot. No! Look at me. You're focusing on the problem. If you focus on the problem, you can't see the solution. Never focus on the problem! Look beyond the fingers. How many do you see?

Patch: Eight.

Arthur: Yes! See what no one else sees. See what everyone chooses not to see... out of fear, conformity or laziness. See the whole world anew each day.

So try to see what everyone else chooses not to see out of fear, conformity or laziness. Look beyond the problem and evidences.

Are assessments really required?

Are assessments really required? Who are they important for - students or teachers/researchers? Do the students really need to know what they "know"? When they are in the class interacting with their peers and teachers then they are obviously learning "something". Education researchers keep on saying that the agency of learning needs to be with the learner (e.g. Collins) but then when we think about evaluation, we find that the students are evaluated on what the teachers/researchers think they should know. Moreover, any kind of evaluation seems to be framed to ascertain how good the teacher was or the learning environment was, and this is known by the performance of the student on the evaluations. Does the student really need to know how good the teacher was? Let us argue that the student really gains from the evaluation as he/she gets a chance to measure his/her knowledge and then compare with others to determine relative knowledge or use the measurement to secure further educational opportunities (e.g. progressing through the grades, transfer from school to college, etc.). This notion of quantification of knowledge is disturbing because can the evaluator really know "everything" the student learned? The evaluations are mostly based on what the students "ought to know" by the end of the school year. So if the evaluators don't know what the students really learned and they evaluate the students on what they should have learned, is that a fair way of ascertaining which students are more intelligent than others (very often evaluation results i.e. marks are used to indicate the intelligence of the student)? Moreover, given that we know that every student is unique and internalizes knowledge in different ways, are standardized evaluations justified?

Suppose we do away with the complete system of evaluation, and let the students discover & internalize knowledge in their own unique way then how can we know whether that student can or cannot do a specific task later on in life (example write a letter to the boss)? Well, I would argue that this task later on his life also presents a learning opportunity and can be utilized as such. There is a constant push to prepare our students to face the "harsh realities of life" and we justify their schooling along that argument. Hence we keep on testing them to see if they are well prepared to move to the next stage in life and this goes on throughout the life. Maybe the "harsh realities" aren't that harsh if we stop thinking like that. But alas, the generation before the students were brought up thinking like that and so are the students now. They will do the same to their students and it will go on... Is it all in the mind? Are evaluations a way to know what's in the mind? Who's mind - the teachers or the students?

Make my child the most intelligent of all...

This thought came to me when our Learning Science cohort was discussing the research study where they found that US students were not at par with students from other nations (particularly China and India). This race to be the "best" has been going on since the launch of Sputnik which spurred the US govt to invest a lot of money into educating the "citizens of tomorrow" so that they were scientific thinkers and could compete with the Soviets. With time the competitor changed and now its the Asians who are leading the race.

I have been wondering since that class discussion whether who is at the top really matters. The US wants its kids to beat the Chinese and then ..... then what? We'll have one more study which will claim that US kids are now at the top (and of course someone will dispute that claim and there will be many more studies trying to prove/disprove that). Excelling in studies is definitely important and one must strive to gain as much knowledge as possible but one must not forget that every child is distinctly different. That doesn't mean that US kids are dumb or Indian kids are intelligent but what it means is that people from different cultures have different goals and needs and these influence the way the entire community thinks and acts. For example, in India, learning is given a divine status. There is a goddess of learning. So it is automatically put at a very high pedestal and is viewed as something that will enhance a person spiritually and help him/her lead a better life. One may not hear or say this aloud but I feel it is there within each one of us as a subconscious force driving us to gain knowledge. There is also a huge social value attached to education. Educated people are respected by the society and they automatically gain a high status in the community. So you see, the motivation factor to gain knowledge is completely different as compared to US where the stress is on beating the kids across the globe. Of course these are not the only ones and there are LOTS of other factors influencing the game but for the sake of argument I've used these couple. In fact now even the Indians are getting into the race business...

So all these examples are simply to stress that every community has its own "local" needs and goals. In trying to compete with the kids across the globe we are putting too much stress on our kids at home and that is getting reflected in disastrous ways (increased suicide rates, increase in diseases amongst kids, etc.). Why can't we just settle for goals that are meaningful to each community and structure the learning experience of the kids accordingly. Why do we need to make every child on the globe the most intelligent? Some of you might be saying globalization demands that. But like we saw, education is a complicated matter... it's not just schools, kids and curriculum. There's a huge socio-cultural aspect to it which is often neglected. Globalization can merge markets across the globe but can it also merge socio-economic and cultural values? People across the globe will remain different and their differences should be acknowledged and respected. The race to be the global first shouldn't take a toll on the kids... let them play and learn at their own pace.

What's the price of evidence?

For me this question is mainly situated within the context of research and hence my focus is on experimental evidence. Is spending billions of dollars and thousands of man hours worth the effort in trying to find evidence to support a claim? I was recently watching a National Geographic program where they were investigating the horrible 9/11 attack. There is a lot of controversy surrounding why the twin towers fell down - because of heat from the burning aviation fuel or because of the impact. Numerous agencies have investigated this controversy and have their stories ready for the consumer. Purdue even got a grant allowing them to model the whole incident in way that allows everyone to analyze each second of the impact from 360 degrees and find out what happened. They spent almost 2 years and (I am guessing) millions of dollars in addition to the thousands of man hours into building this excellent model from scratch. In the end they concluded that the building collapsed as a result of heat that melted the steel beams holding the tower upright. However, another agency dismissed this evidence claiming that it wasn't representative of what actually happened and started their own investigation.

There are two things that this program made me think. The first is that in cases of this magnitude, anything is possible. In fact it might be both the heat and the impact. That's kind of logical conclusion. But I don't claim expertise on that and hence won't comment on it further. However, the second point is the relevance of investing so much effort into finding evidences and then dismissing them. Evidences are definitely needed to substantiate a claim but my point is at what cost? Take another example, in education research, millions of dollars are spent every year identifying and analyzing problems and then designing solutions for them. We even spend a lot of time investigating issues which are kind of obvious (like if a kid studies in a quiet room then he/she would learn better). We also spend considerable research effort (time and money) into proving the value of a particular education technique (like learning by doing is better than rote learning... kind of obvious too huh?). My point here is not that finding evidence is not necessary or useless. It is absolutely needed but what I am asking is to consider the cost involved in the task. Is it worth the cost?

Designers as change makers

An interesting series of interviews:

http://www.designwala.org/2010/01/designers-as-changemakers-part-4-ritwik-dey/

Froebel - The concept of kindergarten

Froebel was a German pedagogue, a student of Pestalozzi who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities. He developed the concept of the “kindergarten”, and also coined the word now used in German and English.

Read more about them (pretty interesting):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Fröbel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Heinrich_Pestalozzi

but unfortunately, the concept of kindergarten was modified by most people (Dewey etc.) and the current form is a distorted version. Read more in this book (Chapter 3):-

Tinkering towards utopia - A century of public school reform

or a review of the book here:-

http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/263

Taming the free spirit

When a child is born, parents wait for the day when he will run around the house and make noise. They encourage playful acts and help the child to walk on his own feet. The child grows up innocent and playful believing that everyone will appreciate the playfulness. But with the first step inside the school, a different world greets the child. He is confronted with a strange concept called discipline. This concept is hard to understand because it prohibits running around in this strange place called "classroom". In spite of the fact that so many other chubby little friends are also in that strange place, one cannot talk to them unless permitted to do so. "Permitted" what does that mean? The buck quickly passes to the parents who are summoned by the school only to be told how indisciplined their child is. The reason - he talks in class and does not sit still. Excuse me! Isn't a child supposed to "play"? How can you expect the child to sit still? But the school doesn't care. This is what has been the norm for god knows how many years (maybe lots of decades). If the warning doesn't bring any changes, the child is promptly labelled as hyper-active child or a child having come kind of attention-deficit disorder.

Poor kids... what dreams they had, what fantasies they cherished, nothing mattered anymore. All that mattered was what the grown-ups thought was best for them. Maybe what's best for them is to just let them be kids and not force discipline upon them. Won't they then grow up to be rowdy, good for nothing, cave-men like people? Maybe they will, maybe they won't; I don't have an answer... but why not try to think of an education system that doesn't try to "convert" every child into a fact remembering, number crunching, good-boy; like everybody else. When the child was born, he was yours special, an unique gift. Why try to mold that unique gift into something common? If only they could speak up, we could have known how much they really hated the "grown-up world" that they were being trained to face.

(PS: Replace he -> she, boy -> girl, etc. at will. )