I am watching my teenage son Bobby after school. He is, as usual,
playing a game on his computer. I would
prefer that he do his biology homework. His biology teacher has made two strong opinions very clear. One is that creationists
are beneath contempt: the other is that Bobby is fundamentally unwilling
to put effort into learning.
When Bobby is allowed to do what he wants, he buys
a new computer game every few months,
and then spends hundreds of hours of intense concentration learning to play it.
It strikes me that his biology teacher is ignoring this evidence in her
diagnosis of Bobby, for almost exactly the
same reason that the creationists ignore the evidence of evolution: she allows
her ideological self-interest to overwhelm her ability to analyze the evidence.
Admittedly, this particular teacher may not know
the details of the behavior of this particular
student, but the educational establishment has made this judgment about a large
segment of the student body, while being
perfectly aware of the fact that this segment puts incredible mental energy into these games. Also, I have taken a
little poetic license in describing today's scene, as it will take me longer to
write this than Bobby is likely to continue to play the same game.
The
The school would no doubt argue that shooting aliens is inherently more
attractive to teenage boys than algebra, but I really wonder if this is
true. Surely a bigger difference is that
the software industry is like an American corporation, whose continued
existence reqires it to provide a product attractive to its customers, while a
school is like a Soviet factory, whose continued existence has nothing to do
with the wishes of its customers but everything to do with its ability to
convince central authority that its activities are politically correct.
The core reason I am willing to vote my tax dollars
to have Bobby taught biology is that I hope Bobby will come to have an appreciation of the
elegance of & causes and effects of
natural selection, and of the biochemical mechanics of the process. His teacher
would probably describe her role more in terms of the possibility of his
becoming a professional biologist of some kind.
To
become a biologist, Bobby would have to understand core biological concepts,
but would also have
to learn to communicate with other biologists without saying things like "the spiky things in the
middle of the flower covered with dusty stuff'. To save time, improve accuracy, and to sound
professional, biologists have invented terms like stamen, pistil, etc.
Unfortunately, it is much easier to test whether Bobby knows these terms than it is to test how well he
appreciates the inner beauty of the theory of evolution, so the school biology
curriculum evolves (by a process of natural selection) to stress learning these names more and more, and
appreciating the structure of our knowledge of biology less and less. Biology teachers
who recognize the problem and try to compensate for it are considered troublemakers by the school
establishment and therefore never achieve the seniority necessary to
participate in the evolution of the biology curriculum.
Bobby is therefore faced with a biology curriculum
almost devoid of what makes biology interesting, and replete with boring memorization of
terminology. That he prefers computer games is hardly surprising. Most (but not all) of the teenagers
I know who do study
hard appear to be somewhat colorless personalities, apparently completely motivated by the desire to
please authority and not at all by the intrinsic interest of what they were studying, and although
I worry about the choices Bobby is making, I would certainly not wish him to be like that.
A hundred years ago, most children would get home
from school to face the demand from their parents to go out and weed the meadow, or some
equally enthralling activity. Homework might then be a welcome excuse to avoid this task. Computer
games thus pose a
new challenge for the educational system, but they also show how to meet the challenge, both ideologically and technically.
Ideologically they show that children do not have
to be coerced (and in many cases cannot be coerced some even bring guns into schools and
blaze away in protest) into making an effort to acquire a new skill: it simply has to be presented to
them in an interesting
way. Of course we knew this long before computer games: children learn to walk and talk without coercion;
the few that do not usually have some clearly comprehensible disability to explain it. As soon as
they have mastered these skills, they run around calling "Daddy, Daddy, why's the sky blue?
Mommy, Mommy why's the grass green?" Our collective response is to send them to school in
the belief that they have
to be made miserable before they will be willing to learn! If Martian anthropologists ever arrived to
study our education system, their executive summary would undoubtedly say
something like "At the age of 3 (5-6 Earth years) humans are segregated from the adult
community in institutions that turn them from bright inquisitive children into bored teenagers
who sometimes commit suicide. No adult we talked to was able to give us an explanation for the purpose of
this treatment that did not contain obvious
falsehoods. For comparable earth practices, see the reports of earlier anthropologists under the headings Female
Circumcision, Trial by Ordeal, Human Sacrifice, etc."
Technically,
computer games show us how to help children understand complex ideas without coercion. The '
The core problem is that our existing K-12 educational system is a
monopoly, funded and protected by the
government, ultimately backed up by military force. The characteristics of any monopoly of any reasonable size or duration
include publicity on the holy mission of the monopoly, combined with decisions
that are always entirely consistent with the convenience
of the decision-makers. When AT&T was a monopoly it produced a fountain of propaganda about the holy mission of
bringing phone service to the population,
while refusing to provide the same 800 number for instate and interstate
service. Its propaganda was not quite as ridiculous as Pravda, perhaps because
it was aware that its audience had
access to other information, but it clearly originated from the same mindset. Similarly, while we were all listening
to the usual propaganda about the dedication of teachers,
When AT&T lost its monopoly, the message from
management changed drastically. I remember watching Bell Atlantic's CEO on the
internal TV channel saying something like
"Including paperwork, it costs us eleven man-hours to install a phone line
for a new customer. It takes the cable
company six man-hours. As long as this discrepancy exists, the cable company will be able to take business
away from us, and your job and mine are in jeopardy." As a result of this attack of reality, long-distance
phone rates fell by a factor of
thirty. I see no reason to doubt that if the education system was deregulated,
it would not become thirty times as
cost-effective. Indeed, I believe the change would be much greater than
the change in the phone system.
When AT&T was
deregulated, an unfortunate side-effect was the accounting scandal at Worldcom. Since deregulation of the schools would
affect the lives of our children, it is worth taking some time to
understand the dangers and try to minimize them. When a longstanding monopoly is broken up, there is a general
lack of understanding of alternative methods, since the monopoly has put so
much effort into suppressing effective inquiry into the subject. This
places an enormous premium on leaders with the capacity to make decisions based on the scanty information
available, despite the conventional wisdom (created by previous AT&T propaganda) that these innovations will
not work. At first, the opportunities
for improvement are so vast that sensible, though imperfect, decisions reap enormous rewards, as Bernie Ebbers
demonstrated. He came to be treated as a God. As various companies find various improvements and compete among each
other, they exhaust the supply of
obvious improvements that reap vast rewards, and cut prices to compete
with each other. Bernie Ebbers could only maintain his reputation as a God by
finding further improvements, again ignoring the conventional wisdom. However,
his previous successes had forced the expert establishment to reassess their
position, with the result that they had come
to figure out the difference between scientific evidence and AT&T propaganda. Now they were much more
likely to be right, and Bernie Ebbers wrong.
The results of his second generation of sweeping decisions were therefore incompatible with his reputation as a God, and the
inevitable decision was made to hide the
results. Because he was a God, his underlings agreed to participate in the
coverup, and the mechanism of external audit had been allowed to decay over the
years, so that about ten billion dollars disappeared before the coverup
collapsed.
External examinations of students play the same
role in the educational system as external audits do for corporations, and they are welcomed
by teachers' unions with all the
enthusiasm that Bernie Ebbers welcomed external auditors, and for exactly the
same reasons. Just like Bernie Ebbers, they
have been able to subvert the purpose of the exams, substituting tests of the names of parts of a flower for tests of
understanding of the theory of
evolution, for example. Before deregulating the schools, it is critical that we
reinvigorate the effectiveness of the exams.
To do so, it is instructive to understand how exams
came to play such an important role in our
society. The first institution to use exams extensively for personnel selection
was the Chinese civil service. Confucius
played a major role in establishing the system in the ?? century. Meanwhile, the civil service in Western
countries was staffed by recommendation
by influential individuals. When the British East India Company found itself in
the unexpected position of administering large patches of
In
It is certainly true
today that all examinations that drive the education system are devised
exclusively by people who have passed extremely similar exams. This runs right
through the system: the hurdles on the way
to becoming a college professor are designed by college professors: the SATs
and other tests taken by schoolchildren are devised by professors and
teachers, chosen by their ability to pass similar tests. There is no reason to
believe this is less dangerous in
The details of the tests must certainly be left to experts, and the
experts will inevitably be chosen by their
ability to pass tests. The only way of mitigating the effects of the "the test
that showed me to be a genius is obviously the best test" syndrome is to
hold the test designers accountable for the
"success" of the test. This can only be measured by demanding the test predict the future success of
the student. From the viewpoint of society
as a whole, the future success of the student is perhaps best measured by the income tax he pays, less the cost of incarcerating
him and/or making him welfare payments
etc. (I will call this amount, summed over his lifetime his 'Net Contribution' for
short.) The way that the success of a test is measured is not critical to my
argument: I simply wanted to give an example of an objective, quantitative
measure.
The structure that the government could put in place
to ensure an effective educational system is now clear. Every student would be exposed at
regular intervals to multiple testing services, who bid for the privilege. Each testing service then
gives its best estimate
of the Net Contribution of each student. The testing 'services will be paid (eventually) based on the success
of their predictions. Meanwhile, each set of test results will be compared to the previous
predictions for that student. If the predictions have improved, the school that the
student attended in the interval will be paid a bonus (proportional to the
improvement) in addition to the regular (voucher) per-pupil amount. If the predictions have gone down, a refund will be
demanded from the school.
The experts in the testing companies will still
exhibit the bias that tests that show the expert's limitations are somehow less worthwhile tests,
but the testing organization will be powerfully motivated to discover what
factors do, in reality rather than in politically-correct educational theory,
predict the future productivity of a citizen, and how to devise tests that uncover these
factors. Once the tests are devised, schools will be powerfully motivated to find ways of
eliciting these factors in their students, whether or not the teachers recognize them as virtues.
For
example, our inner cities contain many girls in homes led by a single mother
who became one while still at school herself. Statistics show that many of them
will repeat that
pattern. Most of us would agree that this is undesirable, and it certainly
affects the Net Contribution
of this girl. The testing services would therefore be motivated to detect this situation and to find ways
of estimating the chances of a particular girl falling into this trap. Once the tests
reflect this factor, the schools will be motivated to influence it. Perhaps religious schools will
find it profitable to instill moral values in these girls. Perhaps academically challenging
schools will find they can profitably inspire girls to become doctors instead of
unmarried mothers. My point is that the government has removed itself from the
discussion of which approach is best, merely saying in effect "you figure out the best
way, and we will pay you when it works". Protestations of the teachers' unions that this is not within the scope of
the schools, or that "schools are just a reflection
of society" (which has always left me wondering what the speaker would regard
as the reason we pay teachers) would give way to economic self-interest.
Can we afford this? Actually we pay about half a
trillion dollars a year today for an ineffective
educational system I do not believe that an effective one would be nearly as expensive, even including the cost of testing. Ten
thousand dollars per pupil per year is a lot of money: Bobby spends
maybe two hundred a year on computer games, and probably learns more from them
than from school. Long distance rates went down by a factor of thirty after
AT&T was deregulated, suggesting that we could have a school system that accomplished three times as much useful learning
for one thousand dollars per pupil per year, with perhaps another
thousand for testing.
What might such a system look like? From here on I
will be speculating.
Tomorrow's grade schools could look more like summer
camps today. Different games would be in progress at different locations, and each student could
choose which one to join.
Each game would be moderated by an adult (no doubt with the title 'teacher')
and would be
designed (unknown to all but the most discerning students) to induce the student to play it for enjoyment,
but to learn useful knowledge in order to play it well (many existing games can only be
played by those who can read: exciting foreign films can only be appreciated by reading if they have been
dubbed).
At puberty, children become concerned about how they
will fit into the adult world: they are no longer content to be children. High schools can
take advantage of this by adopting a
more serious tone than grade schools: they will function in a way intermediate
between libraries and today's high schools.
Teachers will be tutors rather than disciplinarians. Whenever possible, students will play useful roles:
those who wish to become doctors will
be asked to learn first aid as well as biology; prospective lawyers will be
asked to participate in the internal
discipline of the school; prospective electricians and network engineers have obvious roles to play. Computer
games will take the place of most lecture-type
activities by teachers, and will also remove the burden of marking homework. Homework itself will be
computer-game-like, in the sense of
Back to today: American colleges are far more functional than K-12
schools, presumably because they do to some
extent compete with each other. They are significantly contaminated by contact with K-12, and the
competitive pressures are substantially diluted by their need to conform
to the various accreditation boards.
Colleges
choose students primarily based on their school GPA, which is partially a measure of how submissive the
student was to the boredom of the high school curriculum. When the submissive students arrive at college; the college
finds it has to use some of the same coercive
measures as the high school to attract the student's attention. Once that pattern is established, and
the SAT testers measure themselves on how well they predict first-year
performance at college, they inevitably find themselves measuring how submissive the student is, thus becoming part of the
problem. College professors, like
high-school teachers, hate the position they find themselves in, but seem unable to find a way out. Each professor does what
he can to stimulate his students, but is
almost helpless in the grip of a defective system. Part of the problem is that
the professor is himself someone who
managed to survive the defects of the system and who is therefore not
necessarily the best person to empathize with someone who cannot. The Chinese
civil service syndrome strikes again!
Each generation of college professors is tempted to
explain the situation by the theory that this generation of students is less motivated than
his own because of adverse changes in society. This opinion is clearly expressed in Plato's
dialogs, and no doubt was prevalent for hundreds of years before that. Since this opinion has been
expressed by every
mature generation since time immemorial, and human civilization has not come to
an end, it is clearly an artifact of
human nature rather than an unbiased explanation of the situation.
Perhaps the society we live in is sufficiently
different than the one that natural selection shaped us for, that almost all
teenagers find it difficult to adjust themselves to it. By the time they are
middle-aged, they have adjusted much better, and have so nearly forgotten what a struggle it was, that they
cannot sympathize with the next generation of teenagers. A few teenagers of each
generation, like Richard Feynman or Bill Gates, seem somehow to avoid the need to adjust, and
spend the years while their faculties are peaking accomplishing amazing things.
Others, like Osama Bin Laden, also refuse to adjust, but act destructively instead.
Actually Osama Bin Laden and Bill Gates appear to be
similar people. Both grew up in wealthy families and had expensive educations.
Each one grew up with a clear vision of how he thought the world could be
improved, and a ruthless determination to bring his vision into reality. Bill Gates
himself credits his success not to his *K- 12 teachers, or to his Harvard professors, but to
the fact that his high school installed a computer terminal and allowed him to play with it
unsupervised. If he is correct (and who should know better than he) that computer
terminal was one of the best investments in human history. The contributions of both Bill
Gates and Osama Bin Laden to humanity are hotly debated, but I will estimate, without providing
evidence, that the net benefit of Bill Gates, and the net disbenefit of Osama Bin Laden, are both
approximately one trillion dollars. If the computer terminal at Lakeview High turned an Osama
into Bill Gates, it was worth two
trillion dollars.
Obviously
the two trillion dollar terminal was an extreme case, but there are countless examples of the high cost we pay
for the current ineffective system. Recently, a boy on an Indian reservation shot
several teachers, fellow students, and himself. His family described him as 'always
thinking'. I believe that he had an original mind, and was continually punished by the school for this. I
understand his reaction completely. I felt
the same way myself
at his age, and once attempted suicide at school, after the following incident.
In math class, we had just been taught the formula
for solving quadratic equations: if a*x^2 + b*x + c = 0, then x = (-b +/- SQRT(b^2
4*a*c))/2*a . I started asking questions about how this worked, and was told by the
teacher to be quiet. I quickly figured it out by myself: the easiest quadratic equations
to solve were the ones in which b was zero: then the equation was a*x^2 = -c, and the
solution was x = +/- SQRT(-c/a). In the original equation, -b/2a was the average of the two
roots, so defining y = x b/2a and
substituting in the original equation gave an equation of the simplified form
(in y).
Having figured this out, I started to wonder whether cubic equations (of
the form x^3 + a*x^2 + b*x + c = 0) could be
solved. I quickly realized that defining y = x a/3 eliminated the term in x^2, giving an equation of
the form y^3 + d*y + e = 0, but could find no way of eliminating the
term in y. I felt in my bones that there must be a way, and neglected my homework while trying out various ideas.
Suddenly I realized that the substitution
y = CUBEROOT(z) +d/(3*CUBEROOT(z)) created a quadratic equation in z, which could be solved by the formula I had been
taught. There were various complications,
including the fact that even when all the roots of the original equation were real numbers, z normally turned out to be
complex, and I had to work out ways of finding
the cube root of a complex number to find y. By this time I was so excited I forgot
about homework altogether.
Before I had figured out all these complications, I
found myself in the principal's office: the fact that instead of my normal
partial homework I was now turning in no homework at all had not gone unnoticed. I
remember trying to explain something about cubic equations, but the principal, himself a Latin teacher, had no interest
in this. I received a punishment unique in
the history of the school as far as I know: I was given six lashes with a cane on each of three consecutive days, a
total of eighteen lashes. (Reviewing this,
there may have been more than one day between sessions to allow me to heal, but
this is the way I remember it.)
Looking back on the incident, I wonder why I attempted suicide after the
punishment was complete: surely it would
have been more logical to do so before. Also did I try to interest my math teacher in my efforts? He was
generally discouraging of my curiosity,
but he might have tried to mitigate the punishment. Did he ever get to hear of the cubic equations? Did he feel that trying to
influence an already-published decision would be detrimental to school
discipline? Did he just not care?
Years
later I discovered that my method of solving cubic equations was a slight modification of the one
discovered by Tartaglia several hundred years ago. This was one of the first discoveries of the
renaissance that was clearly known to surpass the knowledge of classical times,
and helped to inspire the intellectual self-confidence that propelled the renaissance
forward. If I had succeeded in interesting my math teacher in my ideas, would I have become a math professor? I
think I would have been a good one, but even if that's not true, excluding me
from this career because of my curiosity does not seem rational.
The
decisions that determined my life are far beyond recall, but it gives me
enormous pain to
see my son rebuffed by his school for the same reasons I was. I dedicate this essay to him, and to the boy in the Indian school.