joshuago’s education Bookmarks

Dictators provide strong incentives for the ruling clique; democracies provide more modest benefits for everyone else. For democracy to beat dictatorship, the dispersed population needs to have the skills and motivation to work collaboratively to defeat dictatorial coups and executive aggrandizement.

It's a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees. The answer to saving the forest (or the trees) isn't always to suggest we burn the whole thing down.

It wasn't socioeconomics, school funding, or racism, that accounted for the students' poor academic performance; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents.

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.

The path to many good jobs and others is community college. You spend a couple of years getting a certificate or an Associate in Arts degree. It's not expensive and loans are not hard to get. A call to action and a new way of thinking for black America.

The World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum. A study of the theory and practice of the Web’s technologies would traverse many key areas of our discipline.

Why does HCL Technologies, a $2.5 billion (revenue) company with more than 3,000 people across 21 offices in 15 states, not hiring more people in America? The CEO's answer: because most American college grads are "unemployable." Beyond the need to bolster competencies in math, the hard sciences, and basic problem solving, U.S. schools at all levels must place a greater emphasis on global history, foreign languages, and other subjects that prepare students for jobs and life outside this country.

Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven.

The pattern of the basic curriculum is extraordinarily rigid, and has never been critically reconstructed from the ground up. The schools continue to teach it for no better reason than that it has always been taught.