two things on academics

My friend Jim sent me a couple of interesting things recently. One was information about a collaborative information project he is helping ramp up. In a (surely inaccurate) nutshell it's a bit of a wikipedia / cooperation commons / xanadu mashup. I can see tie ins with my own quixotic belief system project as well. As a bonus, he sent a link to the blog of Geet Duggal, one of the principals of the project. Geet authored a physics paper called What is an Energy Landscape that includes a section on "the ass-pains of an atomic pair potential". Geet turned me on to the term Bloom Filter, which is something I'd never heard of despite the fact that I implemented what is apparently a specific algorithm for a Bloom filter at my last company (I simply referred to it as the Ullmann algorithm, used for subgraph isomorphism searches of molecular compounds).

Jim also sent a set of links to a series of articles written by Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve. Murray examines the realities of the modern education system and the role it plays in society. Here are some excerpts (and the links):

Intelligence in the Classroom

Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

What's Wrong With Vocational School?
Too many Americans are going to college

Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses--probably a majority of them--are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient.

Aztecs vs. Greeks
Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise.

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.

Comments

[Ms. Jen]

Dav,

Thanks for bringing this up, both on what is the level of IQ and instruction needed to pass the various exams.  There is an expectation in this country that if we give everyone equal opportunity that everyone will achieve at the same passing or excellent level.  As someone who has taught at both the K-12 level and undergraduate private college level, this is patently untrue. 

I have erred by raising the bar to the high level and expecting all students to pass.  At the junior hight level, it was a rude shock when they didn't.  At the college level, when one or two did not, I did not massage their grade to raise them up. But the next semester they came back and delivered for me.  And I still admire those students.

As for high IQ and humility, I wish in my own public K-12 education that I had been tracked out to more challenging classes earlier.  My family encouraged me towards math and science, which I excelled at, but I was terrified by writing and English composition.  At 26, I made a personal challenge at my "writer's block" by signing up to write reviews and interviews for a local indie music magazine.  After 5-6 years, I was able to overcome my fear of writing, then came blogging... and here we are.  But in many ways, I wish, I had been challenged to write and apply myself to writing much earlier, as well as rhetoric and logic.

Then programming and languages might be easier for me... 

;o)

[Dav Yaginuma]

Yeah. Having gone to a "party college" I can atest that there are plenty of people attending universities who really have no reason to be there that's beneficial for themselves or society.

In Austria, and undoubtedly other countries, the school system decides around grade 8 whether you'll attend a vocational high school or a college prep version. When I first heard that, my reaction was what an awful thing to have your fate decided at such a young age. But upon further reflection, I realized that people I knew really showed their true aptitude before they got to high school.

[Ms. Jen]

Hi Dav,

A friend of mine went to school in Germany, and he was slotted into a manual voctech school for high school.  He learned cabinet making.  At 26 he decided he wanted more out of his life and went to college in the US, Art Center in Pasadena, and studied Product/Industrial Design. 

I am not sure what I think of slotting folks at 14.  I always tested out that I should do things with my hands and am afraid that the education folks would have sent me on a non-college track.  I thrived in college and got the best grades of my school career because the classes were interesting for the first time. 

Now I use my hands and my brains together on my computer.... ;o)

But I see your side of the argument and the reasoning above.  I do think that there are a good set of folks who would benefit from voctech school rather than academic high school and college.  Then perhaps, academic high school could be geared to really challenge the kids who will go on to college.