Rand Paul gets schooled: Libertarian fantasies don’t help kids learn — teachers do [View all]
by JAMES GOODMAN
When I was in elementary school, I remember wondering about the day when teaching would become automated, and human teachers would be obsolete. I remember thinking that information could be delivered through computers (as I was seeing with early educational software) and that students could even input responses that could be automatically evaluated. And the technology was very new then, so of course it would only get better (and of course it has gotten much better). What I failed to understand, at that age, was the critical importance of direct human interaction in the process of education.
According to Politico, Rand Paul is planning a major push on education reform, including education choice, school choice, vouchers, charter schools, you name it. As one specific example for improving education, Paul suggested that if you have one person in the country who is, like, the best at explaining calculus, that person maybe should teach every calculus class in the country. He allowed that Youd still have local teachers to reinforce and try to explain and help the kids, but youd have some of these extraordinary teachers teaching millions of people in the classroom. As an example, Paul lauded the work of Salman Khan, the creator of Khan Academy, a growing vault of education videos aimed to comprehensively cover a wide variety of traditional school courses and other topics as well.
I like Salman Khans videos I think they can be a valuable tool. Just like all sorts of other educational media, talented teachers can utilize these assets wisely to help complement their teaching, and there are many different approaches that can be used to great success. Salman Khan does a very nice job of explaining difficult concepts. This happens to be a great strength of mine as well. And while my knack for explaining the concepts of calculus have been of tremendous value to me in my teaching, I must say that the explaining aspect of teaching is one small part of what we do, and that the best teachers (and this goes for just about every discipline, not just higher-level mathematics) do not simply stand in front of the class and feed knowledge into their skulls. This sort of approach to education is one of the flaws in our system, as too often teachers gravitate toward this conventional approach.
Here is the biggest problem with this approach (and thus with Pauls vision of education): If your brand of teaching is simply explaining things to kids, then youre not teaching them to think. Youre not teaching them to problem-solve. Youre teaching them to learn what you tell them, and to be able to reproduce something similar. What we need to do in education, however, and in particular in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education, is to cultivate creative critical thinking skills. As former Secretary of Education Richard Riley said, We are currently preparing students for jobs that dont yet exist, using technologies that havent been invented, in order to solve problems we dont even know are problems yet. This is always in my mind as I teach my math courses. I have to constantly remind myself to get out of the way of the students, to not jump in with a hint or answer too quickly, and to challenge them to ponder a concept before I explain it to them.
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http://www.salon.com/2014/08/10/rand_paul_gets_schooled_libertarian_fantasies_dont_help_kids_learn_teachers_do/