A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory…Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music”. It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music…are considered very advanced topics and generally put off till college, and more often graduate school.
As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language—to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key…One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”
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Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this sort of nightmare.
So begins Paul Lockhart’s scathing critique of how mathematics is taught in this country, A Mathematician’s Lament. The book is an expansion of Lockhart’s essay of the same title. I encourage you to read the essay, buy the book, and share your thoughts in comments.
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Caitlin Flanagan is such a smashingly good writer that I normally devour anything she’s written. But when I saw her latest piece in the Atlantic—roughly 5000 words in opposition to public school gardens, where students learn horticulture instead of long division—it seemed well, too petty a subject for Flanagan’s vast talents—so I put it aside without reading it.
Today I read it. Wow, was I wrong. This is Caitlin Flanagan at her blistering best. I’ll offer you a few choice quotes, but my real recommendation is to leave now and go read the entire piece.
With the Edible Schoolyard..the idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a social agenda has reached rock bottom. This kind of misuse of instructional time…has been employed to cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours over the years, so that they might be indoctrinated in whatever the fashionable idea of the moment or the school district might be. One year it’s hygiene and the another it’s anti-Communism; in one city it’s safe-sex “outercourse” and in another it’s abstinence-only education.
Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it?…If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: A way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.
Until our kids have a decent chance at mastering the essential skills and knowledge that they will need to graduate from high school, we should devote every resource and every moment of their academic day to helping them realize that life-changing goal. Otherwise we become complicit—through our best intentions—in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, undereducated underclass, but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its state.
There’s much more where that came from. Why are you still here?
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Two weeks ago, I posted the first half of the honors exam that I administered last spring at Oberlin college. I am following up today with the second half. Once again, I’ve translated some of the questions from economese to English, but am fairly confident that nothing significant has been lost in the translation. This starts with Question 6:
Continue reading ‘The Honors Class, Part II’
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Each year, the economics department at Oberlin College invites an outside examiner to determine who among its top graduating seniors should receive an honors degree. Last spring, I was that outside examiner. The seven candidates had several hours to complete a written exam (which I wrote), and then a few weeks later, I interviewed each of them face to face.
I thought my readers here might be interested in seeing the written exam. It’s by no means comprehensive; entire areas of economics are omitted. Instead, it’s supposed to test core material and ways of thinking that I believe should mostly be second nature to any top economics graduate.
Where necessary, I’ve translated some of these questions from the original economese to something approximating English. Occasionally, a little has been lost in the translation, but not, I think, too much.
There were ten questions on the exam. I’ll post five today and the remaining five next week.
Here, then, is Part I:
Continue reading ‘The Honors Class, Part I’
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The final chapter of The Big Questions is called “What to Study”. This post is about where to study it.
Stanford professor Carolyn Hoxby reports that in the college admissions market, the big change over the past 40 years is students’ increased willingness to travel far from home—not surprising since the costs of long distance travel and communication have fallen dramatically over that time. The main effects are these:
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