Why Johnny can't hypothesize, and the US can't do education

An excerpt reported in Scientific American from a panel discussion on US education moderated by someone from the Wall Street Journal. Doomed from the start.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=why-johnny-cant-hypothesize-a-discu-2009-10-26&sc=DD_20091027

My comment follows.

*****************

[...]

"The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and sciences," added Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Whereas other countries recruit teachers from the top tier of graduates, he said, "America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third."

Convincing star college scientists to enter the field of K-12 education can be a hard sell, especially when comparing salaries of public school teachers with those elsewhere in the science industry. Universities entice great minds with pay that is more competitive within the field—physicists generally earning more than humanities instructors to reflect jobs outside of the ivory tower. Public schools, however, pay teachers based on seniority and education rather than field.

Aside from upping the competitiveness of science and math teacher salaries, most of the panelists agreed that competition among schools needed to be increased. "Competition is extremely weak with respect to most education contexts," said Christopher Edley, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and former member of the Obama education transition team. He and others noted that schools should be brought into more direct competition with each other (in part by expanding student choices through the creation of charter schools). Advances in science or math education are often not embraced as quickly as those in private industry because schools and instructors have little external incentive to improve their product (other than meeting basic proficiency requirements).

Competition, however, shouldn't entirely overtake the role of regulation, concluded Edley. "This is a huge, huge industry," he said. "Ultimately, you're going to have to use competition to identify the innovations that work, but then… require of low-performing schools that they adopt best practices." The education policy debate, noted Murray, is not unlike that currently taking place over health care: Do you create an environment with forced competition or place more emphasis on regulation?

*************

The US is a slime of worms when it comes to education. A miniscule elite (artificially fed from other countries) and an overwhelmingly undereducated, falsely educated and just plain uneducated general public. The solutions suggested here will be less than useless.

As long as the goal is a few top brains, the rest of us get nothing.  Instead, the States should aim to develop the best possible knowledge and skills at the middle of the Gaussian curve mentioned by Fyngyrs. This would not only give a much broader foundation for the best performers to rise from, but also give underachievers a much more attainable target. It's also a damn sight more democratic. And it requires a completely different focus from the US. One that makes sure that ALL schools regardless of location or intake turn out an equally high standard of "product" - our kids, the next generation. It's been done (in Sweden, for instance) and it can and should be done everywhere. But there's no chance at all of  this happening in the US under the tyranny of profit-driven capitalism. It' s not dog-eat-dog competition that's the answer, but supportive emulation.

Brains, astrocytes and octopuses

From Scientific American, about brain cells called glia, that could well be more important to thought than neurons.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-root-of-thought-what&sc=DD_20091027

My comment follows.

*********

The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do?
Nearly 90 percent of the brain is composed of glial cells, not neurons. Andrew Koob argues that these overlooked cells just might be the source of the imagination

[...]

LEHRER: Could you describe some of the early experiments that first led scientists to reconsider the role of glial cells?

KOOB: Glial experiments didn't get going until the 1960s. All scientists knew about glia was that if you put neurons in petri dish, you had to have glia, or neurons would die. Then, Stephen W. Kuffler at Harvard, for reasons unknown, decided to test Pedro's accepted theory of insulation. This was around same time that cell counts in the brain revealed glial cells to be nearly 90% of the brain (this is where the neuron based idea that we only use 10% of our brain comes from). Kuffler is notable because he ironically established the Harvard 'neuro' biology department while he was performing these groundbreaking glial experiments. Anyway, Kuffler took astrocytes from the leech and mud puppy and added potassium, something that is known to flow out of neurons after they are stimulated. He thought this would confirm Pedro's theory that glial cells were insulators. What he found instead was that the electrical potential of glial cells responded to potassium. Kuffler and colleagues found that astrocytes exhibited an electrical potential, much like neurons. They also discovered in the frog and the leech that astrocytes were influenced by neuronal ion exchange, a process long held to be the chemical counterpart to thought. Since then many researchers have completed experiments on the communicatory ability of glial cells with neurons, including in the late 80s and early 90s when it was discovered glial cells respond to and release 'neuro' transmitters.

LEHRER: Why are calcium waves important?

KOOB: In short, calcium waves are how astrocytes communicate to themselves. Astrocytes have hundreds of 'endfeet' spreading out from their body. They look like mini octopi, and they link these endfeet with blood vessels, other astrocytes and neuronal synapses. Calcium is released from internal stores in astrocytes as they are stimulated, then calcium travels through their endfeet to other astrocytes. The term 'calcium waves' describes the calcium release and exchange between astrocytes and between astrocytes and neurons. Scientists at Yale, most notably Ann H. Cornell-Bell and Steven Finkbeiner, have shown that calcium waves can spread from the point of stimulation of one astrocyte to all other astrocytes in an area hundreds of times the size of the original astrocyte. Furthermore, calcium waves can also cause neurons to fire. And calcium waves in the cortex are leading scientists to infer that this style of communication may be conducive to the processing of certain thoughts. If that isn't convincing, it was recently shown that a molecule that stimulates the same receptors as THC can ignite astrocyte calcium release.

LEHRER: You suggest that glia and their calcium waves might play a role in creativity. Could you explain?

KOOB: This idea stems from dreams, sensory deprivation and day dreaming. Without input from our senses through neurons, how is it that we have such vivid thoughts? How is it that when we are deep in thought we seemingly shut off everything in the environment around us? In this theory, neurons are tied to our muscular action and external senses. We know astrocytes monitor neurons for this information. Similarly, they can induce neurons to fire. Therefore, astrocytes modulate neuron behavior. This could mean that calcium waves in astrocytes are our thinking mind. Neuronal activity without astrocyte processing is a simple reflex; anything more complicated might require astrocyte processing. The fact that humans have the most abundant and largest astrocytes of any animal and we are capable of creativity and imagination also lends credence to this speculation.

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choppam at 03:48 PM on 10/29/09
First - "octopi" is a terrible false-learned plural of "octopus". Like the equally terrible false-learned plural "virii" (or a dozen variants) for "virus". The "i" plural is a Latin plural for certain words ending in "us" (not all by a long chalk). "Servus" - slave, plural "servi". "Virus" is a neuter noun in Latin, meaning poison/slime/stink. It doesn't have a plural, and if it did, it wouldn't be "i". Same sort of thing with "octopus". It's from the Greek for "eight-foot" (cf Oedipus - swell-foot). The Oxford English Dictionary (the big one) explains this, and gives the plural as either "octopodes" - the archaic really learned variety, or "octopuses", the normal English-style plural (like "viruses"). "Antipodes" has the same Greek inspired plural - it's an interesting word - look it up!
Second - I love the way this article shows us how we are fighting our way towards an understanding of important things that have been with us for a very long time - like, say, the universe. The object of study remains there for us to examine, regardless of our ideas about it. But the better we get to know it, the better we can relate ourselves to it, and even if we can't control it in any important way, we can use our knowledge to avoid injury and pain, and to increase pleasure and well-being.
Neither the universe nor the brain gives a toss if our attitude is one of worship or contempt. But they can both serve us better if we release them from the mind-forged manacles (mistaken hypotheses or superstitions) we've clapped on them.

Hope for humanity!

Just look at this energy!
You won't believe what can be done with skipping ropes and young legs!
So there's hope even in the US at an army and navy basketball game. China, North Korea... and Ohio.
The girls are 4th and 8th graders from an Ohio school district, and call themselves Firecrackers....
Sit back and take a deep breath...

http://www.bookwormroom.com/2009/10/21/something-to-shake-up-even-the-most-blase/

C

Learning: "in at the deep end"?

An extract from an article in Scientific American "Getting It Wrong":

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong

Some readers may look askance at the use of word pairs, even though it is a favorite tactic of psychologists. In another article , in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied,Lindsey Richland, Nate Kornell and Liche Kao asked the same question, but they used more educationally relevant text material (an essay on vision). Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.

This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall . Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own.

Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.

************************
My response:

Lots of useful comments!
Joney makes an interesting point:
"Unfortunately, the experimenters and the author of the article have confused getting right answers with learning. Remembering a piece of information does not mean that it is worth knowing in the first place or that you will ever use it again." I'm not sure they do, though. Not in the content-focused article test, even if the content of the article might not be very stimulating. Remember there are control groups in all the experiments, so the futility factor would be the same for both groups.
Getting things wrong/Failing to solve a problem can be useful a) if you want to get them right/solve it, b) if you know it can be done, and c) if you've got a sporting chance.
Most people know more than they know ;-) The thing is to show them they do, and show them that they can mobilize this knowledge over the board to tackle any problem that comes their way.
If you can get the pre-emptive questions to stimulate learner curiosity, you're home and dry. If you use them to bust their teeth out, you're not.
Frinstance, I once used a Latin poem by Catullus (with lots of love and kissing and ignoring wagging fingers) in a class of 14-year-olds at a school in Sweden in a Swedish lesson. Literature. Most of the class were non-Swedes, including several Latinos. With the help of the Latinos (Spanish being so closely related to Latin) we worked out key words, like life and love and kiss. Then we chorus-read it, to get the swing of things. Etc. It worked like a charm. They knew more than they knew. A Latin poem for 14-year-olds in an immigrant-rich school (second poorest district in Sweden, too, as it happens)!
I'd have generalized the piece a bit more though.
People hate being taught, but they love learning.

Onions and Whisky - McDonalds in Iceland

From the mailing list, again, about McDonalds closing down in Iceland:

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 13:07, IH quoted a BBC news item:

Besides the economy, McDonald's blamed the
"unique operational complexity" of doing business
in an isolated nation with a population of just 300,000.

Bollocks.

The franchises are run by a firm called Lyst,
with owner Jon Gardar Ogmundsson saying the decision was "not taken lightly".

"Lyst" means "appetite" cognate with "lust". "Lust not taken lightly" - go Velvet Underground.

"It just makes no sense. For a kilo of onion,
imported from Germany, I'm paying the equivalent
of a bottle of good whisky," he added.

Ah, the nostalgia - reminds me of when I was there in 1985. Most goods marked with "units" - say "5" - whose money equivalent changed by the hour with the inflation. This morning, times 2 equals 10 koruna, this afternoon, times 2.5 equals 12.50.

A can of crushed tomatoes cost around 4 dollars.

Iceland's banks collapsed at the height of the

global credit crisis - wrecking the country's
economy and forcing it to rely on an $10bn (£6.1bn) international aid package.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/8327185.stm

Usual media lies about capitalist society, its economy, and our choices. No "forcing" about it at all. Iceland could have thrown those responsible into a geyser, or into the maw of a volcano, or just chained them up outside McDonalds for the duration. Instead the government patted them on the cheek, called them naughty boys, and put the people of Iceland into hock for the foreseeable future so the Reichenscheisse (rich shits) would feel no pain.

Same story in Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine. Oh, and in the US, the UK, Germany, France... ad nauseum.

C

--
Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es.

Death by a thousand cuts - The Titanic Syndrome

From a mailing list:

The Titanic Syndrome, the film by Nicolas
Hulot and Jean-Albert Lièvre, which will be out
on [French] screens October 7, will upset people.
This environmental documentary shows almost no
nature: Breaking with the postcard aesthetic
customary in the genre, the film confronts the
hard reality of poverty and injustice. It
attempts, uneasily, to say that the vertiginous
deterioration of the biosphere is the result of a
social order become insane, one which makes the
weak, the poor and the exploited bear its consequences.

The film repeats that the key to escaping
this sort of destructive logic is in the
reduction of rich countries' material
consumption. Let us bet that this discourse,
harsher than that of "little gestures for the
planet," will garner a mixed reception. And
should Nicolas Hulot begin to upset people?

The strength of his persona is to remain
popular by going right to the tip of what French
society - or more precisely, the media system
that provides access to French society - agrees to hear at any given moment.

Thus, for a decade, he has little by little
hardened his speech: At first, sounding the alarm
over the scope of the environmental disaster, he
then sought to involve citizens, then brought the
question into political terrain. He now succeeds
in demonstrating that ecology is first of all a
social issue, and criticizes - but in terms that
remain very general - "capitalism."

In the commentary that clothes the images,
he says: "I am lost." Lost? I telephone him to
understand. He answers: "I'm lost because I don't
understand that so much energy should be
necessary to put what is obvious before our
elites. People who have a sometimes dazzling
intelligence have blind spots, that is, they
don't manage to understand that their economic model will not succeed."

That's Nicolas Hulot's problem, and,
consequently, our problem: He believes that
political action today is inspired by the pursuit
of the common good. But he forgets the strength
of interests: individual and class interests.
What Hulot calls the elites are today an
oligarchy. The oligarchy does not want to hear
about the obvious facts of environmental crisis
and social disintegration because the principle
objective of the oligarchy is to maintain its own
interests and privileges. It does not concern
itself with the common good insofar as it does
not challenge the oligarchy's own position.

When one is a nice person, it's difficult to
absorb the fact that others are not all so nice.
Nicolas Hulot is about to do that, and,
especially, about to draw the appropriate
conclusions. That is: to speak in vague terms
about "capitalism" no longer, but to plunge a
knife into the flesh of class selfishness. He can
do it. But he knows that then, all of a sudden, a
number of media and of more low profile powers
will suddenly find that he has many flaws.

http://www.truthout.org/1006099

Films are for a mass market. And it's amazing how sometimes people grab a subtext and take it much farther than the surface action and message would appear to warrant. In this sense it's often better to see films as pointers, as signposts to an alternative direction than to take them literally. It's events and solutions outside the cinema that make a real difference, and just making a small hole in the media armour protecting the rotten core of the current system can show people that it's possible, and that it's also possible to make similar holes in the real-life armour protecting the rich and powerful. Not only small holes either but much bigger ones.

So the more the merrier. Michael Moore's documentaries, satirical films like Wag the Dog or even Mars Attacks, Ken Loach's work, and now The Titanic Syndrome, they all add up to more than the sum of each individual stabbing.

The death of a thousand cuts for the lying presentation of *our* world by *their* media. The lies have been exposed for decades in well-researched and cogently argued books by writers and analysts like Chomsky (eg "9-11" "Manufacturing Consent", "Profit Over People") and Pilger (eg Freedom Next Time), and eye-witness accounts like Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. But these are not mass market works, and make an impact on an avant garde of independent and critical readers. Films can make a mass impact.

C

Disenfranchised EU subjects

A common situation getting commoner (from a mailing list):

>So my question is: are you active in or do you pay attention to your
>local municipal political scene?

These are the only elections I am allowed to take
part in, apart from European elections, but I own
I haven't much paid attention to who was who and
proposed what on a community level, especially as
what politics propose during election campaigns
is basically only geared towards getting your vote.
I voted according to my old family traditions and
beliefs, but that is no longer valid.
I feel more in tune with alternative currents
now, ecologists, anti-consumerists etc. and will
have to look into this more closely. Next elections are far away.

I

I'm a disenfranchised citizen of a leading nondemocratic EU country, too. But everyone in the European Urine is disenfranchised - how many have had a chance to affect the adoption of the Lismal Treaty with a vote? How many will have a chance to affect the choice of an EU President? Blair as our highest representative?

C

Gagging over gagging

The links here *are* chilling (Groucho's word)...


"Sue the fuck out of 'em" is the favourite motto of the Corporate Killers if they can't kill their critics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/26/spreading-toxic-injunctions

For the general method see:

http://www.johnperkins.org/

(He's the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman)

For a hilarious take on the killers of cultural life, check out:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/resource.cgi?ResourceID=31

Current example of this disgusting attitude is the Warner Brothers attack on Ms Marmitelover's planned Harry Potter evening at her occasional restaurant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/25/harry-potter-lawyers-ban-restaurant

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/oct/26/harry-potter-halloween-warner-lawyers

C

Mary Beard's Don's Life Blog Book just out

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2009/10/its-a-dons-life-the-book/comments/page/2/#comments

Just love the cover with its homage to Monty Python! And for once it's not just a pretty face - though I hope it'll prove an attractive one and lure punters in. They won't be able to put it down... but let's hope the price is as spot-on as the cover.

Can't wait to get my fingers in there - hope there's lot of nice pictures!

POSTED BY: XJY | 22 OCT 2009 10:08:31

XJY -- Lots? No. Well-chosen? Yes.

POSTED BY: MARY BEARD | 22 OCT 2009 10:16:41

Bad conditions for workers even in imperialist countries

Mail thread on the continuing subordination of women even in "developed" industrial societies.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=7as9n55y8u51&shva=1#inbox/1248ad610636d2e9

Choppa Morph wrote:

> But to say workers seldom have 74 hour weeks for starvation wages
> is sheer nonsense. Unless you're thinking of relatively privileged
> and well-organized workers in industrialized countries.

If we are talking about the proletariat, aren't we by definition
talking of industry?

Nope - the proletariat (according to Marx) is made up of who own nothing to sell but their labour-power - no other "productive" assets, like computers. This definition makes a big difference. The industrial proletariat is, obviously, sells its labour-power in industry. Nowadays in imperialist countries ("our" advanced industrial nations) the public sector and services are mostly industrialized - the workers there are wage-earners involved in producing the commodity labour-power, ie us human beings.

But yes, industrial workers in developing countries have relatively
bad conditions. But as I mentioned before, I was referring to France
& the US - where workers do not have starvation wages. Very different from conditions in 1848 London or Paris - which were worse than conditions in China today.

Not by much. And industrial workers in developed countries are still risking life and limb and internal organs due to the pace of work required and the lousy conditions and machinery not adapted to human bodies. Not in the "posh" industries featured in "aren't we great" Readers Digest or airline glossies, but in normal industries manufacturing paint or plastics or the like. Not to mention the service industries.

Read Barbara Ehrenreich's illuminating book "Nickel and Dimed" on this.


> A lot of "rich" countries also have workers forced to work two jobs
> to survive.

Bullshit. "Survive" is not a meaningless term.

Again - read Ehrenreich - she's talking about basics. Food and shelter. Why the hell have soup kitchens sprung up again, or homeless people become a problem once more?


They "need" two jobs to have big homes, cars, electronic toys, etc
etc - environment-destroying "things" they are "forced" to buy to
serve big capital. If they didn't enslave themselves to consumer
society, "they" could work 20 hours a week and do much better than
"survive". The average Westerner spends more on each car they own
each year than the world-wide average total annual income. And yet
cars are planet-destroying luxuries. Most French families spend more on cell-phones than the annual incomes in poor countries. No one needs a cell phone. Survive?

This is for the "lucky" ones. Two income households able to put themselves in debt ("credit worthy"). I wasn't talking about them. In our society(ies) you now need two incomes to sustain a "normal" standard of living. This normal standard of living DIFFERS FROM COUNTRY TO COUNTRY - that's very important to bear in mind. Never mind if this standard includes the kind of crap you mention - a daily paper, for those who can still afford it, can be sewage like the Daily Mail or filtered sewage like the Guardian. We're more often talking about "social survival" (keeping above the contempt level) than actual physical survival. If you look at the worst cases of "social" death in "developed" (excuse me while I vomit) countries, the list is still endless. The street-sleepers of Paris (under bridges, on underground ventilation grids) are a good (!) example. All kinds of diseases on and inside their bodies, including gangrene and organ failure. Frinstance.


I'm not questioning that the distribution of resources is skewed. But
don't tell me that we have to swallow the television commercials to
know how to "survive".

The TV commercials are a worry, but only cos they reinforce the generally shitty situation of those with nothing to sell but their often unwanted labour-power. Like the rural poor in the US with no access to health care (cf the "health fairs" mentioned in a previous thread), who drink way over the Danger level of sweet fizzy drinks, or smoke, etc. Only the extremely poor, anywhere in the world, are unable to get hold of such destructive poisons - tobacco and alcohol or narcotics.

This relates to the breast-feeding part of the thread cos of the efforts by very big capitalist groups to replace healthy reproductive behaviour (like breast-feeding) with artificial and often harmful commercially profitable behaviour (bottle-feeding using milk substitutes).

C

New approach

I write a lot by way of comments in other blogs, mail lists, chats, news media etc. Like a mosaic, a bigger clearer picture can emerge from lots of small, apparently separate pieces. And even if it doesn't for every reader, at least a lot of the pieces are colourful and have some depth (or let's say the glass is sometimes thicker ;-) ), making for a kaleidoscope rather than a mosaic. When I was a kid I loved the kaleidoscopes we made at home on the kitchen table.

So I'm mainly going to post my comments out of their immediate context. You can decide if the larger context/perspective gives a clear enough ground and frame for my scattered fragments, these "disiecta membra".

I'll indicate the original location of each entry so you can follow the whole discussion leading to my response, if you want to.