DiscoStu":1xwjikst said:
Kids don't need to know this stuff off of their head, this day and age they have access to that answer in their pocket it's called their phone. Or they have a computer etc. Equally who can tell me what 1122 x 7831 is, using only mental arithmetic? Not many, and that proves my point, it's not about knowing the answer, it's about knowing how to solve the problem.
This isn't true. I'm not picking a fight here but children DO need mental arithmetic, and the better it is the more useful. Of course it's perfectly OK to use a calculator (in school, in exams, and so on), but the issue of decimal drift (putting the point in the wrong place and mucking up by orders of magnitude) has already been mentioned above. It's important that people can work out roughly before they get a precise result from a machine, as a sanity check.
Similarly with language, spelling is very useful, as is grammar, because it means you express ideas unambiguously. Commas change meaning, for example.
We have access to a world of information that we have never had before. We need to be educating our children so that they know how to access that information and evaluate it and use it. We have devices that are great for doing maths and robots for repetitive tasks. What we need are people who can solve problems, people who can work out the best way to do things.
They won't do this, and in my experience can't do this, unless they develop the mental agility to calculate in their heads. It isn't innate. It has to be learned and, like any skill, practiced.
Ask my own children, who all went to what were considered good schools in the city (excellent OSTED ratings, consistently), if they now think dad was old-fashioned and anal about their spelling, punctuation and grammar, and silly to try to teach them simple rules (which the schools weren't doing). They've needed that stuff since, and two of them have discovered that they have difficulty explaining complex ideas at degree level. Language - vocab. and grammar - is essential. In the computer industry that's been especially obvious. You can only frame a concept, or a problem to solve, if you have the language to do it.
The other issue is that schools do have a role in calibrating children's expectations of the adult world. In almost all important jobs you
can't afford to be slapdash, you
do have to attend to detail, you
must be precise and exact. And you have to do this all day long, every workday. Children no longer come out of the education system appreciating this, and higher education has very often replaced high standards with an obsession to create a "level" playing field for the 'underpriveleged'. It's a nice idea, but it was Jesus who said, "The poor are always with you." His meaning, I think, was that you will
never remove all the world's inequalities, and other things may have a higher priority (he was far from uncharitable, so I'm not making a case for the Trump view of the world!).
I am convinced the three things children need to leave school with are simply these:
1. a set of core mental skills, in reasoning, arithmetic and language (English),
2. an appreciation that the adult world they're joining relies on precision and detail, which will be expected of them, too,
3. an enthusiasm and ability to learn whatever specialisms they need.
I agree that information is freely available, more so than ever before, but children by and large aren't leaving school with the critical skills to value it. You can often see evidence of this in the nonsense that bubbles up to popularity on the web (Internet "memes"?).
What colours were in that badly-snapped stripey dress of last year? The answer was simple - check the colour of the pixels! If one did, the answer was unambiguous, but it didn't stop supposed centres of excellence like the BBC wasting editorial space on it, even on Radio 4 news programmes. Did we learn anything about colour perception? Nope, nothing at all. Yet it was a "mystery" that evidently captivated many. I love optical illusions - Escher, for example - but this definitely was just an example of the gullible being led by the stupid (and depressing to discover where some of the stupid have ended up).
For other good examples read the Huffington Post! It's not the political views I object to but the pathetically weak arguments and subjectivity presented as fact. Of course they can publish/promote whomsoever they wish on their site. What depresses me is the popularity the Huffpost has - apparently people don't read it (as I largely do) for a dose of ironic humour. Again, its an example of a general inability to exercise judgement, which one hopes might have been developed in school.
At a more serious level, you see dreadfully weak thought being applid to really big and expensive policy decisions: wind farms, sending humans to Mars, or at a trivial level, bicycle lanes and 20MPH zones in cities.
To pick just one of those, a Martian expedition: we've had experiments on the psychological effects of a long space flight, but no consideration of the (probably fatal) radiation belts astronauts will travel through, and solar wind exposure on the Martian surface (as Mars doesn't have a strong enough magnetic field). You can't just clad a spacecraft in lead, as the one thing that's hard/expensive to do is lift mass into space! Then there's ecosystem issues: it's infeasible to take all the food a manned mission would require, but might you grow it there? The biosphere of Earth is staggeringly complex - plants don't just grow in soil, they interact with the soil's ecosystem. So which microbes would you transport to mars, which would you leave behind, and how would you keep both plants and humans healthy? And that's assuming you might use the Martian soil in the first place. What do you do about poisonous trace elements (poisonous either to plants, or humans - it doesn't matter which!). None of this really depends on Elon Musk's ability to land a rocket the rght way up on a barge.
My point - It's wonderfully romantinc, but it simply ain't gonna happen. There are no magic bullets for this stuff. The popular science press may be full of guff about "missions to Mars", but it's no nearer reality than it was in Jules Verne's day. Yet nobody is calling out the Emperor's tailors...
... so what are we educating people to do or be, even in our research institutions? Lack of mental arithmetic seems to be just the tip of an iceberg of incompetence in modern life.
E. (Probably just grumpy this morning at having to climb scaffolding in the wet to clean uPVC window frames).
