Radical Change In Education

I know that you have heard this before, but this time I think that it is "radical".  That is what this blog is about.

This might jump around, but I think you will see what I am talking about.  In our schools, we learn a bunch of algorithms.  In math, they are how to add, subtract, divide and multiply.  Most of us learn exactly the same algorithms, not realizing that their are actually many ways to do the above.  An algorithm is just a "procedure".  That is one reason that I have recommended in prior blogs that our schools should focus more on the writing down of "procedures" or "algorithms".  Most of the other classes try to teach "facts" that you can later in life use to build procedures and algorithms.

If you have ever written down any kind of procedure, I think that you would have realized how difficult this can be.  Further, if you were to compare your procedure with that written by someone else, they would be very different. That does not mean one is wrong or that one is the best, but it shows how many alternatives there are to solve a simple problem.  Now, what do you think happens when you have to deal with a very complex task?  It looks like a "book" with many chapters, but even then it is not complete.

Most times the objective of school is to teach a lot of facts and principle so that a student can develop a "strategy" on how to deal with a problem.  A good strategy will not guarantee a good solution. Along the way the strategy has to be supplemented with additional procedures or algorithms.  Even if our schools did a good job the student will still be left with a lot of unknowns.  Some of the students who go thru the process do end up becoming "experts" with special talents to solve problems fast and accurately.  Why is this?

The problem is that only a very few students have the intellect to become experts.  As the demands of the world shifts to demanding more experts, it is clear that our current schools and methods of teaching will not be able to meet the demand.  That does not look good for the future of the human race.  What has to happen is that our schools have to change in a radical way, but what is that way?  I think it will be to learn how to utilize the computerized concepts of "AI".

It is a fact that only a very few human minds are capable of handling a large series of rules and to apply them in a unique way to solve a specific problem.  A game like "chess" has a set of very simple rules that can be applied in an almost infinite number of ways.  Most problems in life are even more complex.  The modern computer is just a new tool in a long series of tools that us humans have created and our schools have to teach their students how to maximize its use.  The computer is more significant than was the written language and paper.  In our schools, one size fits all.  Their are some exceptions but they are small.  Most teachers accept that smaller classes are better for learning.  What if we had a class size of "one" and the teaching process was hand tailored for that one student?  That is what computers and AI can offer.  Think about two current teachers who are using the black board to demonstrate the concept they are trying to teach?  Do you think that each will write exactly the same thing onto the black board?  No!  If they were teaching just one student, do you think that it would be even more different?  Yes!  See what I am talking about?  It is going to get radical and soon.  I can tell you now that our teachers colleges are not upto the challenge either.

How do you think that current teachers are going to react to this radical change that is coming?  It is clear that they are not up to the intellectual challenge they face.  I don't think that teachers are going to give up easily.  I think that the fight is going to get dirty on the part of teachers when they realize that students don't need them.  If you look at education in the past 50 years, you will find that a larger and larger percentage of our students focus on the "fluff" classes or majors vs "technical".  This is just the opposite of what is needed and it is driven by our teachers.  They are on the wrong side of history.  I was reminded by the Moon shot how badly we have drifted in the wrong direction over the past 50 years.  We have gotten soft intellectually and computers and AI promise to change all of that.  You just watch and see if I am not right!

PS---AI is not complex.  It is just a type of procedure, but one that can be very complex and can produce an almost infinite number of results.  It is a little like our brain works.  One of  the big problems that I have found developing AI programs is translating the intelligence from an expert's mind into a corresponding computer program.  That is because many experts have no real idea of how they arrived at their "correct" solution or why they approached their problem this way or that way.  Think about how you do or figure out something and see if I am not right.

The bottom line is that we are going to have to try to teach students about "how" they actually solve problems so that their knowledge can be coded into needed AI programs.  This part is going to be the real challenge, I can tell you from experience.

Artificial Intelligence #3

Here goes chapter #3 on AI.  This is a different slant.

We all know that some people are much smarter than others and are able to solve complex problems much faster.  Why is that?  They are both smarter and have a lot of information in their brains. Here is what they have what others don't have.  They have "learned" a bunch of algorithms that others did not.  For my money, just learning a bunch of algorithms is not intelligence.  Is a person who learned a long division algorithm in 4th grade smarter than a person who never went to school?  What about two people who never went to school but one figured out how to do long division all by themselves?

Next, what if we want to computerize how to do long division?  How do we get the intelligence from the individual so it can be coded such that the computer can utilize it?  There are a lot of ways to do long division.  There is not just one algorithm like you learned in the 4th grade.  Example, you could divide the number 200 by 4 the normal way that most learned in 4th grade and get the answer 50.  Another way would be to "multiply" 200 by .25 and you would get the same answer, 50.  You could also find the answer by trial and error and get the answer that way.  I think that you can see that there are often many ways to get the right answer, so what do we put into the computerized AI program?

If we talk to an expert and ask them how they come to their answer or conclusion, what form will it or should it take?  Will it be a step by step procedure?  Will a different expert have a different step by step procedure?  Is one procedure better or worse than the other?  How many possible procedure are there? Will some of the procedures only work in special cases or will they work under all conditions? If you were to follow one of the procedures, but made an error on one or more steps, would the procedure eventually provide you with the correct answer?  Should our computerized AI program contain one or all of the procedures?  You can see that dealing with experts and coding their methods is a very complex and difficult job.

Objectives Revisited --- Student Loan Law

Here is another chapter.

Think about this.  Why don't we require that new laws be preceded by a clear statement of the law's "objective"?  If we had a clear objective, we could then judge if the law actually met that objective. In this blog, I am going to take on the student loan law where our government guaranteed loans taken out by college students and set the qualification requirements.  I am going to start out "guessing" what the objective may have been had it been published.

(1) Buy votes from young voters by giving them tax payer's money rather than their own money.

I think this might have been the true objective of the law.  If you talk to students who took out student loans, most will have a favorable opinion of the action by the legislators and thus vote for them.

(2) Get students who have zero experience taking out or paying back large loans that they will not be able to repay with the worthless degrees that they spend their time and money earning.

This may not have been the objective, but what has resulted is what has happened.  Think about young people, for the very first time, taking out a very large loan for the very first time?  Does this sound like a responsible thing for our government to do?

(3)  Run up the cost of college for both the students the government are trying to help as well as all of those who were paying their own college expenses.

This looks like exactly what happened.  The cost of college was driven up for "all" students.  In many cases it has made "working one's way thru college" no longer possible.  Did anyone think about the "extra" cost to all of the college students who were not helped by the government's student loan program?

(4)  Protect banks and allow them to make more student loans and thus make more profit for themselves.

It looks like this also happened.  Before the student loan program, banks used great care in making student loans and only made them to students who had a reasonable prospects of paying back the loans.  It was clear to all before that students who took "fluff" majors had little chance of paying back their loans.

(5)  Create a financial crisis for the USA by amassing a large debit that was guaranteed by the tax payers similar to the banking crisis that occurred a few years ago by the government guaranteeing loan for homes people could not afford.

Realize that the student loan debit is over 1.5 trillion dollars.  That is larger than all the debit on credit cards.  Much of the money spent by student has been for "fluff" degrees.  It is like spending the money on expensive steaks.  What do have 24 hours later?  In the case of home loans, the government can foreclose and sell the home for some salvage value.  That is not the case with student loans.  My grand father was very poor and he knew that you should never buy food on credit.  He chose to eat less because he knew how difficult it would be to pay back that type of loan.

How is that?  I could go on and on with ideas about what the objective could have been, but I think that if we had an objective for the law, we could judge the performance of our government.

Objectives Revisited --- Education

I think that this is going to turn out to be a new series and this is the first chapter.

I have been listening to all kinds of discussions and debates that have ranged all over the place, but the thing that seems to be missing from all is that there is no discussion about the basic "objectives".  How can anyone make any sense our of all this if there are no agreed to objective.  Most seem to be proposing some kind of decision that they are for or against, but there is no way to judge the merit of any without some kind of objective.  Are you starting to see what I am talking about?

The first one that I want to take on is our public schools and universities.  As far as private schools and universities, they can do anything that they want with "their own money", but when it comes to our public money, we should have some kind of say.  Let's see if we can come up with an "objective" for our public schools and universities so that we can determine if they are meeting our "objective".

(1)  The objective should be to educate our kids.

I know that many would agree with this, but it is a little bit too general to actually be effective.  Shouldn't the objective be to prepare our kids for a high quality and responsible life as adults?  I think that our literacy rate is about 30th on the list while we spend the most per child!

(2)  The objective should be to prepare our kids for a high quality and responsible life as adults.

This sounds a little bit better, but what about kids who are not residents or citizens of our state or whose parents did not pay into the tax pot?  Some states specify the percentage of students who have to be residents of the state.  Sounds like a good idea to me, but is there more?

(3)  The objective should be to prepare out kids for the job needs of our state in the future along with a high quality and responsible life as adults.

When you think about medical care, it is interesting that our universities train less than 50% of  our kids to be the doctors that we need or less than 75% of the technical graduates that we need.  Maybe the objective should be more specific about the needs of the state that pays the bill.  In many universities over 50% of the technical graduate students were not even born in the USA and will not stay in the USA after graduation.  Is this some kind of screw job for the tax payers of your state?

(4)  The objective should be to make the universities educate "our" kids rather than recruit students from around the world to give them more prestige and then give them free tuition on top of that.

I read some time ago that many of our major universities have over 90% of their technical students in the important area of "Material Science" from outside the USA.  As it stands now, most of the world is screwing the USA due to our out of control policies of our most important universities.  I used to teach a a major university and know first hand that it is easier to teach an advanced student than an average student, but that is no reason that don't demand that our universities work harder to teach our many average students.  I want to raise the "median" student up and not focussing all of our resources on the top few percent.  Think of a parent who has an average student who is rejected from the university that his taxes paid for in favor of some foreign student whose parents never paid a penny in taxes here.  Are you starting to see that we need to "revisit" the objectives of our education system?

(5)  The objective should be to provide colleges that allows students from any place to chose any major that they want at minimum cost to themselves.

The problem with this objective is that it is very close to what we now have.  What is happening is that students do not chose the majors that will allow them to enjoy a high quality of adult life nor will they be able to support the state's technical economy of the future.  It clearly will not produce the number of medial doctors that we need nor the number of engineers.  What it will do is to allow students with shallow and short range objectives to squander the taxpayer's  money and create a national debit that they will never be able to pay back.

I have a lot more, but this is a taste of what I mean about revisiting our objectives.  This concept could apply to any part of our government and it is badly needed.

PS---Here is some more data on education.  The high school graduation rate for different racial groups is: 52% for Blacks, 78% for Whites and 94% for Asians.  Further, 80% of those in jail are non high school graduates.  What role do you feel that our public schools have in these numbers?  Based on the different graduation rates, I calculate that Whites should earn 50% more than Backs and Asians should earn 21% more than Whites.  Interesting isn't it?