Category Archives: Education

Why Do We Lie To Students?

Minute Physics points us to a fact that I’ve always wondered about.  Why do we lie to young physics students?

 

I recognize that general relativity is not the easiest thing for an 8th grader to wrap her head around, but why not tell the truth?  Why not preface everything with “What I am about to teach you is a lie.  It just happens to be a good enough lie that it will work for most of what you will have to do.”?  And then at least show them the truth.  Or at least the truth as we know it now.  (Come on, unified field theory!)  Having to unwind years of “truth” can be very difficult.  Letting kids know that the truth is out there even if we don’t teach it to them in full now could lead to a much brighter scientific future for the world!

There Is No Skills Gap

A friend of mine linked to this article purporting to explain the skills gap that is affecting not only the United States but also the world.  The article basically takes three charts from a much larger report (pdf) that also purports to explain a skills gap, but neither actually do, though, the actual report has some interesting findings that they for some reason completely ignore.  Let’s go through the three charts, though.

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The poor think differently than you

My post about socioeconomic blindness triggered a memory of a study from a few years ago that shows that poor kids really do think differently from rich kids.  This is both fascinating and completely understandable.

There is an immediacy to being poor.  It’s very hard to plan a future when so many resources are spent providing for now.  This immediacy causes all sorts of problems, as shown by the kids in the study.  Throwing poor kids into a classroom and expecting them to learn because it’ll be good for them in 20 years is like giving a bear a honeycomb and telling it that it can either have that or the giant barrel of honey just in the next room.  The sad thing is that so many people then blame the kids for failing.

The good news is that there are tools that we already know will work that can help these kids.  The bad news is that society has decided that teachers are greedy and lazy and evil and we spend way too much on education already so getting them those tools will be nigh impossible.  And this is an area where rich people think like poor people.  They are too blind to see that spending some extra money now could mean huge savings in the future, with respect to necessary social services that many people would also like to see cut.