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What does it mean to have an educated mind in the 21st century?
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What does it mean to have an educated mind in the 21st century?
We are continuing to rely upon outdated notions of the educated mind that come from elitist notions of erudition and scholarship not germane to this century. Obviously telecommunications is more important than basic chemistry and HTML is more significant than French in today's world. Roger Schank responds to Edge publisher/editor John Brockman's request to futurists to pose "hard-edge" questions that "render visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefine who and what we are."
Originally published January 2002 at Edge. Published on KurzweilAI.net January 21, 2002. Read Ray Kurzweil's Edge question here.
While education is on every politician's agenda as an item of serious importance, it is astonishing that the notion of what it means to be educated never seems to come up. Our society, which is undergoing massive transformations almost on a daily basis never seems to transform its notion of what it means to be educated. We all seem to agree that an educated mind certainly entails knowing literature and poetry, appreciating history and social issues, being able to deal with matters of economics, being versatile in more than one language, understanding scientific principles and the basics of mathematics.
What I was doing in my last sentence was detailing the high school curriculum set down in 1892 by a committee chaired by the President of Harvard that was mandated for anyone who might want to enter a university. The curriculum they decided upon has not changed at all since then. Our implicit notions of an educated mind are the same as they were in the nineteenth century. No need to teach anything new, no need to reconsider how a world where a university education was offered solely to the elite might be different from a world in which a university degree is commonplace.
For a few years, in the early 90's, I was on the Board of Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most everyone else on the board were octogenarians -- the foremost of these, since he seemed to have everyone's great respect, was Clifton Fadiman, a literary icon of the 40's. When I tried to explain to this board the technological changes that were about to come that would threaten the very existence of the Encyclopedia, there was a general belief that technology would not really matter much. There would always be a need for the encyclopedia and the job of the board would always be to determine what knowledge was the most important to have. Only Clifton Fadiman seemed to realize that my predictions about the internet might have some effect on the institution they guarded. He concluded sadly, saying: "I guess we will just have to accept the fact that minds less well educated than our own will soon be in charge."
Note that he didn't say "differently educated," but "less well educated." For some years the literati have held sway over the commonly accepted definition of education. No matter how important science and technology seem to industry or government or indeed to the daily life of the people, as a society we believe that those educated in literature and history and other humanities are in some way better informed, more knowing, and somehow more worthy of the descriptor "well educated."
Now if this were an issue confined to those who run the elite universities and prep schools or those whose bible is the New York Review of Books, this really wouldn't matter all that much to anybody. But this nineteenth century conception of the educated mind weighs heavily on our notions of how we educate our young. We are not educating our young to work or to live in the nineteenth century, or at least we ought not be doing so. Yet, when universities graduate thousands of English and history majors because it can only be because we imagine that such fields form the basis of the educated mind. When we choose to teach our high schoolers trigonometry instead of say basic medicine or business skills, it can only be because we think that trigonometry is somehow more important to an educated mind or that education is really not about preparation for the real world. When we focus on intellectual and scholarly issues in high school as opposed to more human issues like communications, or basic psychology, or child raising, we are continuing to rely upon out dated notions of the educated mind that come from elitist notions of who is to be educated.
While we argue that an educated mind can reason, but curiously there are no courses in our schools that teach reasoning. When we say that an educated mind can see more than one side of an argument we go against the school system which holds that there are right answers to be learned and that tests can reveal who knows them and who doesn't.
Now obviously telecommunications is more important than basic chemistry and HTML is more significant than French in today's world. These are choices that have to be made, but they never will be made until our fundamental conception of erudition changes or until we realize that the schools of today must try to educate the students who actually attend them as opposed to the students who attended them in 1892.
The 21st century conception of an educated mind is based upon old notions of erudition and scholarship not germane to this century. The curriculum of the school system bears no relation to the finished products we seek. We need to rethink what it means to be educated and begin to focus on a new conception of the very idea of education.
Copyright © 2002 by Edge Foundation, Inc.
www.edge.org
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Re: A Black Mans pointe of View.
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I don't care, if there are any real IQ differences among whites and non whites.
I want "IQ 10^10 or something" - for myself and anybody else. Current differences are minor and most of all - not essential for any future improvements.
As a Slavic I can be a target of racism also - and I don't care. I've encountered an American on the net, while playing chess.
What?! - he typed - another Russian! (Due to the similar flag).
I am Slovenian. - I said.
Doesn't matter, it's the same, I will lose in a minute!
That's the inverse racism. Also irrelevant, since I've lost the game. (I am no good at chess, BTW).
My point is, even if it was true, that the whites are the most intelligent group and the Frenchmen are the best among them, it is not important in the light of the Singularity.
The group culture, the memplex, is maybe more important (for now). I can imagine, that the black community in America is hostile toward the nerds like you. And that you don't have the bunch of real life nerd friends among them.
That's why, the Internet is good.
- Thomas
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KoD
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As a more than slightly radical educator/ reformist proponent, I can tell you what it will boil down to: KoD, or Knowledge on Demand.
Before I go into that, though, I do want to address one point in the article itself: there ARE some good classes out there, but for some reason, they come up 'shorted' in the lists.
Speech and debate courses. Consumer Economics, which is often considered a 'dummy math' substitution class in high school. Civics. Comparative Religions/Governments courses. Most ex-cirr classes, because they allow students to channel their own interests and energies. Sociology. Health. Etiquette, as 'silly' as that sounds. And any type of work-study or apprenticeship program which allows those who have a talent or interest to pursue it at their own pace.
Now, back to KoD.
I hate to cheapen this with a movie analogy, but I expect things in the not-to-distant future to resemble the Matrix interfaces, except hopefully without the painful 'skulljack.' People will have the equivalent of an 'OS,' as well as memory dumps for whatever their interests/needs may be at that time.
The jump between now and then can be seen by looking at the wise, the monied, and ESPECIALLY the wise and monied people of the world - especially parents taking a vested interest in their children's education.
They actively seek out the best schooling environment and provide the best home environment for education. Schools, teachers, tutors, coaches, materials, etc. are all carefully screened and monitored as critical investments. And, increasingly, computer assistance comes into play - for diagnostic, reteaching, and enrichment purposes.
If the visions of some others at this site hold true, and 'work' as we know it today becomes non-existant (as well as our most basic needs), then humanity may well have the opportunity at a global 'Golden Age' - one where hobbies, communication, leisure, relationships, recreation, and 'education' are the order of the day.
In such a case, building a sort of global knowledge base and a means for accessing it on demand would be of a paramount importance.
Our students of today should be shown the potential for such a future, and we should provide them with the tools that can help make it into a reality.
Intelligence untempered by wisdom and compassion just isn't really worth a damn, in my book.
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Re: KoD
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When I was in the business of selling computers to the common man, I stopped one day in a small black restaurant in Southeast San Diego for lunch. There was a black social worker in there carrying on a rant about how the local schools were not serving the black children and it was the fault of the school system that they were coming out poor and uneducated.
It just so happened that a couple of years before some 100,000 Vietnamese had fled Vietnam and came to the U.S. to get away from communism. Most of them could barely speak a word of English and a large number of them settled in the same neighborhoods as the blacks because that was where housing was the cheapest.
I pointed out to the social worker that the Vietnamese immigrants were going to the same schools, living in the same housing and other conditions as the blacks, but they were excelling in school and many of them were taking honors in science and math.
The social worker accused me of claiming the Vietnamese were smarter than blacks -- a heresy in todays world.
I told him the difference was how the partents of the children thought and acted. When an American child goes to school, the parent says something like "Have a good day." When the Viethamese child heads out to school, the parent tells him, "Work hard." When the Vietnamese kids came home from school, the parents got the kid to teach them what they had learned in school that day and studied the homework right along with them. When the Vietnamese couldn't compete for jobs because of their English language deficiency, they took what they kids taught them and opened their own businesses.
What the kids got from their parents was constant interest and encouragement and participation in the process of learning. The parents demonstrated what education could do for them in making a living. The kids didn't just go to school because they "had to." They went because they saw it as a way out of the slums in which they were living and as a way to get the tools they needed to succeed in business and society.
The schools in southeast San Diego turned out hundreds of Vietnamese doctors, scientists, lawyers, and other professional people but fewer black ones. So, in my estimation, it's not the schools that were to blame for the plight of the black students. It was what the people who used the school did with their opportunities. What the Vietnamese kids had was an attitude that caused them to make the most of what was available to them. That was what the other kids lacked.
That is the potential value of KoD. The people who have the drive and attitude to go after the knowledge available to them will get it. The others won't. They don't even get it in regular schools. It's not the schools that are the problem. It's the way the child's parents impart the right attitude and desire.
Grant |
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Re: KoD
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Grant ~
Excellent points. I had the benefit of getting to know students from all over the greater Houston area while living/working there, and am actually living and working as an educator in the Republic of Korea now.
I have seen great money squandered on unmotivated kids, and seen pupils carve out opportunities for themselves which everyone else told them were unavailable, due to their race or economic status.
Myself, I went to a smaller public university, but I will put the quality of my education up against anyone in my fields, because I wanted to make the most out of my college experience.
The attitudes of Asians towards education in general, as well as some religions and cultures, such as those of Muslims and Israelites, makes a huge difference in their 'starting block.' Most teachers will tell you that, for better or worse, a students most important years are BEFORE they ever enter an institution. The 'home education' is the foundation for the rest, in general.
Also, as an additional note, I will tell you another area where education is 'failing' society. Any good teacher will tell you - especially elementary school teachers!!! - that the '2 curriculums' are a problem. All of our focus these days seems to be upon the second curriculum - that regarding the classes and content of what students 'learn.'
However, the first curriculum - known to us as the 'hidden' curriculum, is the one that limits our advancement as individuals. That is the one that - across all school courses, interactions, and activities - promotes control, order, obedience, unquestioning patriotism, competition, segregation, submission to authority, and a host of other traits that we rarely, if ever, question, but are ultimately damaging to our evolution as a society, a species, and a world.
Slowly, but surely, public schools are failing our kids and our societies as a whole, especially in the '1st world countries,' as ironic as that seems. Basically, I don't think public education as we now know it will survive - as technology cheapens, more and more parents will move their kids towards specialization programs, based upon tutors and multimedia content. (I currently see that every day here in Korea, where parents tell their kids to put their efforts into their extra-cirricular courses and after-school programs/lessons, as well as spending lots of money on computer-based or multimedia content). AI will make that jump possible.
On an amusing, thought-provoking final note: educators hold the second-most important job in the world, as according to the status that they enjoy.
Do you know who holds the first? Not politicians, royalty, priests, or even parents, for that matter.
Gardeners. (score a point for the Greens there).
GAJ |
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