Negative Space: education
- ACLU enables Texas textbook takeover
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If you give the government a gun, some politician or bureaucrat somewhere is going to pull the trigger. Make sure that whatever powers you cede to the government are powers you want them to exercise.
- Another reason to ban cell phones from schools
- Scales Elementary in Murfreesboro has another reason to ban cell phones: kids might be able to call their parents when they’re about to die. That would put teachers in danger during mass murder drills.
- The basement was my university
- Free play is how children become scientists. It inspires creativity, which can be both dangerous and rewarding, often at the same time.
- Blogs fight resegregation in DC?
- Can bloggers resurrect a successful education program that beltway Democrats killed?
- Brainwashing 101
- Except for a few high points, this documentary is disappointing, and especially so whenever the director appears on-screen. It takes an important issue and trivializes the political causes and implications.
- Can schools compete with the Internet by clicking?
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Fat, drunk, and clicking is no way to go through life.
- Cell phone neo-McCarthyism
- It’s 1976 all over again at Framingham High in Framingham, Massachusetts. “Neo-McCarthyism. I like that.”
- Cell phones: threat to public safety
- Cell phones are a part of the decentralization of our society; they are a severe threat to those who prefer centralization and restricted channels of access.
- Childish things: the decline of toys and the fall of man
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The old admonishment to put away childish things misses, in a very important sense, a critical point: we can never put away childish things. The way we interact with toys as children is how we interact with life as adults. If your toys have not taught you to sift evidence, weigh risks, and make decisions, the world becomes a very frightening place.
- D.C. voucher students show gains
- D.C. voucher students show increased learning at lower cost; parents happy. Washington Post not as happy.
- The Dry Offensive: The 1870s and 1880s
- From its beginnings, state-run public education was used as a means of shaping policy by indoctrinating students towards a particular view.
- Education and the Internet
- Copying from a chalkboard to the Internet?
- Government food courts
- Imagine there’s no grocery… it isn’t hard to do… nothing to grill or fry for…… and no bacon too…
- How best to avoid high school
- Paul Graham writes about how best to avoid wasting four years of your life on high school.
- I. Long-term trends
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Colleges and universities today find themselves immersed in technology. Over the past decade, the demand for computing power for research and instruction has resulted in the creation of thousands of faculty research labs, special purpose discipline-centered computing labs, remediation facilities, and vast public access labs for word processing, document processing and other generic computing tasks.
- II. Concrete Goals
- In the 1990s, educators will find themselves more and more in control of information tools that will enable them to teach and do research in their discipline in a variety of new ways. These long term trends present opportunities for both academic departments and university instructional computing services to effect wide ranging changes in how computing now fits in the university environment.
- III. Examples of Success
- It would be unfair to say that institutions of higher education have had no success in weaving computing into the instructional fabric of their institutions. All of us have met both success and failure to one degree or another. Many excellent examples have been documented in the literature. The authors would like to provide two such positive examples based on personal experience.
- IV. Challenge of the Computer Revolution
- The challenge, however, is to capitalize on these trends through cooperative computing efforts aimed at centering the use of computing tools in the disciplines themselves. Convenient departmental, preferably individual office access to campus library bibliographic resources as well as national data bases and data services is critical to scholarship and research.
- Maintaining Educational Diversity
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A state-run education is ever a danger to a liberal, free country. At any time, demagogues can take control over the education of nearly every child in the country.
- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave
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Not only does slavery make life worse for slaves, it doesn’t make life better for slave-owners. And the ultimate freedom is freedom to learn.
- No room for education reform in spending frenzy
- In a year of record spending, the one thing we apparently can’t afford is saving money on better education.
- Open source value shift at OSCON?
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There is either a value shift occurring, or an attempt to create a value shift, in the open source community here at OSCON. The new heroes are big, resource-hungry government and cathedrals inside the bazaar.
- Stupid in America?
- Monopolies rarely respond to their customers. That appears to be true of school monopolies as well.
- Teaching kids to fail
- Are schools designed to teach kids to fail?
- Torn Between Two Lovers
- The theme for the 1995 World Conference on Computers in Education was Liberating the Learner. But liberating from what? From the people at the conference: from the teacher, and from the school.
- The Washington, DC Prison Experiment
- When public schools are mandated for the underprivileged and alternatives are shut down, abusive behavior on the part of school officials to students is inevitable.
More Information
- Malice or Incompetence?
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“Recently I came across a news article estimating that 80% of NYC graduates cannot read and write and are functionally illiterate. I’d bet those numbers are not far off across the country, and it wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise was what my son told me when I discussed the matter with him.”
- What we can do
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“There is one other thing conservatives can work on immediately, a mighty task that brave pioneers in the school choice and home-schooling movement have already begun: take back education from the Left. This requires a different strategy from bringing the media around, because the education establishment is a virtual monopoly: enforced by State power, funded by mandatory taxes, and dominated by the most doctrinaire and politically powerful union in the world. The public education system will not change itself in response to ‘competition,’ because it has the government to protect it from its failures. (Both Big Media and the State…”
