Sep 1, 2008
Education & change.
Last week's Newsweek had a good feature section on higher education and how it's changing internationally. I especially appreciated Ballad of the Old Cafés, about how Gulf states, through much higher education spending, are usurping the old, cosmopolitan learning centers of Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad:
The Gulf states have been happy to take advantage of this collapse. But a rearguard of academics contends that the new schools there are academic Disneylands that can't eclipse the old centers. "Intellectuals and academics don't want to live in a mall," says Osama El-Ghazali Harb, the Egyptian former head of the Arab Association of Political Scientists. "Science is more than labs. It's the people, it's the environment."
Egypt has even started fighting back, by trying to recruit U.S. universities to open campuses on its soil, too. But it's had relatively little success. "Do you really expect us to open a campus in a country that could be run by the Muslim Brotherhood in a few years?" said one high-ranking NYU official involved in the school's search for a Middle East campus.
Closer to home, I agree with almost every word of this critique of American secondary education ("almost," because I think early college isn't the answer; high schools themselves should be reformed):
To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data, replacing calculus as the entry-level college requirement. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today's young adults.
The school K. attended for 5th and 6th grade had, as part of its original charter, a model for teaching that was closer to being a professor. Teachers taught fewer classes, had more prep time, were given sabbaticals, and received bonuses for research and artistic contributions in their field. Over time they moved away from this, which was part of the reason I wasn't as excited about it by the time she finished her second year there. But I still think it's a great model for secondary education.
