Fri 17 Aug 2007
I heard this piece on NPR last week regarding how much (or little) high school students know about economics. Strangely, depending on your news source this is reported as an encouraging or a discouraging amount of economics savvy on the part of America’s youth, but what surprised me about it was that high school students were expected to know about economics at all. In my high school, economics was not touched upon, even for the most rudimentary introduction. No supply and demand, no interest, no unemployment rates, zip.
This led me to wonder, what is essential to cover in K-12 education? Is the goal to equip students for life after high school, to prepare them for college, to “teach them how to learn,” to carve them into good citizens, or some combination of these? Also, how much choice should we give students in tailoring their own course schedules to match their interests and plans? I have a few nascent thoughts on the subject, but am eager to hear the salon’s thoughts first.
3 Responses to “Early Education”
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August 19th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Well, I did take an economics course in High School(the same one as Elizabeth). I can’t say that I thought very much of it. Macroeconomics used to seem very distant to me.
Personally, I think the goal in High School ought to be to teach as much as possible. But, I think that my/our perspective on Secondary education is skewed. I never really understood what was being taught to the ‘average’ student.
I think the first priority ought to be to teach how to reason, in the broadest sense. That means language skills come first, since that is how we reason with each other. History, because that gives a context for reason.
It pains me to say this, but I think those are more important than Science and Math. Although I think the the wrong Math is taught at the High School level (I vote for more logic, less Calculus). If I had to pick a science topic I would pick Chemistry, but biology would probably be more useful.
I think that it owuld be wrong to try and teach everyone the identically. Certainly if you are destined to go to college, then your classes should be geared to that. But, for those not interested or capable of pursuing higher education, practicality demands teaching what is useful.
Oddly, it strikes me that the most important part of Economics for me is Le Chatelier’s Principle: Disturbing an equilibrium will result in action back toward the mean.
I’ll have to give this more thought.
August 21st, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Hi, Iain. I agree with your emphasis on teaching reasoning (broadly speaking), but I am not so sure about your proposed method.
I think we agree that it is important for people to learn true facts about important issues. I take a ‘true fact’ to be one that has been verified through some ‘truth process’. We would both say that a core skill of learning is understanding these truth processes, each of which can be used to learn many true facts.
As you point out, one very broadly useful truth process is deductive logic, whereby true facts are those that are provable from a given set of axioms.
However, the deductive logic truth process has severe limitations. To take one trivial example: if you are doing chemistry, all the deduction in the world will not tell you the weight of the material in your flask. Instead, you need to understand how to calibrate your balance, what its measurement accuracy is, how to eliminate confounding factors, etc, etc.
An more relevant example comes from economics. Economists long took it as an axiom that people were purely rational profit-maximizing agents. The more intelligent among them recognized that this was only an approximation, but continued to use it and defend it because it was so helpful in their analyses.
More recently, economists have realized that the assumption of rationality is wildly wrong in many contexts. But why did it take so long? My sense is that the allure of fascinating mathematics in the deduction process distracted them from the painstaking work of verifying their results against real markets, which would have forced them to re-examine their premises.
The point I am trying to get to is that there are many truth processes that are important. I want very much to avoid creating a breed of arrogant intellectuals who believe they can think their way through any situation without checking against ground truth.
To that end, students should be exposed not only to rhetoric and classical logic, but to many domain-specific truth processes and “old hand” experts who can give them a respect for real-world complexity. And that is particularly true for young children, since intellectual abstraction is a slowly developing ability.
(Note that, from my perspective, the main intent of learning about domain-specific truth processes is to provide general intellectual capacity, not vocational training!)
I fear that if we focus on rhetoric and logic alone, we’ll get another generation of Platonists, classical Marxists, and neoconservatives…
August 31st, 2007 at 10:03 pm
I have so many thoughts on this subject, both positive and negative, that I’m having trouble even organizing them in any coherent way. One of the main conflicts is between what I, as an individual, wanted (or would want now, looking back) for myself as a high school student, versus what I might want taught in a broad sense, for the “populace”, in high school. Without going into the pile of reasons, I quit my own high school for a year (10th grade) and went to live with my grandparents, who were favored with a “real” high school. It was an excellent move for me, and it was with very mixed feelings that I gave it up to come back to finish high school and live with my family. :) Needless to say, the quality of public education has been an important issue to me for a long time.
But ultimately — all of that aside — I would idealistically want high school (and all mandatory schooling) to achieve the goal of igniting a learning desire in the students. It sounds a bit trite these days, but in my opinion, it’s the core of what will provide success, year upon year, in a person’s life. Even with limited resources, poor teachers, day jobs, dependents, and all of the other limitations and distractions of life, ultimately, if someone wants to learn, they will find a way. The desire and ability to learn new material and identify solutions are what prepares people for dealing with obstacles and surmounting them. And without that drive, all of the best teachers, newest books, financial independence, and other boons — won’t be enough.
Interestingly, a certain amount of privation seems to cultivate this sort of drive far more than an overabundance of opportunity and assistance. Perhaps the mediocre schools have more chance of “success” at this goal?
This isn’t specific to Trey’s comment, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently. Humans aren’t very good encyclopedias; we’re not really built to be repositories of facts. We’re beings of action and behavior. I think it’s more effective (and admittedly harder) to teach students useful processes than to fill them up with facts. I do agree about the utility of knowing basic facts — for the purpose of applying them later — and for knowing the context provided by history — for the purpose of understanding, and potentially even predicting, the course of current events.
This is a great discussion to have, as I prepare for teaching a college-level Computer Science class that starts in three weeks. :)