Thoughts on our children's education

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The war has interrupted almost every Ukrainian child's education. As Oksana reminds me, the students in Eddie's former Sunflower school have done better than most. Throughout Covid they continued to meet in person while the public schools were largely online. Now, during the war, as they are scattered to the winds, the class is still meeting through Zoom. They have more continuity than most.

Eddie, however, has the most continuity of all. Though he still attends Sunflower one day a week, we have been homeschooling him in most subjects. The major discontinuity is that the pair of teenagers who were helping him with Ukrainian have fled the country.  We haven't heard from since the war started. He has the textbooks for Ukrainian and he is making progress with the help of his mother. The objective that he and Oksana have set is 30 pages a day. It's not often that many, but it's a good objective. Anything is better than nothing.

Oksana is concerned about preparing him for proficiency tests to be given in May. My take is that everything is so chaotic that most children will not be prepared to sit for tests even if they have been studying for them. It's time to look at the big picture.

Covid and the war have blown up a good many misconceptions surrounding education. The greatest of all is that teachers teach and children learn. That has never been true. To learn is a reflexive verb. Навчатися. Teach yourself. A teacher's job is to inspire and help the student to learn, which he must do by himself. Wise educators have long disparaged the Dixie cup model of a teacher opening a child's head and pouring in knowledge. It doesn't work like that. The child has to do it. American education has deteriorated so dramatically that this truth is becoming evident to all. Teachers are not inspiring, and children are not learning.

Eddie is teaching himself mathematics this year. He reads the textbook and does the exercises. I correct them. Most of his mistakes are careless ones, although occasionally they are systematic. A typical problem from yesterday was 3/5÷.06.  The trick was to grapple with both fractions and decimals and the same problem. We talked about it and now he knows.

When I was a graduate student in education in 2006 I took a course in mathematics instruction from a wonderful old lady named Mrs. Graber. The other students were largely middle school mathematics instructors. Most were middle-aged, getting their masters degrees as a matter of professional development and to improve their salaries.

Mrs. Graber had a young PhD educator as a visiting instructor talk to the class about the wonders of calculators.  The schools at which the other students taught also advocated calculators. The outcry from the real math teachers about the fact that calculators prevent students from developing mathematical intuition was delightful to hear. At any rate, schools here have never heard of calculators. Although Eddie knows enough Excel that he could have the computer solve the problems, he does it by hand.

This discipline not only ensures that he knows the algorithms, but that he applies them carefully. Eddie has a tendency to rush through things and not be two concerned when he gets them wrong. I suspect that this is why he failed the admission test for the lycée last year. He needs to have the discipline to check his answers. The best place to start is doing it for his present teacher, which is me.

He is also learning to check his written work. I recently described the process. He used it last week to summarize a couple of chapters that we had read in Roald Dahl's Going Solo, which we are now almost finished reading. Among the things that Eddie has learned is that writing is rewriting. He has to learn how to edit himself.   Here is the way his piece looks after a couple of edit passes.

The Black Mamba.

Roald Dahl woke up one morning in his house in Dar es Salaam Tanzania. Roald Dahl was shaving in his bathroom, and he happened to look out the window. He saw a black mamba snake creeping up on a man, a native to be precise. He quickly opened the window start to yell ”look out there’s a black mamba behind you.” The mamba was moving fast toward the man, but then it stopped and was creeping slowly.  Running would be no help. A mamba can move as fast as a running horse. The man who was attacked by the mamba was straightening gravel on the road. He had a rake in his hands. He got the rake 5 feet in the air and waited till the snake got closer. The snake got closer; it was ready to strike. When the snake was 5 feet away from him, he hit the snake with the rake he had in his hands, he quickly put one more weight. He broke the snake’s back. Roald Dahl ran down the stairs he took a golf club and said “how can I help you”. The man said, “keep your distance, I have broken the snake’s back it can’t move”. The the snake was squirming viciously, but it surely couldn’t move the man picked up the rakes aimed carefully and hit the snake on the head. The snake stopped moving. The man had killed the snake. He came to Roald Dahl and said “thank you” in Swahili. The rest of the month when Roald Dahl saw that man it made him feel good.

Roald Dahl worked for Shell oil in Tanganyika. His job was to bring oil to all the machinery that needed engine oil, WD-40 and other oil supplies. Roald Dahl was once a town for business. He was spending the night in the house of another white man. In the evening when they were having their sundowner, a man came running and yelling that a lion took the wife of the cook. Robert Sandford was the name of that man. He rushed in the house took a rifle and ran out. Roald Dahl ran after him. The cook was chasing the lion and Robert Sandford was chasing the lion with the rifle and Roald Dahl was running in the end. The lion was leading the parade with the cook’s wife in the mouth. Robert Sandford was yelling get out of the way I’m going to shoot. but the cook didn’t listen to him. Robert Sandford stopped aimed sidewise, not the shoot the cook or the wife or the lion and fired. As soon as the lion heard shooting, he threw the woman and ran for his life. He accelerated so fast that Roald Dahl was amazed. When the parade reached the place where the lion put the cook’s wife, the wife stood up. Then her husband said were did he bite you, and she answered, “he did not”. He carried me gently in his mouth I only got slobbered. That evening they had a big party to celebrate that the lion did not damage the cook’s wife. The cook said that if the lion would have injured his wife he would go and shoot him.

Learning that he is responsible for his own education will be the most important lesson of this year. Success in life depends upon education, and nobody can do it for you. You have to take charge of your life.

There were more geniuses per capita in the 19th century than any other. Very few were products of public school education, at that time in its infancy. The lucky ones were the children of parents who cared to ensure that they got a good education, like Charles Darwin and Sir Humphrey Davy.  Some had the wit to see to education themselves, like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Mikhail Lomonosov, and Michael Faraday.  Public education wasn't essential.  It was probably not even an asset.  The comparative success of modern homeschoolers reflects these truths.

We are fortunate to have been homeschooling through this period of Covid and wartime. We still have to admit that institutional schooling would bring some benefits. That was our thought last year when we had Eddie take the admission examination for Lyceum 208. A lycée will do a better job of teaching Ukrainian language in history. It will also be an opportunity to participate in sports and to develop new friendships.

I now propose that Eddie now take the test for admission to the sixth grade at Lyceum 208. My guess is that part of the problem last year was that he had never taken a standardized test before. He has not been in the habit of double checking his homework before he gives it to me, and may have made the same mistake with this test. In any case, the practice of taking such a test again won't hurt him.

Because their primary intake is in the fifth, in normal times there are not that many openings for the sixth grade. My guess is that a large number of current students are now abroad, and many who would be taking the entrance exam are also gone. There is therefore a good chance they will admit Eddie. They may be hungry for students. He can join an institution that will carry him clear through graduation and allow him to make friends with boys who will rise to levels of importance in the Ukraine of the coming years.

I consider American university education to be a waste of time, money and human potential. It is an opinion I formed over three decades as a parent, private school trustee, and student in the College of Education at the University of Maryland. You pay a lot of money for your children to be coddled as they learn about sex (not love), drugs and Marxism. The grades they receive don't represent much, and are colored by considerations of political correctness. Only a few courses of study prepare them for the real world.

I am far from alone in making this observation. I have written Amazon reviews of several books with useful suggestions.

·       Hacking your education (2013)
·       The Nearly Free University (2013)
·       Disrupt This (about Massive Online Open Courses) (2017)

The common theme among all these books is that books and video lectures are so readily available over the Internet that one no longer needs the services of a professor to assemble and deliver study materials. If you want to learn something, you have simply to find the sources and do it. Moreover, potential mentors will be eager to respond to a truly motivated student.

The role of the modern university is therefore credentialing more than teaching. That Harvard diploma opens doors for you, whether or not the Harvard education improved your mind. Credentialing is important because the majority of modern jobs don't demand much talent in the first place, beyond interpersonal skills such as kissing up and knowing when political correctness demands that you keep your mouth shut and nod along with the other sheep.

Credentialing was not important in my career in data processing. This largely remains the case. Smart people can become good programmers. No matter what their credentials, dumb people cannot. Except within workplaces such as government and labor unions that resolutely refuse to recognize talent, the best people will rise to the top.

My projection is that there will be so few people overall in my children's generation, and especially so few with any great talent, that real skill will once again outweigh credentialing. Therefore my children should focus on developing useful talents and not worry too much about where they get their credentials.

Those useful talents in my mind include the 3R's – reading, writing and arithmetic.  They can express these skills by applying them through the power of personal computing devices and software such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, statistics, graphics packages, voice recognition, text recognition, tax preparation, cryptography, audio and video processing and the like. They should of course be familiar with the Internet tools as well: complex searches, translation, thesaurus, rhyming dictionaries, and meeting software, to name a few. If they acquire a mastery of these, they should be welcome in just about any imaginable workplace.

That is not to say that they should not get credentials as well. Many of Ukraine's best universities are in Kyiv. Tuitions are reasonable, the quality of instruction is good and it will give the kids the opportunity to get to know the best and brightest of their generation. While our emphasis should be on learning skills they can apply anywhere, with more emphasis on the ability to learn than the subject matter being absorbed, we should not be blind to the fact that this is a good place to attend university.

As far as a course of study goes, I am encouraging Eddie to think about fields with employment opportunities in Ukraine. We have an advantage in data processing mainly because of a relatively low wage structure. Ukraine has a natural and permanent advantage in agriculture that will only become more pronounced over time. It pleases me that at the moment Eddie is interested in beekeeping and choosing appropriate flowers from which the bees can collect nectar. Maybe it will build to something.

Those are the musings from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men are looking forward to what comes after the war, the good-looking women are setting examples of family life, and the children are drinking in parental wisdom despite their frequent manifestations of independence.

Graham