User:Fasten/Education2
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Q: A currency like the Saber could be used for assistant teachers?
A: Not necessarily. The currency is a tool to motivate pupils to educate each other. Pupils who have qualified to educate themselves still need teachers or help occasionally. Pupils could buy lessons from pupils of higher grades or from teachers and before they could buy such lessons they would have to teach others. Buy buying a lesson with a currency nobody can provide for them pupils would have a constant reminder of the value of their education. A computer based currency would also allow teachers to monitor closely how active a pupil participates in the system. The currency would also remain fair by being not transferrable and time based, so one hour is one hour, no matter what the quality of the lesson is. Fairness might need to be enforced in the assignment of very popular teachers and teaching pupils. While the currency could encourage pupils to teach each other the ultimate goal could be to replace it with a gift economy. This is something the pupils could establish against the pre-arranged currency system, if they choose to. The problem of motivating their peers to participate could be left entirely to the interested groups, teachers could claim to prefer the currency system, which is indeed easier to monitor and manage. If you teach for free you could later be eligible to get your exams for free, which would be an application of Kant's Categorical Imperative by the teachers. That would, of course, require that the teachers were able to track the teaching behaviour of individual pupils and groups reliably and make an informed, collective decision about who is eligible and who is not. A group of especially good pupils who establish a closed gift economy but refuse to teach less good pupils would not be eligible because the teachers could refuse by reason of not wanting to teach much less educated persons. A deliberate test would be to, openly or secretly, redirect bad pupils to such groups on a regular basis and verify the result. Teachers might want to reproduce close approximations of the responses these test persons received, on occasion. Pupils who are still assigned to classes but visit voluntary lessons could be candidates for leaving the class system.
Q: Wouldn't there be a strong trend to get all pupils out of classes towards the end of class 10?
A: You could prevent that by making it more difficult towards the end. The last semester or trimesters could require pupils who want to reach the college/university preparatory high school grades to write tests for admission and at the same time allow them to go back one or two grades immediately (not waiting for the year to end), out of their own free decision. At the same time the higher grades would be encouraged to help those who need it because there would be either an incentive to get the educational currency, or, in a gift economy, there would still be an incentive to help the less good pupils, so as not to undermine a foundation of the gift economy: the precedent of helping the less educated. This judgement of the teachers should never be explained to pupils and there should not even be a prognosis available. If a gift economy fails that is the result of long term trends and should require a general change of conduct, not a quantifiable number of measurements.
Q: Why should a pupil go back two grades?
A: Because it may be required at times. Pupils sometimes manage to evade all measures designed to make them learn enough, when that happens a pupil should have to pass a test of admission for the previous grade. Failing that test he or she would have to go back two grades, where the learning matter is almost guaranteed to be too easy, which gives him or her a head start as a teacher for others. This is a much preferrable situation to going back one grade and facing the same problems immediately again. A change of school should be recommended at that time so that the pupil meets unprejudiced teachers and, especially, schoolmates. This doesn't have to be a problem but it might be and also a change of surroundings can be stimulating, especially when the surroundings could be part of the problem.
Q: How could the quality of lessons given by pupils be verified?
A: Lessons could be announced ahead of time and teachers and assistant teachers could monitor the quality of lessons or interrupt as they would deem necessary. Every lesson could be announced with a list of the required exams the lecturer recommends for participants. It could also be required to provide high quality minutes of every lesson or coaching lesson that is to be credited, including a list of the participants and/or an audio or video recording of the lesson. This is no longer a problem with modern low cost technology, like web cams and PCs. It is also possible to connect a whole classroom to one or two PCs (max. 5 * 4 monitors per PC) instead of using one PC for every pupil, that decreases the number of required PCs significantly. Incidentally the money you safe would be wisely spent on sending teachers to developing countries (bringing pupils from developing countries to Europe or the USA is obviously a complement when sending teachers to those countries is so much more efficient). PCs are fast enough for this and also support this kind of sharing conveniently today. Black boards that can make a digital copy of their content are also available and could also be used for electronic minutes. Refusal to pay for a lesson by the participants could require a recording of the event in order to mediate. With electronic minutes the minutes could serve as an index to the recording and allow convenient screening of recordings. Screening for noise level would also be possible to find interruptions. This way teachers would be much more in a position to educate pupils to become teachers by evaluating and discussing the quality of lessons held by pupils.
Q: What would happen to a pupil who doesn't learn enough without a regular class?
A: Pupils would be free to learn whatever they want to learn, as long as they cover a sufficient number of topics over time. A pupil who fails to apply for any exams would simply drop back into the class system.
Q: What would happen to a pupil who finishes early? Should there be a chance to go through final exams early, like a "Freischuss" for college/university admission?
A: No, there is no reason to stop learning just because you have fulfilled minimum requirements so that doesn't happen. Pupils who have less need to learn more could, of course, act as assistant teachers more of the time. An assistant teacher could strive to reach a preliminary qualified teacher status, which could result in qualified teacher status together with a diploma and some additional qualification in pedagogy at the university. That would be an additional certificate which would be general good karma but don't mean anything beyond the fact that somebody has shown positive social behaviour and is especially qualified as a supply teacher and, of course, could apply more easily for a job as a fulltime teacher. Between grades 10 and 12 there could also be an offer to visit a developing country for half a year, as a teacher, and, of course, receive another karma certificate and some valuable insights.
Q: Sending high school pupils to developed countries as pupils for a year is a complement?
A: Maybe. Think for yourself. What sounds more useful to you, when you consider Kant's Categorical Imperative? Every school in the rich countries could have a dozen partner schools in the poorer countries and send their assistant teachers primarily to those partner schools. Helping all those schools with learning material (even old school books) would come cheap for a school in the rich countries. Organizing letter exchanges with pupils from those partner schools could be an indication for a pupil to be allowed to leave the class system. This should require a basic knowledge of the native language of the corresponding country, learned in self-organized courses. This could mean that a child starts early, decides to learn some basic Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Bengali, Hindi, Arabic or an african language (preferrably a language that isn't commonly taught) with the help of older pupils, who act as assistant teachers, possibly in a small group, but only driven by his or her own effort to do so. The choosen language could also be the language of the desired country for a visit as an assistant teacher later on. Learning the language could also include online chatting with native speakers in a twin school in the destination country, if internet access is available on both sides, but writing letters to a foreign country can be both a training for intercultural competence and a chance for slow, deliberate and well thought-out social communication, which can be lacking in modern education. Correctors on either side could help to improve the quality of the communication and some letters could be printed in a pupil magazine or posted to a school online forum.
Q: To teach applied ethics and conflict resolution there needs to be conflict potential that can be observed by teachers or conflicts need to be simulated entirely?
A: You can simulate conflicts in a course on applied ethics but you can also allow a certain degree of conflict potential in school. Pupils could organize learning strategies by forming associations and developing rules and ethical policies on how to ensure fair distribution of learning resources and how to (re-)organize the collective learning process. Pupils could also form political parties and vote for a school parliament or practice direct democratic votings to assign resources to different associations or to overrule the decisions of isolated associations. A system of two parliaments, one for the younger and one for the older grades, would allow the younger to experiment more and the older to stablize their system, otherwise the stable system would just be inherited by younger grades without a learning effect. Teachers should obviously retain a veto right but try not to interfer without reason. The political decision process leaves plenty of space to teach ethics and, especially, Kant's Categorical Imperative. If pupils take no interest in participating in the political process of their school teachers should support the interested minority in hijacking the system and reorganizing it to suit the minority only, until the silent majority wakes up and organizes new parties. This could go as far as excluding the silent majority from all exams, because it wouldn't be sufficiently interesting if pupils were able to ignore it.
Q: A possible new conflict is the decision of a teacher to return a pupil into his or her class?
A: That could be an important area where pupils might want to negotiate regulations and a process of appeals. In order to allow them to work on that the initial situation could be that teachers would show arbitrariness and appeals would be impossible. That situation is convenient for teachers and could be reinstated for every grade. The teachers might also keep track of the behaviour a pupil shows towards other pupils and teachers and apply his or her precedents in the treatment of a pupil. A pupil who is never helpful towards others and only pursues what is in his own interest would be walking on thin ice, when allowed to leave the class for some subjects, as the slightest reason to return him or her would be sufficient to do so, without regard. Any social work or work with a strong social component inside school or outside school would make teachers more affable. A pupil returned to class would, of course, have to do some presentable, self-motivated work to be allowed outside class again. Any regulations that fail to accommodate the expectations of the teachers should be terminated unilaterally at any time, which is especially useful when a grade needs to be stirred into action (again). To prevent this the pupils of every grade would need their representatives in a district parliament of schools to negotiate with the supervisory authority of the school.
Q: That means while the apparent arbitrariness of teacher's decisions would leave room for the teachers to apply their personal insights into the social behaviour of their pupils it would be something the pupils would ultimately want to overcome?
A: Pupils might also aim to show positive social behaviour, which would have the positive effect of teaching them to be self-motivated altruists, as the negative effects of failing to do so would only be revealed to them with a large time delay and nobody would be encouraging them to be altruists. While there is a positive effect and pupils might recognize it as a positive effect they would also, at some stage in their political education, begin to refuse the black box in this system and would probably want to remove it. If the general acceptance for the system was too strong teachers might opt to either invite pupils to overcome it or reveal its inadequacy thru the deliberate mistreatment of individuals, possibly pupils acting the part.
Q: Did you mention school uniforms?
A: You most definitely want school uniforms. The reasons should be apparent. Looks distract and distinguish people where there is no apparent use for it. Incidentally all school uniforms could carry a fair trade symbol, as a subtle reminder.
Q: In Hebrews 5,13 you mentioned that we should be teachers: We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers ...? And you mentioned the metaphor of the Leerrohr?
A: Sure. All adults need to be able to teach, because there are many things you may understand more properly when you try to teach them. This is especially true for ethics. The best qualification you can aim for in school is to having taught logically and ethically advanced problems to an interested group of pupils. Being good teachers is what qualifies you to raise children at all, that's why I would recommend to make it an ethical requirement, to maintain a certain social status, that somebody acts as a supply teacher once in a while.
Q: Is writing down your personal ethics a useful tool to teach ethics?
A: Done right it can be useful. Pupils can discuss ethics among each other and write down public journals of personal ethics, allowing each other to annotate their journals.
Q: That reminds me of a friendship book or poetry album . An abstract description of a poetry album could be "a personal chronicle with insights into your mental state".
A: Poetry is circumscribed in german with "geflügelte Worte", which means "words with wings". Poetry albums are not quite what you want because they rarely contain ethics, at least not in an easily applicable form, and they are more usually only available to a small circle of friends. Today you would probably prefer a blog because it allows digital signatures and convenient public access. Social status can be defined by public consensus. Making social status explicit has several educational effects. Any claim to social status can be dismissed if it is in conflict with the status agreed upon. The rules for status can be defined by the community, e.g. reviewing ethics, adherence to ethics and acts of public utility or altruism. The applicability of social status can be defined by the community. If the community is trying to form a parliament they may allow candidates to make explicit reference to their social status. Teachers might also grant certain rights depending on social status but in most other cases a claim to status would indicate that somebody is trying to abuse his or her status. This way social status also offers some valuable conflict potential that can be used to teach mediation and ethics. Finally pupils can learn what social status could be and what it should not be.
Q: Could regular schools also create communities for adult education?
A: That might be desirable for several reasons. Adults are often difficult to educate, once they are no longer participants of any educational system. If you are serious about lifelong learning this is one way to invite everybody to maintain it and make use of it.
Q: What is the point if all you really need to educate yourself is a book?
A: Even academics occasionally need some motivation to look over their fence, this is even more true for less educated persons and, of course, this is a chance for community building. Anybody who deemed him or herself above this kind of education would be welcome as a teacher, provided he or she had acquired the permission to teach, and would be welcome to acquire the permission to teach otherwise. If participation in this system was generally expected that would create a mild pressure to become a teacher if you can be a teacher, which is desirable. As this would be a learning community the most significant social status would be the permission to teach, or to hold lectures in this community. The latter could be an intermediate status for people who do not have a permission to teach, so they might need an editor for any lectures they intend to hold. As the community would not be bound by a curriculum any topic the audience desired could be treated and schools in the same city could, of course, create larger communities and allow for a greater variety of interests.
Q: That would also have been the point of the Jugendleiter training I signed up for around 1986, but which I missed because I got the location wrong ? (Amusingly my last flat was right next to the location, the Kolpinghaus, following the right answer at the wrong time pattern).
A: Youth holiday camps may be nice but do they address the problem at hand? The advantage of promoting school communities is that every pupil is part of one school community while outside school you mostly get in contact with children who are actively joining a group or community already, which leaves room for subcultures and isolationism. There may also be some subcultures whose autarky you may want to question.
Q: You already mentioned that pupils could have older pupils as mentors but to what effect?
A: The effect would be to teach the mentors responsibility, to promote their pupil's education and to build communities between different generations of pupils, which is often suppressed in schools that have no need for contact between the grades. Parishs also have activities that can lead to community building between teenagers but neither school education nor out-of-school education has a formalized mentorship where the mentor is reviewed. You could have peer review and you could review mentors by measuring their success and disposition by observing their pupils. It might be a good idea to make this a critical criteria for the admission to higher education. If pupils had well motivated mentors that could also possibly relieve tension in families where older siblings automatically have to take that role. Diverting that relationship outside the family can be advantageous, because inside a family it is informal and may cause strain where it is not desirable, while outside the family it furthers social skills. Mentors could be required to keep a diary of their mentorship and to see to it that the pupils they mentor receive a sufficiently diverse education in school and outside school. One pupil could have several mentors of different ages, possibly including adults, and, obviously, at the same time one mentor could also have several pupils, this would also encourage peer review between mentors. Also mentors could be required to attend to advanced training outside regular school. Anybody who failed to pursue such training without being required to do that would have shown a noteworthy but inconsequential lack of self-motivation. You might also want to encourage pupils to change mentors after several years or to acquire additional mentors over time. You would probably also want to introduce all mentors of a pupil to each other and encourage cooperation. Godparenthood could obviously be redefined as a formal mentor relationship, being an informal one anyway. You might also want to mix social strata, school types and ethnic groups to the maximum.
Q: What would be the purpose of a mentor, should he or she be another teacher?
A: A mentor can be a teacher, tutor or coach but he or she can also be an advisor to the teachers of a pupil. Without necessarily being a legal guardian the mentor can keep an eye on the personal development of his or her pupils and advise a teacher when a pupil is unchallenged and bored by a subject. This is something many pupils silently accept and teachers often do not perceive as a problem. It can, however, spoil self-motivation and the curiosity in education of a pupil who hasn't yet understood that this state can become a sever problem. A mentor could also suggest literature and extracurricular activities and keep track of both. An important goal could be to understand and appreciate the interests of a pupil while aiming for a diverse education that is taking the interests and preferences of a pupil into account and then to verify and document that in an education diary. Childhood photo albums are a less plausible (or useless) mutation of this.
Q: What extracurricular activities do you suggest?
A: Something that lends itself is animal care and research of animal intelligence by pupils. You have enough bored primates, elephants and dolphins in captivity. That could include teaching simple languages to the animals (see The mind of an ape) and proper scientific documentation of the research, so that later groups can continue the work and communicate in the same language. The animals that appreciate human presence would gain some intellectual stimulation and entertainment and the pupils would gain first-hand understanding of animal intelligence, especially primate intelligence, and of teaching very unintelligent pupils, which may be desirable. A precondition would be, of course, that the pupils learned to be animal keepers in a zoo. Elephants and some primates could also be allowed to leave their enclosure outside regular hours and in the presence of a sufficiently large group of qualified animal keepers.
Q: Does it make sense to distinguish tutors and mentors?
A: It does make sense to motivate older pupils to become both. A tutor could actively teach a specific topic without being responsible for the general education of a pupil while a mentor would be more occupied with monitoring and guiding education with respect to the interests of the pupil. Some mentors, who are not yet adults themselves, would, of course, require guidance and review of their skills themselves in order not to allow mentorship to deteriorate into gathering bad habits from older pupils. It would also allow pupils to learn to reject bad teachers or faulty knowledge and the tutors to verify knowledge they are supposed to have understood. It would also allow a network of relationships between tutors and, yet a bit older, mentors, promoting peer review and support between them and motivate them to see the problems of learning and teaching from quite different angles. To motivate pupils to take this offer seriously tutors and mentors could be allowed to recommend to return pupils into class (ending, at least, the tutorship this way) and teachers could evaluate and grade the work of tutors and mentors, by testing for knowledge, skills or insights tutors or mentors claimed to have taught successfully. The work of a mentor could also receive criticism of the parents, up to a veto to count the mentorship at all. This would be a motivation for the mentor to interact with the parents and discuss pedagogical goals with the parents. To make this fair every tutor and mentor could be assigned an even share of good and bad pupils to be taught in one group, in separate groups or alone. As the details of such a process would also leave a lot of room for discussion this is another topic a school parliament might want to regulate for each grade anew, which would include negotiation between the grades of pupils, tutors and mentors. A grade without representatives in that parliament would find itself in the pathological situation of not having any tutors available and never being allowed to leave the class for independent study.
Q: What would motivate pupils to negotiate if the outcome is guaranteed?
A: Without negotiation a grade would be stuck and would have to leave school after completion of grade 10 or repeat the grade, otherwise pupils wouldn't perceive this as a pathological situation. The older grades, who are required as tutors, could start such a discussion with a plain refusal and state that they are unwilling to teach kids so small, undisciplined and uneducated, which wouldn't necessarily be far from the truth. In reply to this the pupils of the lower grades could start to organize themselves and try to solve the problem. A possible attempt would be the formation of closed groups that try to negotiate individually. Depending on the situation such attempts could be allowed to succeed for various reasons. One possible reason is that the group in question might easily solve the problem and spoil the learning effect for the rest of the grade while, as an elite group that has left the rest behind, they can motivate the rest to tackle the problem or to prohibit the practice in an open discussion with a democratic vote (which could take some time to prepare and be held outside regular hours). Any association (pupil's magazine, political party, learning group, ...) formed by pupils could be required to register with the school and keep a diary of its activities, especially memberships and explanations for refused and revoked memberships. It might be a nice goal to have every pupil be a member of at least one association. The goals of associations could, of course, include extracurricular activities. Associations with a charter could have a certain freedom to negotiate with the school and other grades.
Q: Why would the older pupils allow the negotiations to succeed at some time if that means more work for them? Pupils who lack self-motivation, that is.
A: They would either want to earn educational currency for their own purposes or, in a gift economy, they would not want to loose the support of the teachers, which could happen when the lower grades have made a reasonable proposal and negotiations are stalled. The teachers should, of course, not influence the negotiations openly but retain a veto against unacceptable proposals.
Q: Negotiations could lead to several proposals and the formation of political parties and a grade parliament?
A: Yes. Older grades or teachers could intentionally try to invite younger grades to enact unfair contracts, like, for example, a partitioned system where pupils with good marks could opt-in to receive tutors with the same qualification. Anybody accepting this option would obviously be noted by teachers monitoring unfair behaviour and would also risk having his or her contract cancelled by the school parliament later but might otherwise have the contract fulfilled, at the cost of having to work much harder to reach a possible gift economy in the higher grades. A possible excuse for accepting such an offer could be that a pupil offered free coaching lessons, preferrably at another school with expressed demand for his or her service, which would encourage him or her to strive for good marks in order to receive good tutors and to be a mostly self-motivated teacher to others. Following the Categorical Imperative it is generally a good idea to be a teacher if you want to be taught. One of the more important goals would be to devise ways to teach ethics for an affluent society, the leisure society of the future, without any real or imagined poverty and without suppressed classes. There is no reason why that task cannot be delegated to the pupils themselves, which would put applied pedagogics / education science in the place of a mandatory major field of study. Older pupils who are motivated to teach ethics, have a mandate to do so, have been taught pedagogics and ethics and had a chance to devise their own plans for doing so are potentially more influential than adult teachers, as pupils more easily pick older pupils as role models. Older pupils acting as tutors or mentors would, if properly motivated, learn and get used to disciplined interaction with younger pupils and to being positive role models, which is contrary to the undisciplined behaviour which is not uncommon among teenagers in the absence of adults. The word gymnasium, originally spelled gymnazein, is Greek for place to be naked. That is the opposite of what you want, which the choice of name should suggest to any fluently pilingual person.
Q: Yes, my own interest in Jugendleiter training was probably based on positive impressions from youth holiday camps, definitely not on the insight to a moral obligation to be a tutor. Why formalize mentorship? Doesn't it already exist informally?
A: What's the reach? The IB already exists, you might as well argue that there is no need to promote concepts like CAS beyond that. The people you reach most reliably are probably the ones least in need of it. Is that satisfactory? Non-systematic approaches do mean you are gambling.
Q: Universities do have tutors for students, is there a similarity?
A: University tutors often act as teachers with groups as large as school classes. That is merely the concept of a school teacher in front of too many persons with a slightly more adult audience. Theoretically university students should not require much more, if their high schools successfully raised adults.
- ↑ Digital black boards can be expected to become cheaper and more practical with the advent of e-paper around 2007.
- ↑ This probably would be a reference to standards for the clothing of pupils, without diminishing actual school uniforms, of course. Correctly phrased it could be: "What social skills, values and activities would you like to teach to pupils and how can you standardize something like this sufficiently so that it could become a part of formal education?"
- ↑ The english term friendship book means something different. The poetry album serves a similar purpose but is kept, not sent away and access to it is considered much more intimate, sometimes the book even has a lock: "To lock the words" might refer to a timestamp for the "winged words".
- ↑ Not legally binding digital signatures, merely digital signatures that assert authenticity with sufficient credibility. Legally binding signatures are an immature technology, at least on today's personal computers.
- ↑ Campaign advertising posters (Wahlplakate) often exhibit oversized portraits of the candidates: "You want to make yourself a picture of the candidates, to know their character traits, not portraits, and that should show a large piece of altruism, not show up on a large piece of paper (Paper -> washi (紙) {ja} -> altruism, see Homophones)
- ↑ Apparently another metaphor: wrong location. I do have an ethical problem with an instance using unintelligible language to confuse pupils. In my opinion that would require a strong corrective action by responsible adults and, most probably, this is even designed to provoke exactly that reaction. As usual, the metaphor is ambiguous, because I signed up for the training at my school and not the parish so as not to get caught in unnecessary religion and the Kolpinghaus is a christian organization, so, from my point of view at that time, it would have had the wrong location (if dogmatic religion, as a meaningless statement, can change your location). I also thought, for not adequately analyzed reasons, that signing up for the training might be a bad idea, which was a complement, the way I see it now.
- ↑ Depending on your position that may be an unethical offer: Training pupils to be animal keepers for the more intelligent species would also put them in the position of keeping these animals in captivity. A solution would be to approach this as an animal activist group and demand visiting hours, if the conditions of captivity are not appropriate to the species (in the eyes of the pupils). This could vary from species to species and lead to very inhomogeneous arrangements. It might also motivate the pupils to try to analyze animal psychology beyond outer appearance which could, again, be of mutual benefit. Zoos often offer a very diversified diet to the more intelligent species; that could be interpreted as "you might want to offer them some diversity in their food" (-> intellectual stimulation). When you keep animals in an artifical environment that may bring some additional responsibilities, including entertainment the animals wouldn't have and wouldn't need in the wilderness.
- ↑ Which would make death a random event. Granting adulthood at a given age is a non-random event but it lacks any sensible measurement.
