Why Do We Expect So Little of Our Youth?

The dichotomy between STEM and liberal arts isn't real. For some reason we declare some kids math-oriented and some art-oriented, but it's bullshit. I have a nephew who loves computers and reads three grades higher than he should, and a nephew who is two grades higher at math and can't use them at all. The one wants to be a programmer, the other a veterinarian. To them, there is no STEM/liberal-arts dichotomy--they will be taught that by some well-meaning adult idiot. Kids don't emerge from the womb as STEM or liberal arts; they have a variety of strengths and can learn any subject with enough time and energy.

The idea that you can appreciate a complex metaphor in a poem or a complex philosophical concept but not solve for x is absurd. It's fashionable to be bad at math and lots of people indulge in the fashion. The proper tool to address this problem is shame coupled with better education. When your niece tries to be cute by saying she's too pretty for math, you give her the disdainful disappointed look that says this shit won't fly and then ask her what she's having trouble with.

Teaching and learning are hard. We keep looking for a simple way out of doing it. Maybe if we teach less of this and more of that, remove this requirement, write this software, etc, it'll be easy. In reality, it's just like diet and exercise. In America, we want a magic pill, but the truth is that some things are just hard. The sooner we stop complaining and start doing, the better off we'll be.

The big problem with the liberal arts is the subjectivity of grading.

The algorithm that works best in the liberal arts is "guess what the teacher wants to hear and say it."

The horrible truth is that this is an unreasonably effective algorithm for functioning in management. At worst, it's used by scam artists like Madoff and Ken Lay. Many executives have left a trail of destruction, moving from one company to another just before reality sets in.

If there's any attribute that will cause mankind to end up like the dinosaurs, it's like this. It's got everything to do with our inability to deal with problems like global warming and it drives the everyday mediocrity that drags us down.

Back in college I remember some of the humanities profs were known to be liberal and others were conservative. Students who had different politics frequently believed they weren't graded fairly.

The mediocracy hates STEM and has waged a war against math because, often, we can say results in STEM are objectively right or wrong.

For instance, one time I pointed out an error that a math prof made on the board and he was happy to be corrected -- it's a bit of evidence that he's succeeding at his job. But after class, a student told me he was shocked that I'd been arrogant enough to think the teacher was wrong!

On the other hand, if you don't agree with what a humanist says about Shakespeare, for instance, she might reply that "different people can believe different things" or she can be bullheaded and not admit the subjective element.

I remember having a English teacher in high school who was the most respected, but I couldn't get better than a "D" in her class because she thought I couldn't write.

A few years later I had a strech when I got most of my income from writing and copy editing so there.

My girlfriend is from Poland, and the educational system there is different, compared to the USA. When she went to college, she did a 5 year program that left her with a degree that is normally translated into the USA system as a masters degree. Her focus was Polish literature.

When she got to the USA, she did a 2nd degree, this time in marketing. She was surprised by the USA system, in particular, the number of courses that she had to take that had nothing to do with marketing. She tells me that in Poland general purpose "learn a little bit about everything" classes end with high school. Once you go to college, the assumption is that you are becoming a specialist in a particular field, and all of your education goes to that specialty. Computer programmers are not forced to take literature classes, nor are those studying literature forced to take math classes.

I have the impression that in the USA, the universities are used to fix what's often seen as a broken K-12 educational system. We know that many young people arrive at college with educational deficiencies, therefore we load up the next 4 years with all the stuff they should have learned during their K-12 years. If they want to become specialists in something, well, that is what graduate school is for, after they turn 21.

I am generally impressed with what comes out of the Polish system. I've had a chance to work with Polish programmers, and they were very good, at very young ages. And, likewise, those who study Polish literature seem to understand it deeply, having spent 5 years reading all the classics (without the distraction of having to take unrelated classes).

I think the USA would be wise to fix its K-12 system, and then allow colleges to be places where people can specialize in what they want.

I suspect a lot of these issues have a deeper cause and one that might be summarised rather simply: there is an assumption teenagers are incapable of contributing to society. This is not an original idea but I wonder if it gets enough notice. I would argue this problem is worse in the West (at least this seems to be in line with my own experience).

It doesn't take much to put together the pieces. With increasing affluence, parents were given a greater opportunity to protect their children from the realities of life. It is clear that children are not always capable of facing real life challenges. However, the age for just when they are ready for many of them, seemed to gradually shift further and further. (Something that was no doubt encouraged by the longer periods of time required to complete the education for many vocations.)

Until we arrive at the present day. Teenagers are more or less assumed to be parasites on society, incapable of true contribution to it. Until, that is, they are magically transformed at the arbitrarily chosen 18 year mark into full fledged members of society.

I would argue that all this impacts how we teach kids in schools today. Instead of introducing them to truely independently useful skills, there is an uspoken rule that they aren't actually capable of anything useful just yet. Instead we play pretend, teach them some ideas that might one day lead to something useful, and expect they'll be satisfied with the experience. Highschools often cram kids' heads full of mundane method after mundane method, with little explanation as to how they work or why they are relevant. There is a litany of seemingly random factoids to be memorised. Abstract thinking is a lofty skill reserved for the adults and we needn't waste our time trying to evoke anything of the sort with these kids.

So yes, in a way I think our expectations of what our kids are capable of, do need to change. Not only on a superficial level where we just get them to work harder within the existing broken system. But a new approach is required where their full potential can be challenged.

It's easy to make such grandiose sweeping statements of course, but I maintain one of the keys is not stopping short with purely theoretical methods but extending them to practical realities. Yes, that is more challenging. Let's stop assuming that the challenge is out of grasp for these young people.

A newspaper or blog post is probably the wrong medium for this question. It's one I explored in detail when I was evaluating an opportunity in the education space between September and January. There are a variety of big problems in the education space, most of which centre around the problems of bureaucracy. Here the fundamental issue is that it's extremely difficult for school boards that are offering the same salary scale to everyone regardless of skills/subjects (which is the norm in Canada and much of the U.S.) to get similar levels of teaching talent for subjects that are highly in demand. This tends to lead to a notion of progress that involves reducing the math curriculum to the point where the "math" teachers you have can actually teach it well. This is often spun as giving everyone more opportunity for success or presented as innovation to curriculum, and many buy into that spin. The answer of teaching better is the best solution when it's actually possible, but the combination of convincing government to spend it, and convincing the unions to allow it to be spent well is nearly impossible. The net result is something similar to the system we have. Perhaps worst of all, entrepreneurs get scared away from the space because there isn't anything worse than dealing with enterprise style sales processes for sales numbers that simply are not.

The biggest hurdle in U.S. and western education that I see, especially with maths and engineering is this strange culture of nerd stereotype and 'too pretty for math/homework' etc... I just can't figure it out. I'lived in other eastern countries where these stereotypes are non-existent and not so surprisingly, over there, you see many pretty girls who are exceptional mathematicians and programmers and they aren't considered strange or special.

This entire post seems to be predicated on an invalid premise: Math is hard and liberal arts is easy. There are certainly some liberal arts majors that are easy blowoff majors. But there are also plenty of very challenging liberal arts majors.

Rather than make this a simplistic question of "Should we challenge our kids or not?", we should be asking the question "What should we challenge our kids with?". And it's not clear to me that every liberal arts major needs a good algebra foundation. So why not replace it with something equally challenging that will be more useful to the students?

Both articles are wrong. One makes the point that art should scaled down and math should be scaled up, while the other argues that math is holding back art and should be scaled the opposite direction.

Both are wrong. Math and art are one and the same. Yes, this article in the link was correct that the problem lies in our education system, but there is no distinction between math and art. Our math just isn't applied enough or taught correctly, so students miss out on a true understanding of how math works. Look at da Vinci, that is a man who made no distinction between math and art.

I don't agree that we need "less liberal arts degrees" but having more stringent STEM courses that push students to excel is never a bad thing. Bill Gates used to say "smart people go where the money is" and so if by the author's assertion that the new economy needs people who are good at math, then the market will reward those people and the system will change to focus on math skills. This does not mean that liberal arts degrees are useless as the best innovations usually come at the intersection of liberal arts and STEM fields.

> Our schools are not failing students because they are too hard. They fail because few schools expect anything from their students and shy away from challenging their minds.

I think this is close to the mark, albeit vague. Challenging their minds in what way? Such a statement could be misinterpreted as, "We need more rigorous test standards!" or some other specific solution that does not necessarily meet the goal.

From personal experience, for classes other than upper-level math at my college, people would constantly ask questions like, "Is this going to be on the test?"

And I was always annoyed by that. It seemed indicative of the meaninglessness of our education, and I can see why math classes are so difficult for people who learn this pattern rather than the subjects. I don't know how different it is at Ivy League or other schools perceived as high in quality, but when the majority of testing is multiple-choice, true-false, or fill-in-the-blank, it becomes easy to look at everything you learn as a task of rote memorization. It's like that saying: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The difference with math that makes it so "hard" is you often can't rely on rote memorization. You have to actually learn the material (or understand algorithms and memorize steps to finding solutions with different initial conditions). People get discouraged (probably early on) by the fact that the skills they use for academic success elsewhere do not always work with math, and I think they associate those negative emotions with "math is hard."

I don't know the solution, but I think people need to at least realize that rote memorization is not indicative of learning. It's an uncomfortable realization because so many of our metrics for academic success rely on the assumption that memorization equals learning or understanding.

Of course, that's unlikely. The status quo is always easier. Why do we expect so little from adults?

I think what many fail to see is that the problem does not necessarily begin with the education system. It begins with the popular culture.

In those countries where doing well in school is almost certainly the difference between a decent life and a really bad life, there is a different mentality at play than in America, where even if one goes to a middle tier college, they can probably still lead a relatively comfortable life.

The second issue is that everyone in our society is encouraged to become a scholar and intellectual. While noble in its intent, society may very well be better off with a system like Germany, where many attend vocational schools and learn a craft that can have a real effect on the economy.

"What creates wide gaps in achievement in math (and many other subjects) in minority students is lower expectations for success."

I found this sentence frustrating. It was simple-minded to an extreme, neatly finding a solution to fit all minorities.

Minorities in the middle class, e.g., may have a completely separate set of problems from minorities in poverty circumstances. Recent immigrant minorities may face a different set of circumstances from second, third, fourth, etc. generation minorities.

The author's message is essentially "try harder, think positive". Unfortunately it does not address the different nuances of being a minority.

"What creates wide gaps in achievement in math (and many other subjects) in minority students is lower expectations for success." And then it links to http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb0...

But to attribute the entire discrepancy to lower expectations baffles me. How is it that so many people are so confident in their various contradictory theories surrounding educational outcomes?

I remember poignantly an argument I had with my cousins about education. They themselves are teachers, two elementary and one specializes teaching kids with special needs. All of them are extremely dedicated and very passionate (to the point of tears) about learning and teaching. They love their jobs and the kids they work with.

The argument I had was that it wasn't teachers that were the problem. It was the institution of education that allows the problems we see. Unfortunately for my cousins and I that I was too inarticulate in showing them they weren't the problem.

Ken Robinson did my thoughts far more justice in his TED video about education paradigms [1]. To summarize, why do we educate our children along a yearly conveyor belt with compartmentalized subjects and standardized testing? The whole system mimics the factory assembly lines, complete with specializations and quality assurance.

We allow process to educate children instead of people. We can effectively replace any teacher with another and our expectations and the system itself doesn't change in any meaningful way. We squash the organic and relational learning with rote memorization and rigid structure. We don't foster curiosity or exploration. We value conformity to structure and authority. There isn't any opportunity for kids to "scratch their itch" unless it falls within the existing structure.

I do have hope for the future. Places like Khan and Wikipedia allow for the curious exploration of subjects, and the Internet allows for participation and dialog that weren't available a few decades ago. I believe we are waking up to a different paradigm of learning that has the ability to transform education from it's Industrial Revolution roots. I also believe this will give passionate teachers, like my cousins, the freedom from the rigid structure that allows them to foster the natural interests of their pupils.

If we allow this form of organic learning, then Standardization is effectively impossible. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. This gives more flexibility to tailor the education to the kids' interests. However this means we will have to accept that some people will want to grow their kids in ways that are hard to swallow. Creationism comes to mind. I don't have a good idea how to counter this.

[1]: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_par...

Seems like somebody who'd enjoy reading "A Mathematician's Lament"