If I Had a Billion, Part 4
(Continuing a thread I began in my July 13, 2007 entry.) It's interesting to tote up the responses I've gotten to my challenge of playing the "If I had a billion..." game. Basically, if you had a huge lump of money and all the material goods you wanted (and many of us seem to be either close to or already at that point) what would you do? For the most part, people would fund either research or initiatives in education. Here's a proposal from a correspondent that I will quote in full, because it echoes shorter concepts that others have sent, and I endorse it myself:
Substantial grants to public schools, provided the schools meet the following rather novel requirements:
- No more than 500 students in a school.
- No more than 30 students in each class.
- All discipline administered by human beings; no mindless "zero tolerance" policies.
- Declaring certain things to be intolerable is OK, but guilt and punishment must be decided by accountable human beings. (We are not training people to live under fascism -- are we?)
- No racial quotas. The school must not even keep track of the color or ethnicity of the students. (Time to get past the 1960s, folks! Don't send me to a school that doesn't meet my needs just because you need my color in the statistical mix.)
- If 2 school on the same grade level within 25 miles of each other get grants, then all students who are eligible to attend either one must have a free choice between the two of them.
- Limited extramural sports. (You can have all the intramural sports you want, provided that no student who wants to participate is turned away.)
- A physical education program with a real component of education, not team sports.
- A high level of community involvement.
Actually, I think public schools need to be replaced with a voucher system, but some attempt to humanize them along these lines [shown above] would be beneficial. Who was it that said the public schools are the only thing in America that is run on the Soviet system?
The answer to this final question is: Lots of people, and add me to the group.
My own education initiative is something I've been thinking about for a long time. Call it metaeducation, and it would be targeted at students in the last two years of high school. I see it as a summer program, but it could work as well on Saturday mornings throughout the school year. The hard work would be to create and document the curriculum and methodology, but once the program were created, it would be franchised to groups that wanted to implement it locally, with the bulk of the nonprofit's proceeds funding race-blind but income-sensitive scholarships to the program. Here's what the program would teach:
- How to study in school. Not how to ace tests. How to learn from the material you are presented. (If you learn the material, you will ace the tests.)
- How to teach yourself new skills and subjects without attending a formal course.
- How think critically.
- How to read for retention. (This includes indexing, as the most rigorous form of "taking notes.")
- How to research.
- How to frame and write a coherent argument. (We used to call this "rhetoric.")
- How to engage in the scientific method.
- Finally, the lost disciplines of courtesy, etiquette, and respect-for other students, and in fact for all people no matter who they are or where the interaction takes place.
For reasons unfathomable, few of these things are taught in any organized way in American secondary education. The program would be a supplement to, and not a substitute for, a conventional high school curriculum.
Next time, we'll speak of funding research with that hypothetical billion.