Doing the Mess Around
Nobody has a clue of the skills students will need to bring to bear when they enter the workforce. Technological, environmental, social, cultural, parental, political and communal skills are a changing very fast because of the increase in speed that the Internet accords communication. There is not a great deal of lag time available to develop curriculum, educational resources, teaching skills, and jobs training and coop programs to be developed for to fill the jobs that will be.
Students and teachers and employers end up “Do’in the Mess Around,” as Ray Charles would say; of course not literally, but figuratively. Oh, it’s a lot of fun do’in the mess around, that’s for sure, but in reality everyone is wasting time jumping from academic objective to academic objective just to say that standards have been adhered to. But, very, very little is understood, transferrable to other applications or remembered. Parents look the other way when students resort to cheating to get ahead, because “They’re all doing it; my child needs to get into college,” they rationalize. They encourage and are glad to be relieved of the responsibility to help their child by directing them to the Discord Chat web site where they can get cut-and-paste help anonymously to call their own.
I have worked in School Districts that mandate that all schools and all teachers allow students to redo everything on which students receive a grade if they think they can get a higher grade; and they will allow this throughout the students entire school career, all the way up until students walk across the stage to get their high school diplomas. That’s right; for example, a 10th grader can, if they choose, redo a test or homework from say 4th grade if they think they will end up with a higher average. Ladies and gentlemen, that kind of nonsense is what can result from affirmative action mandated college entrance allowances and acceptance standards heavily weighted towards overall grade point average.
In that kind of environment, the players in a child’s school life are “gaming” the system and requiring every teacher to maintain an inventory of everything the teacher has assigned years and years. That is nonsense; that is “Do’in the Mess Around.”
Consistently harvested higher order thinking lessons are not being used that will help students enter the work force just five years from now, let alone fifteen years later when six graders get old enough to have a decent job, family, and wages.
Students not only need to develop problem solving skills, adaptive, transferable, skills need to become innately ingrained into their cognitive reasoning. The only things that students seem to be able to readily grasp for newly developed technology are gaming skills. Good gaming skills include, among other things, being able to synthesize everything happening, assimilate and classify changing variables involving hearing, vision and kinetic senses. Necessarily, that requires the ability to rapidly evaluate threat/risk/reward options. Those skills are not taught in schools of today; I know this as a teacher.
There is a big disconnect between the skills needed to master gaming, risk/reward choices, choice making combinations/permutations, and the educational curriculum. Those gaming skills also happen to be skills needed to deal with new technology being commercialized in artificial intelligence (AI), biogenetics, wave signals and discrimination, 3D modeling, processing and manufacturing, and the like. And yet, students still also need to pass the educational curriculum being taught today. But skills taught with today's curriculum are not skills that are enabling workers of today earn a living.
The ways students have been adapting to gaming and associated technical acuity skills needed today include primarily trial and error. The education system has drummed multiple choice evaluations into students’ minds. Students have gotten very fast at using the process of options elimination thru cut and paste and trial and error iterations. If it's not A, B, or C, then it’s “gotta” be D; see how smart I am. That is what students are certified in doing. Most of what is wanted and needed to succeed in today's jobs is to try all possible options until the right one is found. That is what Hackers do! Sadly, that is what most of the field of Data Science is doing as well. Just visit GitHub/Python to see how easy it is to copy and paste code to do almost whatever you want on a computer. Of course, that also plays right into the hands of software, APPs, and game developers.
Successful commercial ventures today have mastered the "like" mechanism; and people buy their stock like crazy. When they started selling their stock to raise capital, their IPO's typically went “to the moon, Alice.” It's the same mechanism that is inherent to the success of GOOGLE's YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsUp, yada, yada, and much of today's Data Science developments. It's all about choice-frequency. That principle is also the primary driver of biological health advancements. Bio-space specialists look for effective treatments on a trial and error basis and make choices based on improved outcomes frequencies. Trillions of investment dollars expended in the last 20 years has given us the ability to test choice frequencies very, very rapidly. That is what computers do.
But computers do not think, no matter what anyone says about Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning. Computers performing Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning are only doing what has been programmed into them to do. They do not and cannot think for themselves. It may appear they are thinking but they are not. They may make choices or form conclusions that a designer had not thought specifically about or used some allowed fuzzy logic with quantum randomness that wasn’t anticipated, but that is not thinking; that is just going through the process of elimination by the computer exhausting all of the choices that are available to test and then choosing the one that meets parameters set by a programmer.
Answers are statistically provided without the regard needed to evaluate the more esoteric variables that are harder to test, such as right, wrong, humane, environmentally impacting, need, value beyond just yes of no.
And now we have the Pandemic; dare to imagine the students our education system is training.
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Like, dislike, what would you do, what can be done?
Put it in an email: aulygeo@gmail.com
Let’s start a dialogue about this education mess before it’s too late to do anything about it.
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