Bring on the Learning Revolution!

Reference: Subject: Education

You may read the transcript here.

Here are the main points from this talk (May 2010):

(1) Currently, there is a crisis of human resources. We make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. But there are also those who love what they do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But such people are in a minority.

(2) You might imagine education would be the way to create the circumstances where natural talents show themselves, but too often it’s not. Education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. What we need is not evolution, but a revolution in education.

(3) One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education, but we are still hypnotized by the ideas that were formed to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. Those ideas do not meet the circumstances of this century but we take them for granted and find it difficult to overcome them. For example, in education, we are obsessed with getting people to college because we take it for granted that it is the only way to get set up for the rest of our life. But life is not linear; it is organic.

(4) At the heart of our challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us.

(5) We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, where everything is standardized and not customized to local circumstances. It is impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

(6) Human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. It’s about passion and what excites our spirit and our energy. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn’t feed their spirit, it doesn’t feed their energy or their passion.

(7) We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people, to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture, which recognizes that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, and that it is an organic process. You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

(8) It’s about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you’re actually teaching. It is not about scaling a new solution; it’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.

(9) Today’s extraordinary resources in business, multimedia, and the Internet, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. Every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly.

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April 29, 2014 – 12:48 PM Categories: Education | Post a comment

Massenet Meditation


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Beautiful meditation at 1:06:20. It is out of this world.

April 29, 2014 – 6:11 AM Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Jewish People

Jewish1Scarlett Johansson: Jewish entertainer

I love this response on Quora, so much so that I have added it to my blog.

Do Jews think they are superior to other ethnic/religious groups in the world?

Response by Marc Ettlinger, a yiddishe boychi

It’s certainly undeniable that Jews have reached incredible heights of achievement in science (Einstein, Feynman, Bohr, Salk, Sagan, Lise Meitner), social science (Freud, Marx, Chomsky, Boas, Levi-Strauss, Proust), technology (Google, Intel, half of Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Facebook, von Neumann, Erdös, Kurzweil), business (Bloomberg, Soros, Fridman, Rothschilds), the arts (Chagal, Kafka, Roth, Modigliani, Rivera & Kahlo, Rothko, Dylan, Shoenberg, Gershwin), politics (Kissinger, Albright, Disraeli, Goldwater, Emma Goldman, Trotsky&Lenin, Jesus, Brandeis, Ayn Rand) and entertainment (from Groucho Marx and the founders of MGM to Mila Kunis, Scarlet Johanson and Natalie Portman – it’d be easier to list the entertainers that aren’t Jewish). Heck, even the joked about Famous Jewish Sports Heroes pamphlet is filled with luminaries like Mark Spitz, Koufax, Sid Luckman, Aly Raisman and Hank Greenberg; I once even calculated that the number of Jews in baseball (Braun, Youkilis, etc) was actually appropriately proportional to its population.

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Krugman: Jewish economist

To throw some numbers behind it, Jews make up between 20-30% of Nobel prize winners in all science categories as well as Fields medal and AM Turing award winners. Economics Nobel winners are 36% Jewish, Pulitzers clock in at about 10-20% Jewish, except for Non-Fiction where fully half of all winners are Jewish. 37% of Oscar Winning Directors, 19% of Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest of the 20th Century, 21% of enrollment in the Ivy leagues and 11% of US Senators are Jews. And the cherry and perhaps the most dominant achievement, for 66 years out of its 122 year history, a Jew has been World Chess Champion (Influential Jews in History Jewish Popular History Jewish Population).

All in all, not a bad track record of achievement for a group that makes up about 0.2% of the world’s population.

To sum up, I’ll hand it over to Mark Twain:

“…If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of  lost in the blaze of the Milky way. Properly, the Jew ought  hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of   his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.”

All this, while Jews faced crippling antisemitism for hundreds of years in the US, particularly in the early part of this century (e.g., Harvard’s Jewish Problem). And they still do: Anti-Semitism: Do American Jews experience anti-Semitism ever?(Sorry, but Jew down is not a compliment even if you mean it to refer to Jew’s supposed superior business sense).

In fact, worldwide and throughout history, Jews have been pushed out, killed, converted, chased, banned, robbed from and scapegoated in pretty much every place we’ve lived. From the Roman conquest of Cana’an, the Spanish Inquisition, Christian blood libels, American KKK lynchings, Russian pogroms, 19th c. Muslim forced conversions, and oh yeah, the Holocaust, where fully 1/3 of the entire Jewish population was wiped of the face of the earth from levels it still has not recovered to, it’s been a tough go of it for the past 2000 years or so (Jewish Persecution | Timeline of Judaism | History of AntiSemitism).

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Screenshot from Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Norman Jewison who, irony of ironies, is not Jewish.

Tevye put is best when he said, I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?

But, as Lisa Liel notes, in some ways we’re superior and in some ways we’re inferior. For example, I think you’ll find that many American Jews are attracted to Buddhism (Jewish Buddhist, or JuBus, e.g., Robert Downey Jr. and Alan Ginsburg) because of the things Buddhism has that Judaism or some Jews may lack. Let me reiterate so there’s no ambiguity: We’re incredibly successful in some ways, but not in others. And success does not equal superiority.

However, having said that (https://plus.google.com/10513620…) if you look across all the successes and the challenges, if there’s one thing that the crucible of history has ingrained in the Jewish people, if there’s one commonality across the highs and lows of Jewish history, if there’s one way in which Jews are indeed at least above average, it’s in their persistence and perseverance.

Comment:

This is indeed impressive. But there is another story yet to be told of another tradition that is considered decimated… It is a cousin to Jewish people and it is coming back.

April 22, 2014 – 9:58 AM Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

5 Alternative Teaching Methods

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Reference: Course on Subject Clearing

These methods are described at

5 Alternative Teaching Methods

The common features of these methods are:

  1. All of these methods are against indoctrination. 
  2. They support “self-learning.” 
  3. They believe that a child is capable of learning by oneself.
  4. Best learning is hands on and experienced with all senses.
  5. One should feel free to make mistakes and learn from them.
  6. Learning should be free of evaluation by others.

These methods are summarized as follows.

1. MONTESSORI

  1. Children are born with absorbent minds and are fully capable of self-directed learning. They are not born as “blank slates.”
  2. Educational environment should empower children with the freedom to choose how they spend their time in school. In such environment children would seek out opportunities to learn on their own.
  3. Structured lessons and teacher-driven curriculum inhibit a child’s natural development. Children enjoy and need periods of long concentration.
  4. Most learning takes place through tactile sensation.
  5. Education should be non-competitive without grades, tests and other forms of formal assessments.
  6. Evidence shows that Montessori education leads to children with better social and academic skills.

2. STEINER/WALDORF

  1. Humans have the inherent wisdom to uncover the mysteries of the world.
  2. Education should focus on the development of the “whole child,” with an emphasis on creative expression and social and spiritual values.
  3. First 7 years of a child’s life (up to 2nd grade) should be marked by imitative and sensory-based learning and devoted to developing a child’s non-cognitive abilities. Kindergartners are encouraged to play and interact with their environment. Children are encouraged to write before they learn to read.
  4. From age 7-14, creativity and imagination are emphasized, including learning of foreign languages and expressive dance and performing arts. Demands for standardized testing are restricted.
  5. By age 14, students are ready for a more structured environment that stresses social responsibility.

3. HARKNESS

  1. The educational method involves all students in the learning process. It is an approach designed to get at the individual boy.
  2. Students sit with their classmates and teacher around a large oval table and discuss any and all subjects, from calculus to history, often in great detail. Individual opinions are formed, raised, rejected, and revised.
  3. The teacher’s main responsibilities are to ensure that no one student dominates the discussion and to keep the students on point. No conversation is ever the same.
  4. The group is small enough so that the shy or slow individual is not submerged.
  5. The intimate setting of the Harkness table forces students to take responsibility for their own learning and encourages them to share their opinions.
  6. In addition to learning about topics being discussed, students also learn valuable public speaking skills and to be respectful of their fellow students’ ideas.
  7. Studies have supported the method’s effectiveness in increasing students’ retention and recall of material.

4. REGGIO EMILIA

  1. Children are competent, curious and confident individuals who can thrive in a self-guided learning environment where mutual respect between teacher and student is paramount.
  2. This educational approach is about exploring the world together and supporting children’s thinking rather than just giving them ready-made answers.
  3. This approach is most important for teaching children aged 3 to 6.
  4. It emphasizes the importance of parents taking an active role in their child’s early education.
  5. Classrooms are designed to look and feel like home and the curriculum is flexible, as there are no set lesson plans.  Emphasis is placed on art and on a variety of creative projects.
  6. Extensive documentation of a child’s development, including folders of artwork and notes about the stories behind each piece of art, is kept.

5. SUDBURY

  1. The basic postulate is that students are inherently motivated to learn. Students are capable of assuming a certain level of responsibility and of making sound decisions. In the event that they make poor decisions, learning comes in the form of dealing with the consequences.
  2. Sudbury schools operate under the basic tenets of individuality and democracy and take both principles to extremes. Students have complete control over what and how they learn, as well as how they are evaluated, if at all.
  3. At the weekly School Meeting, students vote on everything from school rules and how to spend the budget to whether staff members should be rehired. Every student and staff member has a vote and all votes count equally.
  4. Students regularly engage in collaborative learning, with the older students often mentoring the younger students.
  5. Annual tuition for the Sudbury Valley School, which welcomes students as young as 4 years old, is $6,450 for the first child in a family to attend the school.

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April 21, 2014 – 8:55 AM Categories: Education | Post a comment

My Sweet Lord (George Harrison)

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April 18, 2014 – 6:36 AM Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment