Dear Mr Obama: please change your education policies

Dear Mr Obama:

I realize there is no point in writing to you about education. Your mind is made up. Evaluate teachers; everyone should go to college; school is a big competition and there have to be winners; the 1892 curriculum cannot be changed in any way because Bill Gates and all the book publishers want it that way. 

But I will ask anyway. Please do the following.

1. fire Arne Duncan
2. abandon Common Core standards
3. let teachers teach and by that I do not mean test prep and I do not mean lecturing
4. let students learn what it interests them to learn
5. build thousands of on line curricula, so that anyone can learn whatever they want to learn
6. make sure that these on line students are learning to do something and not to memorize and pass tests
7. allow students the option to get out of all the mandated standards
8. stop pushing college, which as any professor knows is simply a four year party for most students
9. get rid of courses (including MOOCs); replace them by experiences in which real skills are learned
10. re-train teachers to be mentors, to help students achieve their own goals, not ones that the school has established for them

Yes, I know its hopeless. But I thought I’d ask. 

Just as a suggestion, take a look at the new computer science short courses we are now offering. Open to anyone, but not free (we spent a lot of money building them, something the government should be doing.

http://www.socraticarts.com/courses.cf.

Sincerely,

Roger Schank

Emeritus Professor

practical education for everyone; enough with MOOCs and enough with college

Sometimes, I despair that anyone really cares about educating students apart from the people who actually need them to be educated. Colleges simply have never cared about educating students. I was reminded of this yet again when I received this in an email referring to the problems software companies are having when they hire recent college graduates:

What the guy is saying is that they (and others) hire a bunch of bright young CS and ECE graduates whose educations have left them completely unprepared for real-world professional software development. Helping graduates through the school to work transition is a critical problem. (Some people have said that new grads aren't useful to a company for the first year.) 

Really? No Computer Science graduate is prepared to go to work? Isn’t software one of the few thriving businesses we have left in this country? How could this be?

That is an easy question to answer for a former Computer Science professor and really for any professor. Professors do not consider it their job to prepare students for work. They like teaching theories and their latest research.

What is interesting in this context is all the noise about MOOCs. These are just lectures on line interrupted by quizzes and discussion groups for the most part. There are no actual teachers and there is no one to help you get better at something. (A lot like an actual college course, in fact.)

Students taking MOOCs (apart from those who are really just trying to seeing what these things are) have eschewed the notion of education as a credential, which is actually an important change whose time is coming. But, and this is the big unspoken “but,” the real issue is that the companies offering these MOOCs see themselves as a kind of employment agency. They will give the names of successful students to possible employers and make money in that way. But what will the students know how to do? Not much, or at least not much more than you could ever learn from lectures and exercises. So, for computer science at least, not much will have changed with the exception that employers in the US can now find the names of people in other countries who will work cheaply.

Actually educating students to do something that will get them to be useful in the real world is still an odd notion to professors and school systems.

In the meantime, my team and I have been building practical computer science masters degree programs that are being piloted now and will launch in January.

Of course not everyone needs a degree. Some people just need how to learn how to do something useful. They may already have a degree or two or they may have none. They might just want to learn. To that end my company is also about to offer a series of short courses, all learn by doing, all experiential, and all on line, with mentors, in the following broad areas:

1. New graduate to software professional
2. Experienced developer to technical lead
3. Senior developer to architect
4. Senior developer to manager
5. Various job roles to product manager

In addition we will be offering short courses in data analytics, search engine optimization, requirements analysis, user experience, mobile development, big data essentials, web and network security, web page authoring and many others.

We will be launching some of these in the next weeks. It is time to change education from a meaningless credential to a practical experience. Enough with the domination of theories and research.

Anyone interested in any of these can simply write to me for more information.