Dedomenocratic response to free community college: Reform compulsory high school education

I agree that the current school system is not doing a good job preparing high school graduates who are well equipped to enter the job market. However, instead of extending high school for two more years through publicly funded community college, a better approach may be to end the compulsory education period at the 8th grade and then allow the educational benefits of voluntary continued studies to apply to high school years instead of waiting for the community college years. Our once more excellent high-school education was damaged by making high school universal (making it compulsory). We can restore that quality education by returning it to voluntary and provide alternative paths for those who decide they are not interested in the academic/college-prep track.

Advertisement

Grammatic fallacies in data

Data should meet tests against fallacies that apply to data like errors in grammar, logic, or reasoning are fallacies in arguments. The above example of a medical health record of a birth with same-sex parents and the mother identifying as a male is analogous to a grammatical error even though the data itself meets the business rules for the form. We should be able to object to this data as valid to use for some purposes such as determining eligibility medical necessity for health services just like we would reject a grammatically incorrect sentence in an formal argument.

Critical theory manufactures dark data, my concern about hiring social sciences

As I mentioned, I find some value in critical theory to extract models from real-world observations. But overall my attitude toward the topic is negative. I think critical theory distracts from productive work in building persuasive arguments, and that is distracts the students in college from the productive training in classical rhetorical skills of building and defending arguments that do have a chance to persuade.

Thoughts on experiential approach to education

The key question is how can we recover the valuable experiential learning approach. The online approach has merit and the current time welcomes so-called disruptive technologies. The online approach involves a simulation of a task. The problem with simulations is that it there is no way to eliminate the understanding that it is a simulation. No matter how realistic, a simulation will never have an outcome that has real world business-relevant outcomes.

The M in STEM does not mean Mistake, but maybe it should

In a recent post, I discussed the importance of shopping skills for a career in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.    Most STEM projects involve a small amount of stuff specifically built to a particular purpose and a much larger amount of stuff that has to be obtained pretty much like…

Trigger warnings vs democracy

I observe a common theme in several topics of recent interest on Internet.    The theme is a popular desire to avoid being confronted with uncomfortable or disagreeable content.   Besides a personal choice of avoiding difficult topics, we are increasingly demanding institutional or policy changes to govern the information in such a way to…

Data Mining For Children

This article Data mining your children from Politico provoked a lot of thoughts for me. I appreciate and share the concerns raised by data collection of the learning process.   It does present some serious privacy concerns especially as this data will be assigned to the child for the rest of his life.   No…

Data science and education

This post follows up on last post suggesting that there should be a fresh emphasis on data science (the selection, scrutiny and analysis of data) in the elementary and secondary education.    Recent education reforms such as common core present an opportunity to look forward to the challenges of future citizens and workers participating in…

Teaching Data Investigation in Schools

This article reminds me that we have for many years promoted the introduction of computer technologies to primary and secondary classrooms with the primary goal of teaching software programming.  I object to the notion that the motivation should be to prepare students for jobs as computer programmers.   Programming languages take about a week to…