In article ,
toto wrote:
On 30 Mar 2005 11:21:57 -0500, (Herman
Rubin) wrote:

In article ,
Bob Coleslaw wrote:
Is it better for the government to give out vouchers so parents can
send their kids to private schools, or to use that money to fix up the
public schools?

On this question, I have no problems. The public schools,
as they are run, are hopeless. The idea that children
should be with their age groups, instead of being taught
to the best of their abilities, whatever they may be, is
antithetic to real learning. Even the idea of a child
being in a "grade" needs to be scrapped.

And what private schools exist where children are not also
grouped with their peers, Herman? There are a few, but not
very many. Skipping grades is not encouraged in most
private schools any more than it is in public schools and
aside from the higher grades (high school, mostly), there are
no more independent study classes in those academic
private schools than there are in the public schools my own
children attended.

There are now few academic private schools. What is needed
is not just independent study classes, although this is
what I did outside of class, and what my son essentially
did in mathematics below the strong college classes, which
he audited when he was in elementary school. He was home
taught, which was mostly self-study with some guidance.

I do not recall exactly when, but we have had one posting
by a school which did not have students by grades, let
alone by age. If this is expected, I doubt it will be
that much of a problem.
Also, most of the teachers can no longer teach concepts.
One does not learn to understand concepts by memorization
and other rote material. The not too strong mathematics
courses of most of a century ago have been scrapped in
favor of teaching how to get answers where the questions
are not even known, instead of incorporating the conceptual
advances of the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries.
Attempts to teach the concepts to teachers have been
largely unsuccessful; they know too much that ain't so.

This is a generalization you continually make with *no* proof
that it is true other than your assertion that you have had some
few education majors in your classes whom *you* could not
teach concepts.

There is much more than that. I am not exaggerating about
the "new math" problems; they were well discussed in the
mathematics meetings of the time. I was present, but not
involved, in an attempt to teach better than average
high school teachers of mathematics the basic abstract
courses; these are what my son audited. One of my colleagues
claimed that at most 10% of them could learn the material
under any circumstances. My colleagues here have the same
complaints about the prospective teachers; they were not at
all surprised with what happened in my class.

BTW, at this time, FEW who get BA's in mathematics have
an opportunity to take these basic abstract courses. It
is hard to find out what they have, and they have great
difficulty in overcoming this, if they can.

My late wife taught a lot of prospective teachers, and was
often quite ill after the struggles to get them to understand.
She was a popular teacher, as well as someone who worked in
the foundations of mathematics.

At this time, we do not have a good idea how to teach well,
so we will need to have lack of control. There are now
very few academic private schools. Most will continue to
use the public schools while we find out how to do even a
fair job of teaching, and I suspect we will end up with
mainly electronic schools, not computer programs.

We might, I suppose end up with at least some electronic
schools and distance learning. For many kids this will *not*
be a sufficient way of educating them, however. Humans
need contact with real live adults,and with their peers in
education as much as in other areas of their lives.

If you interpret "peers" as intellectual peers, I can
agree. My son definitely profited from the contact with
college students in those abstract undergraduate courses,
and subsequently with graduate students in mathematics.
I do not know how effective electronic classes will be;
by those I mean regular classes, with the class run
electronically, not by physical presence. But they will
be at least as good as keeping the students dumbed down.

Home schooled students do not seem to have that great
a problem in later interactions.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558