The Red, White & Blue Papers, Scott Keller In a Series, On The Issues

Education needs to be a fully customized, incorporation of all learning styles in a way that best suits each student so that they can strive to reach their fullest potential.

Our education system needs to be self-paced and mastery-based, so that students are rewarded for learning MORE than the teacher can teach, for discovering new breakthroughs, etc., and should NOT EVER AGAIN be TIME based, but rather always be based on the mastery and progress of the student in their customized path.  Students should be able to start when they're ready (rather than waiting for a certain age or a certain time of the year) and finish when they're ready.  It should EVEN be customizable to the point that a student can progress faster in a subject where he or she is talented even though they may be progressing slowly in another subject.  No one subject should hold a student back from progressing in other subjects.

Money needs to be out of the education equation.  It needs to be oriented to achieve full potention for each study, plus be free from birth to death.  Options in education for science based students should include a more futuristic "science-academy-like" environment, which is extremely intensive, allowing students to go far beyond what is now the norm. 

The government needs to be out of education other than perhaps to perform a coordination role.  It needs to be "governed" by a mixed board involving principals, teachers, students, AND parents, rather than all government officials.

There needs to be, as part of the coordination effort, an established network for sharing information around the world.  New techniques and methods that are proven to work to improve the educational experience for the student, need to be shared so that these ideas can be applied around the world by those who wish to try them.

Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques in modeling and questioning to constantly work to improve on education needs to be applied as well.

How we educate and treat our children directly and dramatically impacts the future of our country.  We need to be about always being our best at all times and creating the best future possible, which means dramatically shifting our educational system to systems where the students can be their best, thus creating the best possible future.

Other factors to consider as we completely overhaul the educational approach in this country:

1. Curiosity Driven Learning:

•Curiosity drives learning if it is allowed to do so and is not shut down. 

•Curiosity is shut down via the current dsyfunctional eduction system, which fails completely to take into account different learning styles which falsely is diagnosed as ADD. ADD is less of a disease and more of just how some people (mainly visual learners) function.  They think too fast for an audial approach which is what is given in most classrooms I've witnessed.

•Curiosity driven learning involves more brain area participation. If a person doesn’t really like their experience, the subconscious mind edits it and doesn’t learn from it. Using curiosity driven learning potentially accelerates the learning curve such that it would not be unreasonable for the society of the future to expect the equivalent of a multiple PhD level education after high school.

•The largest obstacle to curiosity driven learning is the current student-to-teacher ratio. Curiosity driven learning requires a personal curriculum to be developed per child, an enormous labor process for most teachers. The cure is to use peer tutoring, and older child tutoring in conjunction with professional testers. Teachers are being asked do two different jobs, Teaching and Testing. Testing is incredibly underutilized. How can you know what a child is ready to learn if you have not learned from them who they are and what they know already?

•The second largest obstacle is a lazy educational system which must be corrected and re-educated itself. The educational paradigm currently being taught is not the one which is being taught in reform education psychology and sociology classes.

•An interactive system which evaluates a student's progress and automatically adjusts itself to a student's aptitudes, re-instructs in areas that need attention, and even skips areas that have already been grasped can make large strides.  And a system which allows a student to enter in the middle without causing disruption to other students needs to be incorporated.

2. The topics of psychology, sociology, conversational logic, and ethics should be added to the current curriculum for all Middle Schools (ages 12 to 14 or grades 6 thru 8) and High Schools.

3. Personality differences including Learning styles and Types of intelligence can mean that people learn in very different ways. Groups of students should be organized without regard so much to age as to Learning style. A class full of visual learners from 3 age groups is better than a class full of kinesthetic learners and visual learners who find each other distracting and each others' interactions with the teacher bizarre. Throw in some introverts and some extroverts and a speed-reader or two, and a teachers modus operandi cannot hope to effectively reach the different types of students that he/she is trying to teach.

4. Our society is composed of a population which is by about 50 percent Anti-intellectual due to the influences of Mass Media trying to dumb us down.  Humanity's past shows a deep and long term attempt at denial of science facts.  The people who have been influenced by this will crucify the "nerds" rather than encouraging them, and that’s the end result of pack psychology and anti-intellectualist mob events.  Focusing on nurturing the mind, rewarding "smartness" as "being cool" will bring powerful influences to bear in a positive way.  We want to be healthy of course, and sports are worthy, but it's far more important to be smart as that's what ultimately defines us as a species.

"MAKE IT CHANGE!"

STK 08.10.2011

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