The term "Running from safety" is the title of a book by Richard Bach -- a pilot turned philosopher.
I've seen the following trends time and again in professional settings. People are terrified of thinking and debating. Considering possibilities is often so disconcerting that they are sought to be avoided altogether. However, doing something -- an actionable -- is considered less terrifying and more safer than thinking. Finally, endorsement by others is considered safest and is often actively sought.
If you ask me though, things ought to be just the opposite of the above.
A pat on the back by someone usually signifies a hidden agenda or a game plan. If someone says, "you are great", it usually means that they want something to be done, that we may not really agree with.
Even if there is no hidden agenda, a personal endorsement by someone usually means that the endorser is more interested in me than the issue at hand. They're watching me, rather than watching the issue. So, if I try something new and fail at it, they are not likely to understand the significance of what I tried to do and failed. They're more likely to pass a judgement on me, saying that I've lost the old charm and talent, etc.
Building our lives based on endorsements by others is extremely unsafe.
The second issue -- doing something -- is less unsafe than seeking acceptance. If you baked good pudding and nobody endorses it because of political dynamics, you can at least eat the pudding yourself. You know you are worthwhile because you can get something done. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, than in others' endorsements.
However, actions have repercussions and we're accountable for our actions. Actions based on half-baked ideas usually create more problems than solutions.
In professional settings, where we are accountable for our actions, it is important to remember the maxim: do it right the first time.
In order to do that though, we need to think. Unfortunately, thinking requires us to consider possibilities that are unpleasant or even horrific. We need to understand that, we don't necessarily need to accept all that we consider in our thought processes. There is this quote by Aristotle (I think): It is the hallmark of an educated mind to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it.
Thinking also requires us to be objective -- concentrate on the issue rather than the people involved (something which I've reiterated so many times in my previous posts.) We need to realize that argumentation and debates are collaborative activities and not ego-competition or warfare. The objective of argumentation is to understand an underlying issue -- not to sling mud and clobber one another.
Thought, action, outreach -- in that order -- is the way to be most effective.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Lessons from profession: On Excellence
This post is the first in another series, updated irregularly, on lessons learnt at the professional front.
For a large part of the population -- whether we are talking about individuals or organizations -- those that don't have godfathers, ancestral property or such extraneous resources to rely upon, quality is a survival mechanism. For them, excellence is no longer something to dream about -- they better have it, or else..
Almost all organizations have crucial pockets of excellence that keep them on their toes, alive and kicking. The hallmark of excellence is not awards, recognitions and endorsements by the high and mighty. The hallmark of excellence is often, grudging acceptance or even outright active animosity seeking to "cut down to size."
Excellence is also mostly not the "cream" that "rises to the top" and that which attracts others with its flamboyance. Excellence is mostly somewhere deep inside an organization -- a well-oiled part of the organizational machinery that is all but invisible until it is no longer there. The excellent part of our cellular systems are crucial organs like the heart, liver and lungs. They are not exactly visible outside and are not exactly flamboyant. Nobody thinks about these organs on a routine day.
The biggest detractor for excellence is mediocrity and its push for social acceptance as the only indicator of merit. Social acceptance games are usually more about political manipulations for short-term gains than about addressing core issues. These games are typically lose-lose games. Even when one wins in such a game, all they get is usually a push for even greater compliance.
Social networks are extremely powerful, often destructively so. The more mediocre and short-sighted such networks are, the more power they are willing to use. The one who seeks excellence should learn early on, how to manage social networking games. These games cannot be avoided, as typically one's physical survival depends on such games. But entering such a game unprepared, can destroy all motivation, skills and talent, and may even push folks towards desperation.
Nobody is indispensable. Not even the excellent. The excellent can always be replaced by a mediocre. Just like the beating of a healthy heart can always be replaced by an artificial pacemaker.. :/
For a large part of the population -- whether we are talking about individuals or organizations -- those that don't have godfathers, ancestral property or such extraneous resources to rely upon, quality is a survival mechanism. For them, excellence is no longer something to dream about -- they better have it, or else..
Almost all organizations have crucial pockets of excellence that keep them on their toes, alive and kicking. The hallmark of excellence is not awards, recognitions and endorsements by the high and mighty. The hallmark of excellence is often, grudging acceptance or even outright active animosity seeking to "cut down to size."
Excellence is also mostly not the "cream" that "rises to the top" and that which attracts others with its flamboyance. Excellence is mostly somewhere deep inside an organization -- a well-oiled part of the organizational machinery that is all but invisible until it is no longer there. The excellent part of our cellular systems are crucial organs like the heart, liver and lungs. They are not exactly visible outside and are not exactly flamboyant. Nobody thinks about these organs on a routine day.
The biggest detractor for excellence is mediocrity and its push for social acceptance as the only indicator of merit. Social acceptance games are usually more about political manipulations for short-term gains than about addressing core issues. These games are typically lose-lose games. Even when one wins in such a game, all they get is usually a push for even greater compliance.
Social networks are extremely powerful, often destructively so. The more mediocre and short-sighted such networks are, the more power they are willing to use. The one who seeks excellence should learn early on, how to manage social networking games. These games cannot be avoided, as typically one's physical survival depends on such games. But entering such a game unprepared, can destroy all motivation, skills and talent, and may even push folks towards desperation.
Nobody is indispensable. Not even the excellent. The excellent can always be replaced by a mediocre. Just like the beating of a healthy heart can always be replaced by an artificial pacemaker.. :/
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Citation mania
Note: Standard disclaimers hold. Please see "About me" for the disclaimer. Especially those who know who I am, let me reiterate that this post is meant to address issues, and it is not about any particular person.
When you ask the Google search engine, a simple question like "23*12=" it gives you an answer: 276, in this case. (Actually, it is the wrong answer as my question was in base 4, but that is besides the point..;-)
On the other hand, if you ask the search engine, a realistic, bigger question like: "Are we really nurturing innovation and exploration in our higher education system?" Google does not provide an answer. Instead, it cites a few URLs with the implication that the answers may be found there. (In this case, the first result is this post itself. Heh :-) Of course, for a question like the above, no cited URL will contain the answer, or the answer that is most pertinent to the context in which the question is stated.
The above experience somewhat summarizes much of the "intellectual" conversations I have at work with students or colleagues or at home with learned folks. And this is what I mean when I say that our education system is creating database engines out of our students, rather than thinkers and problem-solvers. And the problem with this is all too clear: our intellectuals are in danger of being obsoleted by google!
The hallmark of an intellectual in our society today, is someone who can cite a great number of sources and pride themselves for belonging to the creed or school of thought of some great person from the past. In all these, the major casualty is the issue itself. The actual problem at hand does not get enough attention due to these social networking and posturing dynamics and almost always we end up adopting half-baked ideas.
Here is one concrete example to illustrate this. (Note again: standard disclaimers hold.)
Recently, there was this issue of intellectual property ownership for work carried out by research students in a University. The most popular school of thought was that, the University holds all the IP. The matter was sought to be closed there. But then I asked, what does it mean exactly? For instance, if a research student wants to commercially exploit his ideas after graduation, can the University prevent him from doing so.
And the answer I got was "Yes." But then, the University wants the student to publish his work in journals and conferences. So, some other third party may well be commercially exploiting the idea, but the University can still disallow the student from doing so? The problem with algorithms is that they can be easily diffused around the world over the Internet and it is infeasible for the University to stop each and everyone across the world from implementing the idea. The only person that the University can always track down and control would be the student himself.
For this dilemma, to my horror, I still get the answer "Yes." Apparently it is okay even if the rest of the world can commercially benefit from research ideas of a student, but the student can be prevented from exploiting the ideas himself -- because the University says, "all your ideas R belong to us.."
Apparently, this restriction holds even if the idea is not patented, but only copyrighted. A copyright only offers protection to the actual form and not to the underlying ideas. Hence, if a musical note is copyrighted, the exact sequence is protected, but not the underlying abstract ideas that led to this sequence of notes.
The first justification for such arguments starts usually like: "That is how it is done in the US.." and a few example universities are cited. But of course, there is no answer for the question as to how do these universities address the dilemma above?
To address the dilemma itself, I get another citation. A case law is cited where one company used a tagline called "Yeh dil maange more" to advertise their product. Their rival then used a mocking line called, "The heart wants a peacock" to advertise their products. The former then stopped the latter from using this, citing copyright on the tagline. Apparently the judgement ruled in favour of the former and this is used as an argument here that copyright protects the ideas as well, and not just the form.
I don't know the details of this particular case in question, but to say that our dilemma is the same as this case is clearly absurd. Firstly, "Yeh dil maange more" does NOT translate to "The heart wants a peacock" :-) At least, that was not the intended meaning of the tagline. So, clearly the underlying idea was not the issue of contention in the judgement at all.
Second, we are talking about algorithms and engineering innovations in our case. Clearly, a tagline is different from an algorithm? A tagline is meant for marketing purposes -- to create a hype or aura around a product, while an algorithm results from developing ideas over long periods of time. The research student may have had these ideas even before he applied for a research degree at the University.
And lastly, saying that the rest of the world may commercially exploit the ideas that are proposed by the student, but the student himself can be prevented from doing so, is mind-numbingly absurd.
If there is a law that would allow such a thing, then sensibility requires that such a law be challenged. The law has to be subservient to sense-making and natural order (Truth, if you will), and not the other way round. The motto of our courts is "Truth alone triumphs" and not, "The law alone triumphs." The rule of the law may be superior to the whims of any one person; but Truth itself is the most supreme.
It is no use arguing along these lines though. What I would typically get back in return, are a set of some more citations. Sigh.
I make it a point to tell my students the following quote I've coined: Augment thinking with reading, and not reading with thinking.
Or to put it another way: If you want to cross the ocean and get to the other shore, you cannot do so by drinking up all the water and walking across.
When I say such things, I've been asked questions like, "What kind of a teacher are you? You are asking your students not to read?"
Well no, I am not asking them to not read; but I am asking them to THINK. And to make thinking the fundamental driver and the control system of your mind. Reading gives the fuel and creates knowledge. But fuel alone is not sufficient to make us travel. There has to be a machinery that converts fuel into physical movement. And thinking is this machinery for navigating in cognitive spaces. It is thinking that makes you apply knowledge and solve problems. And thinking is not trivial at all. We all think we know how to think. But my experiences with intellectual conversations, belie such beliefs.
When you ask the Google search engine, a simple question like "23*12=" it gives you an answer: 276, in this case. (Actually, it is the wrong answer as my question was in base 4, but that is besides the point..;-)
On the other hand, if you ask the search engine, a realistic, bigger question like: "Are we really nurturing innovation and exploration in our higher education system?" Google does not provide an answer. Instead, it cites a few URLs with the implication that the answers may be found there. (In this case, the first result is this post itself. Heh :-) Of course, for a question like the above, no cited URL will contain the answer, or the answer that is most pertinent to the context in which the question is stated.
The above experience somewhat summarizes much of the "intellectual" conversations I have at work with students or colleagues or at home with learned folks. And this is what I mean when I say that our education system is creating database engines out of our students, rather than thinkers and problem-solvers. And the problem with this is all too clear: our intellectuals are in danger of being obsoleted by google!
The hallmark of an intellectual in our society today, is someone who can cite a great number of sources and pride themselves for belonging to the creed or school of thought of some great person from the past. In all these, the major casualty is the issue itself. The actual problem at hand does not get enough attention due to these social networking and posturing dynamics and almost always we end up adopting half-baked ideas.
Here is one concrete example to illustrate this. (Note again: standard disclaimers hold.)
Recently, there was this issue of intellectual property ownership for work carried out by research students in a University. The most popular school of thought was that, the University holds all the IP. The matter was sought to be closed there. But then I asked, what does it mean exactly? For instance, if a research student wants to commercially exploit his ideas after graduation, can the University prevent him from doing so.
And the answer I got was "Yes." But then, the University wants the student to publish his work in journals and conferences. So, some other third party may well be commercially exploiting the idea, but the University can still disallow the student from doing so? The problem with algorithms is that they can be easily diffused around the world over the Internet and it is infeasible for the University to stop each and everyone across the world from implementing the idea. The only person that the University can always track down and control would be the student himself.
For this dilemma, to my horror, I still get the answer "Yes." Apparently it is okay even if the rest of the world can commercially benefit from research ideas of a student, but the student can be prevented from exploiting the ideas himself -- because the University says, "all your ideas R belong to us.."
Apparently, this restriction holds even if the idea is not patented, but only copyrighted. A copyright only offers protection to the actual form and not to the underlying ideas. Hence, if a musical note is copyrighted, the exact sequence is protected, but not the underlying abstract ideas that led to this sequence of notes.
The first justification for such arguments starts usually like: "That is how it is done in the US.." and a few example universities are cited. But of course, there is no answer for the question as to how do these universities address the dilemma above?
To address the dilemma itself, I get another citation. A case law is cited where one company used a tagline called "Yeh dil maange more" to advertise their product. Their rival then used a mocking line called, "The heart wants a peacock" to advertise their products. The former then stopped the latter from using this, citing copyright on the tagline. Apparently the judgement ruled in favour of the former and this is used as an argument here that copyright protects the ideas as well, and not just the form.
I don't know the details of this particular case in question, but to say that our dilemma is the same as this case is clearly absurd. Firstly, "Yeh dil maange more" does NOT translate to "The heart wants a peacock" :-) At least, that was not the intended meaning of the tagline. So, clearly the underlying idea was not the issue of contention in the judgement at all.
Second, we are talking about algorithms and engineering innovations in our case. Clearly, a tagline is different from an algorithm? A tagline is meant for marketing purposes -- to create a hype or aura around a product, while an algorithm results from developing ideas over long periods of time. The research student may have had these ideas even before he applied for a research degree at the University.
And lastly, saying that the rest of the world may commercially exploit the ideas that are proposed by the student, but the student himself can be prevented from doing so, is mind-numbingly absurd.
If there is a law that would allow such a thing, then sensibility requires that such a law be challenged. The law has to be subservient to sense-making and natural order (Truth, if you will), and not the other way round. The motto of our courts is "Truth alone triumphs" and not, "The law alone triumphs." The rule of the law may be superior to the whims of any one person; but Truth itself is the most supreme.
It is no use arguing along these lines though. What I would typically get back in return, are a set of some more citations. Sigh.
I make it a point to tell my students the following quote I've coined: Augment thinking with reading, and not reading with thinking.
Or to put it another way: If you want to cross the ocean and get to the other shore, you cannot do so by drinking up all the water and walking across.
When I say such things, I've been asked questions like, "What kind of a teacher are you? You are asking your students not to read?"
Well no, I am not asking them to not read; but I am asking them to THINK. And to make thinking the fundamental driver and the control system of your mind. Reading gives the fuel and creates knowledge. But fuel alone is not sufficient to make us travel. There has to be a machinery that converts fuel into physical movement. And thinking is this machinery for navigating in cognitive spaces. It is thinking that makes you apply knowledge and solve problems. And thinking is not trivial at all. We all think we know how to think. But my experiences with intellectual conversations, belie such beliefs.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Feynmann is not too much off the mark here too
The previous post from Feynmann's book actually quite nicely summarizes the scene in India too.
Education here is much more "lexical" than "semantic." I've many times retorted that our "best students" are basically next-generation database engines -- who can retrieve paragraphs and programs given keywords.
I once remember giving the class a project problem, that involved building a model, based on observing a set of events. The main objective behind this exercise was to help the students think through this problem of model-building from first principles.
However later in the day, some students caught me in the corridor and asked me whether such problems have been addressed elsewhere, and "what can they read up." And I made the mistake of dropping a few keywords like "learning automata" and "grammatical inference."
That was it. The next thing that happens is that these keywords diffuse through the entire class. Google searches are made based on these keywords and papers retrieved. Many students also find that I myself had written a paper on learning automata some years ago.
So the final project evaluation becomes one big pain for me, giving me a splitting headache at the end of the ordeal. Over and over again, I see people having blindly implemented my paper or some other paper on model-building. They have copied formulas verbatim from the paper and unable to explain the formulas or their significance. And a large majority of the class just implements my paper. In fact, the exact problem statement that I'd specified was slightly different from what my paper was about. But this didn't seem to matter.
I even heard that some students decided to implement my paper because they felt that it would flatter me and make me more amenable to give them better marks. Our people-centric world-views at work again. Everything has to reduce to a social predicate: personality, feelings, moods, etc.
I think there was just one group (among the set of 36 or so project groups) who seemed to have actually thought through the problem and had come out with their own approach, that was not some delta-x change over some existing paper. Their approach may have its flaws, but I'd bet that these students understand the problem space much better than those who just implemented existing algorithms. These guys would be in a much better position to tackle similar problems or see the same problem semantics occurring in several other situations.
Well, I could go on and on about several other examples, but what's the use.. ;-)
Education here is much more "lexical" than "semantic." I've many times retorted that our "best students" are basically next-generation database engines -- who can retrieve paragraphs and programs given keywords.
I once remember giving the class a project problem, that involved building a model, based on observing a set of events. The main objective behind this exercise was to help the students think through this problem of model-building from first principles.
However later in the day, some students caught me in the corridor and asked me whether such problems have been addressed elsewhere, and "what can they read up." And I made the mistake of dropping a few keywords like "learning automata" and "grammatical inference."
That was it. The next thing that happens is that these keywords diffuse through the entire class. Google searches are made based on these keywords and papers retrieved. Many students also find that I myself had written a paper on learning automata some years ago.
So the final project evaluation becomes one big pain for me, giving me a splitting headache at the end of the ordeal. Over and over again, I see people having blindly implemented my paper or some other paper on model-building. They have copied formulas verbatim from the paper and unable to explain the formulas or their significance. And a large majority of the class just implements my paper. In fact, the exact problem statement that I'd specified was slightly different from what my paper was about. But this didn't seem to matter.
I even heard that some students decided to implement my paper because they felt that it would flatter me and make me more amenable to give them better marks. Our people-centric world-views at work again. Everything has to reduce to a social predicate: personality, feelings, moods, etc.
I think there was just one group (among the set of 36 or so project groups) who seemed to have actually thought through the problem and had come out with their own approach, that was not some delta-x change over some existing paper. Their approach may have its flaws, but I'd bet that these students understand the problem space much better than those who just implemented existing algorithms. These guys would be in a much better position to tackle similar problems or see the same problem semantics occurring in several other situations.
Well, I could go on and on about several other examples, but what's the use.. ;-)
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Feynman on Education
Here is a very interesting excerpt on education from the book, "Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman". Obtained this online from: http://www.feep.org/articles/feynman.html
Do read in full; extremely interesting and pertinent to us. I'd read this book several years ago and vaguely remembered reading such an episode. Good that it is now preserved online.
============================================================================================================
The following is an excerpt from Richard Feynman's book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" (p. 211-219, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997). Feynman is a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics. Here he recounts his experiences while teaching in Brazil.
In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience. I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers, since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism - Maxwell's equations, and so on.
The university was located in various office buildings throughout the city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.
I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question - the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell - they couldn't answer it at all! for instance, one time I was talking about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.
Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.
We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips were now admitting light polarized in the same direction - what passed through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I asked then how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, from a single piece of polaroid.
They hadn't any idea.
I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint: "Look at the light reflected from the bay outside."
Nobody said anything.
Then I said, "Have you ever heard of Brewster's Angle?"
"Yes, sir! Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light is reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized."
"And which way is the light polarized when it's reflected?"
"The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir." Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the tangent of the angle equals the index!
I said, "Well?"
Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me which way it was polarized.
I said, "Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the polaroid."
"Ooh, it's polarized!" they said.
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that the "direction of the light" is the direction in which you see something when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, "What is Brewster's Angle?" I'm going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, "Look at the water," nothing happens - they don't have anything under "Look at the water!"
Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: "Two bodies . . . are considered equivalent . . . if if equal torques . . . will produce . . . equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration." The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.
I didn't see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge - nothing!
After the lecture, I talked to a student: "You take all those notes - what do you do with them?"
"Oh, we study them," he says. "We'll have an exam."
"What will the exam be like?"
"Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions." He looks at his notebook and says, "'When are two bodies equivalent?' And the answer is, 'Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.'" So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and "learn" all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.
Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it. One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly. Then they asked, "When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?"
"It comes out parallel to itself, sir - displaced."
"And how much is it displaced?"
"I don't know, sir, but I can figure it out." So he figured it out. He was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.
After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way. The first question I ask is, "Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic substance?"
"No."
Then I asked, "If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I tilted the glass?"
"It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you've turned the book."
I said, "You haven't got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?"
"No, sir!"
He had just told me in the examination that the light would be displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to one side, but he didn't realize that a piece of glass is a material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.
I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It's something that people don't usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. so I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.
After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn't understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.
So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, the were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn't do it!
One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally , a student explained it to me: "If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, 'What are you wasting our time for in the class? We're trying to learn something. And you're stopping him by asking a question.'"
It was kind of a one-upmanship, where nobody knows what's going on, and they'd put the other on down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it's not confusing at all, telling him that he's wasting their time.
I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn't do that either, because they would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating "education" which is meaningless, utterly meaningless!
At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. An the talk there would be not only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, "Sure. Of course. It's a free country."
So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used in the first year of college. They though this book was especially good because it had different kinds of typeface - bold black for the most important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.
Right away somebody said, "You're not going to say anything bad about the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks it's a good textbook."
"You promised I could say whatever I wanted."
The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, "What is a good reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself civilized unless . . . yak, yak, yak." They were all sitting there nodding, because I know that's the way the think.
Then I say, "That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a sensible reason; not just because other countries do." Then I talked about the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human condition, and all that - I really teased them a little bit.
Then I say, "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!"
I can see them stir, thinking, "What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes."
So I tell them that one of the first things to strike men when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find many physicists in Brazil - why it that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.
Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek - even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?" - and the student can't answer. Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?" the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrrr-up" - he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.
But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!
What this Greek scholar discovers is, the student in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letter, then the words, and then the sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.
I said, "That's how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids 'science' here in Brazil." (Big blast, right?)
Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. "There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place, where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have 'errors' in them - that is, if you look at them, you think you're looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors - very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental 'results' is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!
"I have discovered something else," I continued. "By flipping the pages at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page, I can show you what's the matter - how it's not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show you."
So I did it. Brrrrrrrup - I stuck my finger in, and I started to read: "Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed . . ."
I said, "And are there, have you go science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature - what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can't.
"But if, instead, you were to write, 'When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called "triboluminescence."' Then someone will go home and try it. Then there's an experience of nature." I used that example to show them, but it didn't make any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like that everywhere.
Finally, I said that I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. "However," I said, "I must be wrong. There were two students in my class who did very well, and one of the physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible for some people to work their way through the system, bad as it is."
Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education department got up and said, "Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but is appears to be that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!" - and he sat down.
That gave the other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they got other committees organized to do this and that.
Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the students got up and said, "I'm one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was educated in Germany, and I've just come to Brazil this year."
The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, "I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system."
I didn't expect that I knew they system was bad, but 100 percent - it was terrible!
Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just giver. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, "That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn't understand the problems." Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that's what it was.
Do read in full; extremely interesting and pertinent to us. I'd read this book several years ago and vaguely remembered reading such an episode. Good that it is now preserved online.
============================================================================================================
The following is an excerpt from Richard Feynman's book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" (p. 211-219, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997). Feynman is a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics. Here he recounts his experiences while teaching in Brazil.
In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience. I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers, since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism - Maxwell's equations, and so on.
The university was located in various office buildings throughout the city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.
I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question - the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell - they couldn't answer it at all! for instance, one time I was talking about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.
Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.
We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips were now admitting light polarized in the same direction - what passed through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I asked then how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, from a single piece of polaroid.
They hadn't any idea.
I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint: "Look at the light reflected from the bay outside."
Nobody said anything.
Then I said, "Have you ever heard of Brewster's Angle?"
"Yes, sir! Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light is reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized."
"And which way is the light polarized when it's reflected?"
"The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir." Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the tangent of the angle equals the index!
I said, "Well?"
Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me which way it was polarized.
I said, "Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the polaroid."
"Ooh, it's polarized!" they said.
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that the "direction of the light" is the direction in which you see something when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, "What is Brewster's Angle?" I'm going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, "Look at the water," nothing happens - they don't have anything under "Look at the water!"
Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: "Two bodies . . . are considered equivalent . . . if if equal torques . . . will produce . . . equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration." The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.
I didn't see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge - nothing!
After the lecture, I talked to a student: "You take all those notes - what do you do with them?"
"Oh, we study them," he says. "We'll have an exam."
"What will the exam be like?"
"Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions." He looks at his notebook and says, "'When are two bodies equivalent?' And the answer is, 'Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.'" So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and "learn" all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.
Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it. One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly. Then they asked, "When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?"
"It comes out parallel to itself, sir - displaced."
"And how much is it displaced?"
"I don't know, sir, but I can figure it out." So he figured it out. He was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.
After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way. The first question I ask is, "Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic substance?"
"No."
Then I asked, "If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I tilted the glass?"
"It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you've turned the book."
I said, "You haven't got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?"
"No, sir!"
He had just told me in the examination that the light would be displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to one side, but he didn't realize that a piece of glass is a material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.
I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It's something that people don't usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. so I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.
After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn't understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.
So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, the were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn't do it!
One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally , a student explained it to me: "If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, 'What are you wasting our time for in the class? We're trying to learn something. And you're stopping him by asking a question.'"
It was kind of a one-upmanship, where nobody knows what's going on, and they'd put the other on down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it's not confusing at all, telling him that he's wasting their time.
I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn't do that either, because they would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating "education" which is meaningless, utterly meaningless!
At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. An the talk there would be not only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, "Sure. Of course. It's a free country."
So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used in the first year of college. They though this book was especially good because it had different kinds of typeface - bold black for the most important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.
Right away somebody said, "You're not going to say anything bad about the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks it's a good textbook."
"You promised I could say whatever I wanted."
The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, "What is a good reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself civilized unless . . . yak, yak, yak." They were all sitting there nodding, because I know that's the way the think.
Then I say, "That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a sensible reason; not just because other countries do." Then I talked about the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human condition, and all that - I really teased them a little bit.
Then I say, "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!"
I can see them stir, thinking, "What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes."
So I tell them that one of the first things to strike men when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find many physicists in Brazil - why it that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.
Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek - even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?" - and the student can't answer. Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?" the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrrr-up" - he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.
But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!
What this Greek scholar discovers is, the student in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letter, then the words, and then the sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.
I said, "That's how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids 'science' here in Brazil." (Big blast, right?)
Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. "There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place, where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have 'errors' in them - that is, if you look at them, you think you're looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors - very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental 'results' is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!
"I have discovered something else," I continued. "By flipping the pages at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page, I can show you what's the matter - how it's not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show you."
So I did it. Brrrrrrrup - I stuck my finger in, and I started to read: "Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed . . ."
I said, "And are there, have you go science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature - what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can't.
"But if, instead, you were to write, 'When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called "triboluminescence."' Then someone will go home and try it. Then there's an experience of nature." I used that example to show them, but it didn't make any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like that everywhere.
Finally, I said that I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. "However," I said, "I must be wrong. There were two students in my class who did very well, and one of the physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible for some people to work their way through the system, bad as it is."
Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education department got up and said, "Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but is appears to be that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!" - and he sat down.
That gave the other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they got other committees organized to do this and that.
Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the students got up and said, "I'm one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was educated in Germany, and I've just come to Brazil this year."
The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, "I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system."
I didn't expect that I knew they system was bad, but 100 percent - it was terrible!
Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just giver. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, "That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn't understand the problems." Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that's what it was.
Facts, rhetoric and people-centric worldviews
How much are we deluding ourselves? Seriously, how much?
I find it most amazing to note that when I try to admire someone for their skills and want to encourage them to pursue their skills further, things actually backfire in the most horrendous fashion -- every time.
For instance, my rhetoric about exams in the previous posts, is usually met with this response, "It easy for someone who is academically accomplished to talk like this, just like it is easy for a rich person to say money does not matter."
What are the problems with such a counter argument? Well, it is more about the person making the argument than the content of the argument itself. Rather than understand something about what ails our education system, such an argument only puts me on the defensive -- as though I've committed a cardinal sin to have studied. I can't even say I am not academically accomplished, for this would just put fodder into another camp of people who like to swear by whatever narrow "achievements" they have had.
Ultimately, rather than furthering the cause of education or encouraging creativity or creating opportunities, these rhetoric only serve to make a lot of people squirm uncomfortably.
Even more radically, such argumentation are perpetuated more with the aid of rhetoric than facts. Here is one of them that is apparently about education in America:
Clever, yes. Smart, yes. Witty, yes. Factual, NO.
It may good poke fun at the counter lady at McDonalds about the lack of her mathematical skills. But don't even get me started about the lack of design skills among highly-placed decision makers and thought leaders over here. It is not funny at all.
It has become a fashion among the so-called successful folks here to say to actually believe that American schools have question papers like #5 above. I would like to see one real evidence that American schools actually ask questions like #5 above and if so what their education department says about it.
The underlying assumption behind this is also that an argument against 3-hour assembly line exams are necessarily arguments for no rigour and a laissez-faire attitude towards education. Basically, this is a "false dilemma" fallacy where the assertion is that, "either we have the current-day examination model, or we have nothing, no rigour, no diligence, just a hippie approach towards education."
It is somewhat like asking, "Are you a capitalist or a communist?" There is no real choice; you can't be neither, you have to be one of the two. Either you are with me or against me.
Sure there may be greater emphasis on maths and science in the developing countries the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) belt in particular. But by far, much of the creative ideas still come from the former leaders in the age of reason. And no, creativity is not about telling a student, "It is ok to cry.." etc.
For all the new cars that we are having in India for example, except for small examples like Tata Indica, the rest are mainly copies of designs that have existed elsewhere. A small look into some major issue like city planning for example, will show the lack of foresight quite starkly. Our city infrastructures are woefully inadequate, mass rapid transport is non existent and generally we burn away several more litres of fuel just by waiting in signals and changing gears, than by driving.
I think we are seriously deluding ourselves if we think our education system is actually good and go about believing whatever is convenient to us by attacking nay-sayers rather than their ideas.
I find it most amazing to note that when I try to admire someone for their skills and want to encourage them to pursue their skills further, things actually backfire in the most horrendous fashion -- every time.
For instance, my rhetoric about exams in the previous posts, is usually met with this response, "It easy for someone who is academically accomplished to talk like this, just like it is easy for a rich person to say money does not matter."
What are the problems with such a counter argument? Well, it is more about the person making the argument than the content of the argument itself. Rather than understand something about what ails our education system, such an argument only puts me on the defensive -- as though I've committed a cardinal sin to have studied. I can't even say I am not academically accomplished, for this would just put fodder into another camp of people who like to swear by whatever narrow "achievements" they have had.
Ultimately, rather than furthering the cause of education or encouraging creativity or creating opportunities, these rhetoric only serve to make a lot of people squirm uncomfortably.
Even more radically, such argumentation are perpetuated more with the aid of rhetoric than facts. Here is one of them that is apparently about education in America:
Fifty Years of Math (in the USA )
Got this sometime back. Very hilarious and sad too ... Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried. Why do I tell you this? Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1950s:
1. Teaching Math In 1950s
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit ?
2. Teaching Math In 1960s
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?
3. Teaching Math In 1970s
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit?
4. Teaching Math In 1980s
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
5. Teaching Math In 1990s
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers, and if you feel like crying, it's ok. )
6. Teaching Math In 2009
Un hachero vende una carretada de maderapara $100. El costo de la producciones es $80. Cuanto dinero ha hecho?
Clever, yes. Smart, yes. Witty, yes. Factual, NO.
It may good poke fun at the counter lady at McDonalds about the lack of her mathematical skills. But don't even get me started about the lack of design skills among highly-placed decision makers and thought leaders over here. It is not funny at all.
It has become a fashion among the so-called successful folks here to say to actually believe that American schools have question papers like #5 above. I would like to see one real evidence that American schools actually ask questions like #5 above and if so what their education department says about it.
The underlying assumption behind this is also that an argument against 3-hour assembly line exams are necessarily arguments for no rigour and a laissez-faire attitude towards education. Basically, this is a "false dilemma" fallacy where the assertion is that, "either we have the current-day examination model, or we have nothing, no rigour, no diligence, just a hippie approach towards education."
It is somewhat like asking, "Are you a capitalist or a communist?" There is no real choice; you can't be neither, you have to be one of the two. Either you are with me or against me.
Sure there may be greater emphasis on maths and science in the developing countries the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) belt in particular. But by far, much of the creative ideas still come from the former leaders in the age of reason. And no, creativity is not about telling a student, "It is ok to cry.." etc.
For all the new cars that we are having in India for example, except for small examples like Tata Indica, the rest are mainly copies of designs that have existed elsewhere. A small look into some major issue like city planning for example, will show the lack of foresight quite starkly. Our city infrastructures are woefully inadequate, mass rapid transport is non existent and generally we burn away several more litres of fuel just by waiting in signals and changing gears, than by driving.
I think we are seriously deluding ourselves if we think our education system is actually good and go about believing whatever is convenient to us by attacking nay-sayers rather than their ideas.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
More on exams
Found this related blog post on exams coming from someone from UK (now, why am I not surprised..;-).
What exams have taught me and Death to the three-hour exam -- this one by a professor. So I am in good company. (got them via Sanket's tweets)
Some quotes from the former post (he seems to have taken the words right out of my fingers..;-)
"So, I have been thinking about what exams taught me:
(Something which I've been arguing all along -- that the rank holders, myself included to some extent, have optimized themselves for passing exams, not for solving problems in real life.)
"I summarise and display knowledge that I don't really have to any great extent. I extemporise. I do things because I fear punishment or crave reward. I play to the rules even when the rules are insane."
(I do the same, but am too afraid to say so, because the rules and norms forbid us to question what is generally accepted.)
What exams have taught me and Death to the three-hour exam -- this one by a professor. So I am in good company. (got them via Sanket's tweets)
Some quotes from the former post (he seems to have taken the words right out of my fingers..;-)
"So, I have been thinking about what exams taught me:
- that slow, steady, careful work is not worth the hassle - a bit of cramming (typically one-three days seemed to work for me) in a mad rush just before the event works much more effectively and saves a lot of time
- the corollary - adrenalin is necessary to achieve anything worth achieving
- that the most important things in life generally take around three hours to complete
- that extrinsic motivation, the threat of punishment and the lure of reward, is more important than making what we do fun, enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding
- that we are judged not on what we achieve or how we grow but on how well we can display our skills in an intense, improbably weird and disconcerting setting"
(Something which I've been arguing all along -- that the rank holders, myself included to some extent, have optimized themselves for passing exams, not for solving problems in real life.)
"I summarise and display knowledge that I don't really have to any great extent. I extemporise. I do things because I fear punishment or crave reward. I play to the rules even when the rules are insane."
(I do the same, but am too afraid to say so, because the rules and norms forbid us to question what is generally accepted.)
Thursday, June 04, 2009
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