Lean Production: Inside the war on public education

[HiPointDem]

45. Schools already use labs (computer, audio, video) for various purposes, & one is for individualized

learning. Labs work well for some things, with some students; less well for other things, with other students. The idea that '200 8th graders' in a computer lab would work for all students, or even most students, is laughable. Schools have been using labs since I was in grade school (*over* 40 years ago.) There's no evidence that wholesale use of computer labs would raise achievement, interest or participation one iota. The students it works well for are, in most cases, the ones who are *already* high achievers with high internal motivation & good parental involvement.

Of the many lab programs available to schools, Khan academy is one of the duller ones. There's nothing especially unique or thrilling about it -- its advantage lies only in the fact that Khan is connected to ed deformers & thus his program gets lots of media attention -- so people like *you*, with little real-world experience in a variety of classrooms, with a variety of students & program -- can talk about it as if it's some big deal. But it's not.

You pretend to know what 'the problem with the current education system' is, but your post shows you've not spent any significant time in the classroom since you were a child. Your children are not *all* children; your experience is not *everyone's* experience; the school they went to is not representative of *all* schools, etc. etc.

Your post also demonstrates a certain superficiality of thought; of course computers brings biases; they reflect the biases of their designers. The claim about the student who was tested & found to be a 'genius' is idiotic. There is no test for 'genius'. There are only IQ tests, & what they test for is highly debatable. There is no correspondence between high IQ & 'genius,' unless it's your opinion that having a high IQ is synonymous with genius, in which case I'm also a 'genius,' albeit i've never done anything worthy of the appellation.

Your point, i think, was that the student was bored in his class because he was too smart for it. Maybe that was the case; but you don't *know* that, & i doubt 40 years hindsight has made things any clearer. Maybe he was just more interested in raising hell than anything the teachers might have thrown at him; maybe he was having trouble at home; maybe he just didn't want to be in school, period, & would have rather been out playing with his friends; maybe he didn't like that particular teacher for whatever reason, maybe he was showing off for his friends.

Maybe if you'd put him in a lab with 200 other kids he would have been *worse,* not better, as his goofing off would have been more hidden in the huge lab. You don't know.