Chess

Teaching my eight year old chess, she wipes the floor with me her first time out. I'm impressed, but I did handicap myself with libations. I didn't let her win, the porter distracted me.

How Technology Disrupts Education for the Better

MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) have seen a decline in usage since coming onto the scene a few years ago, but I don't think that is a sign that they have failed, only that initial attention was as massive as the name implies. I definitely think that this is simply the beginning of a shift in how we are able to learn. If the material is presented in a way that overcomes the lack of physical, direct connection to the instructor and other students, then it can be quite effective. I took classes for a few years at a couple of universities that were strictly online courses. While most instructors made themselves available by phone (as did some students when working on collaborative projects), I found that it was an easy transition from brick-and-mortar institutions, mostly because I already work in that sort of environment, where most days I hardly interact with anyone in person. Being able to work independently is a necessity when it comes to shifting learning into the MOOC world, and for those who are able to make that shift, then the new platform can have massive disruptive potential for the education industry. First, it has to develop fully, though.

Last summer, I took a "how things work" course with my daughter from Coursera. It was the only offering at the time for her at eight years old, and she had never taken any online classes before, but she made the transition easily. We didn't finish the course due to summer travels and a hectic schedule, but we both enjoyed it. In the past, I've noted that there there are incentives to individuals investing in their own education, and "free" education has the potential to see the reverse effect, with low completion rates for free online classes compared to traditional institutions. This is expected, and is likely a part of the shifting education models moving forward.

Someday, students will ask their parents about the (not so good) old days when a quality education could cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, slack-jawed and in disbelief, and prospects for employment was an even scarier thought. We will be successful as a culture by embracing the future, by investing in our children and their education, not in the institutions themselves. I see what MOOCs are offering as having the potential to disrupt the learning process all the way down to the early stages of learning, with even kindergarten-age children having equal access to information and learning resources despite social or financial background.

I have taken classes online that have been both self-paced as well as those that stick to more of a schedule, with beginning and end dates. My personal preference is self-guided, simply because my schedule tends to fluctuate with work and personal life, and I never know if the next week will be busy or if I will have time to dedicate to studies. I tend to read more than take MOOC-type courses simply because of the time constraints.

As my children grow up and I have more free time, I definitely look forward to more online learning, and I think that the future for this disruptive technology is going to change the way we learn. Currently, I see accredited institutions as gate-keepers, protecting their interests and embracing this new technology half-heartedly, simply because it has the potential to upset the industry enough to de-throne those legacy institutions that arose in a different era, when most had to visit a library or enroll in classes to gain a meaningful education.

Today, that is hardly the case. Technology gives us the means to provide learning to even those with the most meager means. It removes the financial barrier to education that has kept so much of the world uneducated and in poverty. Knowledge is a resource, the most important one. Providing access to learning for little to no cost relative to legacy institutions will change things for the better, and those institutions that dig in their heels will fall the hardest. Embracing this inevitable change requires institutions to change business models, to accept that high profit margins might well become a thing of the past, or that sprawling universities may well fade into the past and become unnecessary.

With interactive technology, massive lecture halls become unnecessary. MOOCs already show us that we can work together with educators and students without regard for the distance that sets us apart. Location will no longer be a barrier Educators can reach a wider audience than ever. With digital publishing, libraries might also become museums, and we will have instant access to textbooks and research materials without ever leaving home. Mobile devices, battery life, and storage capacity continue to advance at impressive rates, and the ability to access a greater amount of information becomes more demanded, and successful firms will supply.

The optimist in me believes that successful companies and entrepreneurs will support this shift, and there are already examples such as Sal Khan who are embracing and pushing the technology even further (I love using the Khan Academy to tutor my daughter in math) to provide access to learning at no cost. Business models will need to compete with services like this, which will drive down costs to learners and the scope will continue to expand. Even poor communities that cannot afford the technology today are seeing it utilized to pull them out of poverty. Technology has the potential to disrupt education for the better.

In Dreams...

Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations.

—Chuang Tse: II

Another Boom-Bust Example from the Fed

An interview with Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute, in which the scholar discusses the Austrian Business Cycle, the Skyscraper Curse, and how Federal Reserve policy enables out of control government spending to demonstrates the former in the form of the latter. Debt is not wealth, and a government cannot spend, through increasing debt, an economy into prosperity. But bad monetary policy can debase the very commodity that policy intends to prop up; the US dollar.

Unfortunately, good intentions do not guarantee good results. Without natural market corrections, reallocating resources through price signals, entrepreneurs will continue to make bad long-term investments. By allowing interest rates to rise and monetary volume to readjust properly and signal spending reductions and savings increases.

When all major economies are in a race to the bottom to debase their currencies to make exports more competitive. But there is only one end-game; the bottom. Our politicians are playing "chicken" with those in the oligarchy, and we in the proliteriat are the cars.

http://feeds.mises.org/~r/MisesMedia/~5/cvITDPKFOwI/Monetary%20and%20Fiscal%20Policy.mp3

Threats are not Crimes

A 16-year-old boy is facing a disorderly conduct charge after making an online threat against Oregon State University. 

The boy, who lives outside Corvallis, was arrested Friday, a day after authorities spotted the threat on a blog, said Oregon State Police. An emergency alert was sent out to the university community and security was temporarily increased on campus. 

No one was hurt and there is no evidence of other further potential threat, police said. The boy's identity and details about the threat have not been released by police.

Source: Oregon State University online threat lands 16-year-old in handcuffs | OregonLive.com

Threats are not crimes. Of all of the reports on this incident, none have cited the blog posting, simply falling back on the police intervention on a non-crime. A crime must have an infringement on the rights of others, meaning there must be a victim. Philip K Dick explored this concept as pre-crime in his story Minority Report, in which "criminals" were charged and convicted before actually committing a real crime. The idea quickly collapses in application.

Education in the Internet Age

Discussing education in tye age of technology and the Internet.

http://feeds.mises.org/~r/MisesMedia/~5/xiOT7AgtYQA/Higher%20Education%20in%20the%20Internet%20Age.mp3

Stefan Molyneux on the Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan chats with Stefan Molyneux about society, science, war, politics, and more.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/joeroganexp/p396.mp3

Being Productive

Brett from the School Sucks podcast talks with Jake from the Voluntary Life about David Allen's book on getting things done.

http://schoolsucks.podomatic.com/enclosure/2013-09-21T08_21_33-07_00.mp3

The Vital Link of Education and Prosperity

Doesn't give much confidence in the public education system:

"Americans are aware of public education's many failures—the elevated high-school dropout rates, the need for remedial work among entering college students. One metric in particular stands out: Only 32% of U.S. high-school students are proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. When the NAEP results are put on the scale of the Program on International Student Assessment (PISA), the world's best source of information on student achievement, the comparable proficiency rates in math are 45% in Germany, 49% in Canada, and 63% in Singapore, the highest performing independent nation."

http://www.hoover.org/news/daily-report/156361

What is Unschooling?

What is Unschooling?

Self-ownership and Education

Good questions on self-ownership and education:

Libertarians are quick to defend the "rights" of homeschooling parents against violations by the state. I can only half-heartedly get behind such a cause. Yes, the state should get out of the way of parents, but just as important, maybe even more important, is that parents should get out of the way of their children. Contrast Ron Paul's defense of homeschooling, that is parents controlling their children's education, with John Holt's defense of unschooling, or children controlling their own education. The relevant question for libertarians: which is more in line with the principles of self-ownership and non-aggression?

Everything-Voluntary.com: Homeschooling vs. Unschooling

Our daughter is in a charter school. While I recognize that these schools are still reliant upon the state for redistribution of wealth without consent, they do provide some flexibility in the curriculum and choice for parents. Our daughter likes it more than public school, and we know of another opening next year that focuses on the classical method. My preference is decidedly free market; I believe that public schools' existence is immoral (involuntary taxation, forced redistribution of resources), and that private schools are the only real choice in the long run. Parents and students should have the ability to choose from a variety of learning institutions, or to choose to take the autodidactic route, rather than being forced to conform to a system that was designed for a different world, one that even its creator quickly abandoned. 

I'm keen on aspects of both homeschool and unschooling, but I believe that it is more a mix of these ideas than one system over another. The perfect system to me would be dependent on the learner's abilities, and their pace, as well as their interests and passions. The NAP wouldn't support forcing someone to do something that they simply do not agree with, would it? Why should the act of learning be any different?

Google and edX collaborate on Open edX Platform

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Sept. 10, 2013 – EdX, the not-for-profit online learning initiative, today announced its partnership with Google to jointly develop the edX open source learning platform, Open edX, and expand the availability of the platform and its learning tools to individuals and institutions around the world. In collaboration with Google, edX will build out and operate MOOC.org, a new site for non-xConsortium universities, institutions, businesses, governments and teachers to build and host their courses for a global audience. This site will be powered by the jointly developed Open edX platform.

Full release: mooc.org - Press Release

Allison Benedikt, Private School Hater, Sends her Kids to Private School

By now you've heard about this, I'm sure. Allison Benedikt thinks you and I are terrible if we send our kids to private school. 

I actually do send my kids to private school.

I do have to wonder, though, if Allison Benedikt only thinks this because her husband thinks it. Benedikt's husband is John Cook, the Gawker blogger. Last September John declared that private school should be banned.

In December of 2012, Allison admitted they were tapping out their resources to send their kids to preschool. That's right. They were paying to send their kids to preschool.

In September of 2012, John Cook admits to hating private school. In December of 2012, his wife admits they have stopped contributing to their 401(K)s in order to send their kids to preschool and are looking forward to the kids being in public school because of the financial burden, then in August of 2013 John Cook's wife admits to thinking people are bad if they send their kids to private school.

Is she brainwashed or just stupid? Perhaps we should embrace the healing power of "and." In any event, it seems both John and Allison are more jealous than self-righteous and they hide their jealousy behind contempt for those who can afford to send children to private school.

There is more: http://www.redstate.com/2013/08/30/does-allison-benedikt-think-this-only-because-her-husband-does

Only bad people send their kids to private school

For no good reason, a blogger (I refuse to refer to this drivel as writing) claims that even bad public schools are better than even the best private schools. 

She went full retard. Never go full retard. 

More: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/private_school_vs_public_school_only_bad_people_send_their_kids_to_private.html

Government Schools are Bad for Your Kids

"Once in a while you come across a book that ruptures the dominant narrative of a body politic, that it causes you to reshape your assessment of something.  Government Schools are Bad for Your Kids, by James Ostrowski, is an unapologetic indictment of the contemporary American education system. It's about 20 years ahead of its time, but shouldn't be; its insights and conclusion will seem both obvious and inevitable in retrospect."

More:

http://buffalorising.com/2013/04/book-review-government-schools-are-bad-for-york-kids/

Slate blogger goes full retard on education

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I'm not sure I follow the author's blogger's argument here. The thing about private and even charter schools in competition with traditional public schools is that they offer alternatives, giving parents the choice of where to send their children to be educated. Choice is always a good thing, and even 100% enrollment in old-school public schools would not guarantee anything beyond higher funding, not actual results. The end result of the public system is simply not something that is desirable for all parents and students, so choice is always needed. There are really no good reasons that these efforts to increase the quality of any school should be limited to public schools. The author fails to recognize the moral deficiency in funding public schools through theft (involuntary taxation) when private institutions (should) only rely on voluntary contributions to educate those students that choose those institutions. Every enterprise, public or private, should be allowed to succeed or fail based on its customers. Public schools shield themselves from market effects instead of living up to the same standards as private institutions.

I'm thinking that the author probably hasn't stopped drinking since high school and was thoroughly wasted when she wrote this long-winded rant. She really offers no good reason not to send your kids to private school, other than because she says so. Me, I tend to do what I want because I know better what is good for me than some stranger in another state or country. The author is a great example of why public schools are such dismal failures, and why we have to have alternatives, even if only some of us can afford them. And, yeah, anyone can get a library card and learn without ever stepping foot in a classroom. Some of the greats are autodidactics, and proud of being self-taught leaders in their fields. Benedikt is trying to be seen as relevant in a dead-end career by lashing out in the most vulgar and ignorant manner.

Read the whole article, really. Make it a drinking game. Apparently Benedikt believes tagging a rant as a manifesto will redeem her intellectual inadequacies.

Don't discount the pre-game underage drinking with the kids from the trailer park. 

Private school vs. public school: Only bad people send their kids to private school. - Slate Magazine

College Board Enters Expanding Common-Test Market

The College Board will redesign four of its testing programs to align to the Common Core State Standards, following an announcement last year that the SAT would be redesigned for the same purpose. Ed Week reports that the additional tests include ReadiStep (8^th and 9^th graders); the PSAT (10^th and 11^th graders); and Accuplacer, which colleges use to determine course placement for incoming students. The College Board is currently talking with policymakers and educators around the country.

Education Week: College Board Enters Expanding Common-Test Market

Should Higher Education Be Subsidized?

Professor Friedman leads a roundtable discussion with students. Liberty Pen

Teaching Children to Learn using the Classical Method

“What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers–they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.” - from The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1947

Teaching the Trivium to Children - Trivium Education.com

Texas Education Assessment Testing Confusion

 

This week, the Texas Education Agency will release a tsunami of reports rating Texas public schools under a new accountability system. 

Designed to credit schools that increased academic achievement even if they didn't deliver glowing test scores, the new system grades schools and districts across four indexes: student achievement, student progress, closing performance gaps and postsecondary readiness. 

It also might credit those schools in which poor scores rise higher at a greater rate than others, but unfortunately, like the old system, schools will still be penalized if students fall below the grading curve of 5%.

The accountability system is the state's way of measuring how well schools are doing in educating kids. The old one could sink a school based solely on the standardized test scores of its lowest-performing students. Educators pleaded for more flexibility, and the TEA didn't rate schools at all last year while it overhauled the system. 

But some who have looked closely at Index No. 2, the new method of calculating student progress, say it might be as much a curse as a blessing when the reports come out Thursday. 

Despite being necessary to have 3-4 years or testing data to vet the new system, it is being implemented immediately.

“It doesn't look right, feel right or smell right,” said Mike Lara, director of research and technology services for North East Independent School District, the second largest in San Antonio.

More: Schools, districts await grades - San Antonio Express-News

Support Home Schooling…But

In the 1980s home schooling was still a concept with which most people were unfamiliar and with which many elected officials were not comfortable. In fact, I often quote former Texas Attorney General Jim Maddox, who said that he did not believe parents were qualified to raise their children, much less teach them at home. In that environment, home schoolers were very happy with an elected official who simply said he supported the right of a parent to home school.

That was then, and this is now. Almost any elected official or candidate for office today will say that they "support home schooling." Unfortunately, what that often translates to is not a supportive position on the home school political, legislative, or legal agenda. In fact, that phrase is often used just before the official tells us he opposes the parental rights or home school position.

I have been corresponding recently with the chief of police for the city of Euless regarding an incident in which Euless police officers stopped some home school children who were walking to their grandparents' home. These officers took the children into custody, took them back to their home, went inside to examine the home, asked to see their curriculum, and told their adult brother they were going to call CPS to report them. This was all done under the Daytime Curfew Ordinance of the city.

More: 

http://thsc.org/2013/07/support-home-schooling-but/

Malala Day

Earlier this month, Malala Yousafzai, the girl shot by the Taliban for standing up for education rights, celebrated her 16th birthday by addressing the UN. Her speech read like history in the making. We were delighted that Camille McGirt, winner of the 2012 Pearson Prize for Higher Education, was on the floor as a youth delegate to witness it. Here's her special report.

***

On July 12, I was invited to serve as a youth delegate and representative for Pearson at the United Nations for Malala Day – an event organized in support of the UN Secretary-General’s Global Education First Initiative. Over 500 young leaders from around the globe joined Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban on her way to school, in calling for action on reaching the goal of all children, especially girls, to be in school and learning by 2015. My role as a youth delegate was an empowering experience that I will never forget.

More: Postcard from the UN - Malala Day « The Pearson blog

Fear and Schooling

From Seth Godin's Stop Stealing Dreams:

To efficiently run a school, amplify fear (and destroy passion)
School's industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line. There's no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination.
And the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed. There's no room for someone who wants to go faster, or someone who wants to do something else, or someone who cares about a particular issue. Move on. Write it in your notes; there will be a test later. A multiple-choice test.
Do we need more fear?
Less passion?

Its no coincidence that the Prussian paramilitary school system was the model on which the US education system was built, and it has long since served the purpose for which it was designed. Its time for something truly different. 

Education vs Schooling

From Seth Godin's "Stop Stealing Dreams," in which he describes how the Prussian school system was effectively applied in America in the 1800s, paving the way for the failure that we find our children being pummeled with today:

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.
Sure, there was some moral outrage about seven-year-olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work—they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.
Part of the rationale used to sell this major transformation to industrialists was the idea that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence—it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child-labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.
Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Scale was more important than quality, just as it was for most industrialists.
Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

Greg Mankiw's Blog: EconRhymes

An excerpt from a new poetry collection on economics:

An Economist 

(Economists study how society produces and distributes its scarce resources.)

An economist pretends to knowWhy things are made and how they flow.He studies men’s biggest woe,He wants it all, what to forego. 

Like a machine with unseen gearsThrough greed a solution appears. By making what men hold most dearProfits are earned by serving peers. 

To boost theirs and the common's gainBecome experts in their domains.To make one thing well they attain,Through trade the rest they obtain. 

But their profits diverge by much.Those with great tools earn a whole bunch.Tools like machines, schooling and such Boost production so very much.

Greg Mankiw's Blog: EconRhymes

Awesome.

Cengage Files Chapter 11, Blames a Changing Publishing Market

Cengage Learning filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week as part of a "restructuring support agreement" to help reduce its $5.8 billion debt.

 

"The decisive actions we are taking today will reduce our debt and reduce our capital structure to support our long-term business strategy of transitioning from traditional print models to digital educational and research materials," Michael Hansen, Cengage Learning CEO, said in a statement.

In the past, the Company and its peers in the educational materials market produced only traditional print products.

From kindergarten to higher education to career training, students, instructors, and institutions depended on printed goods, typically as an accompaniment to live classroom teaching. The publishers in this market provided textbooks, workbooks, and other instructional materials and relied heavily on their profits from selling new print products.

Now, the educational publishing market has entered the early stages of a major transition from print business models to a greater focus on digital products, with digital market share growing as quickly as 20 percent annually over recent years. The move to digital began with the simple substitution of electronic versions of textbooks for the printed forms. Over time, digital products such as homework programs and interactive learning software have increasingly been paired and integrated with print materials.

And in some cases, digital products are becoming a favored medium for learning materials in the classroom. As much as 15 percent of learning materials sold today are sold in digital format, including course materials, homework programs, and interactive and online learning platforms. All indications are that digital will continue to grow in importance in this market.

More: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/723898-dk000015-0000.html#document/p4/a108470

By failing to adapt to a changing market, Cengage essentially signed its own death certificate. I don't think that print is dead, but the publishing industry is changing, and fast. Those companies that didn't see the changes coming years ago don't have time to react now, and those that did and had the foresight to adapt to that coming change have and will survive. Blaming a changing market instead of adapting to it is hardly productive. That sort of debt-to-revenue imbalance can not be sustained. Only the government can maintain long-term losses and get away with it (taxpayer bailouts). Companies must maintain profits to compete and survive by serving their customers.

Considering Class: College Access and Diversity

Each time that the continued legality of race-conscious affirmative action is threatened, colleges and universities must confront the possibility of dramatically changing their admissions policies. Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear this year, presents just such a moment. In previous years when affirmative action has been outlawed by ballot initiative in specific states or when the Court has seemed poised to reject it entirely, there have been calls for replacing race-conscious admissions with class-based affirmative action. Supporters of race-conscious affirmative action have typically criticized the class-based alternative as ineffective at maintaining racial diversity. This article presents the results of a study conducted at the University of Colorado in 2008 and 2010 that challenges that common assertion. We present a class-based affirmative action policy that led to increased socioeconomic diversity as well as slightly increased racial diversity in two entering freshmen classes. This study, the first done at a moderately selective university, shows how class-based affirmative action can be an effective tool for admitting a class of students that is diverse both socioeconomically and racially. Even if the Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of race-conscious college admissions, class-based policies are attractive as a supplement to race-conscious policies. The challenges associated with low socioeconomic status are different from those associated with minority status, and there are good reasons to seek equal opportunity along both lines.

Considering Class: College Access and Diversity by Matthew Gaertner, Melissa Hart :: SSRN

I am not convinced that a pure race-based admissions method reduces disparity between races, or even negates any negative discrimination by shifting the discrimination perspective toward minorities. Reverse racism, after all, is simply another form of racism. A merit-based system would be the most equitable, even if certain social or racial classes are under-represented.

Common Core: What's Hidden Behind the Language

Jane Robbins, a senior fellow for the American Principles Project, writes, “Common Core has never been piloted. How can anyone say it is good for kids when it’s not in place anywhere?” 

Common Core: What's Hidden Behind the Language

State Education Spending Outpaces Inflation

From a US Census Bureau report, $407 million in debt across all of the states might be a driving force in reducing spending during a time in which most other public and private sectors are doing the same. Despite the temporary decrease in state spending, it continues to outpace inflation. When we consider that revenus from the states was only $259 million, it is easy to see how continuing to spend at significantly greater rates than revenues can support might lead to an unstable situation. Total spending was $522 million. Those numbers are less than comforting. It will be interesting to see if the trend in public spending continues to decease  or whether this is a temporary deviation rather than a trend. When taxpayers incomes have stagnated, along with increasing unemployment rates, it is even more difficult to support the ever-increasing spending rates. Fewer taxpayers with precious little resources can not sustain these constant increases.

Federal Student Loans: Interest Rates Going Up?

Partisan battles in Washington are jeopardizing efforts to prevent interest rates on federal student loans from automatically doubling on July 1.  The House last week approved legislation that would replace the current fixed rate on Stafford loans with a variable rate pegged to Treasury Notes interest rates that would be capped at 8.5%. 
 
The White House has threatened to veto the bill claiming that it will make it more difficult for middle income students to get the financing they need for college.  Senate ed committee chairman Harkin (D-IA) is proposing a two-year extension of the current rate to give Congress time to work out a better plan.
 
House ed committee chairman Kline (R-MN), at a breakfast appearance last week, defended the House bill saying it would provide affordable interest rates to students and reduce costs to the taxpayer.

Why is the cost of higher education rising?

Actually, there is a simple reason that educational costs are so high, and we should not be surprised. Higher education lending is no different than any other market. Lenders assess the risks of loans based on a variety of criteria. Interest rates are set based on complex models for loans if they are approved. When was the last time you got the advertised rate when buying a car? When the government leverages the taxpayers against the loan risks, lenders are more likely to approve more loans and at lower rates that they would otherwise. Eventually, when it becomes common practice, the public demands and feels entitled to those new common terms.
 
When universities know that they will be paid either way, they have no incentive to compete with each other, but effectively collude with lenders and regulators (government), letting tuition prices rise as a result of the intervention into the market. This is what happened in the housing crisis and subsequent bubble. Now its happening in the education lending market, despite the lessons that should have been learned.
 
The effort by politicians and lenders to make education more affordable has had the opposite effect. What's scary is that the results of these actions can be assessed based on basic microeconomic principles, yet the failure continues.

A better solution would be to let the market react and the interest rates rise. Lenders view government-guaranteed loans as reduced risk (since taxpayers are on the hook if loans go into default), and those risks are necessary to stabilize a financial market like loans for homes, education, etc. Without risk, lenders lend to borrowers who may not be as capable of paying back loans in a timely manner, which has led to students being shackled with educational debt for terms stretching to near mortgage lengths and further.
 
Continuing to suppress rates at such a low rate only encourages the continuation of this practice by lenders that approaches predatory, such as has been seen in the housing market. The trouble with either of these scenarios is that eventually those low rates will return to higher levels, either voluntarily or when the bubble bursts. A gradual deflation of the higher education lending bubble would be far less disastrous that the current trend.

More: The Economics of Liberty: Bubbles, Intervention, Money, Debt, Education

Simplemente hazlo

Somebody said that it couldn't be done,
But he with a chuckle replied
That "maybe it couldn't," but he would be one
Who wouldn't say so till he'd tried.

So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn't be done, and he did it.

Somebody scoffed: "Oh, you'll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it;"
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he'd begun it.

With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn't be done, and he did it.

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you, one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.

But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start to sing as you tackle the thing
That "cannot be done," and you'll do it.

It Couldn't Be Done
Edgar A. Guest
(1881–1959)

Climate Literacy: Navigating Climate Change Conversations

There is a new course on climate change starting Monday, 20 May this spring, focusing on both the science and the public policy surrounding the issue.

Climate Literacy: Navigating Climate Change Conversations | Coursera

Arthur C. Clarke on Learning from Childhood's End

"Whatever problems the future might bring, time did not yet hang heavy on humanity's hands. Education was now much more thorough and much more protracted. Few people left college before twenty-and that was merely the first stage, since they normally returned again at twenty-five for at least three more years, after travel and experience had broadened their minds. Even then, they would probably take refresher courses at intervals for the remainder of their lives in the subjects that particularly interested them."

The way Clarke describes the idea of lifelong learning for the sake of learning is of special interest to me, since I have long since abandoned the idea that I need to learn to achieve any external success, when the act of learning itself is the greatest success. 

MOOC Limitations

We should champion and study our innovations while at the same time drawing clear lines around the space where they’re useful and being honest about the space where they’re not.

While I like to imagine a future in which students do not come to the school, the school comes to the student, I also see that there is a reasonable limitation to what can be done with the new learning format. On one hand, content can be provided by fewer instructors to a greater audience than ever, but the instruction is somewhat one-way, as smaller groups lend themselves more to peer and instructor interaction, and younger learners need more direct involvement in the beginning. As they grow, independence wins out and learners that have mastered the communication methods have much more chance of teaching themselves what they seek to learn.

We are, after all, self-taught in what we learn from day one.

When Public Mission Meets Private Opportunity

The intersection between public mission and private opportunity continues to get busier as schools search for better ways to educate students, and entrepreneurs work to create products and services to help educators achieve their goals. This special report—a follow-up to our 2012 report “Accelerating Innovation” and produced with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York—examines the complex relationship between the private and public sectors in K-12. The report is part of Education Week's commitment to following the education industry and new approaches to schooling on a special Industry & Innovation channel.

More: Education Week: When Public Mission Meets Private Opportunity

Challenging Traditional Education

MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational resources. First was open access to course content, and then access to free online courses. Accredited institutions are now accepting MOOCs as well as free courses and experiential learning as partial credittoward a degree. The next disruptor will likely mark a tipping point: an entirely free online curriculum leading to a degree from an accredited institution. With this new business model, students might still have to pay to certify their credentials, but not for the process leading to their acquisition. If free access to a degree-granting curriculum were to occur, the business model of higher education would dramatically and irreversibly change. As Nathan Harden ominously noted, "recent history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information."¹

More: The MOOC Model: Challenging Traditional Education (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

Will MOOC Technology Break the Education Cartel?

It happened to the record industry first. While popular music had long been available on radio, it could be argued that a true music industry as we know it today didn’t arise until the 50‘s and 60‘s when distributable media and players became widely available. 

But that’s where technology turned. CD drives in computers plus early sharing software like Napster meant that instead of getting good at mashing the pause button on your stereo so recording to cassette stopped before the adds kicked in, you could rip a whole CD to MP3 in minutes and upload it for anyone who was also connected to the net. You could also bypass the record stores entirely by downloading songs, for free. It meant you didn’t have to buy your music a fourth time in some other format – you now controlled the file. No it wasn’t legal, but it was what the people wanted. 

Fast forward to 2013 and we can choose to buy tracks one at time instead of ten at a time. NOW we have Pandora, and Spotify and Rdio et al. Now Music gets pushed to me. Now I tap a thumbs up button and more great tunes keep rolling in, for free if I put up with the Pandora Ads like four times an hour.

Given the resistance to positive change within the public education sector, change may be slow. What I am optimistic about, though, is that resistance can not last forever, and eventually individual choice will prevail, giving parents the ability to either send their kids to proper academies that take advantage of the technology, or even use the technology at home rather than send their kids off to school for most of the day. I can imagine a future in which companies such as Coursera, edX or the Khan Academy offer full curriculums for children starting in early primary education, supporting their education throughout their lives, and at prices that are affordable for even those at the lowest end of the income scale. Back before socialized healthcare, the poor were afforded care through charity, and I can imagine a future in which plunder is not the method through which education is provided, but through charity from private enterprise.

So what about the education system? I mean its truly one of the only things that everybody has in common. In many countries its 5 days a week for up to 12-18 years!  Its a system where what you will learn (the content) and how you will learn it (the curriculum) is highly regulated and centrally controlled, with the user/learner having very little say in either. Its also traditionally been an industry slow to adopt new technology. The US Department of Commerce found in 2003 that Education was actually the least IT intensive of 55 major industries (Dumagan, Gill, Ingram 2003). This may be due to an in-built caution when it comes to something as important as education, or it could be a lack of funding or access, particularly in the developing world.

The medium also brings with it an efficiency that public and many private institutions fail to put into practice, that could effectively cut the time spent studying in half, giving children the opportunity to focus on being children while also being students, rather than spending every waking hour dedicated to their studies.

Once flexible and even user-generated learning content embedded in MOOC’s trickles down to a primary school level, and super-capable mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are deployed widely enough to provide ubiquitous access, its really only the process we use to harness them (especially how to keep some strategic face to face time in the mix) that remains to be solved.

When these aspects are satisfactorily solved then, we are left to ask – Can we actually trust people to choose their own education like they choose toothbrushes, or say, tracks on Pandora? Sugatra Mitra who just won the $1 million dollar TED prize for his ‘school in a wall’ work would say yes. Do yourself a favour and ponder all these questions while watching his presentation here. Does it make you want to tap ‘thumbs up’ to add more like it to your stream of learning content?

If kids in poverty can learn programming at a walk-up kiosk when they have never set foot in a classroom, I think that the eventual progression wil definitely be toward something decidedly less centralized, toward a more individual learning experience.

Full article: Will MOOC Technology Break the Education Cartel? « Educational Technology Debate

Ron Paul launches his own home-school curriculum

Former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched his own K-12 home-school curriculum to provide an “education in liberty like no other.” 

The curriculum, which includes courses on “the economics of the Austrian school,” provides its K-5 program for free, meaning that students and families will be able to learn under Ron Paul for six years “without spending a dime,” according to one of the curriculum’s high school teachers, Ludwig von Mises Institute senior fellow Tom Woods.

Ron Paul launches his own home-school curriculum | The Daily Caller

Write Drunk

Taxation is Theft

Taxation, by any measure or method, is theft. Debating this with a statist can be an exercise in frustration, but can be a learning experience (for the statist) if they have an open mind and the ability to reason.

Anyone care to begin?

Quote from The Case for Discrimination

From Walter Block's book, the Case for Discrimination:

In the previous census, the female-male income ratio for 30-and-over never-marrieds was 99.2 percent; and in that year, the ratio rose to 109.8 percent for those with a university degree who were never married. That is, the average salary of females was 9.8 percentage points more than that of males.

Wait, what? Women with comparable education and experience earned more than men? If sexual "discrimination" exists, why do the statistics tell the opposite story? What does this tell us about the motives of policymakers and groups working to change what statistically appears to be a lack of "discrimination" through public policy?

The second nail emerges when we consider the exotic implications of the employer discrimination hypothesis of the pay gap. If this analysis were true, one would expect to find a systematic and positive relationship between profit levels and the number of women in the firm or industry.

Full book available free in electronic formats:

http://mises.org/document/6078

Coursera starts to turn a profit

The Silicon Valley-based company brought in $220,000 in the first quarter after it started charging for verified completion certificates, its co-founders said. The company also receives revenue from an Amazon.com affiliates program if users buy books suggested by professors.

People tend to treat things they pay for differently than things they receive for free, a common observation in economics. By encouraging students to take advantage of low-cost courses, they might see more students complete the courses rather than simply casually observing. The low costs for MOOCs and similar platforms help to make education more accessible and affordable. With just an Internet connection and a computer, companies like Coursera might well change the nature of education in the near future, leaving traditional institutions to fade into the past.

The vast majority of users are just dropping in to take free courses, but the company introduced a “Signature Track” to try to put more weight behind the end-of-course awards issued by universities that offer courses through its platform. Users who pay for this have to submit a photo ID of themselves to the company and are also tracked based on their “unique typing pattern” to ensure that people who take tests or turn in assignments are who they say they are. Prices are set around $50 so far.

Free to consumers does not mean free to produce, so profits are necessary to keep the company, and the idea, moving forward into the future. 

The company remains interested in keeping courses free, Koller said. That’s how the company took off in the first place, as one of the top providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. But a free course does not mean a free end product, so the company is looking at commercializing its certificates. It suggests users can put Signature Track certificates on their resumes as "professional development" or "additional coursework." Coursera is committed to only offering courses from elite universities.

More:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/coursera-begins-make-money

Statism and Student Debt

What most folks fail to umderstand is that government guarantees and student loan subsidization is a part of the cause of this constant increase in higher education costs, and is its greatest weakness since these increases are unsustainable and the bubble that this public policy creates also leads to its collapse. As Margaret Thatcher said, "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Statists tend to disregard this reality and favor violece (forced redistribution of wealth and resources), but theft is theft regardless of the cooorful language used.

Anti-tax Day in Auburn

For anyone lucky enough to be near Auburn, Alabama, the Mises Institute is holding an anti-tax day event. Should be both educational and enlightening.

"As Murray Rothbard pointed out, taxation is the worst method of looting us. Inflation, for example, is destructive, of course, and it might make a loaf of bread cost $10. But at least you get a loaf of bread. With taxation, you get nothing."

http://www.mises.org/WorkInProgress/MisesCirclePostcards/Apr2013HS.html

Build a School in the Cloud

Onstage at TED2013, Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other -- using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), and learn more at tedprize.org. 

Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. His wish: Build a School in the Cloud, where children can explore and learn from one another. Full bio »

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud | Video on TED.com

Kitchen Science for Kids

Having some fun teaching my daughter some scientific principles in the kitchen, we discussed solutions and solutes, viscosity, and density. We put together a list of materials and she made guesses as to which would be soluble in other materials. Only one gave her pause, whether sugar would dissolve into lemon juice, yet she was proven correct once she completed the experiment (it just took longer to dissolve than expected). Not bad for a seven year old. 

Schools as Black-Holes by Butler Shaffer

Ask yourself whether, at any stage in your formalized education, you were encouraged to think outside the boundaries of the assigned curriculum. Were the institutional keepers of the questions you were expected to pursue tolerant of any independent inquiries you might undertake? Might continued efforts to pursue your own agenda of discovery land you in the principal’s office or, worse, subject you to behavior-modifying drugs or other treatment? At what point – if at all – did it become evident to you that the system of formal education to which you had been sentenced had, as its purpose, the turning of you and your fellow inmates into well-conditioned servo-mechanisms whose energies were to be devoted to fostering institutional interests?

More: Schools as Black-Holes by Butler Shaffer

I personally think that public institutional schools are like prisons, or maybe more like purgatory, because when you wake up and have the desire to escape, it is within your power. If only students weren't being institutionalized en mass, almost fast-tracked from school to the prison system.

Autodidactic: Individual Self-Learning

Millions of people pay a king's ransom for college tuition to learn what is free for the taking when motivated by a compelling desire to learn. In the movie Good Will Hunting, Will (played by Matt Damon) chides an arrogant Ivy League student for paying a fortune for an education that would be free but for the price of a library card. Although this is absolutely valid, very few people believe it. Instead they are convinced the knowledge they could acquire on their own is secondary to paying a lot of money to an institution which will attest that they have, even if they cheated their way through the process. 

As they say, cheating only suffers the cheater.

Credentialism has existed for centuries in one form or another as groups with an information or knowledge advantage have tried to maintain their position of superiority with everything from guilds and associations to secret societies and esoteric languages. And even though teachers and educators have noble intentions, their position in our economy, by design is dependent upon a psychology of the scarcity of knowledge. 

Time is the most scarce resource, with knowledge being freely available, whether in institutional settings, or for the individual to discover. There are also those in between, who look to those before them for guidance or example, and then set off on their own.

Whole categories of attributes from self-help to self-directed inquiry have been coined to disguise and set apart individual learning as an aberration so as not to displace the hierarchical power of educators. And yet, throughout history self-educated men and women from all walks of life and social stations have risen to the occasion of the challenges facing them. In so doing, they have set new standards for learning, which without question have raised the bar of achievement for their respective societies. But only in the latter half of the twentieth-century has the insidious notion that one must have the blessing of an institution to function in society been generally accepted without protest. 

More: Autodidactic Hall of Fame

We don't necessarily need more teachers and schools, but more educators and more willing students. Institutionalization or confirmation of knowledge by universities isn't what we need, but simply a facilitation of the process of learning. What we have now is a predatory system which simply uses and feeds off of students through debt. 

The Costs of Education

I benefit from and am vested in the success of this company and industry, but can see a need to end waste and increase efficiency, a shift away from public education back toward the private sector. Why would anyone seek to dismiss that which benefits them? Reason:

“There's no other state in the country that comes even close to this level of punitive requirement on students," her mother, Dineen Majcher, explains.
The Austin mother is a member of TAMSA, or Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment.
The group believes the state puts an unnecessary emphasis on standardized testing and pays Pearson, the British company hired to administer the tests, too much money.
According to state records, the Defenders found Texans spend more money on standardized testing than any other state.

The state's contract with Pearson requires Texas to pay the company $95 million this year. By 2015, tax payers will have paid the company $1.1 billion.

Pearson does not set policy in Texas. It won its contract after multiple companies submitted bids about 13 years ago.

Consider that the gross waste of the education industry is funded through theft, and that there is little economic incentive for efficiency as a result.

The Price of Pearson | kvue.com Austin

A Mises Academy Education in Economics

When interventionism becomes more and more apparent in markets, we need more than ever to look to those with a practical and factual understanding of economics. With the Mises Academy, we see the door opening and more and more minds coming online, seeking out this knowledge:

This is also my first course. I'm looking forward to it. It is impossible to find an education in the Austrian School anywhere else but here.

Sign up at: Course: Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln: The Curse of Economic Nationalism

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, you are mentally ill if you:
Are addicted to coffee —Caffeine-Related Disorders, page 212,
Have trouble speaking in public —Expressive Language Disorder, page 55
Can’t handle math problems —Mathematics Disorders, page 50
Can’t write a good essay —Disorder of Written Expression, page 51
Don’t think you're crazy? Then you’re suffering from Noncompliance With Treatment , page 683.
"To read about the evolution of the DSM is to know this: It is an entirely political document. What it includes, what it does not include, are the result of intensive campaigning, lengthy negotiating, infighting, and power plays."
—Louise Armstrong, And They Call It Help: The Psychiatric Policing of America’s Children, 1993 (Addison-Wesley)

More: In Their Own Words

In Their Own Words

"Schools will become clinics whose purposes is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists. This will include bio-chemical and psychological mediation of learning, as drugs are introduced experimentally to improve in the learner such qualities as personality, concentration and memory… Children are to become the objects of experimentation." (Emphasis added)
—A U. S. National Education Association report, titled: Education in the 70s.

In Their Own Words

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

This video is just a brief introduction to a very serious subject. There are six books listed at the end which will go much further into the subject.

The soundtrack is now available at: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/exposed-the-soundtrack-ep/id444615015 and https://market.android.com/details?id=artist-Add5o4qqbmxyhwr7qwdawbyvcmu

To see/hear more of Neal's work go to http://www.TheRealNealFox.com and http://www.TheArtOffensive.com

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America - YouTube

Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln: The Curse of Economic Nationalism

I almost forgot to Sign up for this course. I've been wanting to, even though my statist educational cycle begins again next week. If nothing else, I'll save the course reading materials for future reading. If you are concerned about government encroachment into individual liberties, your have a penchant for economics, or you are a history geek, join me in diLorenzo's course that starts shortly.

One of the themes of Murray Rothbard's writings on the nature of the state is that state power ultimately depends on the perpetuation of a body of beliefs and superstitions about the benevolence and necessity of the state, and the alleged evils of private property, free enterprise, individual liberty, and the civil society. Because the citizens always outnumber any ruling class by many orders of magnitude, they must somehow be made to acquiesce in the ruling class's plundering of their society in the name of "progress," "nationalism," "the greater good," "socialism," or whatever.

Beatings, imprisonment, torture, and mass murder are time-tested tools of the state, but they can be very costly and can instigate a revolution. Therefore, relentless propaganda is often relied upon instead to secure the power and privileges of the state and statists.

Once the people of the Soviet empire finally understood that socialist propaganda was all a big lie, the regime was doomed. At that point it was always just a matter of how much beating, imprisonment, torture, and mass murder the thugs and criminals who ran the Soviet government could get away with to keep the system going.

American history is vastly different from the grotesque history of Soviet Russia, but in some ways it is similar. Until recently, there has never been much of a movement to bring full-fledged socialism to America. The ideological battle was not so much capitalism versus socialism but capitalism and freedom versus interventionism and paternalistic regulation and taxation. The interventionists eventually won out, so that today's political/economic system (in the U.S. and in many other copycat countries) can be described as "participatory fascism," to borrow a phrase used by Robert Higgs. It is a system of crony capitalism financed by a central bank, government borrowing, and pervasive taxation. It is a system that is of plutocratic elites, for plutocratic elites, and by plutocratic elites (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the true founding father of this system). The massive welfare state is merely used to buy enough votes to maintain the "legitimacy" of the system.

Like Soviet socialism, this system is grounded on a particular ideology or collection of superstitions about the evils of private, competitive markets and the supposed benevolence and necessity of state intervention. The ideology is not socialism but goes under several different names, such as "economic nationalism" or "Hamiltonianism."

Beginning on Thursday, January 3, I will be teaching a five-week online course under the auspices of the Mises Academy on the historical evolution of this interventionist ideology, and on what it means for Americans (and others) today. The course will be entitled "Participatory Fascism: Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and the Curse of Economic Nationalism." This system was almost entirely cemented into place during the American "Civil War," and was the ultimate victory of a political movement that was led at first by Alexander Hamilton, and then by Henry Clay, and then Lincoln. 

Sign up or read more: 

http://academy.mises.org/courses/economic_nationalism