You may remember that the secret of life is 42, according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. But today's number is 46. Forty six years ago today, I was a young PhD in educational research moving to UWSP from Maryland. Thus, for just about ⅔ of my life, I have lived as a Badger (state animal of Wisconsin) instead of a terrapin (state animal of Maryland).
It is fun to recollect finishing my degree, dissertation and orals, searching for a job and landing in my aimed-for upper Midwest states. Historically, those states had a very good reputation in higher ed and established some of the first state-run public universities that included research missions. For much of the early 1000 years of Western higher ed, the concept of education was deeply intermixed with the concept of the wisdom of the ancients. The picture was that an educated person knew what various thinkers of the past had thought and written. The idea of scientific investigation to establish new insights and understandings, especially conducted steadily and using public funds was new.
Somebody somewhere probably knows what portion of current scientific knowledge, understandings and insights have come from public research universities and what from private but I don't. When I was looking for a job, I definitely wanted a school that offered master's degrees in education as well as bachelor's degrees. In my experience, in the US, teaching elementary or primary school involves teaching a group all the different subjects while teaching high school involves specializing in one or a few subjects and teaching. The time involved in getting an elementary, primary or secondary major is too great for the typical four year degree to also include much in the way of research. So, it falls to the master's thesis and the doctoral dissertation to be research papers.
I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about the best education, which I am thinking of as the most advantageous, the education that has been shown to be most helpful. It is an error to think that people who have not been to school don't know anything, just as it is to think that those who have been to school know what was taught there. It seems to me that the best education is that which approximates the best parenting, education that mixes lessons to be learned with plenty of opportunities to try things out and to play and live without learning all the time. We can't take an individual, educate him this way, see how he turns out, undo the education, re-educate in a different way and compare the two results. We totally know that individuals differ very much in their strengths and abilities.
Statistical comparisons between groups sometimes give clues as to better ways to educate but it is often a method that is too gross to reveal the best path.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
