Edward Berger invites you to watch some important TED talks, which he uses to make a point about the appalling ignorance of some of our key “thought leaders.”
Berger writes:
To get the most out of this blog, view Ted Talks 2011 – Knowledge Is Power. #1: Sir Ken Robinson; and #5: Salman Kahn, and the Kahn Academy.
I selected these two excellent presentations for many reasons, but the most important reveal is when Bill Gates comes on stage with Salman Kahn. His reaction and comments – those of a major player in the reform movement – are perhaps the best example of what billionaires who have never done the hard work necessary to understand our public schools and what teachers do, create ideological, (not real) solutions to complex problems.
These billionaires are able to force the adoption of harmful and destructive ideologies, the consequences of their limited understanding, on America’s schools. Perhaps they have influence because politicians and some bureaucrats assume that Wealth = Intelligence? How else can one explain inBloom, Common Core, High Stakes Testing, Race To The Top, NCLB, SAT, teacher evaluation based on false data from student test scores, and other education-adverse implants?
“Reformers,” like Gates, Broad, Rhee, Duncan (and many others) have never learned mastery of subjects and how to teach them, basic knowledge of learning styles, maturation/learning readiness, and classroom management skills. They have not gone through rigorous certification and continued evaluation. They do not have a minimum of 5 years’ experience in the classroom as a teacher. They have not learned to work with parents, and with community needs and values. Most important, they have no concept of the differences in students and teaching approaches depending on age, maturation levels, conditions of poverty or affluence, and learning readiness. They address their imagined education solutions as if elementary, middle, and high school education is one entity that can be reformed by one down-and-dirty hit.
Salman Khan makes a presentation, and Gates gushes. Berger fumes:
Salman Khan’s presentation is well received by educators. His use of video lessons to enhance teaching and learning are very useful. These lessons are tools that teachers can add to their war chests of techniques and exercises that help children learn. Kahn has developed teaching tools. He has not invented a replacement education system. I think that is clear to all who understand what education requires; what education is.
Enter now, Bill Gates. Watch him closely. He is almost orgasmic in his (mis)interpretation of Kahn’s work. What he sees is a solution to all of the complex problems in our educational system. He communicates that Kahn has the solution to education’s ills. That Kahn’s use of video instruction can now change our whole approach to teaching and education. He has found his simple solution to complex problems. Problems he has never clearly and factually defined.
He wonders: Does evidence matter? Does experience matter? Or can billionaires spout off and be believed no matter how nonsensical they are?
A great post, DIane.
Thank you.
I think the evidence shows that billionaires can spout off and be believed. One of the main problems we have is that many Americans don’t value education in the right way. There is an anti-intellectual bias in this country, smart kids are looked down on as nerds, knowledge for its own sake is not an important thing to many people. Learning just because it enriches the learner is not see as a reason for school. I think many people view learning and school as a means to an end, a way to get a good job and maybe get rich. Maybe that is why so many people kowtow to Bill Gates and the other rich folks in the “reform” movement. They believe that those people must be smart because they are so rich. For so many people, that is the only measure of success. Our society needs to change its views about many things, the value of education and a true measure of success are at the top of the list, in my humble opinion.
Watching Kahn academy tapes is a nightmare — this is quality teaching. Kahn makes the assumption that white boards teach — teachers teach. All of these technologies fit curriculum and instruction into formats that reduce all learning to reciting procedural scripts. While there is merit in learning the procedural/methods of a discipline, the application of those procedures to the real world requires a very different pedagogy than teaching procedural knowledge. An interesting tape Kahn might consider is fifteen minutes on the history of Microsofts failures in the last decade with a follow tape on Bill Gates contributions to these failures —
Karim Ani effectively tears Khan Academy apart here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/khan-academy-the-hype-and-the-reality/2012/07/23/gJQAuw4J3W_blog.html
I know Karim has his own for-profit website, but that doesn’t make his critiques false. And the Mathalicious website is a resource for teachers. Nobody looks at it as a replacement.
I find it telling (and obvious from the videos) that Khan boasts about how he doesn’t prepare at all for his “lessons.” Imagine a teacher boasting about that!
Whatever happened to critical thinking skills among the members of the BBC? Or even a little cultural literacy?
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” [H. L. Mencken]
Remember how well stack ranking/forced ranking/rank-and-yank/burn and churn worked at Microsoft?
In case you have the memory span of Mr. Microsoftie himself, just one fairly recent article to refresh your memories—
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
Or as the $65 billion man said on 9/21/13: “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but we won’t know for probably a decade.”
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/27/bill-gates-it-would-be-great-if-our-education-stuff-worked-but/
Any questions?
😎
P.S. For those who feel I have maligned one of the leaders of the new civil rights movement of our time, a true cage busting achievement gap crushing figure that dwarfs even the likes of John Deasy, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and Paul Vallas, please note that he doesn’t need even one extra moment to elucidate what worked for HIM:
Link: https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/bill-gates-tells-us-why-his-high-school-was-a-great-learning-environment/
😎
Not sure ignorance is the root. The super-rich have a plan for the future, where power is locked within their privileged circle, requires tight control, suppression and exploitation. The fact that immense wealth far beyond anyone’s needs exists at the same time as (and often at the expense of) extreme poverty-along with the reality that the extreme wealth drives policies that continue these conditions, is not a “Whoopsie…I guess we just didn’t understand” situation. There is clear intent and purpose.
Our nation is not held up by educational alarmists for comparison to countries with more widespread and equitable outcomes, where character, honesty, and true collaboration are the American values prized. We are measured, driven to beat and compete, convinced to consume.
We are held up to countries that churn out drones selected from the most likely to succeed (those who will test well) and subject the masses to sweatshops and poverty in an economy propped up on exploitation and invitations for foreign investors to come and exploit as well.
It is not a matter of being unfamiliar with the processes of teaching and learning, it’s fear of an educated and aware population, and the plan to prevent that if possible.
Khan Academy and similar programs assume learning is a one-way street: the teacher conveys information, and the student absorbs it. But good teaching has two-way communication: the teacher gives information, the student responds with ideas or questions, and the teacher constantly evaluates levels of attention and understanding.
This two way communication requires a live, empathetic human teacher, not a mouse-click on an “adaptive learning” quiz.
Bill Gates and those so called reformers creating industrial schools are stripping teaching of humanness. Teachers who function under chronic stress become desensitized and mechanical through a natural survival process of coping. They become more robotic and emotionless, less human.
It is a recognized fact from psychiatric observers that Bill Gates has Aspergers characteristics. Therefore his deficit is in social and emotional development which are qualities that make us human. He does not have empathy for children. Without emotional attachments to others, we lose our humanness. Children cannot make healthy emotional attachments to mechanical teachers or computers. This is the reason we have soaring rates of High Functioning Autism /Aspergers in the elementary schools. This is the reason our schools have become factories for producing anxiety and personality disorders in children.
The destruction of our children’s mental health in this country by a few billionaires and The Education Industrial Complex is Psychological Genocide.
You have 2 options: Either continue as bystanders looking on in horror and feeling helpless, or take action? If you choose to take action, this is recommended:
Parents & Teachers at each elementary school should organize and get as many as possible to sign a group petition stating they will Opt Out of all standardized tests and practice tests. Strong Principals who have empathy and courage to stand up for the children will support it. Principals who won’t support it are demonstrating their callous weak leadership and do not place children’s mental health as a priority. Those principals should be asked to leave with your “Vote of No Confidence”.
In Texas we call this petition:
Don’t Mess With Texas Children!
Bill Gates jumped on Khan Academy, because he saw an opportunity for himself, period. He didn’t care about the quality of Salman delivery.
I’ve seen this footage of Gates on Ted talks before. It is repulsive. Whenever he is public speaking, one can not notice the smirk in his deceiving smile and the dollar signs in his eyes when he is consumed by rhetoric of his ideology of the world.
KA started as homework help for Khan’s nephew or something like that. And for that purpose, it could be helpful. Somewhat. But Gates and company have convinced Khan that it’s much more than that, and it’s not.
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who learn the wrong histories are doomed to make stupid policies.
Etc.
Thanks for sharing this thoughtful analysis, with the delightful TED Talk parts.
The majority of peasants and workers have probably faced this arrogance of wealth and power since the dawn or recorded history, with it simply morphing into different iterations at different times — “Divine Right of Kings,” etc. As we joke around here, wealth and power have always purchased the professors, preachers and pundits to surround their belief systems and perpetuate their power with bullshit. I guess one of the reasons this stuff went so far the past decades is that many schools stopped teaching history as the unfolding of events and abstracted it into the same kind of mindless stuff that Gates prattles (I wonder what they taught him in the private schools for Seattle’s richest brats during those years; anyone know?).
Both my younger boys are hard workers who read a lot and enjoy math as well. One of the things that has been helping Sam (now in seventh grade) is going on line to Kahn Academy. But as you note, it’s supplemental — not a replacement for Sam’s math and science teachers at O.A. Thorpe elementary school on Chicago’s Northwest Side. How Bill Gates can miss that differentiation only goes more to show how Gates is seriously disabled. Maybe not as “mad” as George III before the American Revolution of the Czarina addled by Rasputin, but in the same league of out-of-its. Surrounded by psychophants, he gets away with it, as the cheering demonstrates.
Assumption these people are “ignorant”! What about narcissists that don’t give a damn!
I see no reason to “bash” Mr. Kahn–this brilliant teacher should not have been included in this Gates Bashing Post (and I am not a fan of BG) — Just offering an objective opinion — Every thing in moderation — (Including Moderation) — KEN
Remember, Kahn is “teaching” MATH! Then, consider all of the additional facets that are indicative of school reform– before “we” judge the innovators (i.e. KAHN). Sample my manuscripts @ http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/kennethfetterman
(i.e. My Vision of SCHOOL REFORM)
DR. (please post)
Simplistic minds – simplistic answers.
If one has not been there, done that, one cannot possibly understand.
Nuff sed.
Just sit ’em down in front of the screen and they learn… It’s like magic… (In my mind I said this with a pixy like tone)
Gates likes Khan Academy because it’s the paradigm for replacing three million mixed-bag teachers with fifty brilliant teachers. Reduced cost for taxpayers; higher quality education for kids. Win-win (except for the obsolete teachers). Teachers are going the way of bank tellers, travel agents, small farmers and hand-crafted furniture makers. (Of course the rich kids will still have live teachers; the commoners’ schools will have Khan 2.0, lots of computers, and minimum wage aides to keep order). Giant efficiencies stand to be gained. This is what the capitalists are salivating over. Gates doesn’t need more money, but the scheme pleases his businessman’s sensibility. Teachers, know your economic history: this is what capitalism has done to almost every industry. What makes you think you’ll be immune to Efficiency’s wrecking ball? Can anyone think of a group of workers who stood up to this process and stopped it? Did the Luddites have any success?
I am a fan of Wendell Berry and have always liked his argument for small farms tended by local people who know the local land intimately. One could make an analogous argument for having millions of smart, caring teachers in the classrooms. But just as most Americans would say it would be ludicrously inefficient to go back to small-scale farms, I worry that in ten years angry taxpayers will say it’s ludicrously inefficient to have a LIVE highly-educated teacher in each of the nation’s classrooms.
…small is beautiful…
…and so are we…
I would prefer to get my food from a small family farm, who probably take better care of the land and their animals. Eggs from free range chickens taste better than those from massive factory farms.
I would prefer that children have teachers who care for them, who interact with them, and get to know them, not just their data.
We can’t be in the minority here, we just have to get the word out and keep at it until the “reformers” realize that we are too powerful to fight against.
The problem with these billionaires is that many of them either own the media or control it through large contributions. If you own the media, you control the conversation. Control the conversation and you control the direction that conversation takes. They drown out all other voices or they frame the conversation in a way to make their opposition look either foolish or dishonest, such as how they framed the conversations with union teachers.
The fact that Bill Gates has no idea what he is doing does not matter. Because he is rich, none of his closest friends will tell him he is wrong. There is an elephant in the room and no one will mention it. So he has come to believe his own hype.