Elon Musk, tech billionaire, says he has the solution for schools: teach children to ask why. Engage them in constructing things to learn how they work.
Is this news? No.
Wherever schools have the class sizes and resources and expert teachers they need, that is what they are already doing.
According to his Wikipedia entry, Musk went to a private school in South Africa, where he was bullied and beaten by other students. He doesn’t know much about American education. I wish I had the chance to tell him that the schools in affluent areas are doing what he suggests. That is the ideal.
The schools that are not teaching interactively have overcrowded classes, lack the resources to buy the needed materials, and have inexperienced and overwhelmed teachers. Furthermore, every school–rich and poor–is forced by federal law to spend (waste) time preparing to take standardized tests, which do not reward the critical, inquisitive thinking that you admire. The students who asks “why” and stops to think about questions will be penalized by these simple-minded tests.
Please, Mr. Musk, use your wealth and your platform to help bring your good ideas to every school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All schools should teach the four “R’s”. Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and REASONING. Critical thinking skills, must be on every child’s curriculum.
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Charles,
I think you have commented a dozen times today. Enough.
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Inquiry-based learning includes reasoning and critical thinking skills! And,of course, we need the other R’s as well. We are not saying we don’t teach those!
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Thanks for, once again, blaming teachers, Charles. Why do you come on here?
And since you supposedly work for the Pentagon, how much time are you taking from work to troll and comment on this blog? Nice work if you can get it, I guess.
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Here’s how this works on the ground: writing the Common Core standard on the whiteboard at the start of each lesson becomes part of a teacher’s computer automated evaluation. It’s called “unpacking the standards” or the like. Students are instructed to recite in chorus the standards. At the middle school level in which I teach, the practice quickly becomes the cause of disinterest, exacerbating the problem it was supposed to solve. It makes teachers feel silly explaining why lessons are valuable.
Two things about this CNBC report: first, education wouldn’t be so problematic if the media would stop calling it problematic. Everyone has a solution to an imagined problem that has no basis in researched fact. Like Diane said, we were already doing this, and we’re better teaching the whys and wherefores before corporate reform. Second, the billionaire spouting solutions to problems he imagines has got to stop. Micromanagement by outsiders is the direct opposite of the kind of creative genius we should expect from tech entrepreneurs.
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LCT,
I, too, was trained in the unpacking the standard nonsense. I am hesitant to offer advice concerning matters of which I have no knowledge. A relative, for example, is choosing between different types of immunotherapy. I googled it, but I truly have no clear understanding of the benefits and risks. Billionaires, on the other hand, exude confidence in their grasp of all fields of expertise. A dose of humility would be the recommended remedy for their malady.
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To slightly modify what Reb Tevye sang in Fiddler on the Roof
“When you’re rich YOU really think you know.”
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What is offensive and unfair is that know nothing “reformers” like DeVos try to portray public schools as “failure factories” or “dead ends.” During my career as an ESL teacher I sometimes co-taught a cluster of advanced ESL students in the regular classroom where I taught English through content. What was impressive to me is that these skillful teachers always got the students to predict, defend or express relationships in discussions. ‘Why’ was often part of the questioning.
These same “reformers” have tried to label those that support strong public education as “flat earthers.” Coming from DeVos, this is hilarious! Diane stated in a post that she visited a no excuses charter and found the instruction reminiscent of teaching a hundred years ago. Who should be believed? The biased, closed-minded, queen of the pyramid scheme, DeVos or Diane Ravitch, expert educator and scholar.
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My vote goes to Diane.
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I wish Mr. Musk would realize that the nation’s obsession with standardized testing is EXACTLY the reason that sometimes the “why” is not dealt with.
Standardized testing only wants to know the “what.” It could care less about they “why.” And as the kids are subject to more and more of the testing, they stop asking “why.” They just want the right answer, because that’s what’s expected of them.
In other words, the “reformers” have caused the problem. NOT teachers. And yet, Musk is all too happy to blame teachers.
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I am not confident that Mr. Musk has good ideas about education. I doubt that he can or wants to make a dent in the thinking of policy makers like Devos, who thinks that religious indoctrination with taxpayer money is fine and dandy.
The link is off limits to my ad blocker.
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Musk: another techy who should stick with what he knows: rocketing himself to Mars.
Leave getting back to those who don’t have their head in the clouds.
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He also funds a private school in L.A. for Space X employees.
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A school for space sex?
Must be very popular.
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Riff on it SDP, riff on it!
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I have just invented the “Duh, YEAH!” Award, & the first one goes to (drum roll, please)…Elon Musk.
Mr. Musk, please stick to perfecting your self-driving cars, so that they don’t crash.
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He should stick with rockets.
At least he won’t have to worry about hitting a semi truck crossing the path on the way to Mars.
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Incidentally,
Musk must employ some very poor software engineers on his self-driving project because the error they made in failing to identify the semi truck in front of the car was very elementary.
First, it appears they were relying purely on visual data from a camera because sonar or radar would almost certainly have “noticed” the tractor trailer crossing the highway well in advance. Does the Tesla have no built in radar or sonar?
Second, why the vision system failed to distinguish trucvk from sky is a total mystery because the truck was white with dark rims at top and bottom and the weather on the day of the crash was “clear”. Clear sky looks blue. Not white. Also, until the car was very close to the truck, the camera would almost certainly have picked up dark trees in the truck background.
But even if the background had been perfectly white (and precisely the same ” texture” as the side of the truck, which actually had horizontal ribs and vertical “lines”), there is no excuse.
Anyone who has done ANY image analysis knows how easy it is to find ” edges” in an image when there is a clear and quick change from light to dark as there was in the case of that truck, which, as I said, had dark rims at top and bottom.
I did image processing for several years, but you really don’t have to know much to realize how elementary their “error” was.
The person who programmed that system should have been fired.
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