Blurts

Leo Laporte’s weekly Triangulation has some guests with messages that interest me. His last program featured Tim Wu. Wu is an academic from Columbia Univ. I liked his book “Switched” which describes (if I can remember correctly) the movement from the original open Internet to an Internet dominated by major players. The focus of the interview with Mr. Laporte concerns advertising and “free content”.

I have always been a public institutions advocate. I share the concern of so many with the nomination of billionaire Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. I would prefer that this position be filled by someone with direct experiences in the processes of education and not an advocate for a narrow educational issue (private schools). Still, I believe the public institutions should accept some responsibility for questioning the productivity and vision of public sch0ols.

Public education and probably all main stream institutions tend to hang on to how things have always been done. Such institutions attract those comfortable with existing practices and find ways to justify existing ways of doing things. I believe that things do change and new ideas worthy of exploration come into prominence. I think the advance of technology represents an example enabling well-researched classroom tactics that have previously been impractical. I think we are at a point in time in which the individual learner needs to receive more individual opportunities and technology can provide one way to provide such experiences.

The effectiveness of many important ideas need to be evaluated in practice. I fault public education for not providing the natural laboratory necessary to evaluate potentially productive practices. Whatever the motives behind the promotion of charter school options (I recognize that charter school can mean many different things), the lack of exploration that exists in public school settings has created this opening.