Category Archives: Education

What’s On My iPod: Lectures From A Road Trip, LA to DC, Part 2

This post is a bit overdue as the lectures/podcasts I listened happened during the last week of June, but I thought it would still be nice to go over some of the things that I learned from the lectures/podcasts. As you’ll see, this is a “Part 2” where the first part was dedicated to the I had on my iPod (). (Look for Part 3 in the coming week, which will list the Podcasts I included from this trip.)

As I mentioned in , I was in the midst of a long haul of a drive — 4o hours of driving time. Initially, I thought I’d be listening to more music than other things, but it didn’t turn out that way. Prior to leaving LA, I went through  and picked out a number of different lectures that I thought would be interesting. Part way through the trip, I discovered what Podcasts were and that allowed me to add a number of other “lecture”-type tracks along with the latest from a few shows that I like to watch to stay ‘informed.’ Without further adieu, here are the lectures along with a little snippet about them (note: partway through the trip, I erased some of the lectures I had heard to make room for others and I’ve forgotten which ones they were, so you won’t find them in this list):

The Authentic Leader: Interview with Bill George – From what I remember of this, it was quite short (about 10 minutes) and the interviewer asks a few questions of Bill George about some of the key findings of his book, .

Preventing Future Financial Failures – This was another short track (about 20 minutes). The interview is with , a professor of Business Administration at Harvard. Moss references his working paper called, “.”

Fiscal Policy in an Emerging Market – This was one of my favorite lectures. It was by the former Chilean Minister of Finance, . He had some fascinating ideas and examples of the success that Chile observed in managing its fiscal policy (and how that could be applied to other countries). The most important takeaway: use the surplus from the “up times” as stimulus during the “down times.” (This is different in that most countries tend to borrow more money in the “up times.”)

Winners Don’t Take All – This probably was my favorite lecture. I learned so much from listening to try to cram her regular (30-hour course) into 90 minutes. There were so many important takeaways from her lecture that I listened to it on three different occasions just to try to retain it all. In fact, I even mentioned her work on negotiation in a (read: plea) to Democrats with regard to negotiation a few weeks ago (on the subject of the debt ceiling negotiations).

The last 4 lectures I have were all from a series from the University of Chicago aimed at educating the educators about “Understanding the Global Economy.” The four titles were:

Econ 101: What are Markets?
Markets, Trade, and Globalization
Teaching Economics and Trying to Step Outside the Bubble of Capitalism
Globalization: The Great Debate

The last lecture (Globalization: The Great Debate) was probably my favorite in this series. The speaker, , had the audience do a mock debate on the pros and cons to globalization. I learned some interesting points about (both) sides of this debate.

As I mentioned earlier, there were some more lectures I listened to, but I deleted them to make room for some new ones. If I recall correctly, one of them was a series by . In about a weeks times, I will be getting back in the car and driving from Ottawa to DC and I will have about 9-11 hours of time to listen to more lectures. If you can think of any that I might find interesting, please let me know with a comment (or email) or even a tweet! ()

A Shift Towards Waldorf & Montessori: Education & American Public Policy, Part 3

In , I spoke about American public policy in the context of economics. Specifically, I tied in the concept of altruism and showed how given the opportunity, people are more likely to take money from a complete stranger than give money to a complete stranger. In , I wrote about campaign finance and elections in America. I understand that no system is perfect, but I felt that if there were more integrity in campaign finance & elections, people may have a little more faith in the system. In Part 3, today, I will talk about education in American public policy.

Everywhere you turn, there seems to be another story about the poor statistics of education in the United States. The Chicago-Sun Times is reporting that . And that’s an article that was published today! This past December (2010), the US slipped farther down the rankings on the ‘, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world.’ (The data can be found .) On these rankings, the US is now considered “average” on the overall reading scale and on the science scale. They fell below average on the mathematics scale. Shanghai-China, Korea-South, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia, Switzerland, and Poland, all out-performed the US on all three scales.

If you’re interested in the history of education in the United States, I’ve found a couple of great resources that highlight significant events through history with regard to education in the United States (; and .)

I had the chance to see earlier this year and I thought it was quite an eye-opening experience. While I don’t know that I agree with everything that is put forth in the movie, I think that the fact that this movie is even possible (meaning that a documentary of this nature could be done about education in the US) shows that there are definite holes in the system. It was interesting to watch attempt to alter the structure of unions for teachers in the Washington, D.C. area. I don’t think that many would have predicted a a year later.

I am not a primary school teacher, elementary school teacher, secondary school teacher, college-level teacher, or university-level teacher. I don’t know what it’s like to be standing at the front of the classroom day after day — students looking up at me expecting me to tell them something. I believe that it takes a special kind of person to not only be willing to do this, but to want to do this. I think teachers are a vastly underappreciated population. Sure, we have “,” but that’s far from enough, given the responsibility they are charged with — education our young. Could there be a more sacred responsibility?

A former cited statistics in an article published in association with (a libertarian public policy think tank) claiming that . While this may be true, I wonder if maybe the funding is going to the “wrong” places in education and if this may be a case of ‘.’ Put more bluntly — maybe the system is faulty. I think more funding for education can be a positive thing, if used in the right way and if given to the right places.

Maybe the US education system needs a . I was fortunate enough to have had an experience in the . I was far too young to really remember much of my experience there, (I was there from before kindergarten to just before the start of the second grade). It may not be feasible at this point, but I’d really like to see what a nation could do if all of their schools were taught in the Montessori-way or the . There are many different forms of across the world, but I am most familiar with Montessori and Waldorf.

I wonder what a nation of kids raised and educated through Waldorf Education would look like. Would we have ? Would we be ? Would there be less ? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I’d like to think that a system of education like Waldorf’s (given to us by Rudolph Steiner), would dramatically shift a fair bit of the way we interact with each other, especially with regard to education. As I said earlier, the responsibility of teaching our youth is sacred. We should treat this task and those who do it, with the highest regard, just as those who do it, should treat our youth with the highest regard.