Geoffrey Graham

It’s not just the tests that are messed up

Via the Washington Post, a member of the school board, who deigned to take a standardized test prescribed for his 10th graders, vents about its absurd pointlessness:

I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession…

A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took…

It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions?

The school board member is on the right track, but he needs to take it a little further. Something is wrong, and new tests won’t fix it.

Continue reading “It’s not just the tests that are messed up”

“He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”

Thomas Jefferson had some specific thoughts about the unnaturalness of intellectual property:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Unfortunately, modern politicians disagree with TJ. Only last week, I had naively suggested the state couldn’t figure out how to drive innovators away from the Internet. I was wrong:

There is, however, an influential group of people that rejoices at the passing of this type of legislation.

What were you doing when you were 12?

When Steve Jobs was 15, he was working in the HP factory. Bill Gates was debugging software for the Computer Center Corporation. At 12, Thomas Suarez is building iPhone apps and giving TED talks.

Only decades ago, it was legal for children to build things. When I was a teenager, I was allowed to wield power tools during my summer/holiday jobs. By the time I graduated high school, I was earning $10/hr as a carpenter’s assistant. By the time I finished college, I was making $15/hr as a passably skilled carpenter. But that’s still a penance compared to what young people were allowed to do back in the day.

In the early 1800s, children could begin apprenticing when they were old enough to be useful, and very few failed to reach maturity and self-sufficiency by the time they were 18. Remember David Farragut (“Damn the torpedoes!”)? Yeah, that was him at 13 years old commanding his own ship in the War of 1812.

The early 1800s were also an explosive period of creativity and productivity in America, and a time when the majority of (free) Americans were self-employed. Coincidence? Doubtful.

Contrast that with today: Now, it’s illegal for anyone under 16 to be around a power tool, and anyone under 18 must be directly supervised (i.e. they can’t work independently, which pretty much makes them useless). What does this accomplish? Builders won’t hire a teenager, and kids will reach 18 years old with no practical skills.

Fortunately, programming is different. Why do Americans still lead in software development? While most other forms of child labor are criminalized, the state hasn’t yet figured out how to keep them from programming. As a result, kids can still build things with computers. They can still become accomplished programmers by the time they’re 18. Then they go on to build world–changing products.

The same great things could still be happening outside of software. But they’re not; instead of young people spending their time developing self-sufficiency, marketable skills, and practical experience, they sit in classrooms, learning that the only way to learn is to be instructed.