#Educational Reforms

[iyemarathichiyenagari1971]

पहिलीपासून हिंदी या मुद्द्याला विरोध करणे चुकीचे अन् मराठी माणसाच्या तोट्याचे

सध्या हिंदी भाषा पहिलीपासून शिकवली जावी का ? या संदर्भात महाराष्ट्रातील राजकारण ढवळून निघाले आहे. या मुद्द्यावर राजकिय पोळी भाजून घेण्याचा प्रयत्नच अधिक होत आहे. खऱ्या अर्थाने महाराष्ट्राच्या विकासाच्या राजकारणाचा हा सर्वात मोठा पराभव आहे असे म्हटले तर चुक होणार नाही. या मुद्द्यावर तज्ज्ञांनी फारसे बोलणे टाळलेले दिसते. पण अशा गंभीर मुद्द्यावर गप्प बसणे हा तज्ज्ञांचा धर्म नव्हे हे लक्षात घ्यायला…

[trendynewsnow]

Declining Math Skills Among American Students: TIMSS 2023 Results

Declining Math Skills Among American Students: A Pressing Concern Recent results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) reveal a troubling trend concerning American students’ math skills. The latest assessment, conducted last year and encompassing fourth and eighth graders from various education systems worldwide, highlights a significant decline in performance…

[edu-information]

Elevating India's Education Ecosystem for Tomorrow

By Sahil Gupta and Guncha Prakash

India’s education sector stands at a pivotal juncture, presenting a mix of significant opportunities and persistent challenges. With the National Education Policy (NEP) nearing its fourth anniversary, it continues to serve as a strategic guide for all stakeholders involved in shaping the future of education in India.

Current Landscape and Government Initiatives

Over the past three years, the government has increased budget allocations to enhance infrastructure, quality, and access to education, rising from Rs 99,300 crore in FY 2021 to Rs 1.12 lakh crore in FY 2024. Despite these improvements, investment in Research and Development (R&D) remains low at 0.7% of GDP, far below the global average of 1.8%. Strengthening industry-academia collaborations and the skilling and research ecosystem is essential for further progress.

Since the NEP’s implementation in 2020, regulatory reforms have aimed to internationalize Indian education through initiatives like dual degrees, twinning programs, and allowing foreign institutions to establish campuses in India. Additionally, measures such as the Institutional Development Plan (IDP), mandatory public self-disclosure by higher education institutions (HEIs), and the student grievance redressal mechanism have been introduced. The enactment of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) Act, 2023, seeks to enhance India’s research landscape.

Challenges and Budget Expectations

One significant barrier to establishing educational institutions in India is the lack of private capital investment, compounded by regulatory restrictions on foreign investments in trusts or societies. The Honourable Finance Minister’s 2020 announcement to enable foreign investment and External Commercial Borrowings (ECBs) for the education sector remains unfulfilled. Streamlining the process for attracting foreign donations is also crucial.

To facilitate new institutions, the government could create dedicated education zones with built-up infrastructure through public-private partnerships (PPP). These zones would reduce capital expenditures and offer shared facilities like housing, sports amenities, and research centers, fostering multicultural exchanges and cross-learning. Incentives such as subsidized land, tax rebates, or GST exemptions could encourage private sector participation.

The NEP mentions Special Education Zones for disadvantaged areas, but establishing zones near metropolitan cities could better leverage industry-academia collaboration and improve student accessibility.

Strengthening the Research Ecosystem and Addressing GST While the ANRF Act outlines a broad fund for research, clear definitions of fund allocation mechanisms, monitoring outcomes, and eligibility criteria are necessary. Additionally, the current GST framework increases the cost of education for students due to taxable inward supplies and exempt outward educational services. Either exempting inward supplies or zero-rating educational services would alleviate this financial burden.

Enhancing International Collaboration

Geo-political challenges have led many countries to impose caps on international student mobility and visa grants. For true internationalization, mutual recognition of qualifications between countries is essential. While India has made progress with Australia and the UK, expanding Government-to-Government (G2G) dialogues with other nations will promote student mobility, skilling opportunities, and research collaborations.

A Path Forward

The Indian education sector still has a long journey ahead to reach its full potential. However, with strategic efforts and collaborative initiatives, the future looks promising as we prepare our youth for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

[townpostin]

CM Distributes Appointment Letters to 1500 New Teachers

Hemant Soren Emphasizes Quality Education and Youth Empowerment Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren distributed appointment letters to 1500 newly recruited post-graduate trained teachers, highlighting the government’s commitment to education and youth development. RANCHI – In a significant move towards strengthening the state’s education system, Chief Minister Hemant Soren handed over…

[389]

“Education is meant to teach people how to think, not what to think. If it’s doing the latter, it’s not education—it’s propaganda.” — James Lindsay, commentary on education reform

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

Clinical studies be like

1 billion random boys were tested. results show that 0% of girls are autistic* 👍

1 billion autistic males were tested. results show that 0% of autistics are female* 👍

1 billion minors were tested. results show ADHD stops at age 18, often to be replaced by plain laziness* 👍

*certified😎 totally credible source✨ we are pros🤓 with coats🥼

[alwaysbewoke]

[notbecauseofvictories]

as much as I love history and Chicago history especially, I do sometimes forget how recent everything here is. I was at the Hull House Museum with a friend of mine the other day, and we had a wonderful time listening to the curator talk about the birth of social work, the women who drove it forward, and the ghost stories that haunt their stomping grounds despite no one really dying there.

As we were walking around after the tour, my friend pointed out that Jane Addams' dress (the one on display in that room, black and small and otherwise unremarkable) had an uneven hem. "Oh, good eye!" the curator, who was walking alongside us, exclaimed. "Addams' tuberculosis left her with some spinal curvature, even after corrective surgery. She had most of her dresses altered to ensure the hem would be straight when she wore them---but on a standard dress form, the hem looks uneven."

"I always forget that having a tailor or dressmaker was considered typical back then," I said.

"No, by that point it was much more common to buy a dress from Sears and have it altered," the curator replied cheerfully. "That's what Addams did."

The whole exchange was maybe a few seconds, but it sticks with me even now. The idea that Jane Addams bought a dress from Sears---where I have also bought dresses, where my mother bought dresses---makes me feel insane. And yet, we're only talking about a hundred years ago or so. Is it so unreasonable that I, as a disaffected teen, was drifting through racks of mass-produced garments, just as Jane Addams did a century before? The exact location of the hands making those garments has changed of course; the workers' protections that Addams' contemporaries fought for have resulted in offshoring that work to less-guarded parts of the world. But it gives me a strange sort of fellow feeling to think about it, all these many decades later.

[meddwlyngymraeg]

So cool and awesome and important that when Kneecap performed in Cardiff, they had an opening act that was also a bilingual rap act who performs in Welsh and English. And I do highly recommend Sage Todz, he's really cool.

If you can remember 2022, he created a version of the protest folk song Yma O Hyd, by protest folk singer Dafydd Iwan, before Wales played their World Cup games. Dafydd Iawn wrote and performed it in the 50s and 60s during the language rights protests to officially make Wales a nation of two equal languages, and over the last few years, the Football Association of Wales and its players, who were then young enough to themselves be Welsh speakers and learners, have really picked up and supported the language. (Not every player that qualifies to represent Wales necessarily grew up in Wales and so might not be Welsh speakers at home, nor attended schools in Wales where Welsh has been a compulsory subject in the curriculum since 1988 at least.)

The team had been playing the song and the fans began singing the song during games, and things just escalated from there; the fans were heard singing it before games and it sort of became an unofficial anthem. And all of a sudden, Dafydd Iwan himself found that the protest folk song he had written, with a chorus that said, 'We are still here, in spite of everyone and everything... we are still here' about the Welsh language, that he had written nearly sixty years ago. Suddenly, it was being sung by choruses of thousands of Welsh fans, reverberating around stadiums. And they called him to sing it before the World Cup qualifying game against Austria:

Huge, emotional moment. If I remember right, it went hugely viral too. It was then that Sage Todz remixed the song, sampling sections of it and updating it for the modern day. The FAW posted it and that led to a lot of people discovering rap in Cymraeg for the first time.

So it is lovely to see Kneecap also encouraging that, and exposing their fans, people who are already fans of hip hop in a minority Celtic language, where being used in the modern world and not being relegated to myths and folklore of the past, to another person revitalising a language in revival, and updating it to be true to Wales in 2024. This was at their gig at the Tramshed last year. No doubt this year's shows are going to be significantly larger.

[1stpoliticalcartoons]

[sunbeamedskies]

Every single instance I've seen of "I'd punch a nazi" and "Elon is a nazi who must be stopped" from activists has been 1000000% performative. If you really cared about Jews that much, you would have been posting about October 7th for the past year and a half. You would have actually tried to make space for Jewish trauma in your activism and called in your friends for their antisemitism. You wouldn't have tried to pit Jews and Arabs against each other by acting like you can only care about one. Fuck Elon and nazis, and fuck you all too

[hyperlexichypatia]

"There's no such thing as a useless degree! Learning is valuable for its own sake! If you think a degree program is 'useless' just because it doesn't lead to a job, you're an anti-intellectual capitalist who hates learning, creativity, and critical thinking!"

Okay, let me stop you right there, because this take annoys me every time: "learning" and "degrees" are two different things.

There can be many purposes to learning, including "for its own sake." You can learn things out of curiosity, or to enrich your life, or to challenge yourself, to further human knowledge, or to gain useful skills, or to become a more informed person! In general, cultivating an open-minded curiosity about the world can give you a more fulfilling life. Learning doesn't have to have a concrete goal or specific purpose.

The purpose of a degree is to be an official documentation to some external authority (usually an employer or regulatory agency) that someone has (at least theoretically) mastered a qualification.

There's no such thing as useless learning. There's no such thing as useless knowledge. There's no such thing as useless research. There's absolutely such a thing as a useless degree.

And look, as critical as I am of educational systems, standardized testing, lack of recognition of alternative ways of learning, etc., I absolutely think that degree requirements have their uses. I'm much more comfortable being operated on by a surgeon who graduated from an accredited medical school with a degree than by someone self-taught. Sometimes, when someone is assigned a task, you want actual proof that they've mastered the skill set needed for that task, and for want of a better system, a degree can be a useful proxy for that proof.

But unless you're training for a specific job or role that requires specific proof of a specific skill set, there's no actual logical reason that your learning journey should be in the form of a degree program.

"I have a degree in something completely unrelated to my job, but it's still worth it because I learned so much!"

Great, I love that for you, but unless you specifically need the actual degree credential for an external verification purpose, you could've learned just as much from a course of study not centered on a degree.

"I use my art history degree in my marketing job all the time!"

Unless you were specifically hired for your art history degree, what you mean is you use your art history knowledge in your marketing job -- which, again, great, but doesn't require a degree program.

"My boss said it looked good that I have a liberal arts degree because it shows I'm not just looking for money!"

That's Employer for "I assume you're independently wealthy and won't demand a living wage."

"But lots of employers just want employees to have a college degree in any field and they don't care what!"

Yeah. That's. That's the problem I'm objecting to. What logical sense does it make to want an employee who has A Skill, but be completely indifferent as to what skill or what relevance it does or doesn't have to the tasks they're being hired to do?

The only reasons an employer would consider a candidate with a college degree in an unrelated field to be more qualified than a candidate without a degree is: *because they think that someone who could spend ~$45000 and ~360 hours on something is in some way A Better Class Of Person than someone who couldn't (this is classism), or *because they think the cognitive skills involved in pursuing a degree reflect some kind of "general intelligence" indicative of being Good At Learning In General (this is ableism and let's be real, also classism).

There is no non-ableist, non-classist reason for jobs to require "a degree" that isn't a specific degree related to the skills of that specific job.

"But what about Critical Thinking Skills and Cultural Literacy and Being An Informed Citizen? These are things that everyone should learn, not just people training for a specific job!"

If these are skills that EVERYONE should learn, then they belong in K-12 education (the universal tier of education that's free and For Everyone). Why put it in the Optional, Extra level of schooling?

I mean, historically, the reason is that the "everyone" who needed a core college education didn't mean "everyone"; it meant "Everyone in the upper classes who would be the next generation of leaders and are more culturally and intellectually refined than the commoners." Obviously, the working classes don't need "critical thinking skills"; their simple peasant brains probably couldn't handle them anyway. (Again. Classism and ableism are always intertwined.)

And the impulse to "democratize" that by giving "everyone" the educational experience of the upper classes is like. Well-meaning I guess, but almost a microcosm of how "democratizing" elitist institutions without critically examining them leads to some wildly skewed conclusions. "Everyone" can't achieve the lifestyle of the upper classes by achieving the education of the upper classes, because the lifestyle and education of the upper classes is defined by and supported by a command relationship to the lower classes.

"That's why the U.S. should make college tuition free like in [other country]!"

Look, I agree, but that's only addressing one of the many problems here. Tuition isn't the only cost of college (in a capitalist system where time is money, the time commitment alone is expensive), and even if those costs were addressed (e.g. with a student stipend), "Everyone should have access to a useless degree" doesn't make the degrees any less useless, and doesn't address the central question: If not for a specific credential for a specific job/role/position, why does voluntary learning need to involve a degree program?

"But what if I want to get a degree as a personal challenge to myself to prove that I can?"

I mean, look, you do you, but I'll point out that I also do this, and I don't think it's a good thing. I've spent months agonizing over assignments -- not for a grade, but because I wanted my teacher to think I was Smart. And that is a hell of a thing to still be internalizing as a whole-ass middle-aged adult who's written many critiques of behaviorism. I think that impulse in me is a product of assessment-reward-punishment indoctrination, and I need to kill the teacher inside my head. I'm not saying that's true for you. But I'm also talking about how we talk about education as a social and public policy issue, which isn't necessarily about any given individual's personal goals.

"But if people only study what they want to study, they won't encounter new things that they don't know will enrich their lives! Degree programs require students to diversify and broaden their horizons!"

Do they? Sure, this happens sometimes (although, again, I think this is really the role of K-12 schooling), but I think the reverse happens even more often: The grading structure of degree programs actively penalizes students for "broadening their horizons" beyond the degree requirements. If you're taking a class for a degree program, but the class itself isn't required for the degree, you have a strong incentive not to take anything challenging that might bring down your GPA. I've dropped classes for that reason, which was an entirely rational choice on my part. If I'd been "learning for its own sake" and "broadening my horizons" outside the context of a graded degree program, I'd be much more likely to stick with a skill I'm mediocre at, and possibly progress at least from low-mediocre to passable. People are more willing to try things they're not good at if there aren't tangible material consequences for "failure."

"Okay but why are you writing such a long post about it? Yeah, we can all tell you've spent too long in school, because you won't shut up."

Because academic credentialism and the conflation of learning and "degree programs" is classist and ableist in both intent and effect. And the more Trump&Co. attack universities and professors and students and experts, the more progressives cling to academic credentialism out of reflexive contrarianism, and start screaming about how "anti-intellectualism" is a real problem we need to be worried about, and gifted kids are marginalized for being too smart, and it can be cool and progressive to insist that everybody but you is just intrinsically stupid, because you're pushing back against "anti-intellectualism"!

Because the cultural movement I hate most -- reclassifying young adults as children -- relies heavily on this framework of postsecondary degree programs as a Developmental Stage for Children in 13th-16th grade, and if you argue that students should actually have some autonomy in their voluntary educations that, not for nothing, they're paying for, people will scream that you're an anti-intellectual who hates learning for its own sake.

Because debates about things like the ethics of students cheating or using genAI or whatever to skip out on schoolwork get mired in endless circular arguments about what the purpose of grades and degrees even is supposed to be, between "Cheating and ChatGPTing your assignments is bad because you won't actually know how to do the skills you're theoretically being certified to do" vs. "A college degree is just a bullshit pointless hoop to jump through to get a bullshit pointless job, so who cares if you're 'really learning'?" vs. "But you're supposed to be learning for its own sake, not just trying to get a grade and a degree! This anti-intellectualism is why Trump won!" and it's all an incredibly pointless argument if there's no consensus on what the purpose of a degree program is or should be, or if people are insisting on conflating degree requirements with "learning for its own sake."

[floortile34]

not sure if this is a hot take but school is extremely traumatic and needs huge reform. it causes immense damage to everyone who goes through it. no large-scale school system is exempt from this. this happens in all countries, not just the ones where it's worst. this problem's also inextricably tied to capitalism and neither can be fixed without also fixing the other

school genuinely breaks people (and others) with even worse being done to those with intellectual disabilities and neurodivergents and those with other psychiatric disorders

[thepersonalwords]

The point is, education in its truest form, is the foundation of all human endeavors. It is the most noble of all the civilized elements of human consciousness. Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life. The ability of being educated is what distinguishes humans from animals. You can teach a cockatoo to repeat a bunch of vocabularies, but you cannot teach it to construct a space shuttle and go to the moon.

Abhijit Naskar, The Education Decree

[loki-zen]

people are now engaging productively so that takes some steam out of my initial urge to bitch about this, but like:

two times now that I've tried to ask for help/advice in learning more about LLMs/machine learning models as a non-mathematician, non-programmer, and the immediate response has been for people to just throw their hands up in the air defeatedly and declare that they cannot possibly fathom how "anything meaningful" could be learned by any individual who can't do Python or linear algebra. So, clearly, I need to work on my question framing, and yes I do also think people need to work on how they respond to the question, but more importantly - what is going on here?

🤔

Healthcare professionals don't do this. They're completely ready to buy that people without a background in medicine can become informed enough to meaningfully participate in decisions about their care and make healthy lifestyle choices - and they tend to assume that's what they're being asked to assist with!

Unless there's some other specific context, like when I'm helping them with research - and then, they are very ready to assume that I, a librarian with no formal scientific or medical background, can be helped to understand what I need to know to meaningfully support them.

Why do programmers either:

1) fail to make the inference that an outsider is probably asking an outsider's question - seeking operational more than mechanistic or conceptual knowledge?

or

2) fail to grasp that there is, in the case of their field, such a thing as operational knowledge that doesn't require first-principles grounding to understand? (The equivalent - to extend the earlier metaphor - of recognising that someone can learn enough to meaningfully engage in decisionmaking about their cancer treatment without understanding neoplasia.)

and, relatedly, given the general significance of technology in all out lives and machine learning models specifically right now - if they don't think non-programmers can have any meaningful understanding, why doesn't this concern them? it can't have escaped their notice that many decisionmakers aren't programmers, or that some quite bad things could happen if poor decisions are made.