00100	                         NOTES ON EDUCATION

00200	
00300	
00400		1.  If  you really want to know something that the professors
00500	want to  teach,  then  the  American  educational  system  is  rather
00600	effective.   Even  when,  as  is  often the case in high schools, the
00700	teachers don't know much, the subject can be learned from text books.
00800	
00900		2. On the other hand, the system at all levels is rather  bad
01000	at  inspiring  a  desire  to  know.  Perhaps we kid ourselves and our
01100	students when we claim that the liberal education is good  for  them.
01200	They  don't  want  to  know it, and there is no reason why it will be
01300	good for them to do so.  The apparent evidence  to  the  contrary  is
01400	merely  evidence  that people who can bring themselves to do what the
01500	educational system requires of  them  can  also  do  what  the  other
01600	institutions of our society require.
01700	
01800		3.  New  technology, especially computer technology, has many
01900	important applications in education and will  revolutionize  it  when
02000	the  technology  becomes  cheap  enough.   However,  the  area  where
02100	improvement is most cost effective is the textbook.   Here  are  some
02200	possibilities:
02300	
02400			1. The text should speak from the expert in the field
02500	directly to the student.  It should bypass the  teacher  as  much  as
02600	possible,  because  it  is impossible to get enough teachers who know
02700	the subject well, can teach well, and can  afford  the  time  to  pay
02800	individual  attention  to the students.  Any improvement in texts can
02900	be multiplied by the printing press.
03000	
03100			2. Texts need to be debugged.  Students should be set
03200	to learning the subject from the text without the aid of the teacher.
03300	Their progress should  be  monitored  perhaps  by  having  them  work
03400	through a computer.  When students have difficulty, this means that a
03500	section of the text needs to be redone.
03600	
03700			3. A difficulty arises when there is a need  for  the
03800	student  to  absorb  a  lot of material before he gets a chance to do
03900	something he  couldn't  do  before.  Experiments  might  be  made  in
04000	teaching  the  informal  notion of the derivative and in teaching the
04100	epsilon-delta definition of a continuous function.