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\chapter{10}{Notes on Education}

If  you really want to know something that the professors
want to  teach,  then  the  American  educational  system  is  rather
effective.   Even  when,  as  is  often the case in high schools, the
teachers don't know much, the subject can be learned from text books.

On the other hand, the system at all levels is rather  bad
at  inspiring  a  desire  to  know.  Perhaps we kid ourselves and our
students when we claim that the liberal education is good  for  them.
They  don't  want  to  know it, and there is no reason why it will be
good for them to do so.  The apparent evidence  to  the  contrary  is
merely  evidence  that people who can bring themselves to do what the
educational system requires of  them  can  also  do  what  the  other
institutions of our society require.

New  technology, especially computer technology, has many
important applications in education and will  revolutionize  it  when
the  technology  becomes  cheap  enough.   However,  the  area  where
improvement is most cost effective is the textbook.   Here  are  some
possibilities:

\item{1.}  The text should speak from the expert in the field
directly to the student.  It should bypass the  teacher  as  much  as
possible,  because  it  is impossible to get enough teachers who know
the subject well, can teach well, and can  afford  the  time  to  pay
individual  attention  to the students.  Any improvement in texts can
be multiplied by the printing press.

\item{2.} Texts need to be debugged.  Students should be set
to learning the subject from the text without the aid of the teacher.
Their progress should  be  monitored  perhaps  by  having  them  work
through a computer.  When students have difficulty, this means that a
section of the text needs to be redone.

\item{3.}  A difficulty arises when there is a need  for  the
student  to  absorb  a  lot of material before he gets a chance to do
something he  couldn't  do  before.  Experiments  might  be  made  in
teaching  the  informal  notion of the derivative and in teaching the
epsilon---delta definition of a continuous function.
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