education gets the schank

roger schank just started talking during our iLaw  lunch lecture and he's the bomb-diggity lecturer on education and the internet. (schank on board of editors for encyclopedia britannica, designed courses for  trump university, etc.) [i love oz, and use" shank"]

check out some of the stuff he's saying............

he asked a roomfull of us (people who  fly all over the world) about the information in the safety video shown on a 757:

not a single person knew how many emergency exits on a 757. nor now many inflatable rafts. nor now to inflate a slide.....

schank: what would the airlines do if they actually wanted to teach you something? they'd put you through a simulated crash.

why don't they do that? because it's expensive and it's scary.

the same reasons that a school doesnt actually teach you anything.

you'd have to create an experience!

professors don't actually care about education. students aren't really learning and professors aren't really teaching, but the job is so cushy, no professor is interested in changing it.

when i was head of a phych department, i outlawed mulitple choice tests!

the profs under me: what do you mean? what are we gonna do?

me: i don't know, something else

profs: like what? read essays? that's a lot of work!

i had to retire before i could talk about this stuff.

charles eliot was the president of harvard 1869-1909 is the most evil man in the history of harvard -- he set up the high school curriculum that is still in place TODAY.

if you ever wondered why you took algebra in high school, is because the guy in princeton was selling a textbook on algebra, so he put algebra on high school curriculum!

i'm a math major and a computer science prof, and algebra has never come up in my life, maybe it has in yours.

[sorry, missed stuff here -- dead battery and no outlet]

here's a dragon story i made up--

imagine the best university in the land -- could be harvard could be not -- they want to teach a class about slaying dragons -- so they have a class on the theory of dragon slaying, and the language dept teaches dragonese, and the physics department designs weapons to slay dragons.....
and when the students go out to slay dragons, they all die because no one was teaching dragon slaying! no model dragons that students could practice slaying!

[more to come]