GIGO

The light may be dawning for some of our leaders.

In the recent Congressional hearings with the financial industry, it became quite clear that their evangelical belief in the unregulated free market had blinded them to the simple fact that money is only a medium of exchange, and that wealth cannot be created by the push of a button.

These wizards have cousins in industry, the pointy-haired boss of the Dilbert cartoons, who have been trained by Management specialists to believe that process matters more than productivity, and meetings more than manufacturing.

Their relatives in Education are just as deluded and dangerous. Since it became a university discipline, Education graduates have taken most of the administrative jobs in universities and schools and related ones in government. As each new Education 'paradigm' is introduced, we in the US and UK fall farther behind the Far East, where they teach the 'old way'.

My opinion is that every one of these ideas is doomed to failure, since they rely on two false assumptions:

1. We can magically train our mediocre students to become the teachers of the best and brightest.

2. The 'secret' to improving results is to change the way that teachers do their jobs, rather than changing the way that students behave.