I'm a judge for the annual Tech Awards here in San Jose, and every year I write an article summarizing the Tech Award laureates and saying a few pearls of wisdom about technology and education. So I sat down to write this year's article, and was reading last year's, and thought to myself, "Not bad... maybe I'll do a cheap reposting.." So here are the first couple paragraphs and a link to more.
As an economist, I am sometimes asked to justify how my current research on reading habits in rural Africa is related to economics. "How do they let you study that?" people ask. A quick definition of economics as the study of how to make choices in environments of scarcity, and an addendum of economics as a toolkit of methods for empirical analysis, quickly reveals the naiveté of the question. Schools in Africa are grossly under-equipped for the task of developing the skills of an educated person, and parents, often non-literate themselves, have little appreciation of the power of reading practice as a way to reinforce reading ability. The same parents who will have their children patiently walk a young ox back and forth several hundred times, to train the ox how to plow a furrow, will believe that a child reading the same book twice is a waste of time: "She already read it." In this environment of enormous potential for improvements in "human capital," encouraging reading is crucial. Economics would seem to play a critical role in helping to understand.
But for all its vaunted capabilities, the contribution of economics to the discussion of how to improve education outcomes is modest. This is because the more interesting and serious core problems in education fall rather squarely in the domain of psychology. Education is, after all, the process by which minds with particular ways of understanding the world (teachers) impart that way of understanding to minds that have different ways of understanding the world (students). Improvements in education come from more careful attention and insight into how the minds of children work in these structured interpersonal situations. What words should a teacher utter to inspire a student to overcome the hesitation and inertia that are the hallmarks of the reluctant reader? What practices can students carry out that will enable them, through repetition, to master a skill? How can active learning be fostered in a classroom with no electricity, no desks or worktables, and 75 students per teacher? Education psychology brings innovations to the table; economists are more likely to be technicians testing whether new methods actually work.
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