[Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL

[David Handy]

I find Laura's analysis of social and educational trends to be insightful
and accurate, but it doesn't go quite far enough in exploring the question
"what is the purpose of education in today's society?" I find this to be
on-topic, as it gets at the root of why I wrote a programming textbook for
teenage youth, instead of all the other things I could have done with my
spare time.

I'll only speak for U.S. society as that is what I know; all others apply
whatever fits. In addition to the trend of mindless consumerism that Laura
described so well, there have been two additional trends contributing to
changes in education: the weakening of family (parental) influence and the
growing role of schools as the tool of social engineering.

The family: Since the early 1900s women have been given the additional role
of working jobs outside the home as well everything they do inside the home.
Public schools now assume the role of babysitter and caregiver, at the
expense of education.  Also there is a growing trend of children being
raised without fathers; the resulting social and behavioral problems of
children are an additional burden on schools, further hindering education.

Social engineering: Everyone who wants to change the world starts by trying
to get control of the public schools so as to influence young minds in their
direction. I have noticed even on this list many wanting to get
Python/whatever into the official curriculum; it seems so much easier to get
one small group of government officials to push your agenda than to pursuade
parents and teachers. Unfortunately, the public schools then become the
battleground of ideologies, in the same way that government-run media
becomes the first target of any would-be revolutionary junta. Politics
rules the schools, and education suffers.

With all of this going on, it is a wonder that anyone learns anything useful
in school. Indeed, I have memories even from my elementary school days of
feeling that my time was being wasted, that I could be learning a lot
more and a lot faster, and that I was just being "babysat".

So where do I fit in here? I'm trying to be part of the solution, not part
of the problem. I don't have grandiose ideas about changing the course of
world events, but I think each one of us can change the lives of individuals
around us. I was greatly benefited by mentoring from engineers as a
teenager. I'm just trying to give back, by trying to give my own children
and others the same opportunities that I had. We on this list are mostly
self-taught, independent-minded people. We believe that people *can* rise
above mindless consumerism, that they can do something significant. I
believe that young people (and all people) are capable of doing a lot more
with their minds than what they currently do; that's why I believe that they
can learn, among other things, programming with Python.

David H.


On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 03:26:16PM +0200, Laura Creighton wrote:
> Part of our problem is that the development of 'education for all' has
> historically happened in the economic climate where the great need was
> to convert surplus farm-labour into industrial workers.  Thus the sort
> of things that were considered essential to a 'good education' was the
> sort of things that may you _employable_.  (Before then, a huge number
> of people didn't have _jobs_, simply a huge amount of work they needed
> to do.  Housewives are in a similar position today.)  For better and
> for worse, this has produced an educational infrastructure which is
> driven by the demands of the employers on soon-to-become workers.
> 
> This works fairly poorly when combined with advanced high-technology
> consumerism.  What happens when what your potential employers want
> most from the soon-to-be workers is 'to not have to employ them at
> all'?  As long as consumers keep spending, that is their only real value.
> 
> This is decidedly at variance with historical precident, where one's
> value was as a _producer_, and where consumption merely happened to
> balance the books, so to speak. (_Lack_ of consumption mattered,
> in that if you produced something that nobody wanted, you would end
> up with surplus stock, and the indication that something was terribly
> wrong with your business model.  Or maybe the harvest was extra good
> this year ....)  Scarcity was the norm.  Forgetting the problems
> of 'my factory won't scale' and 'my product is so expensive that
> I have very few potential customers', you could build a working
> business model based on the idea that you could sell all that you
> could produce.  Thus converting all the farm workers into producers
> made sense.
> 
> But with prosperity came an end to scarcity.  The first manufacturers
> ran into it when they discovered that the cost in transportng their
> good to new customers made their prices uncompetitive.  At this point
> in time, improvements in transportation technology drove the ability
> of large firms to increase their markets.  Current technology is so
> advanced that you can pick up raw materials from Canada, ship them to
> South East Asia, make cars out of them, and ship the cars back.  It is
> one big global market now.  The attempts to sell in China is the
> pushing back of the last -- admittedly huge -- frontier.
> 
> But the upshot of all of this is that scarcity is over.  The market in
> goods and services are saturated with offerings.  It doesn't do you
> any good to make any more, since all you will do is waste money and
> add to the glut.  Indeed, you are better off spending your money in
> advertising, trying to promote averice, and 'stimulate demand'.
> 
> And where human beings really shine is at unskilled labour.  If you
> invest heavily in touch screens and bar code readers, you can lower
> the skills needed for a checkout clerk.  But they are cheaper than
> robots at picking up goods and passing them over the sensors.
> 
> And it makes sense to pay them, at rates which exceed the value of
> the service they provide.  You just pass on their costs onto the
> price of the goods.  Because what keeps this over-balanced system
> running at all is amount of circulation that the money does.  
> Impoverishing the check out clerks to the point where they can no
> longer function as consumers does not serve the interests of the
> market as a whole.
> 
> But this means that the whole 'what is the purpose of education'
> question is in serious need of revision.  It used to be that preparing
> people for productive lives was enough.  These days a productive life
> may not be what is wanted.  Perhaps a meaningful one would be a better
> goal to strive for.
> 
> Laura
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-- 
David Handy
Computer Programming is Fun!
Beginning Computer Programming with Python
http://www.handysoftware.com/cpif/