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Dec 29
2011
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I like numbers. This morning at breakfast I was browsing USA Today on my iPad, and I came across an article titled “Several new state laws set for 2012. (Article by William M. Welch dated 12/9/2011).
Here is the second paragraph:
Some 40,000 laws were passed by legislatures meeting in all 50 states during 2011, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and many have a state date of Jan. 1, 2012.
What caught my eye were the numbers “40,000 laws” and “50 states.” My goodness. This is an average of 800 new laws per state. I hope that you have studied the new laws for your state and are following them. Don’t forget the many thousand of laws your state government has enacted in previous years. And, of course, many of these laws are not consistent from state to state, so be careful if you cross a state line!
I am remedied of the quote: “Everything that is not required is forbidden.” This is from T. H. White's the novel, The Once and Future King. Many people seem to believe that we can make the world a better place by developing and enforcing laws that govern every human behavior. Of course, there is the “slight” difficulty that different people have strong beliefs about what is appropriate behavior. This observation goes a long way to explaining current politics in our Federal government.
It also helps explain our education system and continuing top-down attempts to improve it. (Need I say more?)
Our Complex World
As I grow older, I find that for me the world is growing more complex. It isn’t just the continuing barrage of new state and federal laws, rules, regulations, and so on. It isn’t just the continued rapid growth of the totality of accumulated human knowledge and the size of the Web. It isn’t just social networking, online shopping, and targeted advertising. It isn’t just the hundreds of TV channels, the proliferation of computers games, and other forms of entertainment. It isn’t just the huge amount of research that is being published in areas that interest me. It isn’t just the changes in our health care. It isn’t just issues of jobs and poverty. It isn’t just issues such as sustainability, global warming, increasing world population, and so on. It isn’t just ( … you can fill in your own complexifiers). It is all of these things taken together.
Hmm. Now I am really feeling overwhelmed. I have convinced myself that our world is really complex and is growing more complex. I wonder what it is like for today’s children who are growing up in this complex and rapidly changing world? I wonder what our educational system is doing to help children learn to deal with complexity, uncertainty, and change?
My interest in math education leads me to ask questions such as: How important is it to help children learn to do arithmetic using fractions versus how important is it for them to learn to deal with the types of challenges and changes mentioned above? How important is it for students to learn the quadratic formula for solving quadratic equations versus … (name some topic that you feel is really important)?
These types of questions help me to understand the challenges faced by us as we work to improve our educational system.
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I find it interesting to think what types of laws and legislation would help improve our educational system. Can you imagine having a law that fines students or puts them in jail for failure to score well on tests? This reminds me of the saying, "Yuo can lead a horse to water, but yuo can't make it drink."
On the other hand, it is easy to imagine state laws that require adequate and fair funding of public schools. There, of course, there is the slight problem of who might be fined or put in jail for failure to do the adequate and fair funding. In addition, there is the problem that some states are able to provide a lot more money per student than others, so that there are huge state-to-state variations in school funding.
At a federal level, we are moving toward national standardization expectations for students. However, our federal government provides only about 10% of the funding for our educational system. Hmmm. Set standards, back them by laws and threats, but don't provide much of the needed funding.