<<=to the home page.... What Infrastructure
Do We Need to the publications=>>
to Build Science of Education?
Foreword: Why would anyone want to listen to what I say
about education?
Because I have a proof that I’m good at what I do (a.k.a. teaching)!
Note: during the first read please, ignore internet links
provide below.
This
was just one of many feedbacks collected over the years
(and
available at: http://www.teachology.xyz/evvv.html)
This
link leads to the full description of my professional path.
Appendix I: What is the
difference between a science and a religion?
Appendix II: A
short letter to venture capital firms
(a presentation prepared for Forbes UNDER 30 Summit in Boston (Oct 16 – Oct 18, 2016);
here https://youtu.be/jCE_Z_bat74 is my “mock” interview during the Summit)
Eradicating Polio (Bill
and Melinda Gates: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Polio);
Finding cure to all diseases (Mr.
Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan: https://chanzuckerberg.com/);
Space tourism
(Richard Branson: http://www.virgingalactic.com/);
Space cargo (Jeff
Bezos: https://www.blueorigin.com/);
Colonizing Mars (Elon
Musk: http://www.spacex.com/ or
President Obama http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/11/opinions/america-will-take-giant-leap-to-mars-barack-obama/index.html)
- what
do all these goals have in common?
The
tasks of achieving these goals are all doable! (hence, all these missions are possible! )
No doubt, achieving each goal
requires an enormous amount of money, and effort, and R&D, and manpower,
and intellectual breakthroughs, and organization, and logistics, and … the list
can go on and on.
But the process for
achieving each goal has a well-defined structure, clear stages, manageable
tasks such that when one task is finished it opens doors for the next one. In
the end,
all
these goals are achievable!
That was the reason all these
goals have been proposed – because businessmen do not set unachievable goals.
Businessmen do not “burn” money, neither literally, nor figuratively.
If
businessmen do not see any realistic and positive (for them, for society)
outcomes of a project,
they do not invest into that project.
After establishing this
notion, we can conclude that businessmen do not see as feasible, or achievable
such a goal as “eradicating illiteracy/ignorance” – a slang for “providing
sufficient education to all”
(otherwise they would be pouring investments into education).
Giving here and there several
millions of dollars to support students and teachers in economically suppressed
areas might help to easy some of the social issues like insufficient teacher
preparation in local schools, or helping students with having textbooks, etc.
However, these actions look nothing like setting apart several billions of
dollars for
It looks like that for businessmen colonizing
Mars, or eradicating all diseases seems more achievable
than providing high quality education to all students. Isn’t this strange?
One might ask, how do
businessmen decide if a goal is achievable or not, if a mission is possible or
not?
The
answer is simple – science!
All goals listed above are
based on a solid science: physics, mathematics, engineering, biology,
chemistry, medical science.
Science
of education does NOT exist.
Consciously or subconsciously,
all billionaires know this.
One cannot build a
multibillion business without having a strong intuition about the things.
All billionaires intuitively
know that currently there
is no basis for an “Eradicating Ignorance” Project (evidently, building a city on Mars is just
easier!).
But accepting the fact that there
is no yet such a thing as a science of education could lead to stating an
actually achievable goal –
investing into the
development of infrastructure needed for the development of a science of
education!
Of
course, philanthropists do give millions of dollars to educational causes, but so
far they see it only as a charity, they do not see
those actions as investments!
Education badly (!) needs its own “Manhattan
Project”, or “Apollo Program”.
This is a description of a possible
specific realization of this approach.
The continuous
battle between supporters and opponents of charter schools, voucher schools,
and other non-traditional educational entities covers one of the biggest issues
of the contemporary education, which is a significant insufficiency of fundamental theoretical and
technological innovations (countless startups promoting their apps or gadgets
do not make any difference in the field). The main reason for this insufficiency
is not the lack of the resources, but the lack of a broad collaboration between
various professional and scientific groups.
Education needs its own “Manhattan Project”,
or “Apollo Program”, which would reexamine the well-established paradigms, and
would guide a broad search for new connections and correlations; which would
combine newly presented advances in artificial intelligence with neuroscience
to study and analyze multi-layered universe of individual, group, and
institutional learning and teaching; which would bring in education newly
developed technologies, including AI, virtual reality, augmented reality, top
level robotics.
This type of a program can be initiated via
institutionalizing a collaboration between various professional and scientific
groups by establishing a specific institution –an Institute for Learning and
Teaching (the name is tentative, of course).
Within this Institute, professionals from
various universities, intuitions, and companies would be able to join their
effort and expertise.
Dear Reader,
at
this point I see only three options: you think
1.
“what a load of nonsense, forget about it”.
2.
“it sounds strange, but promising, I would like to take a part in the project”.
3. “I
am not sure what to make of it, it may be a lot of nonsense, or a very
promising project”.
In the latter
case, two more minutes to check slides below could help to make your mind.
This 6-minute video describes
what can be done to achieve this goal.
OR check below a presentation prepared for Forbes UNDER 30 Summit in Boston
OR download a pdf file with the
slides.
1. Hello,
I’m Dr. Valentin
Voroshilov.
2. Billions
of dollars have been spent to build research facilities to study
3. or
to conquer the physical world.
4. Billions
of dollars are being spent for building research facilitates to study biology,
and medicine.
5. However,
despite the fact that too many U.S. schools cannot provide sufficient education
to too many graduates,
6. there
are no investments in building research facilities designed specifically to
studying learning and teaching processes.
7. The
Government, the NSF, charitable and philanthropic organizations do finance
various projects in the field, but the majority of the projects aim at solving
social issues, like insufficient teacher preparation, adoption of new
standards, bringing technologies in a classroom, and others.
8. According
to Dr. Kauffman and others, the research in the field is
currently in a pre-science state. Most of the research conclusions can be
summarized in a single statement: if we take two large groups of similar students, and one group
of students will have a more extensive or divers learning experience (for example,
more contact hours, or more time spent on certain exercises, or training
through more, or more difficult, or different exercises) students from that
group, on average, will demonstrate better learning outcomes than the students
in a controlled group. Period. (more laws are at http://www.teachology.xyz/6LT.html)
9. This
conclusion does not really need special research; it becomes almost obvious if
we employ the notion that a brain is basically a muscle, or a collection of
muscles, the development of which strongly correlates with the variety and
intensity of exercises it goes through.
10. In order
to move beyond the obvious and to make a transition from a pre-science state
(like alchemy) to becoming a true science (like chemistry) we have to treat
education as space exploration, i.e. the field of education needs research
facilities designated specifically
to studying learning and teaching processes.
11. But first,
two questions have to be answered: What to study, and how to structure this
facility?
12. I’ve
been teaching math and physics for many years, and I know that everyone
can get an A, but different people need a different path
and a different time to achieve that. However, teaching today is like telling
every marathon runner: “You have 2 hours to run, whoever runs the farthest –
wins.”
13. Many
words are said about differentiation in learning. Those words however are just
proclamations not based on any solid data. Nowadays we know only in
general how people learn. But we have no idea how much
time would Ben Smith need to spend to learn “Breaking numbers apart by
addition”.
14. Yes,
different people have different learning styles. We know that.
15. But how
much time would it take to a child of a specific gender, race, socio-economic
background, attention span, temperament, and other individual characteristics
to master a given skill of a given subject? That we
do not know.
16. For
every child, there is a finite number of individual characteristics describing
his or her learning, behavioral, and social styles. There is a finite number of
subjects to learn, and within each subject there is a finite volume of
knowledge to learn, and a finite number of skills to master. It should take a
finite amount of time to study all relevant correlations.
17. The
research facility for conducting such a study must be developed around a
specifically designed school, or a network of schools. Each school will be the
nucleus of a facility where all students and professionals work together, with
the whole world watching 24/7 (click here for more info on the
structure of the facility).
18. It will
generate data sufficient for promoting current educational research to a true
science. The research will lead to development of new teaching tools and
learning aids.
19. Two of
the founders of the Breakthrough prize, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner,
pledged to spend one hundred million dollars on the search for
extraterrestrials. It did not occur to them, or to anybody else, that for many
teachers their students do look like aliens.
20. Today I
am calling on philanthropists to spend money on building research facilities
designated specifically to studying learning and teaching processes, so in the
coming decades every educator could point to scientific data supporting the
method he or she uses, or recommends.
21. Thank
you. This would have been my presentation offered to the judges of 2016 Forbes
Boston “30 under 30” Forum, if I would have been under 30.
22. However,
I can assure you, there is no-one under 30 who could have made this presentation,
because it is based on both, wide and deep, and both, teaching and research
experience, which in the field of education takes decades to grow.
Thank you! (more at http://www.TeachOlogy.xyz)
Click here to see my application to
the Forum and what the judges said!
Dear Reader, if
you still need more information which would help you to make your mind,
Please check the following link in the order they represented below:
1. https://teachologyforall.blogspot.com/2017/11/pilt.html
5. GoMars.xyz/jb.html (just the first paragraph, for
the first read just ignore the links)
What is the difference
between a science and a religion?
This is a heavily loaded
question, which have been igniting many heated discussions.
If you read various
publications on the matter you see that the most of the authors boil their
views down to one statement: “A science is evidence based, and a religion is
faith based.”
For example, the following
quote represents an example of a very common sentiment on the difference
between a science and a religion:
“The important difference
between science and religion is that religion comes with ABSOLUTE statements,
that neither can be proved or disproved, and science evolves from relative
truths and statements, that can be testified and proven false (which means:
science has to develop, in order to replace (partly) untrue theories, and
replace them with better ones). Science does not claim it has absolute
knowledge on anything. Religion claims it has.” (Reference https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/difference-between-science-and-religion.2248/)
This is statement is not
incorrect, but it is missing a very important part of any science.
Every science is also based
on absolute statements, i.e. on the statements in which every scientist deeply
believes without really having them logically derived from indisputable
evidence.
In other words, every
scientist has a faith.
Every scientist has a faith in
that:
* The world (a.k.a. the
universe, a.k.a. the nature) exists.
* The existence of the world
does not require human presence.
* The functioning of the
world has certain patterns (under similar circumstances objects undergo similar
processes). Those patterns do not depend on the existence of intelligent
species.
* Humans are intelligent
enough to uncover and understand the patterns governing the world (a.k.a.
laws).
* I – a scientist – am
intelligent enough to uncover and understand the patterns governing the world
(otherwise why would I be going into doing a science?)
Diving into a specific
science, like mathematics, or physics, or chemistry, shows that all those
sciences are also based on a set of absolute statements, although in a science
those statements called postulates or axioms, not commandments.
Those postulates cannot be
logically derived from certain observations or experiments. Yes, they are
related to certain observations or experiments, and during the search for those
postulates some reasoning, of course, have been used. However, the final
formulation of a postulate is usually a result of an insight. Then, after the
postulates had been formulated, scientists use logical procedures to derive
various consequences/predications, and if those predictions are consistent with
observations and experiments that gives us the confidence in the truthfulness
of the postulates.
There are many good books on
a logical structure of science (just run an Internet search on “structure of
science). Here I would only point at one of my favorite examples, namely,
Albert Einstein’s postulates of The Special Relativity Theory.
In conclusion, we cannot say
that a science does not include any faith at all: there is a faith in a
science, but just different one from a faith in a religion.
If the difference between a
science and a religion is not based on the presence of absence of a faith, then
what does make them different? The answer is – people.
A science and a religion are
just two of many human practices.
The most important difference
is between the people practicing those practices.
A person who practices a
science – a scientist – does not claim that his knowledge is absolute and
cannot be changed. A scientist is not the one who knows everything and is
always right. A scientist knows that his/her knowledge is limited, can and most
probably will be changed in the future (even the postulates!), and because of
that a scientist is always ready to be wrong.
People practicing religion
will never accept any possibility for their postulates to be wrong, they
practice a dogmatic thinking.
To be fair, some people who
call themselves scientists also practice a dogmatic thinking.
Maybe this is why Max Plank
said, that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Appendix
II: my letter to venture capital firms
In
December of 2017 I started sending out the letter below to various venture
capital firms. The fact that this letter is still on this page means that so
far no one expressed an interest in having a meeting.
An
inquiry about possible collaboration
Hello,
The missions and the core values of your VC
enterprise resonate very much with my own views on the mission, goals and
strategy for projects in the field of education.
As the result of a long, diverse and
successful teaching (and more) career, I have developed a very specific project
which could help many school teachers advance their teaching practice
(measurably advance). At this point I am not seeking yet any funds, I am
looking for potential collaborators, advisers, who could offer their expertise
on the business side of the project. All VC enterprises are looking for the
“next Steve Jobs”, but, maybe finding the “next Steve Wozniak” (or at least
“Tim Paterson”) would be as valuable?
There is no rush (education has already been
under a reformation for many decades).
When you have time, please check the
following four web-links in the order they are listed below (23 minutes of
total time), and feel free to contact me with any questions or suggestions.
http://www.GoMars.xyz/evvv.html
http://www.teachology.xyz/vv.htm
https://teachologyforall.blogspot.com/2017/09/cash.html
Thank you,
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Dr. Valentin Voroshilov
P.S.
If you check what the judges
said about my proposal, you will see that their opinions were very much
opposite. Interestingly, the similar case happened when two judges evaluated
one of my papers (http://www.teachology.xyz/msm.html). If you read my official student evaluations,
you do not find many neutral views like "He was OK", but the most of
the opinions are of an “awesome!” – type, and some are of an “awful” – type
(and www.ratemyprofessor.com shows a
similar pattern; more at http://www.teachology.xyz/evvv.html).
Evidently, one way or another, I touch most of the people I meet in a way like
I am a “Donald-Trump/Hillary-Clinton” type of person – people tend to love me
or hate me.
I want to stress, that I have
no intention for making people feel that or another way about me, I just have
noticed the pattern.
P.P.S.
Everyone who is reading this sentence has already spent some time to read this
whole page, and might invest two more minutes to read one more paragraph: it
might be especially useful for very
rich people; just click on the next link, https://teachologyforall.blogspot.com/2017/09/cash.html; press Contrl-F and type in Gates (or scroll down to part 6).
<<=to the home page..
..to the publications=>>