[IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Wednesday 01 Jul 2009 9:03:26 am Alan Kay wrote:
>Your last sentence is somewhat parallel to what many business types like to
>say about how hard it is to measure Return On Investment for research
>funding. But in the business case, this is actually a form of dissembling,
>since an enormous percentage of all the GNP (and in fact GWP) comes directly
>as return from research.
The top 10% of learners don't need school. The bottom 10% need more than a 
school. For the middle 80%, learning in school should be demonstrably better 
than that out of school. A school is relevant only if it can detect and weed 
out contexts that hinder learning (or have nothing to do with learning) as 
quickly as possible. Otherwise people will vote with their feet.

In one of our local public school parents meet, a poor farmer challenged, "Why 
should I retain my kid in this school? Can you show me one student who studied 
here and became somebody in life? In the field, I can teach him to raise at 
least one crop a year". For him, there was lot more of physics in the farm 
than in school textbooks.

Subbu