On 24 May 2012 07:08, Fabrizio Giudici <fabrizio.giud...@tidalwave.it>wrote:
> On Thu, 24 May 2012 01:46:20 +0200, Kevin Wright <kev.lee.wri...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > it cheaper). This is a thorny problem, but I believe the situation would >> be best improved by giving more control back to *teachers* and by >> > > In my experience, putting everything in control of teachers would be a > disaster - but this is influenced by the fact that until a few years ago > teachers weren't evaluated at all and some formal evaluation has just been > started and will need some years to warm up. Probably the best approach is > distributing the responsibility between teachers and families. It's guaranteed that your mileage will vary in different countries here, but my gut instinct is that if you make teaching more attractive as a profession then you'll attract better people. Any one of us familiar with the differences between talent in big corp and startups will surely testify to the fact that excessive bureaucracy is actively harmful. Systematically ripping away the job satisfaction of teaching with even more red tape is really not the solution - it's a job that many do because they believe in it, and not simply for financial renumeration. Having said that, salaries are also so low that they've become a hygiene factor and are driving people away from the profession. Given the way I've seen some parents behave with (lack of) respect to teachers, it also wouldn't hurt if we were to teach those families as well; pushy and belligerent parents are yet another hygiene factor. Like I said... It's thorny :) > > In the UK at least, we seem to have an excess of hairdressers and beauty >>> >> spas and nail polishers. Perhaps we'd be better off by offering >> encouragement for more people to enter engineering fields? >> > > In Italy we have lack of engineers and other sci/tech skills, too many > graduated in humanistic disciplines (most of low quality, that just want to > be employed by the state as school teachers), and lack of undergraduates > technicians. It's hard to say who should be in charge for a better > planning. Clearly young people out of the school aren't able to pick a > reasonable choice, but even experts failed planning - I recall that when I > was going to get my degree "experts" were saying "oh, no, we're going to > have too many engineers!". Myopia like that, they should have concentrated on encouraging more opticians! It sounds like even the humanities are doing badly; surely history counts as a humanity and yet these self-appointed experts seem to be going out of their way to avoid scientists and engineers. I don't imagine it would be so terrible to produce another or Galileo Galilei, or Leonado da Vinci, or Enrico Fermi, or... (actually, Fermi could be taken as a warning against shunning the sciences here, given that he had to naturalise in the US to do his stuff) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
