Why Are Students Willing to go into Debt in Order to Pay Large Amounts of Tuition in Order to Attend College?

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Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He has worked at faculty positions at Stanford University and Yale University. He is the author of, Coloring Outside the Lines, and his website is here.

Why are students willing to go into debt in order to pay large amounts of tuition in order to attend college? 

There are two questions here really.

Why does college cost so much?

Why do students want to attend college?

Let’s start with the first. Here are some important facts to get an idea about the costs:

Stanford University, as an example owns 8000 acres of very highly valued real estate. They didn’t purchase it and they don’t pay taxes on it but there are hundreds of buildings and playing fields and parking lots and laboratories and streets all or which require massive expenses to maintain. Full professors make an average of $188,000 per year at Stanford.

Lazy Learning

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Wendy Priesnitz is the editor of Life Learning and Natural Life magazines, a journalist, the author of ten books, and a contributor to many others. She is also the mother of two adult daughters who learned without school and has been an advocate of home-based education since the 1970s. Her website is www.WendyPriesnitz.com.

Few things seem to trouble parents more than the possibility our kids might be lazy. I guess it’s the legacy of that old Puritan Work Ethic – and you don’t have subscribe to any particular religion to suffer from it! Like our current style of public education, which is based on it, the belief that hard work makes you a better human being dates back to the Industrial Revolution. It might have been a useful tool for factory owners trying to make their employees productive, but it can actually be counterproductive today, when working smarter and more creatively are keys to success and happiness.

Educators Need to Stop Telling Students What They Should Learn & Should Start Asking Them What They Want to Learn. How Crazy an Idea is That?

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Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He is the author of, Coloring Outside the Lines, and his website is here.

I am in London as I write this. I have been riding the trains to get to places like Brighton and Sunbury for business meetings. I love riding trains.

Now, ordinarily the fact that I love trains would be of little interest to anyone, but there is more to the story.

Some years ago, when I was trying to get my father, who was over 80 and visiting me at the time, to do something he didn’t want to do, I told him we could ride the Chicago subway to get there and he immediately agreed.

Be the Learner

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We need to remember to be the example for our children when it comes learning. Written by Brave Writer. Check out their website here.

Be the learner you want to see in your children.

Take personal inventory over a cup of coffee this morning:

What do you wish you had time to learn/do/be?

Join a Zumba class? Apply to grad school? Read an art history book? Learn to quilt? Read a novel that is for adults? Garden? Read more about a historical moment? Watch Downton Abbey Season 1 or A&E Pride and Prejudice? Figure out how to calculate the amount of feed you need for your chickens you will hatch next spring?

‘Learning’ – A New Paradigm of Education

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Lainie Liberti and her son Miro are living a location independent lifestyle, slow traveling around the globe, living in the present, staying inspired, participating as a global citizen, volunteering and choosing to experience in the world without fear. Miro and Lainie are worldschoolers. "Worldschooler" is a term coined by Eli Gerzon. Gerzon defines it by saying, "It's when the whole world is your school, instead school being your whole world." Check out Lainie and Miro's website Raising Miro on the Road of Life. You can find this original article here.

My son is guiding his own education led by his interests. Radical idea, right?

This paradigm of learning is known as ‘unschooling‘. Unschooling is considered by most, a radical departure from ‘education’, and many criticize it’s merits and validity. In reply, my question is:

Are ‘education’ and ‘learning’ the same things?

Within the current schooling paradigm, unschooling simply doesn’t match the criteria of ‘education’, because there are no tests, no set curriculums, no standardized forms of measuring accomplishments. But do those elements define learning?

As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity

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New research suggests that American schoolchildren are becoming less creative. A new post by Peter Gray on his wonderful blog, Freedom to Learn. This original post can be seen here.

If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity.  “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country.  We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity.  In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset.  In a recent IBM poll, 1,500 CEOs acknowledged this when they identified creativity as the best predictor of future success. 

Americans Rate Public Schools the Worst Place to Educate Children

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Terence P. Jeffrey started as editor in chief of CNSNews.com in September 2007. Prior to that, he served for more than a decade as editor of Human Events, where he is now an editor at large.

A new Gallup poll released [August 29th, 2012] indicates that Americans rate public schools the worst place to educate children. 

In the national survey conducted Aug. 9-12, private independent schools, parochial and church-related schools, charter schools and home-schooling all rated higher than public schools.

Gallup interviewers asked respondents: "I’m going to read a list of ways in which children are educated in the U.S. today. As I read each one, please indicate--based on what you know or have read and heard--how good an education each provides children--excellent, good, only fair, or poor. How about: public schools, parochial or church-related schools, independent private schools, charter schools, or home-schooling?"

Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School

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Teaching kids more and more, at ever-younger ages, may backfire. Written by Alison Gopnik, an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes several books and her website is here.

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb. They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law—the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity—abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run?

Why do we still have schools? Part 2

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Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He is the author of, Coloring Outside the Lines, and his website is here.

Part 2: What should we teach students?

It is very difficult to think about replacing sacred institutions. The only way I know how to think about it is as a thought experiment. Just imagine that we live in a different world, maybe a colony in the 1^st century, and ask yourself how we might educate our children in this environment pretending that schools are the one thing we cannot build for some reason. As we think about this, we need to bear in mind that we must also not assume that what we teach in schools now needs to be taught in some other way. We simply need to ask: what should one teach children? while making no assumptions that we have been teaching today is the right thing.

Why do we still have schools?

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Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He is the author of, Coloring Outside the Lines, and his website is here.

People often find my blog when they ask "should I go to school?" So, today, I thought I would answer that question in depth. The answer will appear as a downloadable paper on my web site as well.

Part 1: What is the problem with school?

People get used to the institutions that have been a part of their lives. This is especially true of institutions that have been around for many generations, and of institutions whose purpose is seen as doing something worthwhile. Add into the mix that the absence of that institution in certain places around the world is always correlated with poverty and you have a situation where no one ever questions the value of that institution.

Back to School: A Message to High School Students Who Hate High School; Here is Why you Hate It

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Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He is the author of, Coloring Outside the Lines, and his website is here.

The other day an article written by me appeared in the Washington Post saying that algebra was useless and shouldn’t be taught in high school.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/no-algebra-isnt-necessary--and-yes-stem-is-overrated/2012/08/26/edc47552-ed2d-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_blog.html

The hate mail that followed (written mostly by math teachers) was unbelievable. Mostly accusing me of being irrational and incapable of thought, and stating that math teaches people to think. This is pretty funny because if math is supposed to teach one to think, as they argue, they might have looked me up and discovered that not only was I a math major in college, but I was also a professor of computer science.

Make Math Illegal

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Pat Farenga is a writer and a homeschool dad to three now grown girls. He worked closely with author and teacher John Holt, and has appeared on TV and radio as a homeschool expert. This original piece can be found at his website here.

John Holt wrote, “I suspect that many children would learn arithmetic, and learn it better, if it were illegal.” As an adult who has come to enjoy math after a youth filled with hatred and shame about the subject, I see the wisdom in Holt’s words. I probably would have arrived at this place sooner in my life if I hadn’t had to spend so much time pretending to comprehend math for my classes, so much time memorizing “math facts” that were meaningless to me, and so much time avoiding math during my years after high school because I thought I couldn’t do it. In my twenties I was fine with basic arithmetic and double-entry bookkeeping, but anything beyond that, such as number lines and exponents, and I would run away as quickly as possible from them.

Unschooling Undefined

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Rather than simply defining what unschooling is, Jon Shemitz also defines what unschooling is not; what unschoolers do not want. Basically the parts of public school that are deplorable and the reason for the rejection of it. Jon Shemitz is from Midnight Beach (Jon's Homeschool Resources) here.

Unschooling is a word coined by negating the idea of schooling; it starts off with a negative definition. What, specifically, is it about schools that unschoolers want to do without?

The School Organization

• Breaking up the day into learning time and play time.
• Starting and stopping learning (or shifting topics) according to an externally-imposed schedule.
• Telling students what they should care about.
• Telling students when they should care about it.
• Telling students what is good enough.
• The complex hierarchy with the student at the bottom.

A Simple Truth that Changes Everything: Learning Happens All the Time

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By Linda Dobson who owns and maintains the website Parent at the Helm, and is the author of many homeschool books. A great read!

We hear it constantly, first from educators and, more recently, from politicians who have latched on to education as a “hot button” issue: We need to get children ready to learn.
Some parents have discovered there’s nothing one can do about children learning. Sound defeatist?

Actually, the opposite is true. Learning is just something children do. All the time. Even when no one is teaching. Talk to these parents, and you’re sure to hear stories of six year-olds learning to read, seemingly by osmosis, and 12 year-olds who never even glanced at a textbook who are ready for college math.

The Homeschooler’s Guide to Getting Into College

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If college happens to be in your homeschooler's plans, please enjoy this article from OnlineCollege.org. that offers many facts and tips! The bolded bits are clickable links.

There’s a common misconception that homeschoolers have difficulty when it comes to getting into college. This may have been true 20 years ago, but these days, colleges are making the process of admissions for homeschoolers simple and fair.

In fact, many colleges are now seeking out homeschoolers themselves, as homeschooled students tend to be excellent college students. Here, we’ve gathered several facts, tips, and helpful resources that you can put to work to ensure that your college admissions process as a homeschooler is smooth and successful.