Of Laplace and Theodolites

Oft in the media there is a renewed focus on discussing the quality of elementary school education as well as whether teachers in the public school system (those supported through direct tax payer dollars) should maintain their job by tenure or merit. This question to me is really two fold - the curriculum design /quality thereof in question and the delivery mechanism (i.e. the teacher in the classroom) used to translate it from the archaic prescription to usable and worthy material fit for consumption by the young minds walking in the school doors. As it relates to the former I think the modern public schools - and there is a wide variation in it depending on what part of the country you are in - adhere to a fairly robust data content which however could use a lot more tweaking with relation to cultural awareness building. I shall explain shortly. Aside from that the delivery of the same seems to be lacking severly in the quality of the elementary or high school staff employed by the respective districts. The latter is a function of what supply of quality teaching talent is available in the local markets. This also is affected by the pay and reward metric where teachers make a pittance of a corporate type or even a government worker like Police, City Staff. This dichotomy is in complete contradiction of all the political sound bites about leaving no child behind and ensuring that a sound education is our ticket to continued progress as a society. Just like (at least I think so) rarely a sane (read honest, driven) mind ever steps in to politics (for many an obvious reason) so too do quality teachers shy away from the bureaucracy that is the school system. Depratment of Education is nothing but a tax drain at this point if you were to look at the expense vs. output delivered in the form of lower lows in school results and scores. I am reminded about the skewed relationship of what is taught in class with the realities of the modern world when I think about my under graduate curriculum and the people tasked in delivering that content to would be engineers. For starters each and every candidate going through my alma mater (then considered a jewel amongst India's Engineering Schools) would run into a malnourished and oft BO exuding professor (we really did not know it was BO at that point since there could have been many an odor enhancing event happening in the vicinity such as dead rodents et al); whose task it was to educate the minds on the use of a Theodolite. A what? An instrument (if memory serves and there is not much of it going into this year) used by civil engineers or construction workers to gage the relative topographic elevation during site study. This I am making up without use of Wiki where I am sure I would find a more appropo definition (see how technology has changed and we might still be doing theory back in Engg school I bet). Point is that this dicussion of the Theodolite and its retarded activity of some poor sod getting the privilege to drag this monstrosity across a busy interstate (our school had one going right through it) to conduct experiments (it was one alright) to complete their credit was of no logical consequence to a graduate. Same went for another monstrosity in the math curriculum. We spent hours with a petitie midget like professor covered in cancer inducing white chalk dust as she scribbled and whittled the chalk to explain what a LAPLACE theorem was. Really? Who the %$%$ cares about this dude? Do people even know what his contribution to society was? Unless I somehow got lucky and ended up with Alex Trebek on Jeopardy would I even benefit from this bit of trivia? Good for a Daily Double perhaps? So back to the US based education and what the generation 'next' might look like. As I said before there is a cultural awareness disconnect that some people are at least bringing up in the off line discussion. Students do not know much about the world outside of the US. Or California for that matter. This is a metaphor for how large populations of the country view their place on this planet. We coud tackle this with a few changes - it has to do with learning the popular languages of the world for example. It might be time that the world school systems to start offering and in some cases mandating the learning of Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish as a second or third language even if the native country was China, Brazil or India or the USA. An entirely foreign language to that country taught as mandatory curriculum. Second would be teaching cultural etiquette about variety of regions of the world to the young minds as they assimilate in their friend circle which (at least in the local US market) is getting to be a United Nations. Our school does do some off curriculum events to imprint these ideas on the kids but by nature of it being non mandatory there is only some select families that show up for this. So I propose as the next president of these United .... I shall - 1. Hire the best talent to staff our elementary school system 2. Pay a wage that competes with seniority at a Microsoft or Google (with bonus tied to performance of the total graduating class) 3. Make this available to whoever has a pulse and can maintain a certain WORTHY of SCHOOL INDEX and hunger to learn (for those that have to do a job and get to school due to family issues - we would need to focus on providing additional help to maintain the buddig talent) 4. Shut down underperforming or disinterested schools and colleges based on their performance scores. Then when its time we will make the Theodolites available to our bright civil engineers and a tome on Laplace's brilliance as they choose to design some new circuits for the next generation of computer.