Some Thoughts on Education

Several months ago, I attended a meeting sponsored by the IEEE, entitled "Forum on Motivating Our Students to Become Engineers: How to Make It Happen."

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I was there only during the morning session, and also missed some of the earlier talks.  From some of the presentations, I got the feeling that there was too much focus and emphasis on racing to the top, and over-reliance on standardized academic curriculum, standardized testing results and academic "rigor", especially in the presentation and the accompanying commentary by Ms. Linda Murray, former San Jose Unified Superintendent.  This was quite disappointing, in my opinion. 

The Fascinating World We Live In

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I would like to express some of my fascination with the wonderful and amazingly mysterious world we live in.  On the one hand I can see and recognize all the mind-blowing complexities that underlie much of the seemingly simple everyday experiences and things that we take for granted and consider well understood. Yet, if we really try to delve deep, we face so many unexplored territories. On the other hand, there are all these simple explanations for some of the most tantalizing problems that our species has been struggling with for Millennia; yet, our collective culture, and our education system have been feeding us with untruthful, overly complicated, self-congratulatory justifications for all the turmoil.  So, let's look at two examples to illustrate the point.  Each of these can be formulated as a very simple question.

On Education and its Significance ...

There is a wonderful little book that I read a while ago and refer to every once in a while.  It is by the late Indian philosopher and speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti, entitled "Education and the Significance of Life".  You can read it pretty much in its entirety, online. Here are a couple of passages some from its first few pages that resonate with me:

Happy 74th Birthday Donald Knuth

The Universal Love of Soccer

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I have played soccer -- or futbol as it is called in many parts of the world -- ever since I was in the 3rd grade, and continue to this day.  Back then, I was fortunate enough to study in an interesting, experimental, and progressive school in Iran, called Dabestan-e Farhad, under the leadership of a very caring and energetic principal known to all the students as Touran Khanoum. She was, and still is, a fascinating individual with a lot of passion and energy for her job.  One of her main current projects is to oversee the publication of a multi-volume encyclopedia for children and Young People in Persian language.  Here in an interesting article on this work, translated from German into English.   A website is recently established for disseminating news about this encyclopedia. Our principal, Ms. Touran Mirhadi studied child education and psychology and sociology, in Sorbonne, I believe, and took great pains in providing a school that was an inspiration to many of the kids who had the opportunity to study at Farhad, me included.

Funding Public Education in California ...

I am sure many of you have received what could be characterized as a potentially sincere effort, but it actually is a meaningless exercise in futility -- and could very well be a creative attempt by the oil industry and its PR advisers to divert meaningful and constructive actions against their interests and give their opponents an illusory sense of direction and accomplishment.  I am talking about such efforts as No Gas Day.

On Love, Education and Conformity

William, the Cat

It seems to me that we are a confused species in many ways.  We express our emotions in strange ways.  More often than not, this seems to be the result of being in too much of a hurry, and not letting things take their own proper course.  Also, that we are trying to take short cuts, not realizing that we are in fact going the wrong way!