Reflections, ideas, thoughts on various subjects in education – by Dr. Yoav Armony
DESCHOOLING
From time to time the idea arises to abolish the school and move to another method, for example home education, community education, marginal education or no education at all. Well, the idea is not new.
Ivan Ilyich wrote a book in 1970 called ” Deschooling Society.” The book suggests switching to a personal learning method, i.e. each student learns any subject anywhere, on a topic that interests him/her with the help of a responsible adult who accompanies him/her and serves as a mentor (as for an apprentice). The book suggests that every person in the country would have a credit card for personal education (if you want to do a matriculation certificate at the age of 80 it’s fine). According to Ilyich, cancellation of school will lead to increased self-motivation, as we learn a mother tongue, play football and ride a bike so you can learn everything (call it learning from memorization). Ilyich also claims that the abolition of the school will result in the separation of education from the learning system – students learn from experts in the field and are educated by an educational mentor. Finally, Ilyich talks about the cancellation of the certificates and the grades (I will not expand on that).
In my opinion, despite Ilyich’s weighty ideas and despite the fact that the education system and school system have gone bankrupt, I would not rush to close the schools; the students need a responsible adult in their environment to guide them and it is not clear where he/she will come from according to Ilyich’s method. The school provides a framework that, without an alternative, I would not break down – socialization, values education and even a babysitter when parents are at work. This does not mean that the school should not be changed (a profound change).
As expected, a recommended book is ‘Deschooling Society’ by Ivan Illich.
EDUCATION FOR HAPPINESS
Martin Siegelman who researches optimism and the fathers of positive psychology, researched and found that for every academic paper on happiness there are 115 published on depression, which can make sense since some believe that within a decade depression will be one of the three leading causes of death in the Western world.
A brief search across the web will yield a wealth of recipes to reach happiness – from the Dalai Lama through Victor Frenkel, Martin Siegelman, and Ken Robinson, to various internet consultants, who recommend inner truth, optimism, dedication, meaning, respect, hope, practice or hard work …
I personally prefer to get to ‘well-being’ instead of looking for happiness. The term ‘well-being’ encompasses welfare of various kinds: economic, professional, social (having someone who loves you), health and community (community involvement).
Researchers at the Gallup Institute have studied the issue for decades in over 150 countries and found that two-thirds of the world’s adult population has welfare in at least one of these areas, but only 7% has welfare in all five of these areas. In a deep self-examination, I came to a conclusion that I have four out of five. Guess who the four are?
ENTREPRENEURSHIP OUTSIDE OF YOUR EXPERTISE
A person must be cheeky and stupid to enter a field he is not an expert in and think he will succeed. But the history shows that there were quite a few cheeky and stupid entrepreneurs who succeeded. Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, was a jeweler; the Wright brothers, the pioneers of aviation, were bicycle fixers; Eastman, the inventor of the film, was an accountant; and the dozens of startups currently established in the financial sector (FinTech) are not initiated by suited bankers but rather by young people learning the area as they go.
The company ‘Leverate’ operates in the field of algorithmic foreign exchange trading, established by a number of young 8200 graduates with experience in building algorithms in military fields, without any understanding in the field of foreign exchange trading (brats?). They had an idea to locate price differences between traders (arbitrage) and take advantage of it. They decided to do a pilot that yielded promising results and made them invest in the field; in retrospect they discovered that the pilot was based on incorrect data (stupid?) which did not prevent them to become within a few years the world experts in foreign exchange pricing.
Contrary to popular belief, the education system is in a state of constant innovation attempts, usually even before the technology matures and without much understanding of the field. At any given moment, education systems around the world have tried a variety of pedagogies and technologies, such as film (since 1910), radio (since 1920), Montessori (1910) and anthroposophical (1920), television (1950), learning with the help of a computer (1985), open and democratic (1970), smart board (2005) and smartphone (2010), homeschooling (always) and makers (2010). Unfortunately, none of them succeeded and most only created a very limited effect, however, not to despair! The statistic in the field of startups shows that only a small percentage do succeed.
DISORDER EFFECT
When I was a kid, my order of the day was as its name “orderly”: every day I got up at seven, and went to bed at exactly eight, between four and seven I went downstairs to play with friends, regular meals and a regular daily menu (every Monday schnitzel peas and rice) … even Saturdays and holidays were pretty organized. I was no exception, as an example, at exactly seven o’clock all the mothers went out to the balcony and the cries of “Yossi come home” were heard all over the neighborhood. As if mothers all over the world were united.
However, the world is becoming less and less orderly, for example: the definition of family has always included father, mother and children. The source of knowledge in the world resided with adults with knowledge. Friendship had a clear definition (parents were not friends, and met with their friends occasionally). Time was clearly defined (when to work, when to study and when to spend time) … and I haven’t mentioned roads, workplaces and the number of viewing channels ….
Nowadays the disorder is growing. The reasons are varied and include an exponential increase in the number of channels competing for our attention, flexibility in the time when things can be done, flexibility in use (phone is also a camera), the place is not permanent (you can work from home) and everything is fast, available and cheap. And the schools? What about them? The education systems in the world adhere to the existing order. Disorder hardly enters its gates, maybe it’s good (a bit of order in the chaos) and maybe less, as the role of the school is to prepare youngsters for life (and it is chaotic as mentioned). More about that in another post (maybe).
RESUME (CV) - A WORLD THAT IS DISAPPEARING?
Job search and resume are closely related. If we ignore personal networking for a moment, the possibility to get an invitation to a job interview begins with a quality of your CV. Quite a few students choose to expand subjects in high school, go to higher education or volunteer for community activities because “it looks good on a resume.”
But “in the new world” there are companies (and some are quite large) that are not interested in the candidate’s resume but in his/her relevant performance ability, they do not even ask for a resume but rather take the candidates through exercises and exams that test the suitability for the job. For example, a company is looking for a salesman who is good in selling (or has any trait that is relevant to a salesperson), even if he does not have an MBA and has never worked in a similar position. According to these companies, by taking this approach, in the long run, they end up getting more suitable candidates than from the standard track which includes CVs screening and interviews. Education or experience will improve your chances of getting a job but not necessarily, in the example of the sales person, an exercise of a quality sales presentation will improve his/her chances of success better than any degree from a prestigious university.
The inspiration for the letter came from the popcorn podcast – “Who needs a resume“
FOMO - WHAT DO I MISS?
I’m a member of a group “adventure“, the motorcyclists who cross continents. At any given moment (even in Corona times) there are a number of riders in South Africa, Peru or Mongolia that I would be happy to swap with momentarily, so every time I looked at the group posts I experience a slight FOMO attack.
FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) or ‘miss anxiety’ is a psychological phenomenon in which a person is afraid that he will miss an experience that other people have in all areas of life, social, professional or romantic. This anxiety is expressed in difficulty enjoying the present since there is always a fear that there is a better experience. For example, I went on a date and the date was good, but instead of deepening the relationship I keep looking for maybe a better one. The development of technology and social networks has intensified the phenomenon as people easily post their (mostly good) experiences and everyone is exposed to these all the time.
The phenomenon is not new (it is claimed to have started with the Industrial Revolution when the masses were allowed to see what was going on in the aristocratic palaces), but it intensifies as the means to peek into the lives of the others grow easy. The question arises what happens to the young people? Are they in constant ‘miss anxiety’? I think this is an anachronistic term today. In all the recent studies I have read on the subject there is confusion between a feeling of missing out and an (obsessive) presence on social networks. Adults experience FOMO because they are educated on values of perseverance and solidity (tangible), i.e. appreciate things that can be touched over virtual things, so they are not able to be at the same time in multiple events, whereas the current generation (through technology) connects easily to virtual experiences and can easily switch between experiences. Therefore, the FOMO feeling is much less significant. In a world where you can buy everything cheaply and it arrives within 24 hours (except through the Israel Post) and you can participate in several events at the same time, the reason for the anxiety that exists is not FOMO.
THE LOST TIME
Nowadays I teach English to young students. The fact and the matter is that I do not understand past perfect or present simple, so I ask every student to take his favorite series on Netflix and the like, and watch the first season one more time but this time without Hebrew subtitles. We agree that in the coming week we will watch 2-3 episodes and talk about them (in English). A week passes, and the answer is (without one exception) “I did not have the time”. After hearing this answer over and over again, about every difficult or easy task I asked the students to do (including the ones I thought they would enjoy), I began to wonder where the ‘lost time’ went and in conversations I tried to understand what youth do today (it is not a research and certainly is not representative as these are ninth grade boys, not a simple age, from Mitzpe Ramon, not a simple place, and these are not the easiest children in any case …).
To my surprise sleep is not the main time waster, most of them don’t even enjoy the ‘schlafstunde’ although it would have been obvious in this lock-down time, and those who have difficulty getting up in the morning usually just went to bed late. Work is not the reason either, although some of them do work, but usually during school days no more than one evening a week. Maybe friends? Meetings with friends are also rare, and usually they would meet for a specific purpose (e.g. playing basketball), interestingly most of them have never been in their friends’ homes. When I ask about homework or chores for school, I come across a dismissive ridicule. What’s left? Screen!!! Computer games, TikTok, YouTube and the like. And here a surprise awaited me – except for one who said he spent hours on TikTok no one admitted that he spends many hours in front of the screens (which is unlike any study I know about the number of hours young people spend in front of screens). They do correspond a lot among themselves but it is done while doing other things, and I must admit I did not get the feeling that it was the main time thief.
So, where does the time go? – I have no answer, there are no youth movements here, to community centers they do not go at this age, sports engagements are very limited – so what is left? Staring in the air?
I have not given up yet and continue to look for the lost time.
NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY
In recent months, I have been teaching at Mitzpe Ramon, mainly children from the ‘Courage’ programs (children that are challenged for a variety of reasons), and it is both an inspiring and frustrating experience. What frustrates me the most is the lack of responsibility of the students especially in areas that are apparently should be of interest. For example, I met a student who wants to get accepted to a sports team and has the appropriate skills but does not take responsibility for the process (meeting with the coach, acceptance test …). I will admit that there are quite a few not-so-simple issues in the area, but as a man with passions who tries to educate for acting out of intrinsic motivation, lack of responsibility is the most frustrating.
Moshe Shner in his article “Get thee out of thy country“, places the responsibility for future education on three factors: the teacher, the student and the school, i.e. it is not enough that the education system is as good as it gets, cooperation is needed on the part of the student to become an autonomous, creative and active learner.
The reason I’m frustrated is that in fact the current attitude prevalent in quite a few schools (especially with challenging students) is not to give up on the student – if he does not get up in the morning, go to his home and wake him up; if he does not study for the exam, give him a passing grade anyway (‘success exams’ have minimum score of 80); if he does not perform a task, repeat it in the hope that maybe next time he will perform it. The problem is that this approach (despite its obvious advantages) reinforces the student’s lack of responsibility.
This note is inspired by a 10th grade student who I am tutoring – he did not wake up in the morning to school, after I called him and woke him up he asked me to wait an hour, when I said I would not wait, he replied “I’m sorry it’s not my fault, it’s just hard for me to get up in the morning”.
THE CREATIVE MIND
As far as we know today, evolution develops over millions of years of random mutations, how can we explain then the fact that we have a place in the brain that knows how to decode letters? The script was invented 5,000 years ago and only in recent centuries has it become public domain. In fMRI tests, it turned out that every person, no matter if he reads a letters-based font like Hebrew or a pictures-based font like Chinese, has the same center that decodes letters. How did such a center develop so rapidly?
Calling this phenomenon the “Wallace Paradox”, Alfred Wallace wondered how we evolved so quickly in certain subjects for example mathematical ability or reading, and concluded that it was probably the hand of God who saw the future. Today it is believed to be related to object recognition abilities (tiger, computer, wife), since there are endless such bodies viewed from infinite angles and states, the brain retains representations. Just as we make up each word with 22 letters, the brain knows with the help of individual representations to identify each object. If so, the mechanism exists for other needs and now (at a young age) we need to train it so that it can also recognize letters and not just tigers. (From: ‘The Mind’s Eye’ by Oliver Sacks)
And from here I would jump into creativity. As literacy, the need for creativity (and therefore values such as curiosity, criticism and independence) has been preserved for generations for just few, most people went back to traditions learned from their ancestors (beware of the snake, you can eat this fungus, that’s how a fence is fixed). It was not expected from an average person to demonstrate creativity. To this day a large part of our education is based on the same values: obedience, conformity, punctuality and so on. However, the world is changing and just as literacy is not the domain of few individuals, so the need for creativity becomes a basic need, and it is possible that like representations, we have a built-in mechanism and only need to train it from a young age, perhaps this is what Jews have done over the years by teaching young children ‘Gemarah’.
THERE WERE DAYS
Charles Darwin wrote an autobiography at the end of his life, which was published after his death. Among other things, he wrote, “Nothing was worse for mental development than school … As an educational tool, school was completely unnecessary … My father told me: ‘nothing interests you except for dogs and rat hunting and you will end up disgracing yourself and your family’.” We know how it ended. Here are some facts:
> In the US within 20 years students spend 20% more hours in school, and the time spent preparing lessons increased by 150%
> In the 1970s in the UK, 80% of second graders went to school on their own, today only 10%
> In the Netherlands, parents spend 150% more time with their children compared to the 1980s
> In OECD countries, 30% of children spend time outside the home only once a week or less
Common to all of these issues is that the “inner source of control” of children becomes smaller, meaning they increasingly feel their lives are determined by others (and this too has a U.S. study done in 2002 showing that most children feel less in control relative to several decades earlier).
This means that we systematically, with our own hands (parents and the education system), stifle the inner motivation of our children, there is no time to play, explore, be intrigued, experiment, create … enjoy. Yet, it could be different, for example, in Japan, first graders come to school on their own – even if you have to travel by train, in Finland there is no homework and the studies limited to a small number of hours …
What will happen if children are allowed to have fun outside without parental supervision, to take risks, to go a little beyond the limits, to test and try… to play!
THINK IN REVERSE
From the beginning of World War II until its end, the United States fleet grew from 2,000 to 300,000. Within five years the fleet size has increased 150 times in addition to improving aircraft quality (speed, carrying capacity, distance and the like). During the war, more than 50,000 planes were hit in the United States, so an effort was made to improve the survival of the planes. Exactly! A statistician named Abraham Wald argued the exact opposite since the data are of planes that survived (and returned to their base). See here.
The education system also has programs for strengthening, and naturally they focus on the extremes: the weak (incapable, peripheral, disabled …) and the strong (gifted, outstanding …) and this comes at the expense of the Gaussian curve center, about 80% of students, who receive at best an average care.
On the subject of reinforcements, I want to raise an unpopular question (which I do not have a good answer for), are we investing in the right place? What is better – to invest in the edges or in the middle?
Statistically the vast majority of parents have a child in the middle of the curve (although most of us are sure they are raising geniuses), so it is in the interest of the majority that they invest in the center of the curve and less at the edges. And what about the weak? Does an investment (4.5 times the average student) really promote them sufficiently? If there was an equal distribution among all students, students in the middle of the curve would receive a budget 30% larger than the current situation. So which part of the plane should you strengthen? And finally, the story – the Ministry of Education has a program called Amirim that is intended for the gifted and outstanding, this is a program that is intended for the top 5% (in learning abilities). In the school where I teach there are not enough students who are defined as gifted so it was decided to run the program for “enthusiastic students” those who are not gifted but like to study i.e. from the middle of the curve.
THE WRITTEN WORD
I’m a bookworm and proud of it. Most of my knowledge of the world I draw from books, I do not watch TV, do not listen to radio, do not read newspapers and roam around the net only when necessary, but you will not catch me without a book (usually a few). Also, about field of education I learn mostly from books and I discovered a strange phenomenon: books in education are a rare creature! For example, the online book site “Hebrew” has about 30 classifications, including spirituality and an erotic novel, but there is no education, nor is there a sub-classification for education… A search by word (that is, all books that contain the word education on the cover) – yields poor loot. The same goes for other sites such as Stematsky, Doron Sefarim, Sifri App (I subscribed to them all). Even at the Mofet Institute where there is a rich library in the field of education, the number of new titles is quite disappointing. Given that education is such a broad field, I wondered why that is.
Say, who reads books today? well in Israel over 20% of adults (ages 16-65) read every day and over 40% read at least once a week (above the OECD average), and only 30% do not read books at all.
In Israel, there are 170,000 teachers, 1.8 million students and over one million parents. This seems to be a huge market segment (I guess larger than the one for archeology and philosophy); so why does it not generate a demand? Maybe, education is not something one learns from the books, or maybe parents are just not interested in educational theories and think they know everything they need to know or that one good book on education is enough (my mother raised me according to Dr. Spock). It is difficult to innovate in the field of education, so it is difficult to write a book for it. Or, maybe, educators do not know how to write books …
In any case, if you know of a good library about education – let me know.
PISA TESTS
Although I am not a fan of the tests that assess achievements in education, there is a topic worth looking into a little more in depth that emerges from the latest PISA test (2018). The test shows that Israel is in 10th or 74th place, depending on how you count. Tenth place in the sciences places us above New Zealand, Japan and Norway, whereas 74th place (out of 79) puts us in below Morocco and Lebanon. We get similar results in reading and math. By the way, on the average of all the tests, Israel is right in the middle, in 40th place (out of 79).
Sounds like I’m imagining these results, and in general how can you be in 10th and 74th place at the same time on the same test? Well the tenth place belongs to the Jewish students (without Haredim) while the 74th place is reserved for the Arab students. As a result, Israel ranks an unflattering first in the gaps between the weak and strong students.
What could be the reasons:
> The first thing that comes to mind is money – if we look at the budget (per student) it seems that indeed a student in a religious public school gets a budget that is 30% larger than a regular public-school student and 60% more than an Arab public-school student. On the other hand, in the last five years, the budget for education in the Arab sector has increased significantly (billions of shekels), but the gaps in exams have only widened (from a gap of 90 points in 2012 to a gap of 150 points in 2018). If not money maybe teachers…
> Teachers – I always place the responsibility on the teachers but the status of the teacher in the Arab sector is higher than in the Jewish and there is a surplus of teachers. I did not find any research on the subject but I suspect that the average teacher in the Arab sector is better than his counterpart in the Jewish sector. If so, teachers are probably not the cause of the gap.
> Racism – if so, then how do we explain the fact that the Arab sector in Israel is below all Arab countries examined? This does not seem to be the reason either.
I ran out of answers, maybe you have an idea?
EDUCATION TIME
Yesterday I found out it was Sunday to my surprise (if I had to guess I would have said Thursday). Staying home with no calendar-related commitments caused me to lose count of days in a week.
The education system, since its inception, has been time-driven. That is, first grade, second grade … twelfth; the school starts at eight o’clock and ends at one o’clock; in the first hour you study math, a break of ten minutes, a music lesson and so on.
Sarason, an educational reformer, talks about regularities – processes that are repeated without us thinking / being aware of them. In his opinion, in order to make a change in the education system, we must understand and address regularities.
The problem with the regularities is that we are so used to them that we do not notice them… And then COVID comes and exposes us to the new regularities of the education system (or rather to the irregularities) for example:
> The teacher and the student are not in the same place – remote learning.
> Not at the same time – asynchronous learning.
> Not in the same role – the responsibility for learning is not just on the teacher.
> Clock or calendar does not matter – study at night, sleep during the day.
> A large part of the sticks (as opposed to carrots) do not exist, such as detention.
> And most interesting of all – if until now we have tried to reduce screen time, now we encourage it and for the most part it is fine.
The Corona accelerates an existing process of blurring the boundaries between private space and professional space. It could be expected that such a period would prepare us for the future so when we return to the routine, the education system would be more adapted to the 21st century. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, none of this will happen, when we get back to the routine we will go back to the old habits.
DESPAIR NOT
The prevailing opinion is that the education system is outdated and does not tend to adopt new technologies, but if we examine it in depth, we will find that the opposite is true, education systems (in the world), tend to adopt technology before it is mature, and despair too soon. For example (the data is from the US – but true for most of the world):
> The use of motion pictures in education began in the United States in the 1920s, when the movie was silent, in black and white, of poor quality and with projectors that tend to break down. Huge investments were made in technology that stopped in the 1940s and 1950s way before its peak.
> The use of television for education began in the fifties when television was in black and white, on small and expensive screens. The use was discontinued in the seventies-eighties long before the maturity of the technology.
> The use of computers in education began in the 1980s, without the Internet, simple graphics, and without applications. Investments in the field were discontinued at the beginning of the millennium, even before the field matured.
Common to all these examples and others is that the use began and ended before the technology matured, even at the peak of the use of each of the technologies, the use was not more than 5% of the study time, huge sums were invested and all left no trace after use.
Is it possible to draw conclusions from these regarding online learning?
Unlike the above examples, this is a field intended for study only, but its use also began long before the field matured, huge sums were invested in it, little use was made of it and we will probably despair of it too soon.
I urge the few readers of this post, do not despair, keep trying, technology has a lot to offer and a lot more room to develop. Do not give up!
General Knowledge
April 29, 2011
When I was in the twelfth grade (many years ago), two children from my class were interviewed on television (at least there was television back then), they were asked who was Dov that the airport “Sde Dov” was named after him, they did not know. A disaster! It was a disgrace to my school (which didn’t suffer from a high quality image anyway – after all, they accepted me as a student). The principal of the school called the parents of the ignorant students for a conversation, the class teacher preached in a class about the importance of general knowledge and the subject was brought up in the morning assembly with the motto that this is how it starts and the next step will be theft, drugs and murder.
By the way, Dov Hoz was one of the leaders of the Haganah, he founded the “Aviron” company which was a cover for the Haganah’s airline company (I remember this from those sad days when we had to sneak into our neighborhood hiding from the shame).
Let’s say the interview was held today, the chances of finding a student in the eighth grade who knows who Dev Hoz was close to zero and that may be obvious, but in my estimation the chances of finding a student who knows who Ben Gurion was (the one after whom Ben Gurion Port is named) are also low. My father would probably click his tongue and mark another V in the list of signs that today’s generation is deteriorating. And I, on the other hand, claim that as time goes by a person will need less general knowledge. Already today, by pressing two buttons, I can tell you more about Deb Hoz than he himself knew. In the not too distant future the computer will understand from the context of my conversation (or from the analysis of my thoughts) that I might need a topic, will search for me, summarize its findings and report to me (directly to the ear) when I ask. If so, why should I bother to learn these facts by heart. I, on the other hand, prefer to know about Lady Gaga, about whom I read, am interested, research, correspond with others and about whom I know everything there is to know (by the way, I am not alone, on Lady Gaga’s Facebook Members there are 32 million people at the time of writing this post).
Is there knowledge that is minimal, without which a person is considered ignorant, without which a person cannot function (for example the multiplication table or what Bialik wrote). The answer is I’m not sure. The multiplication table for example, today I think it is possible to get by with the addition table (up to 10), beyond that you pull out a calculator. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I can’t bring up even one topic that is mandatory.
It’s not that I think education isn’t important. What I am against is the term “general knowledge”. There are people who are important to have a broad education (for example TV interviewers), but there are people (and they are no less educated) who have a narrow but very deep education. They don’t know who Ben-Gurion was, but they know how to explain the quantum theory or talk about Mozart and his works in endless detail. And if they need to know who Ben Gurion is – it is two clicks away.
Is the generation waning?
April 14, 2011
Descartes, a philosopher from the 17th century tries to prove that there is a God, one of his arguments, that there cannot be a being that is better than his creator. This is probably also Gittel’s assumption of Tschernihovsky who coined the term “generation waxes and wanes”. Each generation tries to prove with signs and examples that the next generation it conceived, gave birth to, raised and educated will inevitably be less good than it and brings barrages of arguments and explanations, why it is better to play with friends outside in the neighborhood than to stare at the television, how the giants of the generation disappeared and in their place a bunch of drugged, addicted to the screen inherited the country and hooked on Big Brother (I have to agree that there is something to the last point).
As part of a study I am conducting, ten youth volunteers were needed. We tried to harness the headmaster of a prestigious high school in Tel Aviv to the project, the guy tried for an hour to convince us that the youth of today will only do anything if they gain something from it and this is not what it used to be… I am of course not a headmaster, and I do not understand a thing about the youth and their needs, but in my opinion, today’s youth is not only not deteriorating, but is getting better, more serious, caring and investing than the generation that raised them, and this will be proven by the amount of hours the youth invest in activities that do not bring direct reward. Youth movements, volunteering in associations, Magen David Adom, Maccabi Ash, studying in classes for gifted, a year of community service, participating in various knowledge enrichment classes, writing for Wikipedia, and participating in forums on any topic in the world.
Below are some examples:
• The ‘Crembo Wings Association’ (‘Haknafaim shel Crembo’) allows youth with special needs to experience informal activities. The association has branches throughout the country and hundreds of volunteers, all pre military service boys, who come once a week to give the special children an hour of joy. There are hundreds of associations and organizations in Israel that are run by youth, such as: ‘Noam’ – youth volunteers in Holon, ‘Nemla’ – youth volunteers for animals, ‘Ozen Kashevet’ – hearing youth help the deaf in Be’er Sheva (in Be’er Sheva there are 65 projects involving volunteer youth), In Magen David Adom alone, about 6,000 youths (ages 15-18) volunteer and invest about one and a half million hours a year.
• Most of the people who write the entries in Wikipedia are young (up to the age of 25). Their names do not appear anywhere and no one pays them for their work. They spend hours searching and writing the entries of high quality without any compensation. Wikipedia is the most viewed website in the world, but in addition there are countless forums, communities and blogs on topics that interest young people such as: “Noam Panchasov” (I have no idea who this is, but all the writers are under 19), “Aviv Gefen”, “Adolescent love”, ” Twins and triplets” or “between high school and the army”, some of them are very serious, in which young people bring their knowledge and share it with others, usually anonymously.
• Every year two thousand high school graduates (the number is limited by the IDF) volunteer for a year of a community service – in poor conditions, with almost no funding and in difficult places.
• In a study conducted among ‘Ulpana’ girls in religious zionist youth, it emerged that the most sweeping phenomenon among these girls was volunteering and donation.
There are a total of 300,000 high school age students in Israel, obviously not all of them volunteer, but even if it is only 10% (only in the youth movements there are more than 30,000 high school age activists) it is a fantastic amount of a fine generation.
I started with Descartes and therefore I will end with him as well, the singularity movement claims that within 20-30 years the computer will be smarter than the person who created it and we need to prepare for that. If it does happen, it will probably be the proof that it is possible to create a creature that is smarter than its creator.
"Profession" - Isaac Asimov
September 9, 2011
There are books that are engraved in your mind forever, such is the story “Profession” by Asimov from “Nine Tomorrows”. I last read the story about 35 years ago and have been telling it to anyone who cares to listen ever since.
Asimov describes a world where learning can only be done by feeding information directly into the brain. For example, at the age of eight the ability to read is implanted in a child. The system also locates what profession you are suitable for and gives you the necessary knowledge and here you are “certified plumber”. In such a world the people lose the ability to learn, it never occurs to them that they can go and explore the world around them. It’s not that they are indifferent to their fate, on the contrary, they have ambitions and want to succeed, and make efforts to reach high-quality levels, but everything is done within the scope of the frames that are available to you.
How does such a world progress? There are very few people who have the ability to explore their surroundings (the hero of our story is one), these people are not taught a profession but given books, put in classrooms (in front of television sets – don’t forget that the story was written in the 1950s) and are allowed to receive an education by themselves. These few people are the ones who lead the development of the world.
I personally think that the world is going in exactly the opposite direction, that is, since all knowledge can be constantly accessible to everyone, and since most of the work will be done by machines, there will be no need for plumbers, all you have to do is try to add your uniqueness. It is certainly possible that there will be those who will be satisfied with what is there, just as today there are those who only watch tel-novellas, but most people will try to create their uniqueness by developing a subject that interests them – photography, nuclear physics, growing plants, cooking or caring for horses.
Addition from 2023 – three years after this post was written, we founded “Nitzotzot”, a NGO whose main goal is to help boys and girls find their spark.
A disappearing world – embracing the past
April 21, 2011
Seymour Papert (inventor of Logo language) said that “in our opinion, a piano does not spoil the music since the piano was invented before our time”. This means that there is a good chance that technology in its infancy will be perceived by man as disruptive. At some point technology becomes “natural” and it is clear that it is a part of our lives. New inventions make us look for reasons why not to use them (degenerate, carcinogenic, uncomfortable, ridiculous, ugly…). In most European countries they still prefer to use a manual car, in all countries of the world they insist on learning the multiplication table by heart.
Man produces technologies that in turn change him in unknown ways, for example, the mobile phone. As a result of the ability to communicate anywhere and at any time, the intensity of the relationship between parents and their children (at school, in the army or in New Zealand) has increased, regardless of whether the communication is informative (“Where are you?”, “When are you coming back?”) or qualitative (“Did you like the music?”, “Tamar looks nice!”). We have created technology that will allow us to talk while driving and along the way we have also changed the way we relate to our children.
What else will disappear soon and how will it affect us? Looking at my desk you can see that the paperwork is long gone, there used to be trays of incoming mail, outgoing mail and handling. The books give way to Kindles and tablets, the calendar is unnecessary (it’s not clear why I have it at all), a pocket calculator is also unnecessary and is only there for nostalgic reasons, the landline phone is only used for incoming calls and there are only few, the printer has long been out of ink (it is there to be used as a scanner sometimes). There is one more very significant item on my desk and it is a mechanical calculator from 1930 that I use every time I need to multiply two numbers (it takes a little time but the satisfaction is huge). In short, everything on my desk, with the exception of the laptop, is unnecessary and is more of a decoration than a useful device. I believe that with the strengthening of the Cloud even the laptop will disappear (in the coming years), all we will need is a screen with lenses or glasses, a headset and a device that understands what we say, point or think. On second thought, the desk itself is archaic since children usually work and study while sitting on the bed or on the carpet and this is obvious that most of the changes start with the youth. Here are some examples of existing trends that will affect us (without judging if it’s good or bad): the disappearance of the book (with the pages and the cover) – in itself doesn’t really change us, but if we link it to the Internet and YouTube, the ability to read a full-length book and the ability to concentrate for a long time will disappear; Convert speech to text – we will lose the need to write; Improved and online translation capabilities – no need to learn languages; Semantic search capabilities – we will lose the ability to choose between a large number of options.
From these examples it appears that in the near future man will not know how to concentrate, write and read, speak languages and choose. Does this mean that the person will be less “good”? The past shows that it is not so! The abilities we lose give way to others and no less good abilities (after all, we once knew how to hunt, cook and tell stories), probably more visual, focused and short, at the same time and most importantly, more suitable for the person in the future.
Blurring boundaries – leadership
April 19, 2011
A former president is convicted of rape, a prime minister and a former mayor are suspected of accepting bribes, a rabbi is indicted on suspicion of sexual abuse, a singer is suspected of evading millions in taxes, a deputy mayor is suspected of rape and taking bribes – all of this within a momentary period of history.
Are we more corrupt, more exposed or more bored? Moshe Dayan, who was admired by all the people from different backgrounds, stole antiquities; Sapir ran the country with the help of ‘little notes’, each of them individually would have dragged him in for investigation; the conglomerate ‘Koor’ that controlled the Israeli economy reached the brink of bankruptcy without even a single culprit being found. And we didn’t talk about Yedlin, Albin and Levinson – cases that today would last at best a weekend and at the time filled the newspapers for months.
The line between the leader and the crowd is blurred, the ability to pull out a skeleton from a closet that has long since evaporated in the mists of the past, the ability to gather a crowd with frightening speed and take them out on the street, the ability to spread a rumor without examining the source or its truth, and the ability to pre-judge an accused cause that there is no immune person, prime minister, fearless dictator or a celebrity.
I would like to believe that this will lead to the leaders behaving as is expected of a leader, or the public will stop being interested in salacious affairs, or mechanisms will be established to vote for only the deserving ones, but unfortunately this is a utopia that probably won’t happen in the foreseeable future. A more likely possibility is that the Internet has stripped the exalted of their greatness and placed them in the same square as all the masses. Now the question is – what will it do to them and what will it do to us? On the one hand, if the leader is not raised above the people, then the crowd is able to understand a stumble here and there (nobody is perfect), on the other hand, it is impossible without headlines in the newspapers. And maybe artificial intelligence will replace the leaders? – time will tell.
Blurring boundaries – the meaning of time
April 16, 2011
My grandfather was a water engineer, he lived in Tel Aviv and worked in Rehovot. Every Sunday he would get on his donkey and ride half a day to work, sleep in the fields all week and return home on Friday – the unit of time allocated to a continuous task (UTACT) – was a week. My UTACT, on the other hand, is minutes, that is, every few minutes I change a focus. For example, while writing this post (about an hour), I listened to music, answered two emails (that popped up on my screen), and another one that contained a funny YouTube video sent by my son, surfed the Internet (to look for data on Prozac use), and since I was already surfing I checked the news on Assad and found out that Iran accuses us of introducing a worm into their computers, I received two phone calls about work and initiated one private conversation, and when the article didn’t progress I played Sudoku.
I wonder what will happen when, in addition to increasing functionality, this small device will also be “comfortable” to use and we won’t have to settle for a quarter-inch screen, but the information will be projected directly to the eye or appear in the form of a hologram, when we won’t have to reduce our fingers to the size of a pinhead, but we could talk or think to it. Will the buzzer go down to the level of seconds and everything will be in sequence like in a dream (horrors or sweet dreams). And maybe on the contrary, with the raising of its level of sophistication we can delegate powers to this small device, we will have “quality” time and we can sit quietly and do what we really want and is important without interruption and our UTACT will go back up to hours.
In my opinion the answer is of course “both”, both the time limit will continue to shorten (prepare a large stock of Prozac) and also the tasks we will still have to perform will be more significant for us (i.e a small stock of Prozac may be enough).
Blurring of boundaries – work and leisure
April 13, 2011
Only ten years ago, I stayed in England as part of a group of Israelis who worked with the Natives. It was clear that at 17:01 there was no Englishman present. During the holidays, I don’t even think about picking up the phone about work and a month before Christmas there is no one to talk to. A few months ago I was involved in a large tender in England on the subject of banking (the most conservative industry in the country) and the English team worked for several months around the clock, on weekends and even during the Christmas holidays.
I am sure that the above description does not surprise anyone, the trend has been seen for some time, people gradually stop dividing time into clear units – now I am at work, then I will play with the children and in the evening I will go out with friends. The boundaries blur, at work you read a newspaper and watch YouTube videos for your enjoyment, when you are on the phone there is a good chance that you will play solitaire (or Bubbles of your choice) while talking, while celebrating a birthday at a restaurant you will answer the phone from work, send text messages while driving and answer emails while vacationing by the sea.
In 1997, while on vacation in Guatemala, in two weeks I called the children only once, to make sure that they had not moved the country and that I could return to freedom. To make the call, it was necessary to travel to the big city (an hour’s drive), get to the post office (during opening hours), stand in line with dozens of other locals (over an hour), get to the clerk who typed (on a typewriter) my request to dial in five copies, the clerk then did a round of signatures with the supervisors and allotted me five minutes for a conversation. The whole thing took almost half a day. In 2007 (only ten years later) there were three cell phone companies in Guatemala with over ten million devices. Is there any doubt that the average Guatemalan has changed in the past decade? Not mentioning the average vacationer in Guatemala who can no longer enjoy an undisturbed vacation for two weeks?
This small device that has a camera, a typewriter, a calendar, a newspaper, a chess board (with the ‘small opponent’ folded up inside it), a television, a stereo system, a solitaire machine, a private cinema, a library with a huge encyclopedia and I almost forgot a phone that also allows communication in a thousand and one different ways – it has transformed our lives in a much more profound way than just miniaturizing a few functions into the palm of our hands. This small device has managed to blur the boundaries between all the functions of our lives so that it is difficult to define, even for ourselves, when we work and when we are on vacation.
Progress and Education – Tanzania 2011
April 09, 2011
Tanzania 2011 – there is no doubt, it is only a matter of time until Africa “westernizes”. The prices can already compete with New York, the young people already wear jeans, t-shirts and fashionable glasses, every house (no matter how remote) has a satellite dish, every person has a cell phone (and reception everywhere), Coca-Cola is ice cold at every stand (and there is a stand for each person) and the men speak English. It’s only a matter of time before the service will also be westernized – on the next trip to Tanzania you will have a flat tire fixed with pneumatic tools and not with a hammer and nails, the water will flow in the shower and not be rusty and cold, the roads will be paved with black and not holes, there will be Wi-Fi in the hotels and the food will not be cold and hard with yesterday’s color. When those days come, it will probably be more interesting to go on a trip in the safari of Ramat Gan.
An education student (me) will walk around a Maasai reserve and not go to school? We entered the elementary school, from the age of 7 to the age of 14, six hundred students (625 to be exact according to the records of the principal who pulled them out with pride, and even indicated an attendance rate of 85% in the last month). The principal sits in a dark room the size of a desk (dark because there is no electricity in the school, so it is clear that computers are not present there) and knows little English. A total of ten classes, sixty students in a class, what is surprising is that there are only tables for about thirty students (maybe the attendance percentage is not 85% and maybe they are sitting on the floor). We also spoke with the English teacher who knew less English than his students although he spoke with a nice British accent. According to announcements on the wall they study English, geography, algebra and also sexuality (or at least about the human reproductive organs). The algebra teacher emphasized that it is very difficult to explain to the Maasai what a negative number is (as if it is easy to explain to the Israelis). And the sensational news: there are still places in the world where they write on a blackboard (the wall is painted black) with chalk – it turns out that there is still room for progress.
Don't go out of your way
July 09, 2009
The movie “The gods must be crazy” tells about a tribe in the Kalahari that lives its life in peace and quiet. One day a Coca Cola bottle falls from the sky from a passing plane. The people of the tribe find that the bottle (the hardest object they have ever seen) can be used in many ways – as a digging tool, as a tool for processing skins, as a game or as a device to create ornaments. Over time the device took on an independent essence and life, so the tribesmen decided to return it to God (a must film for those who want to understand the impact of technology on modern men).
“The gods must be crazy” is nothing more than a parable for the way we all act in our day-to-day lives. After all, we are all enslaved to tools and frameworks that we created in the past but are no longer relevant. Somewhere along the way we simply forget that these are functional tools and not independent entities. The examples of this are diverse – starting from social institutions that work hard to preserve themselves such as schools and government institutions, and ending with the worship of money and sacred objects.
Let us examine, as an example, the study of mathematics in schools. An ordinary person (who is not a scientist or researcher) needs mathematics that culminates in the multiplication table. Topics such as solving quadratic equations, integrals, differentials and overlapping triangles are not required for grocery shopping nor during the calculation of the salary at the end of the month. Personally, I have a hard time remembering the last time I calculated six times eight without using a calculator. But over the years, mathematics has become something completely different. Suddenly, mathematics became an entrance ticket to the university, as a tool for measuring status and a device for developing logical thinking. Hence the jump to the definition of mathematics as a “thing” that stands in its own right is obvious but most likely unnecessary. Perhaps it is better for a child who is talented in music, instead of looking for limit points on curves (math, 3 units), to learn piano.
The main importance in distinguishing between tool and essence lies in our need to define correct goals. Modern man is a goal-driven creature. In many cases, people, institutions and organizations define goals for themselves that refer to the tools and not the essence. For example, if the answer to the question “What is your dream” is, “I want a high school diploma”, or “I want to have a million dollars in the bank” you are probably targeting a tool that disguises itself and not a real goal. This does not mean that it is simple to set a real goal, the tools become more sophisticated, and more difficult to distinguish. But since at any given moment we define the goals of ourselves, or of the organization we work in (even if we are not aware of it), we must constantly check that we are not confusing the tool with the essence. Why does a billionaire continue to accumulate money, why does the education system insist that students get high grades in useless subjects and why do politicians try to convince us that we must go to the next war? And maybe the next time we stand in line at the Ministry of the Interior we will realize that the official just forgot that he is a tool and maybe that will help us not to go out of our ways.
“Future Shock”, education – stagnation
March 10, 2009
“Future Shock” was written forty years ago and one of the prominent insights when reading the book (today) is how little has changed in the field of education in recent decades. In principle, Toffler claims that the current education system was very suitable for the industrial revolution since the school is similar to a factory, which prepared the students for life. Today, in the age of information, the education system should educate leaders instead of workers, people who adapt to changes quickly.
Toffler talks about several directions – all of them today, after 40 years, are still considered innovative and are in various experimental stages: for example – home education; community education that is the whole community can learn in the school and the school is part of the community; lifelong learning that eliminates the need to study for the sake of studying; renewing the status of the apprentice; moving to other learning methods such as games, roles imitation, technological means, exposure to experiences; change the curriculum so that it only contains elements that will help in the future, which will be less rigid and more flexible; prepare more than one curriculum, the best will survive (as in evolution); focus on three topics: learning, creating human relationships and choice; teaching students about the future (not just history).
Amazing. You read what was written forty years ago and time seems to have stood still, professors and educators today write exactly the same things as if half a century had not passed.
Exams
March 7, 2009
As an (not diagnosed) student, I was considered naughty, wild or just a “bad student” (depending on the teacher). At that time, most of my grades were obtained by cheating in tests and I reached such a level of professionalism that I could change the answers during the test so that they looked as if they were written by me.
After one of the more difficult parent meetings in the 6th grade, my mother decided that I had to study seriously for the next exam, which was in geography, and the entire Passover holiday I sat down to prepare for the exam. My mother tested me again and again until I mastered the material to her satisfaction. In the end, my exam was disqualified because the teacher, Hedva, didn’t believe that I didn’t cheat and only a serious clarifying conversation from my mother with the teacher got my grade back (the only one until the end of high school that was above 70 – if you don’t count sports).
When I joined the army I didn’t think I was supposed to change years of habits, after all the purpose of school is to prepare us for life. Indeed, after several months in the air-force academy, I was caught cheating in the exam, and since I didn’t think I had done anything particularly bad, I confessed to the act with an uncharacteristic ease. Unfortunately the course supervisors did not think so and I was honorably sent to 35 days of detention, and according to them I was not kicked out of the academy because I was the first in the course to be caught cheating, it is always better to be the ‘head of the foxes’. In the end I didn’t serve prison time because the Yom Kippur war broke out and I got amnesty, on the other hand I didn’t really become a pilot either.
It can be expected that after such an experience I will stop cheating, but this is not the case. At the Technion, during an exam, one of the students suddenly found the exercise in his notebook solved and passed the page with the solution among all the students. Fortunately, I was one of the first to receive the solution, so I had time to check the solution, discover a calculation error in it, correct the error and hand in the test. The whole class was disqualified for cheating, I was the only one who got a grade – indeed the school prepared me for life.
In my third degree, in order to avoid testing my integrity, I managed to convince all the professors that I would submit papers instead of exams, probably they didn’t understand why, but luckily they all agreed. And now I’m retired and I hope I won’t have to go through any more tests like this because it’s hard to change habits that were instilled in you as a child.
What do you want to be when you grow up
April 13, 2009
Every child is always asked what they want to be when they grow up. My friends wanted to be a doctor, or a lawyer, some wanted to be a teacher or a kindergartner, one even wanted to work in a garbage truck and shout “Go!….”, but I never heard of anyone who wanted to be an engineer! I wanted to be an engineer! It is very strange considering the fact that there was not a single engineer near me, and of course my grades from a young age to the end of high school would not have allowed me to even be a garbage truck driver and most importantly I had no idea what an engineer was. But I wanted to be an engineer!
It is hard to believe that my parents, who brought me up to this point, were the ones who planted in the newborn the passion for engineering. It is also difficult to believe that the issue was added to the family ethos in later years, because of the unequivocal evidence in which I am recorded on Motke’s tape replying with the confidence of a baby that I want to be an engineer! Once in a while, usually after a parents’ meeting in school, my mother threw the sentence out into the world with a heartbreaking sigh, “You wanted to be an engineer? You could barely shine shoes!”. At that time, a shoe shiner was at the bottom of the ladder of possible jobs for a boy my age, and from that I concluded that I probably wouldn’t be an engineer.
At the end of the eighth grade in the notebook burning ceremony, which I took seriously that didn’t suit me, I burned everything related to school, including the school clothes and the backpack (the one that I actually liked), and I swore that I would never study again, thus ending my mother’s dream of being the mother of an engineer!
And here in a surprising turn in the movie – army, high school graduation exams, preparatory course, Technion and here I am an engineer as I said I would be…
Just for the sake of historical completeness, in the last year of my studies at the Technion I realized that I didn’t want to be an engineer and even though I finished my degree I never engaged in the profession and I still wonder – what do I want to be when I grow up?
Futurism - technology - the end?
June 1, 2009
From time to time I return to “Fantasia”, an excellent science fiction newspaper published in Israel, and look for pearls. I found an article by one of the great writers of the genre, Isaac Asimov, about a population explosion called “The End” (without a question mark). The article was written in 1970 when the world population was 4 billion inhabitants and the growth rate was 2% per year (70 million additional inhabitants to the world every year).
Asimov made a linear extrapolation of the above figure (that is, the world’s population continues to grow by 2% every year until the end of generations) and arrived at alarming figures; at the current rate of growth, for example, the weight of the world’s inhabitants will be equal to the weight of the earth in 1,500 years, and in 500 years in 2,500 there will be 40 trillion inhabitants on the planet (a trillion equals a thousand billion). Since Asimov was clear that this situation could not be acceptable, he proposed to “do something”, for example a worldwide program to limit the birth rate proactively.
Asimov asked himself, how much time do we have until the energy runs out, the greenhouse effect hits, environmental pollution overwhelms us or the social structure collapses? And he replies: “It seems to me that in the year 2000 or even earlier, the human social structure will completely collapse, and in the chaos that will come as a result of this, about three billion people will die… and as far as human civilization is concerned, that will be “The End”.
Of course, Asimov’s mistake stemmed from the fact that he assumed that growth would continue in a linear fashion unless the world mobilized to change the trend. But none of this happened. We have reached the year 2009 and there has not yet been a global holocaust, but more importantly, UN estimates point to a complete halt in growth until 2050 when there will be around 9 billion inhabitants in the world.
The world population is currently 6.5 billion, it was 1.5 billion in 1900 and around 150 million in 0 AD. The growth rate during the aforementioned period increased from less than one per mille 2000 years ago to 2% per year, but around 1980 the trend was changed and it is now decreasing and is currently in 2008 at close to 1% (while in most Western countries – excluding immigration, the growth is negative). And the interesting thing is that what stopped the growth is what caused the growth itself.
In nature, ecosystems are structured so that when the amount of a certain animal (e.g. a predator) increases, an “automatic” correction-balance process opens and the amount of animals it feeds on decreases (there are too many predators), reproduction drops and mortality soars. At the end of the process, the number of predators decreases and nature returns to a balanced state. Men have “outsmarted nature” and found ways to bypass the process through the technology that helps them deal with hunger, housing, medicine and in any way the rate of population growth decreases.
Jacques Ellul in his book “The Technological Society” claims that technology has taken over us and in fact humans no longer decide on its development, but that it itself (technology) decides on its continued development. If we continue his argument then it seems that the technology that led to the wild increase in the human population in the world is also the one that activated the automatic process for correction-balance.
Technology has created personal wealth and comfort and curbed infant mortality so that a person does not need descendants to take care of him in his old age and much of his attention is directed to the higher levels on the scale of needs (Maslow). In the western countries (where most of the wealth is found) the average birth rate is already today below two children per couple (we consider it a negative increase). Since not the whole world is rich, the process is still in progress and as mentioned in 2050 it should reverse.
The question then arises: Will the rate of technology development be affected by the rate of increase/decrease in the population? The pace of technology development depends on the growth of consumption and the global economy. The reduction of consumption inhibits the processes of technological expansion. This was the case in all the economic crises of the last hundred years. Starting with the Great Depression (1929) and ending with the last crisis (2008).
Harry Dent in his book “The Great Boom Ahead” developed a model in which there is a link between the age of the population and the economic growth of the country. The greater the percentage of the population that spends, the greater the growth of the country. This means when there is a higher percentage of people between the ages of 40 and 50, the age at which we consume the most, the country grows. Using this model, Dent already predicted the crisis of 2008 in 1992 (he claimed that it would happen in 2009 and that the crisis would last for many years). The decrease in the world population plus the extension of life expectancy results in an older population which leads to a stagnation in consumption and the economy which causes to stop the dizzying pace of technological changes (all because of a small nail).
So, what awaits us in the near future? Since the days of coming down from the trees and using tools to find food, technology has developed constantly. Sometimes at a dizzying pace (Greek and Roman times) and sometimes at low rates. Now, we are probably at the peak of the current wave, but over the coming decades the race for technology will moderate. You’ll still expect intelligent robots, infinite computing power (in today’s terms) and gene manipulation but not as soon as you thought (or at least than I thought).
HE