Ten Years in the Future

We know that what we will need to know ten years from now isn't even known now, in terms of point of use technologies.

Fundamental technologies will be same body of knowledge- but their % of value add will be low if not commodity in the ecopnomy of the future. Steel used to be a main cost component of the car. today, the largest cost component is employee health insurance.

Urban school education, graduation, and survival rates are appalling- sorry, no made up statistics to share. Frankly, even though we lived in great school districts we decided to home school as the teaching targeted the bottom of the curve, not even the average, and gifted classes don't start until grade X...

The current educational system is a money pit at all levels- and the "object of the act" seems to be more about money into bureaucracies than to providing students with exceptional abilities.

There are some really dreary syllabi and teachers out there.

But knowledge is more than recitation and facts. Books are great repositories but shrinking in relevance for the current generation as they find all things online.

How do we create a means of certifying "capability" in people that used to be implied by the possession of a high school diploma, College degree, or journeymens card?

Could "masters" of certain fields teach apprentices their craft and create jorurney men using online and hands on technologies rather than classroom academies?

At somepoint, either the folks with the degrees (online or not) can either do it or they can't... As we see on this forum all the time people claiming to be engineers or techs can't even set up the math problem...

Nice tip on the kindle...

milo

Your point about bureaucracies is well made. They grow and grow and contribute nothing. I wish I could remember the comment made by Dr. McCoy about bureaucracies. Something about the bureaucratic mentality about being the only constant in the universe. Oh well. I once quit a job that I really liked because of the constant increase in the amount of government paperwork I had to file to stay legal. It's horrible and no end in sight. But our country can't survive filling out each others paper work. Somebody has got to make something.

Early education of young children in the modern urban age, is a hell of a challenge.

I was lucky in that both my parents had Masters Degrees. Books were common in the house. World Book showed how to make atom bombs.

As some of you complain about the engineering life, my parents complained about the academic life teaching.

Mom had a degree in Home Economics and Library Science.

Dad had a degree in Speech and Drama, and was the first in his family to go to college.

Back in the day kids went to school, and when there was an area of important knowledge to be taught to the child, a teacher might very well call the "Mother", and say, "Teach your kid to count to ten."

- this happened in my case.

I have to say that you can go on all day, day in and day out, but in my opinion supervision and consultations with teachers by the mother of the children, is a very big deal.

Even here and know, I cannot teach you things that I don't know.

Your parents don't teach you what you need to know, but what they know.

Personally I feel that changes in the US Culture, where it has come to pass that both Mom and Dad are pressured to work by the bills, the balance of private tutoring by Mom, and Public Schooling is far off kilter.

(I'm a man, and early in my daughter's life I was the primary caregiver and was for a period basically "Mom".)

Really a home ought to be simply a comfortable school.

There are an awful lot of kids whose home is no more than a closet from what I can tell.

P.S. I question your statistic of only 43 percent go to school now. Please clarify that statistic by age or other factors. Are you saying 57 percent are Home Schooled, or what exactly?

Dad had a degree in Speech and Drama, and was the first in his family to go to college.

My dad had the same qualifications but was a life long drug addict (War wounds, Pharmaceuticals). He really needed them, he thought. Alternative medicine was a taboo but it would have helped him, in hind site. If any doctor would have hair longer than 1/8 of an inch he would refuse treatment, kind of a guy.

He was a bloody Nazi and when he died I forgave him, because he did not know what he was doing. We know now and can not do Effing all about it. This all reminds me of something and it is an engineers site any way, so, I better leave it at that.

Good to talk to you Trans, see Ya's, Ky.

I'm thinking that ten years in the future, at current time scales, is comparable to 100 years in the future in 1900. In 1900 Cyrus McCormick and Orville Wright, with their nonsense, peacefully put every subsistence farmer and work horse out of business, they just didn't know it yet. In 1970, Sea-Land and Sea-Train, peacefully put the Northeastern US industrial corridor out of business (drive through Youngstown); and we're still coming to grips with it. I think my little Kindle, or something like it, is fixing to replace the traditional educational system (making school busses as unnecessary ten years from now as draft horses). I made up the 43% attendance statistic (95% of statistics are made up on the spot), but I suppose there is a group studying the situation in Washington. I've been fortunate to have been able to make a living in traditional ways, as in-house engineering talent for some big companies dissolved into bankruptcy and no longer on the landscape. Now I work in Daniel Pink's 'Free Agent Nation.' If a company needs me for a specific purpose, I get on a plane in Austin, go do a mission, and go back home. I don't like living in snow. If I need to manufacture something, I'll draw it up and put it out to MFG.com; Fedex will soon bring it to my customer. I'm wondering what health care will look like ten years out (it seems economically unsustainable right now); how we will manage without large cities (who have more outflow than inflow each day). What other future thoughts are out there?

It is easy to learn math, physics, grammar, or geography from books...or in the twenty-first century, the internet. However, schools teach far more than that. You cannot learn social skills on the internet; that comes only from experience. While schoolyard bullies are an unfortunate reality of life, it is because they exist that we learn to deal with difficult adults, and hopefully we learn not to BE difficult adults. Additionally, schools teach sports, encouraging physical fitness. I never liked dodgeball, but at least I was active.

Without schools we would all become smart, pudgy, antisocial jerks. Of course, this is an engineering forum, so most of us are already like that...but thank goodness for non-engineers, am I right?

but thank goodness for non-engineers, am I right?

I agree. When I left school in 1968 I had practically no survival skills. The being out there thing was not taught only governed and implemented. Most of us had to make up our own rules. This has interrupted my further education imminently and it took years to get back to wanting to learn about things that really interested me.

What I know now is mostly very specialized but still in different areas of expertise. I suck brains as a hobby (The balloon thread) and am an active artist. Boredom is not on my pallet.

My interests are generated by shear wanting or needing to know. If only I had better teachers back then I would have loved it. Going to school was sometimes like going to a dentist, back then, every bloody day! This is back in Germany were they have this great sense of humor.

The kids of today are just like me back then, except that the choice of spending your time has been thrown wide open. More irritation than education for my taste.

Thank goodness for the engineers other wise I would have nobody to ask!

Good to be here, Ky.

xstek99

Good you posted this.

I have bad news for some. I think in ten years time forgetting and forgiving will be the main stream intellectual pursuit and not learning and education. Not a bad thing if it would all come back to "normal schools" were peace would be the most important subject to teach. A masters in reconciliation will be more worth than to know how to change a spark plug or split an atom.

Peace and health care, excluding the multinational drug dealers. The Chinese way back then had a health system were, if some one got sick, the doctor received less pay. Prevention was the name of the game and doctors would make sure that no one got sick in the first place.

It is just completely the other way around. Nowadays they invent diseases to make money out of paranoid potential swine flu victims. Shame, shame, shame. We will have to all change our diet and not only our food intake but have to control other "nourishment's" as well.

I am sad to report that if something major doesn't happen soon, we will all be doomed and end up like other degenerated societies before us. Not looking good on any front, not only the educational.

I hope I am wrong, Ky.

I think health care is ripe for change in ten years, going to a preventive rather than palliative mode. A growing statistic in hospital is iatrogenic, a new word for death or disease caused by medical treatment (correct or mistaken). My Chinese doctor feels for my seven (?) pulses, looks for the 'i' and the 'q'i', we have some tea...this is a highly subjective approach, non-standard, maybe effective, maybe not. Could this diagnostic be done by an instrument connected to my usb port? Could I monitor myself every day, and send trend info to a national clearinghouse? We are the engineers, one of whom will make this tool available.

And our new member identifies yet another "futuristic" thread topic on Health care for potential posting on the biotech biomed forum...

You are so right on the Disease caused by medical treatment point. Earlier this year I took my father in for two surgeries, scheduled infuriatingly a day apart.

The surgeons were emphatic that getting him out of the hospital to his home would SIGNIFICANTLY reduce his chances of picking up a hospital sourced infection/complications that they wanted no part of. When the Dr's tell you the Hospital is the probable cause...

Oh, and Dad is fine after the surgeries, no 'complications.'

milo

I've entered a proposal in Obama's contest for educational system repair to provide each student a kindle with his curriculum loaded; he can write blue books and test as he goes. What should we provide on the curriculum?