This experiment is being performed as we speak. Unfortunately, most of the interesting parts are being conducted in Far Eastern languages. China now has a middle class approx. the same size as the U.S. and the E.U. -- approx. 300M people. But China is graduating 5-10x the number of engineers that the U.S./E.U. are. We can argue about the quality, but there are one heck of a lot of intelligent people in a population of 1.3-1.6 billion. The _only_ thing the U.S. has going for it right now are its demographics: the U.S. population is still growing, while that of the E.U. is not being replaced, and the Chinese demographics are going to turn completely upside down in 2020. Whatever problem the US/EU is going to have with a graying population is going to be magnified enormously in China, as its "one child policy" becomes "one child to support large numbers of retirees" policy. Too bad that political scientists can't solve this equation; they don't know a polynomial from an exponential. (Supposedly true story from the 1980's debate on "Star Wars": one of the scientists testified that some number needed to be 10^20 instead of 10^10; one of the politicians said "we're half way there, then!".) At 11:47 AM 7/31/2012, Dan Asimov wrote:
I totally agree that, instead of debating the best way to teach math, many educationa experiments need to be performed. Perhaps none so radical that they risk leaving the students virtually without the knowledge to be conveyed. And with large enough samples that accidents of who's teaching what won't noticeable affect results.
--Dan
On 2012-07-31, at 9:15 AM, Eugene Salamin wrote:
I'd like to see the same principle applied to grades K-12: school A uses method A, school B uses method B, etc. But instead of making the children be guinea pigs, families get to freely choose schools. And, the selection of different methods is not dictated by the educational establishment and teachers unions.