Are Robots Coming to Get Us? (And If They Are ...?): Conclusion

So ... small world. Not long after I posted yesterday about the current fear of robots taking over, I paged through the March 5 issue of the New Yorker and found the cartoon you see sitting at the top of this page.

And one more little update: On Tuesday's Daily Show (which we stream the next day) the focus was on, well, sex-toy robots--apparently a booming industry. The reporter, the very talented Desi Lydic, took us to a place that designs and manufactures the devices (see image below). Funny and profoundly weird.

Anyway, yesterday I ended the post with a question about what we'll do when robots have taken all the jobs they can take.

And the answer to me is both simple and hard, both necessary and enormously expensive. And here it is: Invest heavily in public education.

(Not surprising idea--is it?--from a guy who taught in a public school for thirty years!)

Right now many (most?) of our schools are a mess. Many (Most?) are horribly underfunded--teachers overloaded--facilities crumbling--etc. All are at the mercy of voters--a ridiculous situation. (Why should you get to vote on whether or not your local school has any money?)

Most, too, are caught in a sticky spider's web of standardized testing. I've written here before that our older grandson, who just turned 13, has already taken more such tests than I did, K-Ph.D. It's insane. And we use the results from them to assess not just kids but teachers, schools, school districts, states. Yet many refuse to recognize that we test only those things that are relatively easy to measure--and those things often are, well, not all that important.

But we are inebriated by numbers. If it's got a number on it, we believe it (unless, of course, it contradicts a bias we have). So  for example, we read something like this: Only 34% of the 8th graders reached the level of "competence."

That's horrible! we think, perhaps never pausing to ask: What's on that test? What does "competence" even mean in this case? And hosts of other questions.

No, instead we wring our hands, sharpen the focus of the curriculum even more on the things that are easiest to measure, thereby denying kids even more the education we've promised them. The test becomes the curriculum, in other words. (Heard that before?)

So ... here's a pie-in-the-sky solution to all of this:

• Invest heavily in the schools--at a Pentagon level. All of our public schools.
• Make all of our school buildings attractive, technologically contemporary--places that kids would love to spend their days.
• Use tests only to help individual kids.
• Raise teachers' salaries significantly (this will attract to the profession some bright folks who now choose other professions).
• Hire employees (at all positions) who love kids, who love to learn, who are quick on their feet, who are devoted, who ... you know ...
• Diminish teachers' workloads Some years I taught as many as 200 students a day. Really. So ... how much attention does your kid get when he's/she's competing with 199 others?
• Flood the buildings with books and other learning materials.
• Broaden the curriculum. Kids should experience in school reading and writing and arithmetic, of course--but also history and psychology and literature and music and painting and sociology and sculpture and sciences of all sorts. The curriculum should be so rich, in fact, that kids go home every day feeling as satiated and happy as if they'd just eaten a superior cheesecake. (But with a next-day craving for more!)
• Etc.

So ... what will all this accomplish? It will prepare our students for ... whatever.. Things are changing rapidly in our world--technologically and otherwise. And the more you know, the better you can adapt to change. The less you know--the more narrow your education--the more likely it is that the torrents of change will drag you under. Drown you.

So ... robots, schmobots. They do what they're programmed to do. But let's quit treating our youngsters as if they're robots--narrowly programming them for narrow lives. We're boring the hell out of our youngsters, peppering them with pedantry, forcing them to look through the narrowest of life's lenses.