Over the years, various Scragged articles have discussed
strategies for
parents who
desire to educate their children to the maximum extent possible.
There have always been successful people who largely educated
themselves
using free resources. For most of the
modern
era, though, most Americans have expected our taxpayer-funded public
schools to teach our children what they need to know to become
taxpaying adults.
It's
become increasingly clear that public education isn't working; to raise
successful
children today, parents need to be much more involved in their child's
education than perhaps even their parents were.
Fortunately, there are a great many examples of effective
educational methods; the earlier articles in this series explored ways
parents
educated children in the past. We then realized that from a
parent's point of view the purpose of education is to maximize the
probability that the family will survive in the long term.
The
question then became, how best should a parent educate a
child? The
basic goals
of education are to teach a child how
to learn so as to increase the
probability that the child will be able to learn whatever is needed
for survival as the future unfolds - which by definition cannot be
foreseen by anyone. Circumstances are changing more rapidly
now than in the past which increases the importance of being able to
acquire unexpected knowledge as things come up.
Although parents used to be able to influence the way their children
were taught at neighborhood schools, local voters have lost more and
more control over schools as power has drifted to the state and
local governments. Parental efforts to improve local schools
are generally futile. Rich parents can either buy homes in
areas
which
already have good schools or send their kids to very expensive private
schools.
For middle class parents who can't afford either of
these
measures, homeschooling may be the only way to give a child a
high-quality
education. This article discusses some free resources which
make it possible for
parents who are willing to put in the time needed to make sure that
their children stay focused on the tasks at hand to have confidence
that their children will have educations that are second to none.
There are so many free educational resources that Google is the only
way to keep up; it's impossible to create an accurate and
comprehensive list because it would be out-of-date as soon as it was
published. That's not the point of supplying the following
information: it's purpose is to give you confidence that you
can
find whatever you need for any sort of education including
resources you didn't even imagine.
It's important to emphasize that you, the parent, do not have
to acquire the knowledge yourself because the computer asks questions
and repeats material as needed. You merely have to make sure
that the child is focusing on the task at hand instead of straying off
into something more interesting. That said, however, there's
no better way to make sure your child really understands than to set
him or her the challenge of explaining it to you.
Beyond High School
The Economist told us that recent progress in
artificial intelligence would
have profound effects on education.
In 2012 Mr Thrun founded an online-education startup called
Udacity, and Mr Ng co-founded another, called Coursera. That same
year Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology got together to form edX, a non-profit MOOC provider,
headed by Anant Agarwal, the head of MIT's
artificial-intelligence laboratory. Some thought that MOOCs would
replace traditional university teaching. The initial hype around
MOOCs has since died down somewhat (though millions of students
have taken online courses of some kind). But the MOOC boom
illustrated the enormous potential for delivering education
online, in bite-sized chunks.
All of these on-line ventures offer many college-level courses for
free. A curious student can use these
courses to
either supplement a standard curriculum or to take courses which are
completely outside the curriculum. Google can find these
knowledge
sources for you. Once you have the URL, you can find specific
courses
using
their search functions or
you can specify the site: Google keyword to restrict
Google to a specific site. We use this technique
when the site's own search doesn't work as well as Google's.
The courses offered by the start-ups listed in the Economist
are sponsored by various high-end universities. If you
think you might
want to go to one of these schools, take
several of their courses long before you apply so that you can prove to
them that you can handle the
load.
Hillsdale
College offers many free on-line courses; check out the
"Online Courses" button. Their course on the US Constitution should be of
particular interest to homeschoolers.
K-12
The broadest K-12 site we know is Khan
Academy.
The Subjects button in the upper left corner gives you an incomplete,
but quite impressive list. It covers mathematics from
beginner through
first-year college, science and engineering, computer programming, arts
and humanities, and economics and finance. If computers make
you nervous, you, too, could benefit from what Khan says about them.
The site is intended to help classroom teachers offload routine drill
to the computer so that they can coach students in areas of
difficulty. A teacher creates a teacher account, then
associates each
student account with the teacher's. The site sends a weekly
email
detaining each student's progress and the teacher can see achievement
levels for each student in every area the student has studied.
Each question offers a short video and a series of
hints. It's important to understand that the computer is very
patient. It will show the video and hints to the student as
often as necessary to achieve understanding. The rule should
be that the student must watch the video and look at all the hints
after each mistake. Mr. Khan believes that nobody can
concentrate on
new material for longer than 15 minutes at a time,
which is why the videos are short.
The music
section is very well done. It's a series of animated videos
which
play music to illustrate what they're trying to each. They
illustrate different key signatures, pitch, chords, and much else.
The computing section is important
because there are very few jobs that have absolutely no interaction
with computers. Jobs will require more and more interaction
with computers in the future, so it would be prudent for students to
learn at least the basics. If a student gets through
Khan's computer courses or needs a different point of view, switch to w3schools.
Their free courses
cover html, Java Script, and pretty much
everything else you need to write the front-end of a web site.
A serious student could attend Code
Camp. They assert that if a student spends
2,000 hours, which is a bit less than a man-year of full-time
work, on their lessons, they'll put the student in touch with several
nonprofit organizations who need web work done. The end
result will be that the student has a portfolio of working web sites to
show to a prospective employer as well as letters of recommendation
form the nonprofits. The theory is that being able to show
actual running web sites will make up for the fact that the student
doesn't have a degree from a university, and getting a job
debt-free without having had to pay tuition seems attractive.
Khan's official list leaves out several important
subjects such as grammar and cosmology that they offer and the
history section
isn't on the
list either. The key is that searching within an
educational site or using the site: URL to narrow a Google search
is just as important as searching to find the site in
the first place.
Brain
Pop offers a number of technical subjects and covers some
humanities areas.
Kingdom First Home School
lists
many resources
starting well before Kindergarten. Their site keeps growing,
which emphasizes that a single search isn't enough. You need
to search repeatedly to make sure you aren't missing something valuable
as each student's needs and interests change.
Miscellaneous
Students might not want to go all the way through these, but they
offer a sampling of topics. One never knows what might really
grab a
particular student's attention.
We've erred in the direction of just
listing topics in a somewhat random sampling, rather than reviewing
them. That's because
contents change fast and we don't have time to take all these
courses. We hope that our readers will comment on this
article as they gain combat experience.
Article about how mathematicians think.
The
basic thought processes behind mathematical research and
proofs are similar to computer programming, except that it's not
possible to develop a mathematical proof that a given computer program
is correct. That's why we keep finding bugs even in old
programs.
A visual introduction to machine learning. The
mathematics of letting computers learn to recognize, say, different
faces by showing them many labeled faces and hope they'll be able to
recognize a new picture of a known face haven't changed in a long
time. Facial recognition never worked very well
because we grossly
underestimated the volume of training data that would be
needed to achieve acceptable performance. Now
that Facebook and other apps are chock full of labeled
pictures of people, we have enough data so that computers can not only
learn to identify faces, they can also shed light on what facial
features are most helpful in identifying them.
An introduction to Big Data. Any data set
containing billions of training cases is by definition Big
Data. Even as computers have gotten cheaper and disk storage
is "almost" free, such data sets require special techniques to minimize
storage costs and maximize the speed or examining all the
data. That's what Big Data is all about - having enough
data to learn something useful and being able to read it fast enough to
get answers when you need them.
Inside a Jet Engine. This is a
very good animation of what's going on when your pilot fires up the
engines to get you into the air. The "CLIENT WORK" button on
that page takes you to other animations. If a picture is
worth 1,000 words, these picture are worth a lot.
Scientific images from the Smithsonian. Our
"Nation's Attic" has a huge number of exhibits. They are
trying to make as much of their information Internet-friendly as
they can.
Prof. Feynman was one of the most famous physics lecturers
ever. His
talks are online. They didn't have
video recording in his day, so you'll see transcriptions of his talks
and his diagrams. Bill Gates once said that if these lectures
had been available to him before he founded Microsoft, he'd have
probably become a physicist. The question of whether the
world would have been better off if we'd had another physicist
instead of Microsoft is left
as an exercise for the student.
Open Course Library.
Users can adapt and
distribute content under a Creative Commons license and download,
remix, or teach using them. All content is stored in Google
docs
making it easy to access, browse, and download. There's no
point in
listing what they have because it keeps growing. They strive
to give educators access to high-quality course material which you
can adapt to your needs. An ounce of cut and paste is worth
a pound of keystrokes, so it's a great place to start.
Free College Textbooks offered by Boundless
- the textbooks cover timeless college
subjects, such as
accounting, biology, chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless
reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its
resources, and that they expect the number of users to
grow. Again, you're free to cut, paste, and create what you
need.
Learning math without words. Students
learn in different ways,
so some might enjoy this alternative approach. In general,
the more different explanations students see, the more likely they are
to grasp the overall concept and the deeper their
understanding. In the old days, a subject was taught out of
whatever book the
school system chose, and if the book didn't resonate for a
particular student, too bad. Now, if a student isn't getting
it with Khan, you can find other resources which might click, and
vice versa.
A list of videos from Harvard Natural
Science education, with a
browseable catalog. Their
mission statement says, "We provide visual demonstrations for a wide
variety of topics to supplement lectures in physics, chemistry,
astronomy, and biology. Our lecture demonstrations have two important
purposes: to increase student understanding of the concepts
demonstrated, and to increase student enjoyment of class."
UC Berkeley has a lot of free
information. Search for Diamond for a course on
human anatomy, for
example. They say,
"Academic Earth was launched on the premise that everyone deserves
access to a world-class education. In 2009, we built the first
collection of free online college courses from the world¡¯s top
universities. The world of open education has exploded since then, so
today our curated lists of online courses are hand selected by our
staff to show you the very best offerings by subject area. We also
make sure there is something for everyone: whether you want to explore
a new topic or advance in your current field, we bring the amazing
world of academia to you for free."
A collection of animations prepared by a software company
under contract to
Harvard University, representing the best information
available
concerning what goes on inside a living cell. Among other
things, the
animation shows protein formation and the actions of a white blood
cell destroying invaders. This
is the short version with music; there
are three versions of the cell
show on
this
page as well as links to other animations. If you
click the "All
Media" button on the right side, you get links to all their
animations. The one labeled Extravasation is particularly
interesting; it shows how molecules that fight inflammation roll along
the inside of the blood vessels to a spot near an inflammation, then
they sneak through the walls of the blood vessel and find the injured
spot. It's been suggested that cancers spread
(metastasize?) by zooming around
in the blood stream and then slipping through the walls when they get
to a likely spot, but nobody is certain.
This site has other videos which animate living cells.
MIT Open Courseware
. The site claims that every MIT course is
available online
for free. You can get an MIT education at
no
cost. If you
want the MIT credential, however, you have to pay
them. They
offer verifiable credit for some of their edX courses for a small fee
per course, though, so credentials don't cost as much as
you might think. If
you might want to go to MIT, it would be a good idea to take
some of their courses first so you can prove you can handle the load.
Video showing how babies
develop in the womb. It's
amazing what can be
photographed now and even more amazing what people post on the web for
all to see.
Converting Your Knowledge Into A College Credential
In a perfect world, once you'd taken all the appropriate
online
courses, you'd be able to walk into a prospective employer's office and
have your knowledge appreciated and properly rewarded.
In the
real world, of course, this doesn't work. Precious few
employers
have the resources and intelligence to evaluate what you actually know;
they take the lazy way out by demanding a credential, on the
increasingly false assumption that a college degree is proof of
knowledge. Someday this may change but there's no telling
when.
So
unless you intend to enter entrepreneurship without benefit of diploma
like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, there is still no substitute for an
accredited degree, the bigger the name the better. With Ivy
League
rejection rates at record levels, though, how can this be accomplished?
It turns out that there are a few backdoors that can open for
aggressive users of online resources.
1) Go either to https://www.edx.org/ (East Coast) or to
https://www.coursera.org/ (West Coast) and take some high-end courses
in mathematics, computer science, biology, chemistry, or any other
really hard subject applicable to the degree you're after.
You can get a certificate saying you
completed the course for a few dollars. Having MIT or
Stanford University courses in your resume will be a useful supplement
to your test scores because it proves that you can do high-end
college-level work.
2) Go to the college web site and look for papers written by the
professors. Find a paper that interests you and send the
author
an email, "I really admired your paper on XX and would like to pursue
the YY possibility you described in the 'Further work' section
because I believe that we can show that ZZ is true, based on what
I learned online at [MIT / Stanford / whichever school you
chose]. How can I work with you?"
Instead of email, a truly determined student can go to the
college and camp outside his
office until he'll see you. Bring along a bag lunch and your
laptop to indicate
that you plan to stay forever, if need be. A peek at his
teaching schedule
may suggest when he'll be there.
It may take many tries, but if you can get a professor interested in
your ideas how to extend his work, he may write you a letter of
recommendation or even let you intern with him for a summer.
Recommendations from faculty make it easier to get in.
It helps to understand the academic food chain: professors get
raises, promotions, and tenure from
putting their names on wonderful papers their students write.
If you can show that you'll write brilliant papers to give him credit
with no work on his part, you're in.
Naturally, a top professor is not easy to gull. Do not email
the professor if you don't understand the paper or do not
honestly want to work on the next step in his research.
Although the probability of a "Yes" to any given email is small, you
must be fully prepared to follow up any "Yes" you receive.
Include
"I am a high school senior" or something similar and give your SAT
scores if you have them. GPA means little if he doesn't know
your school or you're home-schooled.
Professors get a lot of email from students hoping for graduate school
admission. Many students are not specific about
their interests or goals beyond having read a paper or two by that
professor. While it's flattering to have someone interested
in their work, most professors don't consider merely having read their
work
grounds for admission or any further interaction on the professor's
part.
Such students really must be coherent in describing what ideas
interested them, what questions they want to pursue, and
what line their investigation would take. Showing some
knowledge of the required equipment would be a plus.
Be
prepared for "That won't work because of Prof A's paper, but nice
try." That's nearly as good as acceptance because you've
started a dialog! You can read A's paper and get back to him
with, "You're right, but Prof A only covered possibility ZA from your
work. Isn't possibility ZB still open?" Be sure to
Google
possibility
ZB before you do that, you don't want a reputation for overlooking
the obvious.
Remember, he wants his name on the PhD thesis of a future Nobel Prize
winner without having to do much work. If you come across
like that, you're in.
And even
if you never do get a recommendation, poking around like this will
teach you
extremely valuable skills for learning whatever you have to learn as
things change.
The Bottom Line
Education is the key to long-term family survival, just as it
has been for centuries. As always, the child's parents are
the only ones who really care whether the child
learns
anything. In out welfare-riven society, unfortunately, only a
few
parents are wiling to exert much effort to make that happen,
and many of those who do care push sports instead of academics.
Parents who care about academics
and who are willing to get deeply involved,
however, can make it possible for their children to acquire a
first-class education at no monetary cost. As with everything
parental, of course, the big problem is persuading the children to
expend the effort.