Hello Ed,

let me intertwine my thoughts into your message, since this is the new Internet
way of communicating (the virtual conversation with a time lag)

I read with much interest your presentation given to the state of Indiana. I
appreciated its great clarity, which makes it readable and its ideas absorbable
quickly.

Yesterday was another fun day during which I could put into practice many of my
favorite ideas:

I had my kids. I have them every other week end : four boys, 14, 12 and twice 8.
But only the twins were available to come with me, the other two had various
parties to attend. So I thought : oh well the yin yang principle says : In every
idea, concept, representation, situation, or fact, there lurks its contrary
somewhere, more or less hidden, and this contrary reinforces the first part. A
young french judo champion, with a marvellous name, Gabrielle Deflorenne, met on
the TGV last May reminded me of that. She told me that she once in a while would
fight with David Douillet. I said : "But come on, how you can fight with D.
Douillet ?", and she answered : "N'oubliez pas, le judo consiste à utiliser la
force de son adversaire..." (Don't forget in judo you use your opponent's
strength...) Well so I thought OK I'll take advantage of this and give all my
attention to the twins. They often don't get first attention because of the two
brothers before them.

Secondly, I've this principle of every day doing one new thing selected more or
less at random. So I decided to take them to visit the château of Blois, about
150 miles from where they live as well as from where I live. We arrived in Blois
around 2 o'clock in the afternoon (the noon meal was just chocolate tablets
purchased in a grocery store on the way - but please don't tell their mother).

Blois château is marvellous, located on a hill slope above the old medieval
city, overlooking the river, at the beginning of the Val de Loire. It was
essentially started by Louis XII (the second husband of Anne de Bretagne after
Charles VIII to make sure Brittany would remain solidly tied to the kingdom of
France). We are then at the end of the XVth century, that began with Johann of
Arc, that helped end the Guerre de Cent Ans, that was started because the sons of
Philippe Le Bel had no descent and the king of England not satisfied to have
had, almost two hundred years before, our queen, claimed our kingdom as well.

A second part of the castle, its most famous with a beautiful outside stair
shaft, was built by François 1er and Catherine de Medicis, and a third part
strangely enough results from the destruction by Mansart of a section of the
Louis XII buildings to put instead a XVIIth century style stodgy aisle. This was
by order of Gaston d'Orleans, brother of Louis XIII, that thought he would
become king, but then oops Anne d'Autriche and Louis XIII (we are assured) had a
son.

My idea was that the children would fill up their minds with images and facts
that would feed their thinking for many years : it was a success beyond my
expectation.

The guide was so interesting that the visit was a great experience, like a
spiritual experience I had some years ago visiting a cistercian abbey near Aix
en Provence, with the woman I loved, when the guide at the end of the visit
began to sing gregorian songs in the chapel.

We begin the Blois château visit : the guide explains that after the French
Revolution the state authorities realised the architectural and artistic
heritage needed to be preserved. This spurred the launching of Les Monuments
Historiques, by Prosper Mérimée. The renovation of the Blois château was
attributed to a Felix Duban. The castle was in such a state of dereliction that
Duban had to reinvent many things. The epoch being romantic (Hugo, Scott, Dumas)
he decorated many rooms with dark colors, halberds and such like, and others
with what is called in another context an artist view. Alexandre Dumas visiting
Catherine de Medicis study and being so intrigued by the funny contraptions to
show/hide books decided this was her "poison room", and he wrote this in a book,
"La Reine Margot", the subject of which is the religious wars of the end of the
XVIth century in France : the fight between the protestants (conceptuals, free,
rich) and the catholics (accumulative, interested in showy riches, less
entrepreneurs). I'm used to telling my students "Commerce does not mean Money
(that's the accumulative view), it means Exchange (that's the more conceptual
view)". There is much to develop on here, but that's another subject.

The guide explained that it is now realised that Dumas (a fourth negro by the
way - a fact that has always disturbed the french bourgeois - they don't always
understand things these chaps ! ; yesterday I was talking to a bourgeois
catholic, and she was telling me she is friends with protestants and "even with
jews" ; I said : "What you say is dangerous" ; she said : "Why ? because of
islam ?" ; and I thought : "Oh well, shoot, after all why bother explain...".
Even an ex-Prime Minister of France once made a similar blunder) that Dumas was
a novel writer and not an historian and that the funny book cabinets which
protected the books and made them difficult to reach were most probably intended
to be the representation of the humanistic idea that knowledge requires effort
to reach.

I asked : "Information or ideas ?" She said : "Why ?". I said : "Because for
information this is over." "Why ?" "Because of Internet." And I briefly
expounded my views.

Some members of the group of visitors mildly miffed that there seemed to be a
separate conversation taking place with the guide, said : "But on Internet you
have to sort out all the good from the trash." "In books and newspapers too." I
said.

We proceeded - each of us in conference with our thoughts (Diderot used to call
his : my tarts).

We reached the room where the Duc de Guise, the chief of the catholic party was
murdered by order of Henri III, because he was so powerful that he threatened
the throne. The guide asked the audience with much conviction : "And you know if
Henri III had died - and he had no kids, he was homosexual - who was to succeed
him ?"

Théophile, much interested by the visit, as well as by the group dynamic,
blurted out : "His cousin !", while Vivien was contemplating a painting of Henri
IV entering Paris.
- Yes, said the guide, and it could have been Henri de Guise, or Henri de
Navarre. But Henri de Navarre was protestant...

Anyway with the death of Henri de Guise, the head as I said of the catholics,
and, the year after, with the assassination of Henri III himself because at
Blois he had also ordered the death of Guise's brother, a cardinal, to be on the
safe side... Henri de Navarre became Henri IV.

That's then that accepting to become a catholic he said : "Paris vaut bien une
messe" (Paris is well worth a mass).

I think I reached my goal of giving the kids food for thought, i.e., like I
said, food for future pattern recognition, and foreseeing.


>
> Let me respond with some thoughts and questions. I am working on this issue
> of education, because it is a very serious matter here in the states. A
> tremendous failure pf primary education and very slow, minimal improvements.
>
> Let me give you some numbers: About 25% of all children entering high school
> will not finish. Of the remaining students, only about 60% will go on to
> some post-secondary education (or the military). The 40% or so that only
> graduate from high school have minimal skills. They can only claim jobs at
> fast food restaurants. The market value of their skill sets is about $5.50
> to $7.00 per hour.
>
> Life is not all positive for high school graduates who go on to post
> secondary school. About 60% of these young people will not graduate from a
> four year college. As many as 30% need remedial education in their first
> year of college.
>
> To give you some sense of this, I am enclosing a presentation I made to the
> Indiana Economic  Development group. I point out that if you view our
> education system :as a system" (a perspective that few take), you can easily
> identify major imbalances. Too few people with enough skills.
>
> Your ideas encourage me to argue for a far more radical transformation of
> primary (ages 7 through 14) and secondary (ages 15 through 18) education in
> this country.

Yes, I agree. We cannot avoid studying Montessori, Neill, Russell, Freinet and a
few other's ideas.

In the french system, the kindergarten is already enterely Montessori oriented.
But the subsequent cycles (primary, and secondary) are still based mostly on
passive accumulative knowledge, and not much on personality development.

And kids don't learn how to learn, etc.

>
> I assume you agree that first things first: children must have some basic
> intellectual tools: the ability to read and do basic math.

Sure.

>How do you see
> the acquisition of these skills? What works best?

For multiplication : I use candies ; to show prime numbers : you cannot arrange
the candies in rectangles ; and numbers you can arrange in rectangles they can
be computed as results of multiplication, etc.


>I assume some structured
> courses are critically important in these early years.

Definitely. And structured in the sense of a well defined goal, but with
flexibility in the path the kids are allowed to follow.

>(As students grow
> older, structure, as you suggest, becomes more intrusive, less productive.)
>
> I am also assuming that basic reading skills need to be acquired by age 10.

Oh yes.

> What sensible benchmark is appropriate in math: everyone with basic algebra
> by age 14?

Something like that. And let's not forget some geometry.

With my kids, when they were young I made all sorts of devices with water,
spinning stuff, elastics, etc.

And we also told them thousands of tales and fairy tales. And we stressed the
concrete games : ball games, the kid's parc at the Jardin du Luxembourg...

And always this principle : the kids learn much more than they know and that we
think ; but we MUST not push them, we only HAVE to give them the opportunity to
see new things, new situations, new facts, listen to conversations, etc. ; it is
amazing how much they actually absorb for later usage... My schoolmaster when I
was 8 once told my mum that I was a nive fellow but irremediably dumb, and that
was not much that could be done about it... (I intend to dedicate to him my
forthcoming book on education :-)   )


>
> While these basic skills are mastered, other cognitive skills can be
> developed. These skills are what you call "the capacity to feel, and to
> recognize shapes. Then to foresee. Then to express."
>
> How should these skills be acquired? What type of teacher skills are
> required?

Teachers that love kids, love humankind, love themselves (let's give them
Fromm).

>
> In my research, I have learned that one of the major failings in US
> education has been the relatively low skill levels of teachers. The basic
> finding: if you want to improve student performance quickly, work on teacher
> skills first.

Sure. That's a problem. In France too.

>
> That makes sense to me...so is one implication of your new model of
> education that we need to undertake major re-engineering ("re-skilling") of
> teachers?
>
> And what is your opinion about class size. This is another critical issue in
> the US. Florida voters, in November, passed a state constitutional amendment
> mandating smaller class sizes. 18 students for every teacher in primary
> school. An average of 25 to 1 in high school.

These numbers seem OK to me. Of course less is even better, but one has to be
realistic : every one cannot have a private tutor.

>
> The evidence suggest that more important than class size is school size.

Very interesting remark...

>The
> Bill Gates Foundation has supported some promising experiments in Chicago to
> divide large high schools (some of them have 3,000 to 5,000 children in
> them) into smaller units. When reading about this, I was reminded of our
> work with GE in Louisville. I remember a factory manager in the refrigerator
> plant telling me that GE want to keep the size of each factory to no more
> than 1,800 workers.

:-)

>Managing an organization over that size made
> improvements simply too difficult.

Was he the guy with a thick Tennessee accent ?

>
> And now the Internet. When you have a chance, look at http://www.edo.umn.edu
>
> This is an on-line set of courses managed by the University of Minnesota.
> The target market is economic developers. They have a free course you can
> take on business expansion and retention.
> (http://www.edo.umn.edu/online.html)
>
> Spend a few minutes with it. The basic platform is something called Web CT,

I know Web CT, and other platforms (Ganesha for instance, in France).

But platforms, in my (a bit excessive) view, are as relevant to the question as
the color of the walls in a university. What matters in the content, and the
people delivering the content.

By the way I dislike the idea of students being perpetually watched over their
shoulders by the "tutor monitoring" tools of these platforms. I believe it is
counter-productive. (It belongs to the general "reptilian behavior"
classification of human interaction, and this leads to disasters. A beautiful
book on reptilian behavior is "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf ?")


> I think.
>
> I have access to this platform at the University of Oklahoma, where I teach.
> I'm now thinking about experimenting with some courses similar to the ones
> you find on the Minnesota site.
>
> I am now building a new web site to offer these courses to economic
> development professionals.
>
> I am also looking into a web conferencing platform
> (http://www.raindance.com/). I think I will go ahead and launch a couple of
> hour long seminars using this platform and see how I do. (I am enclosing
> their proposal to me, so you can review it.)


I'll look at all this.

>
> In short, I think I need direct experience with e-Learning, because, in my
> view, it is one way to inject innovation into an area (primary and secondary
> education) where unions and other rigid structures have resisted innovation
> for far too long.

With three friends here we are starting a publishing house of "e-learning"
courses and material. I'll talk to you more about it as it develops.

>
> As you can see, our correspondence energizes my thinking. I look forward to
> your thoughts.
>
> Best wishes,

The same to you,

André

>
> Ed
>