Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • May 7, 2021 4:53 PM

@ k12teacher, ALL,

Australia is doing, which is not education as such but training. And the problem with training, as Bruce sees, is that you may be training them for a world which won’t exist in 10-20 years.

You’ve not indicated the difference between education and training, many believe it is the same thing, and the reason for training not education which is “lowest common denominator inclusion”.

For those that are unaware of the difference between education and training it generally is more subtle the younger the cohort you have to work with.

Training is sometimes called “Learning by rule/rote”[1] it is a mechanical rather than an intellectual process. Education is a bit more subtle[2] but enables a student to ask a question not of the teacher but of their own knowledge and refrence material available to them. It should be the point where the teacher guides the learner rather than dictates to them. It is in effect the “spring board” from which a student starts to become self teaching, with the teacher just smoothing the way.

The real problem is that those most capable of self teaching are also those with inquisitive and aquisitive minds. Unfortunately such minds unless kept on course tend to spin off into other thoughts. The easiest way to do this is in effect to hold them back and make them bord.

That is the teaching to the lowest common denominator is actually more harmfull to society than leaving them behind.

For a number of years now “streaming” has been a very dirty and non PC word. Why is something I don’t propose to go into as those who have will know why. Likewise is the notion that children should not be competitive (something a moments thought will tell you evolution demands of us).

The best way to teach is to have a group of students who are on very nearly the same ability level and introduce a strong sense of competitiveness, as individuals as groups and as teams. They don’t get bored and they tend to actually encorage each other.

Unfortunatly getting students into near equivalent abilities tends to be resource intensive as it causes smaller groups in any age range, it also need better than current average teaching. Apparently this need for resources and abilities is very undisirable with most politicians because they have what they consider better use for them… And lets be honest what politician realy wants a population that can both think and reason? After all that just makes their job of misleading you the public more difficult.

But there is another problem, to be educated requires that you be able to build knowledge from fundementals. Thus if something changes you have the resiliance to change with it. Employers who influance educators realy do not want you knowing the fundementals, they want you to only know what is usefull to them.

One thing I keep coming up against is students who have been “Trained to the tools” thus when the tool changes or gets replaced with something else they are like a drowning person with no rock to stand upon. Someone who knows the fundementals and how to use them to build up from there will not drown, they will simply wade their way to new ground.

As part of my education I was taught the fundementals of “tool making” thus if I need to, and occasionaly I do, I will take an existing tool such as a screwdriver and work it into a different tool purpose made for a specific job such as to work not with standard “Sloted Cheese Head fastenings” but those anoying security fastenings.

Likewise I know how to make rudimentry and imprecise electrical instruments and calibrate them so that I can test more complex electronic instruments thus “pull myself up by my bootstraps” to making very precise and quite complex equipment. I’ve had to do this quite frequently when there is no suitable test equipment made. This is what experimental physicists do all the time as do other hard science researchers. You are only as good as the tools you can make.

Likewise sodtware if you know and understand various fundementls such as abstract data objects and the basic operators, then you care not what language you are presented with or the tool chain you get given you can move forward. Again you can use one language such as a simple interpreter to build your own tool chain for a compiler etc.

It might be great that you can wizz out applications for mobile phones in a language like Java, but as we know languages come and go all the time as do the IDE’s that come with them. At some point java will become the Fortran of it’s time or worse the Cobal… Will you be able to just shrug and pick up a new language?

For my sins I’ve learnt and forgotton more assembly languages than most people half my age could even name. Did I suffer a crisis when switching? NO I fairly quickly learnt to write assembler in a language independent way thus with a built up library of such code I could more or less hit the ground running and be productive. Even I would be the first to admit the code would not be efficient, but then 999 times out of a thousand it does not matter an iota. You get code up and running then profile it, where there are issues you flick through the manual to find more processor specific instructions, invariably you pick up a few tips and tricks along the way that you file for future use.

Sometimes you do get a few oddities that can throw you. One such is the use of branches and jumps. Usually you “branch on condition met” but some processors will only branch over a “jump to address” thus you have to think about branching when the required condition is not met. It’s easy to “sprain a tired brain” when you do such things 😉

I’ve seen some programmers get comoleatly thrown by this, and my advice to them is “draw up a table of equivalents” which sometimes they can not do because they’ve not got the fundementals down right…

[1] Rote learning is often defined as the memorization of information based on repetition, it can also be called learning by “sitting next to Nellie”. Actually no inteligent thought is required as in effect you are memorising facts or rules, both of which computers are better at than humans.

The two examples nearly every one is aware of, of “learning by rote” are the alphabet and numbers, from when very young. It is used to get a very basic foundation in place of a minimum level on which other lessons can be built. Slightly more complicated, and at a level of education above that includes addition and multiplication tables and spelling words by rules. Less obvious is that learning to add, subtract, multiply and divide are also “learning by rote” this time however it’s not the facts in the tables but the rules by which you do the operations. When pupils get older and advance to the high-school level, learning by rote decreases, even though basic facts for the likes of science such as the chemical elements and their respective numbers and groups will stll need to be memorized by rote. One charecteristic of learning by rote that appears to have been forgoton by many in recent times is “memorising by longhand”. If I give you a printed page, whilst it is easy for me, it takes a pupil about five times longer to get into their memory, than by making them write it out longhand, for some reason not well explained it appears most brains still work on the “manual skills” learning of our pre human ancestors.

[2] Education kind of starts badly for most, because they do not have the skills for it, and we are uncertain as to how to teach them and just cross our fingers and hope students learn it by osmosis or similar. Put simply Education is learning in a very different way, where you are presented with information often in the writen form, you read it, analyze it and draw conclusions from it, based on earlier learning. This requires that a student has at least rudimentry logic skills and can understand extensible systems when presented with them. Thus not only do they need logic they need the equivalent of symbolic representation or algebra. For instance in theory polynomials should be no harder to understand than writing down large numbers, but few students in their teens appear to be able to grasp the fact, and it can be more painfull than watching five year olds learning how to write large numbers. Knowing polynomials is a prerequisite for learning how to work effectively in other number bases and how to learn more advanced mathmatics such as series and certain forms of matrix usage. Often though they get taught the other way around… As for set theory which effectively underpins maths, and several other subjects, it appears to be “pot luck” if you ever get taught it.