Education and IT
4th March 2011
Steve Sailer critiques Bill Gates.
For the last dozen years, I’ve listened to Bill Gates explain how to improve education. First, it was small learning communities (which he now says the Gates Foundation wasted $2 billion upon), then it was making everybody pass Algebra II to graduate from high school, then it was something else, now it’s giving the best teachers bigger classes (see Gates’s latest op-ed: “How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools”).
The weird thing is that the Way to Fix the Schools has basically never been, according to Gates, about the main way the rest of economy gets more productive — and also the one thing Bill Gates definitely knows a lot about: information technology.
And look: Steve agrees with me:
And yet, common sense says that information technology offers the main hope of us ever being able to afford on a mass scale the one educational tool that works more often than anything else, especially with math: individualized tutoring. It often doesn’t work, but over thousands of years it’s tended to work enough that that’s what rich people get for their kids. And it’s a lot more likely to work than the latest fad.