On top down rule making and standardization
of supply
Sunday Oct 26th, 2008
(under edit)
Comparison between economic theory and
educational theory
The current economic melt
down has exposed the notion that one group of people should be those
who own and decide what to supply and the rest should not complain when
things are broken. This notion is not the essence of American
notions of liberty, individual responsibilities and freedoms.
The concept of freedom must be considered within the complementary
notion of responsibility. It is this notion of individual
responsibility where the distinction between demand side theory and
supply side theory is most acute. The demand side works well only
when each individual is capable of a high degree of
responsibility. If the level of individual responsibility breaks
down, the demand side will not function. The system must then be
controlled by an elite group that owns most of the wealth and
determines what is to be supplied.
Supply side economics is often justified based on
the notion that the individuals are not full capable of knowing what is
wanted. The suppliers must use advertising to show the
individual what should be acquired. A similar situation exists
with supply side information and demand side
information practices.
The economic system will be sorted out during the next presidential
administration. I feel that the educational system will be
exposed as having most of the same type of problems we now recognize
as having rotted the foundations of the economic system. It
will thus be necessary to have a philosophical basis for rebuilding the
educational system from the ground up.
Standardization and multiple choice
testing
Standardization through the use of multiple choice testing has been
opposed based on principled analysis. Two flaws are
identified. The first is that each student needs to select his or
her own knowledge base in mathematics.
If the selection occurs at the comprehension level, then standardized
skill measurement may reflect in
some but not all cases the quality of the student's
understanding. That part of measurement not aligned with
comprehension leads to biases, and these biases support the supply side
systemic requirements for rule following.
The second flaws is that multiple choice testing
is biased towards certain types of good test takers, often individuals
who learn how to guess the answer based on very surface clues.
The example of natural language
control in France in the 1800s
The French Academy was organized in 1786 as an organ of government,
with an expressed intention. This intention was to stop the drift
of natural language semantics. The French Academy is now considered to
be the best example of a top down imposition of control on a complex
system. The consequences were predictable.
The standardization of top down upper
ontology by e-Government (2000-2008)
The refocus of the Clinton era e-Government to the W. Bush era
e-Government funding shifted from citizen centric to lines of business
focus, see second school position on top down upper ontology and
AI. This shift was from a demand side view of government, where
the citizen in the center of government, to a supply side view of
government, where the businesses collectively define the only means by
which the govenment may be suplied by business. The Resilience
Project White Paper discusses this history in a complete way and
suggests a means to fund the first year budget for a National Bridge
between High School and College Infrastructure.
The flaw in all top down
standardization regimes
The open but closed solution seen in
applied semiotics
A comparison to formal languages like
geometry
The open but close paradigm and the
science of natural language
Linguistic deep structure, as seen by
Whorp, Nomsky, and Adi
Stratification is a means to overcome the flaw in top down
standardization regimes