“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – William Arthur Ward

1. Our educational system is in need of a paradigm shift.
2. We have a shortage of truly great teachers.
3. Despite government regulations, our children ARE being “left behind”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As wonderful a step forward as public education was, it hasn’t kept up with all of the changes in the world around it. We still have the same basic emphasis in our schools – training one child to perform one job. In our present-day reality those simple jobs don’t exist. As new markets and technologies emerge, new jobs are created and people are needed to fill them. Some of the job skills that are deemed vital today were unimportant five years ago and every day more are added to the list. People must adapt to new types of challenges every day and be able to fill whatever positions are open in the companies of today.

Read this nationwide poll indicating how many Americans feel about the current state of U.S. Education. (click here)

But sadly we continue to teach in the same way we have for decades. Even with the integration of computers into our schools, most classroom learning is still accomplished via rote memorization and note-taking. Very little teaching of that type occurs in real-world work today, where an employee is given a project and told to accomplish it and are then expected to teach themselves whatever skills necessary for the project’s completion. In the workplace of today, employees are educated by actually facing a problem and developing the skills and strategies to overcome it, in much the same way that we taught ourselves how to speak and walk as infants.

Because of the failure of education to adapt to the changing needs of the world around it, we’re being forced to cope with the problems the old system has caused. Our system of education is still set up the way it was back in the Industrial Revolution; attempting to educate the average student at a rate frustrating to the exceptionally gifted and those needing more reinforcement in order to succeed. Students in low-income areas attend schools that can’t provide the same resources to them that their counterparts in higher-income areas receive. Thousands of students graduate from college every year with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to repay and find they are competing with ever-increasing numbers of graduates for the same jobs and are consequently forced to take whatever job they can in order to pay off educational loans. This creates a type of educational inflation – because so many people are obtaining bachelor’s degrees, positions now require master’s degrees, or P.H.D.s. Whereas, in the past, obtaining your bachelor’s set you apart now it simply shows that you’ve done the bare-minimum.

Our educational system has long been criticized for its chronic inability to adapt to the world around it. It is sad that it has taken major change in other fields, such as politics or technology, to cause it to re-evaluate itself and recognize the need for change. The past two decades have proven again and again that more efficient and engaging ways of teaching exist and that they are inexpensive and easily accessible to the public.

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” – Alan Cohen

This is the time for change.

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BEIJING, – China is still freeing people – including children – forced to work as slaves in illegal brick factories, two months after the scandal involving the brick yards was exposed, officials said Monday.

The scandal erupted in early June after children as young as 8 were abducted or recruited from bus and train stations with false promises of well-paying jobs and sold to kilns for about $65.

“Another 359 slave migrant workers have been rescued in Shanxi since late June, including 15 child workers and 121 mentally handicapped ones,” said Xue Yanzhong, executive vice governor of Shanxi province.

China Toy Boss Kills Self After Recall

August 13, 2007 6:49 AM EDT

BEIJING – The head of a Chinese toy manufacturing company at the center of a huge U.S. recall has committed suicide, a state-run newspaper said Monday.

Zhang Shuhong, who co-owned Lee Der Industrial Co. Ltd., killed himself at a warehouse over the weekend, days after China announced it had temporarily banned exports by the company, the Southern Metropolis Daily said.

Lee Der made 967,000 toys recalled earlier this month by Mattel Inc. because they were made with paint found to have excessive amounts of lead. The plastic preschool toys, sold under the Fisher-Price brand in the U.S., included the popular Big Bird, Elmo, Dora and Diego characters.

It was among the largest recalls in recent months involving Chinese products, which have come under fire for globally for containing potentially dangerous high levels of chemicals and toxins.

The Southern Metropolis Daily said that a supplier, Zhang’s best friend, sold Lee Der fake paint which was used in the toys.

“The boss and the company were harmed by the paint supplier, the closest friend of our boss,” a manager surnamed Liu was quoted as saying.

Liu said Zhang hung himself on Saturday, according to the report. It is common for disgraced officials to commit suicide in China.

“When I got there around 5 p.m., police had already sealed off the area,” Liu said.

A company official who answered the telephone at the Lee Der factory in the southern city of Foshan on Monday said he had not heard of the news. A man at Lee Der’s main office in Hong Kong said the company was not accepting interviews and hung up.

According to a search on a registry of Hong Kong companies, Zhang – whose name is spelled Cheung Shu-hung in official documents – is a co-owner of Lee Der. The other owner, Chiu Kwei-tsun, did not return telephone messages left for him.

The recall by El Segundo, California-based Mattel came just two months after RC2 Corp., a New York company, recalled 1.5 million Chinese-made wooden railroad toys and set parts from its Thomas & Friends Wooden Railway product line because of lead paint.

The maker, Hansheng Wood Products Factory, was also included in the export ban announced Thursday by the General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, one of China’s quality watchdogs.

The administration also ordered both companies to evaluate and change their business practices.

Lead poisoning can cause vomiting, anemia and learning difficulties. In extreme cases, it can cause severe neurological damage and death.

The quality watchdog also said police were investigating two companies’ use of “fake plastic pigment” but did not give any details. Such pigments are a type of industrial latex usually used to increase surface gloss and smoothness.

Telephones rang unanswered at the public security bureau in Foshan and at Dongxing New Energy Company, which is the paint supplier.

In its report, the Southern Metropolis Daily said Zhang, who was in his 50s, treated his 5,000-odd employees well and always paid them on time.

The morning of his suicide, he greeted workers and chatted with some of them, the newspaper said.

Chinese companies often have long supply chains, making it difficult to trace the exact origin of components, chemicals and food additives.

On Sunday, a Chinese court sentenced a reporter to a year in jail for faking a television story about cardboard-filled meat buns in a case that has drawn even more attention to China’s poor food safety record.

Zi Beijia, 28, pleaded guilty to charges of infringing on the reputation of a commodity during his trial at the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate Court, the official Xinhua News Agency said. He was sentenced to a year in jail and a fine of $132, it said.

Zi’s story, reportedly shot with a hidden camera, appeared to show a makeshift kitchen where people made steamed buns stuffed with shredded cardboard softened with caustic soda plus a little bit of fatty pork.

Zi paid four migrant workers from China’s northern Shaanxi province to prepare the buns according to his instructions, Xinhua said. The buns were then fed to dogs, it said.

The story was first broadcast on Beijing Television’s Life Channel, where Zi was a freelance reporter, on July 8 and then again on China Central Television. It was also widely seen on YouTube.com.

Associated Press Writer Dikky Sinn in Hong Kong contributed to this story.

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