The Purpose of Education, Free Voluntary Reading, and Dealing with the Impact of Poverty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
meaning of life to find your gift. The purpose of life to give it away. Pablo Picasso.As we mature, we find our unique talents and interests, develop them, and discover how to use them to help others. Among the ways school can help in this process to encourage free voluntary reading, an extremely pleasant activity. This cannot happen, however, without access to books and other reading material. Unfortunately, children of poverty have little access to books: Often, their only source of books the library.We Are All Different, We Are All SpecialEach of us has unique talents, interests and desires. Along with many others, will assume in this column that in our younger years, we are supposed to find out what our talents, interests and desires are, and as we grow up we start to develop our unique talents. And as we mature, we discover how to use our talents to help others. There are thus three steps: 1) Find your talent; 2) Develop your talent; 3) Use your talent.Things ChangeIt's hard to predict, especially about the future. (Yogi Berra)The history of science and technology has taught us that new developments are nearly always a surprise. This is, of course, a problem for education.A popular view that we must prepare today's students for specific 21st Century Skills. Many experts behave as if they know what these skills are. Most of us have no idea. In fact, it impossible for societies to make detailed plans for the future.There a solution. Instead of training students for professions that may be obsolete by the time they graduate, school should help students their strengths:... it is...difficult to predict what new businesses will emerge and what will become obsolete. Thus, what becomes highly valuable are unique talents, knowledge, and skills, the ability to adapt to changes, and creativity, all of which calls for a school culture that respects and cultivates expertise in a diversity of talents and skills and a curriculum that enables individuals to pursue their strengths (Zhao, 2009, p. 156).Thus, the path of discovering your talent, developing it, and using it for the benefit of others the best path for both the individual and society. School should be a place to help young people on this journey:... if you don't discover things you're good at and things you love to do, then you never quite discover what you're capable of or really who you are. think that, increasingly, the mission of schools has to focus on the development of our individual talents and abilities, among all of the other things that we need to learn in common. Schools should also help us discover more about ourselves and the lives that we should be leading (Robinson, 2014, p. 159).An Example: Free Voluntary ReadingThere are many ways to help young people along the path. One powerful way school can help to encourage free voluntary reading.Free voluntary reading means reading because you want to and what you want to, without book reports or any kind of accountability. It a very pleasant means of finding our talents, developing some of the competences that help us get better at our chosen path, and developing ideas on how to use our talents.The Pleasure of ReadingAbundant research showe that self-selected reading pleasant: In fact, it much more than pleasant.Reading for pleasure produces the state we reach when we are deeply but effortlessly involved in an activity (Csikzentmihalyi, 1991). In flow, the concerns of everyday life and even awareness of the self diminish and even temporarily - our sense of time altereded; nothing but the activity seems to matter.Reading is currently perhaps the most often mentioned flow activity in the word (Csikzentmihalyi, 1991, p. 117). Pleasure readers' reports confirm that they are often in a state of flow: A resident of Northern Italy noted that when he reads, I immediately immerse myself in the reading, and the problems usually worry about disappear (Massimini, Csikzentmihalyi, & Della Faye, 1992, p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".