« on: August 08, 2010, 08:40:36 PM »
Throughout the month of August, Big Think will introduce a different "dangerous idea" each day. Brace yourself: these ideas may at first seem shocking or counter-intuitive—but they are worth our attention, even if we end up rejecting them. Every idea in the series will be supported by contributions from leading experts, from the world's top theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, to prolific legal scholar Judge Richard Posner, to Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, to linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky.
BigThink.comI can go along with some of these... others are weird or just plain silly.
#7: End Aid to Africa
When President George W. Bush came to office in 2001, the U.S. was sending $1.4 billion a year to Africa in humanitarian and development aid, including programs intended to foster democracy, fight corruption and poverty, and combat the rampant HIV/AIDS epidemic. By 2006, the U.S. had quadrupled that aid to $5.6 billion. Total aid to sub-Saharan Africa amounted to almost $50 per person in 2008. Yet corruption is chronic, from high-level political graft to street-level bribes, and costs Africa an estimated $150 billion per year, according to a 2002 report. The corruption watchdog agency Transparency International's 2009 Corruption Perception Index found, of 47 African countries studied, 31 scored less that 3 out of 10, translating to "rampant" corruption that dissipates aid and stagnates economic growth.
We should stop sending aid money, says former Goldman Sachs economist Dambisa Moyo, it simply isn't working, and it's contributing to corruption.
#6: Leave Children Behind: Don't Prepare Everyone for College
The U.S. education system is based on the meritocratic principle that no matter what the circumstances of a child's birth, each should have a baseline level of education and the opportunity to go on to college.
But Robert Lerman, an economist at American University, tells Big Think that for a large number of high school students, college preparatory courses aren't useful and won't prepare them for their future careers. He says we need to face reality and retool our education system to acknowledge not everyone is meant to go to college—and many shouldn't be educated with that goal in mind.
Lerman outlines four reasons for why our college-oriented education system is wrong:
* It's based on the notion that you need the same skills to succeed in college as in the workplace, which is false.
* Adding to the purely academic load displaces more vocationally oriented subjects.
* Adopting more advanced coursework in the curriculum potentially increases the dropout rate.
* Favoring higher-order, college-directed coursework leaves behind those not achieving even solid reading comprehension and basic math skills.
Logged
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