Educationopia

Another boring meeting with a government client. I had a good time to do a small simulation research meanwhile.

A little study goes like this:

A very simplified education system is consisted of 3 entities in the education area directly and one related indirectly. The 3 direct ones are "Student (S)", "Teacher (T)" and "Administration (A)". The indirect entity is "Industry (I)".

State Space :
Motivated Student: S+ Un-motivated Students: S-
Motivated Teacher: T+ Un-motivated Teacher: T-
Motivated Administration: A+ Un-motivated Admin: A-
Motivated Companies: I+ Un-motivated Companies: I-

Motivated student is trying to learn more and more, a motivated teacher tries to teach better with a higher quality, motivated admins want to have happy students and happy teachers and ... we'll see what else is needed for these admins in a bit.
Motivated companies try to increase their efficiency and quality of their work everyday.

Lets see what kind of educational institutions can exist.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
s-	s-	s-	s-	s+	s+	s+	s+
t-	t-	t+	t+	t-	t-	t+	t+
a-	a+	a-	a+	a-	a+	a-	a+

Case 1 : Bad students, bad teachers, bad administrators. Well the students don't want to learn, the teachers don't want to spend lots of energy, usually very little content is delivered, really easy exams, rather good grades for the students, the students are happy, the teacher is happy, the admin can be happy or maybe not happy, if it is an a-, then it will be happy. So such a center is stable.

A stable center is one where everybody is happy and hence no changes happen to it in the future.

Case 2: Bad students, bad teachers. The admin is a good one. A good admin will not be satisfied with the situation and will probably try to change the teachers or the student intake. Can lead to case 8 in this situation.

Case 3: The teacher cares, but the students will have bad results, the admin is not happy that the students are not happy and will probably say goodbye to the teacher. Non stable and will move towards Case 1.

Case 4: Bad students in a good environment. Not stable, the students will be replaced, will lead to case 8.

Case 5: Good students in a bad environment, not stable. They will either let go of this institute or turn into s- in order to be happy. Converges to Case 1.

Case 6: Only bad teachers. Admin will know this very quick and probably replace the teacher. Becomes Case 8.

Case 7: Good students and teachers, administration not really good. Doesn't support the teachers, doesn't care about special requirements, will probably lose the teachers and then converge to Case 1. Students and teachers can't change the admins.

Case 8: Educationopia. Wow. Highly stable.

Now the main question is, how can an administration be a good one or a bad one? Well the first aspect was that a good administration wants to have happy students and teachers. But if this is the only case, then it would have problems with case 2, a good admin should not be silent in case 2.

It seems like a very good criteria for a good admin can be how well they know the industry and the requirements. If you have un-motivated teachers and students and they all get good grades at the end, how do you know your institution has problems? Well maybe you can be in touch with the companies in the industry and be able to judge based on their requirements. In that case you can easily see that although everybody gets good grades in your school, they have problems in the real world. Here is how it goes after the education period.

s+ s- s+ s-
i+ i+ i- i-

Motivated students become motivated individuals and professionals and if hired by a high quality company, everyone will have a good time and flourish, everybody happy and stability.
Un-motivated individuals will be rejected by good companies, if in time all they can get is un-motivated individuals, then the company turns into an un-motivated company after some time (After all, what is a company other than its people?).
Good individuals will not stay in bad companies and bad individuals love an un-motivated company and everything is stable.
So assuming that initially the number of i+ and i- are the same, if in time more s- are added, then we'll have more i-'s and if the input of s+ is more, then the i- can convert into i+. So we need more than 50% s+ coming out of the educational institutions.

In the model above if the initial distribution for s and t are 50% each, then the only way that we can have more than 50% output for s+ is that if case 1 turns to case 2. If that happens then 1 becomes 2 and 2 can become 8 and stable after some time.

So dear administration, if you want your society to be successful, please don't be satisfied with the happy faces of your students and the frowns of your teachers, see what's going on out there and judge based on that.

Maybe some time has passed by and the only I's out there are i-'s. This can happen, in that case when a tries to evaluate its performance with i's, it is not going to get valuable results and hence will remain an a-. In this case our beloved a should go global and measure everything in a global scale, shouldn't be that hard these days with all the information flowing everywhere.

I had to talk at this point and wasn't able to delve into the subject anymore.