How I’d Change Education
How I’d Change Education
Meet Your Host, Alan Weiss
Alan Weiss is one of those rare people who can say he is a consultant, speaker, and author and mean it.
His consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients such as Merck, Hewlett-Packard, GE, Mercedes-Benz, State Street Corporation, Times Mirror Group, The Federal Reserve, The New York Times Corporation, Toyota, and over 500 other leading organizations. He has served on several boards of directors in various capacities.
His prolific publishing includes over 500 articles and 60 books, including his best-seller, Million Dollar Consulting (from McGraw-Hill) now in its 30th year and sixth edition. His newest is Your Legacy is Now: Life is not about a search for meaning but the creation of meaning (Routledge, 2021). His books have been on the curricula at Villanova, Temple University, and the Wharton School of Business, and have been translated into 15 languages.
Get to know AlanShow Notes
Primary and secondary
- End the “warehousing” of children
- Chronology is silly and hundreds of years old
- Socialization is important, but not at this cost
- Move kids as they learn
- Measure learning by outcomes: application, tests, etc.
- Stop defaulting to college educations
- Prepare for a range of employment opportunities
- I sat next to too many duds in college
- Teach life skills: civics, account management, do-it-yourself repairs (remember shop and home economics)
- Growing tendency to hire competence and not credentials
- End the teachers’ unions control of schools
- Introduce carrots and sticks for teachers
- The Rubber Room in New York City
- Albert Shanker’s quote
- Randi Weingarten’s $600,000
- The customers are the parents and kids, not teachers
- Make the job rewarding and also demanding
- Recreate school “open houses”
- End the mainstreaming of behavioral problems
- End the inclusion on non-English speakers
- My experience with Tourette’s Syndrome
- Teachers have lowest grade point averages and attend the worst academic schools
- Former president of URI: People with poor finances and/or grades go to inexpensive and mediocre schools
- Get rid of failed progressive nonsense like “new math”
- Allow for school choice of all kinds with vouchers
- Change school financing
- The affluent/tax/attraction/more tax trap
- Pool money within the state for equal distribution
- Create true equal opportunity with equivalent resources, quality, teaching across the state
- Enforce discipline
- Assistant principle might go to jail for stopping a female, black student from heading for a fight, she claimed he physically abused her in doing so. She had threatened the fight.
- Mandate school officers. Anyone who says that children are fearful of uniforms and police should understand they’d be more fearful of being beaten up or shot at.
- Apply common sense and avoid political correctness and the woke
- Teachers may not involve themselves with personal, sexual, gender, and similar issues without involving parents, including names kids use, how they dress, and how they want to be addressed.
- Teachers’ personal politics, gender beliefs, and religious beliefs are not permitted in the classroom.
Alan Weiss’s The Uncomfortable Truth® is a weekly broadcast from “The Rock Star of Consulting,” Alan Weiss, who holds forth with his best (and often most contrarian) ideas about society, culture, business, and personal growth. His 60+ books in 12 languages, and his travels to, and work in, 50 countries contribute to a fascinating and often belief-challenging 20 minutes that might just change your next 20 years.
Introduction to the show recorded by Connie Dieken
