Jan Coffey wrote:
> I am suggesting that education should be tailored to the individual to use
> and highlight that individuals strengths. We do this anyway (FREX exempting
> Dyslexics from forign language requirments). Each individual should be
> allowed to find the nich in which they can best contribute to society, and
> they should be allowed to do so at their own pace (faster or slower). This
> would benifit the society and increase the societies efficiency by using the
> best of what each individuals strengths have to offer. It benifit's the
> individual becouse they would not have to be constrained by their weeknesses,
> especialy when they have strengths that would benifit society. If we had such
> an education system, the gender differences would no-longer matter.
You could modify foreign language requirements in some cases. For some
degree plans at some point, UT Austin started allowing American Sign
Language for the foreign language requirements.
And some degree plans, EE for one, had *no* foreign language
requirements, probably because there were so many required courses that
if you had to take, say, 13 hours (3 semesters) of a foreign language,
there was no *way* you could get out of there in 8 semesters, not even
theoretically. Interestingly enough, the gender ratio in EE was very
skewed when I was there (I only knew 2 female EE students, out of
probably 30 EE students, and one of them I met because she was the lab
partner of one of the guys I'd known for awhile up to that point), and
one could argue that the skills needed to be good at EE were *not* the
sorts of skills needed for foreign language study, and from what you've
written on this thread regarding gender/skills correlations, this
wouldn't surprise you very much.
Julia
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