I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
scotthyoung.com173 points by andrewstuart 3 days ago
173 points by andrewstuart 3 days ago
I'm not the first person to state this, but it bears repeating: nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't.
I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school.
I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.
Now when I see people talking about how they're going to "revolutionize" school, most of the time I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything, or least never been required to teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.
I never taught myself, so take this with a grain of salt (though I do think it is extremely hard to do well).
I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades — as I wasn't particularly motivated, only occassionaly did I put in the effort for an A.
I could, however, see the level of preparation that he put into it. When students confronted him with a difficult task, he'd not attack it right away but instead prepare for it for the next class so he'd provide the most effective instruction (it was not about being embarrased to show how exploration is sometimes messy because he'd quote that as the reason he won't do it right away). He was also so focused that he kicked out a school director when he tried to interrupt class with some sales pitch for whatever.
Not everybody could score a B grade just out of his instruction, but nobody was failing a class because the instruction was so good.
I will also openly admit: I had exactly one instructor like this in my life, so it is a high bar to clear ;)
I was lucky to attend a liberal arts college with a large and extremely pedagogy focused mathematics department, and all of my math classes there were like this. Engaging lectures, if I listened and wrote down everything on the board I would be able to get a B on the exams, even if I skimped on practice. Made it all the way to measure theory this way. They included in class group practice integrated with the lectures, which definitely helped.
St. Olaf College for those wondering.
Bette White has an honorary degree from there for her Rose Nieland character on Golden Girls
schooling has to be designed around "average" teachers. Having someone who is gifted at teaching is great, but there wouldn't be many teachers if that was the standard. I often think when people idealize what schooling should be like it always seems like they are imagining teachers who are gifted.
Yes, as always, we like people to be good at their jobs instead of being bad at their jobs.
But, I think teaching skills, juuuust like any other skills can be taught and improved. So if we want good teachers and educators we need to build them up, not just relie on a few good ones to carry the day.
I personally reject the notion of competency in this as a matter of "giftedness", as something you either have or don't have. I think it's something you cam build. It's something you can teach. But you need to specifically aim for it.
I think in this case, it was a teacher who is motivated, committed and focused on efficient, effective direct instruction followed by practice.
But I believe your point is great — we usually focus on average vs non-average student, and you are absolutely right that we need to focus on an average teacher just the same: what is the most effective way for a possibly non-motivated, less capable teacher to provide instruction with?
> teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.
This is key. If you are interested in a subject, the learning will come more or less automatically. Different ways of teaching still have substantial impact on how efficiently you learn, but you automatically gravitate towards the more efficient methods since you want to learn this out of interest in the subject. Without interest, this is an uphill battle.
And that is the gripe with traditional schooling. The methods may work well for intetested students, but they really kill interest. If I'm evaluated all the time, pressure on me, my interest tanks.
The difference between something I have to do versus something I want to do is absolutely key.
I think the challenge that teachers have is that being “interested “ in something is a skill in itself. I never played a clarinet when I was a kid, maybe I would have like it, but never did that. If we assume that being interested is a function of household income/structure/ happiness than things get even worse.
We shouldn’t force interest. But have high expectations across the board and just realize disinteresting topics will just take more effort and or be more time. It’s virtually impossible to make every subject interesting for every student.
The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action. And not from the school, from parents. Bad grades should result in punishment. It’s should be the parent’s job to find what motivates their kid to perform under those circumstances. Being grounded, withholding allowance, reducing screen time, whatever your child responds to. The entire issue is rooted in a parenting problem. The education system wants a silver bullet solution that can ignore that but it is pretty constant.
To a large extent, the onus is on the teacher to generate interest. Most teaching until uni is mostly forced upon students.
> Most teaching until uni is mostly forced upon students.
That is the problem. It should not be forced. People naturally love learning and its a matter of facilitating that. Not going into details here as I have recent comments on this and other threads:
People naturally like learning some things and dislike learning others. The idea that if some learning is not interesting to everyone is misguided.
And no, something being useful and relevant does not make it interesting on itself. Even if you know it is useful you can just dislike having to learn it.
Yes, but as an university level educator I have to stress that the vast majority of students suck at understanding what they will need to know to be good at the juicy bits that interested them in the first place. Our task isn't just to teach them what they are interested in. Our task (among others) is to prepare them for a life after university in their profession(s) while giving them the practical skill of learning new subjects themselves. For example: Nearly nobody wants to do the math stuff, but nearly everybody will profit from knowing it after the fact (at least in the field I am in). Education is more than knowledge, but if we talk about knowledge it is the systematic accumulation of interlinked ideas and concepts that after a few years turn someone who had no idea into someone who can excell in their field. Nobody who likes to work on cars likes doing taxes, but nearly everybody who lives off working on cars will need to know how to do them. So the question will be, can a society afford to teach people only the fun bits?
I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside. I have worked as a freelancer in the field I am teaching for years so I know very well what I wish someone would have thought me. You can sell a lot of dry stuff by tying it to a practical application that makes them see the use more clearly. That works pretty well and student like it. Real education should feel like gaining a superpower. That means practical applications are crucial, you should basically build the theory around solving actual problems and not the other way around. Pure theorizing should also have its place for those who like it of course.
But I would advice a little bit of caution to hold too strong thoughts about teaching if you have never done so for at least some period yourself. It is much harder and exhausting to do in practise than most people think it is. Especially with big group sizes some things we wish were possible are not necessarily so.
Well, we've all been students, haven't we? And most of us probably have experience with ways of teaching us that worked, and ways that didn't. Of course we're all going to have an opinion.
I don't have any grand theory of education, but I have some stories of what worked for me and what didn't.
I learned English from a guy with a radical method: the "direct method" or "natural method". After the first lesson explaining what he was going to do, he spoke only English in class. The textbook also had only English (vocabulary was taught with pictures). This was about third grade elementary school. This worked great for me, I always had top marks in English. German, by comparison, was always taught to me in the traditional method with grammar lists etc. durchfürgegenohneum, ausbeimitnachseitvonzu, and I still remember that crap and I still absolutely suck at German.
So one "revolutionary", running his own radical program (he would never have been allowed to do that today), helped me. I think we should let people try things.
I'd agree with this conclusion from another angle as well. It seems slightly odd to me that people think there must be a single "right" way to teach. What works for one student, one group of people, doesn't necessarily work well for another.
And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for another teacher. By striving for something like homogeneity you disadvantage not only students, but also teachers.
This is all even more true in current times as educational outcomes continue to decline even as ever more money is pumped into education, and teacher churn rates are at record highs, with many completely leaving the profession.
There's also this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ which claims data shows students being forced to "figure it out" is not the best way to learn. Most HNer disagree with this.
That's exactly quoted at the start of the article?
"Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. "
Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" method.
What they need to figure out is what topics peaks their interest. Kids need exposure to a broad spectrum early, get interested, and then have mentors that know how to run with it and harness that motivation. Later on these kids can tolerate learning more mundane, boring stuff if that brings them closer to a goal they have set for themself. But motivation has to come first!
As someone who have been teacher for some time - students being forced to "figure it out" is the worst way to learn. For every subject you teach explicitly there is always a ton of knowledge to discover if students choose to do it, but being forced to do it very clearly damages students.
https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/no-explicit-instruc...
Seems to me that "figure it out" works better for learning depth of knowledge than it does for breadth of knowledge. That is, I can figure out the computer graphics tricks I need in order to get my project to draw fast, even if they're fairly deep and sophisticated tricks. I'm less likely to figure out, say, the humanities portion of a college education.
Why? At least for me, focused goals motivate more than diffuse ones. I could treat "the humanities" as a bunch of focused goals, but there would be a large number of them. That takes a fair amount of motivation.
From experience (with a moody teenager), can confirm; I think this is less teaching methods and more personal development.
Younger children will conform more easily to e.g. structured education, teacher / parent authority, and basically do what they are told/asked to do. But at college / uni ages, you're dealing with young adults, some of which are only doing an education still because it's expected of them by parents/society. Or even when they want to be there, the motivation to do the work may not be there. yet.
It's difficult because their brain is still at high learning capacity, so one has to capitalize on that. But they also have other interests, like sleeping until midday and spacing out for ages.
I think the problem with your argument is that you are placing teaching as something done to students at the centre of your view, rather than something done by students. It assume classroom learning. That rules out any really different approach. The fundamental problem is trying to revolutionise schooling rather than learning.
> They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.
Then they should not be there. That is the fundamental problem. Especially at that level why is anyone there who is not even motivated enough to study? Someone might not like ever undergraduate level course they need for a degree, but they should be able to push themselves through the boring stuff.
At school level, its difficult to make things work in a classroom setting with a fixed curriculum. Once I took my kids out of school they largely learned what they found interesting until they started studying towards doing exams. I made sure they learned core skills around reading, writing and maths, but they still had a say in what to do and how. A lot of it can be done by pursuing other subjects or hobbies. With the exams they had a choice (discussed, and they had to do maths and English language) but they had a choice) of what subjects to do and made choices that suited them, including some less common subjects (such as astronomy and Latin). Again, motivated and requiring very little actual teaching (they both entirely taught themselves Latin, and did other subjects with minimal help - although we did have tutors for English literature and classical civilisation, and varying amounts of parental help with other subjects).
A lot of the best universities (in the UK, at least) have tutorial systems that rely heavily on small groups rather than lectures (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews - that I know of). A lot more individual attention is a long proven method of getting better results.
At school level it might look very expensive, but that is balanced by needing a lot less time per student. A few hours of one to one a week is cheaper than school.
based on your description, one reasonable way to 'revolutionize' school might simply allow people (who don't want to be there) to leave.
That might be fine for someone in the wrong college degree, but I - as a tax payer - need every sixth grader to learn essential the same things. I need kids to grow up able to provide life support for themselves so I can retire as by body fails from old age. I'm investing in the future of many kids I otherwise don't know or care about because making their life better makes mine better.
Even in the case of a college degree some are better than others
Depending on what you mean by "school" I'd disagree. Voluntary tertiary education makes sense, not all chosen professions may need or benefit from a degree.
But primary education needs to be a requirement for every child. Coming from a country with a large illiterate population, it's easy to see how hard their lives are compared to folks with an education but similar socio-economic backgrounds.
Now obviously implementing universal primary education and the details can be debated and need to be context specific.
Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.
Makes a lot of teacher not want to be there too!
The schools also have little interest in spending time and money on the higher performing students. They teach the minimum and focus resources on the failing ones to raise school averages.
Currently, tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen.
And why they don't want to be there? This unearths more complex topic of individuality in aproximating school, because I think every kid wants and does't want different things. And these aren't limited to school material but also include social dynamics between peers or even type of chairs (ask kids with ADD spectrum).
> Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.
The upper division has and is getting an education always has and always will and the same applies to those with money, with the screw worm fly hitting Texas of recent measles is ok fame and the current administration which is the worst in American history run by imbeciles the can do America appears to be gone and education for most along with it.
They were already at a University. None of the students were required to be there. They all had the ability to just leave.
There has been a shift towards too many jobs requiring a tertiary education.
But good luck reversing that trend.
This is not true. There has been a shift in requirements to combat credential inflation. The average person is not smarter or more capable.
I think you misunderstood his comment, because you agree with him. He's not saying require as in needed to do the work, but required as in unnecessarily needed to be accepted for the job.
So? People can decide if they want the job enough to participate in the degree or not.
I signed up for software carpentry instructor training at the SciPy conference in 2015. I expected to learn about their curriculum. Instead, I found that they taught pedagogy. There were articles to read in advance. I should have taken that class before I spent 15 years teaching at university rather than afterwards.
What aspects of pedagogy did you find most relevant? It does seem sad that in our industry, one where practical learning is necessary, that learning how to learn isn't really taught well. Often the worse ways to learn are those that seemed to be encouraged, mostly because it's the easiest way to monetize content.
We know what works: a 1:5 staff to student ratio. At that ratio, method matters less. Beyond that, it's a productivity problem.
Yep, known as Bloom's Two Sigma Problem[1]. Like most hard problems we know the solution, but lack the appetite to implement.
Hey Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. So far, (nearly) all conversations about education on HN I’ve seen, have had a naturally point at which Bloom’s 2s should be introduced.
Humanity is now preparing students with a 20 year time horizon, while tech changes much faster. If this was agriculture, the industry would be doomed by that horizon mismatch.
We really need more teachers, if we want the median citizen to be better off.
With AIs as most staff, this should be very reachable.
AI lacks both the reasoning and insight needed to teach anybody that isn't already immensely interested in the topic, and even then might leave large knowledge gaps, not to mention how often it hallucinates wrong knowledge. Especially with topics that already have a lot of bad information floating around.
With AIs as teachers, I disagree. But with AIs assisting routine grading, filling in the university's assessment_framework_draft_v3_final_FINAL.docx, and otherwise freeing up time to actually focus on students - maybe? Although I fear that any productivity gains will be swallowed up by further reductions in lecturer headcount...
I was one of those students. I refused to do homework after the age of 11 (I cited the 13th amendment). Quit school as soon as it was legal to do so. I wrote about this in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Now approaching my 60th birthday, I feel certain I was suffering from undiagnosed ADHD.
You can't force a brain to think what you want it to think. I couldn't even force myself to think what I wanted to think. I began to imagine my thinking brain as if it were a pet rhino that did as it pleased. Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably. But it was a long journey.
I teach for a living now-- but I only teach the willing.
In America being willing historically depending on where you live still isn't enough for getting an education, healthcare or voting depending on where you live. But no worries there is a country on the other side of the world moving upwards.
I was too. That's why it was so frustrating to me.
Teachers would like me, I don't think that any of them thought I was an idiot, but I wouldn't do my homework and they'd be stuck giving me middling-to-bad grades.
I eventually more or less figured out how to force myself to learn things I didn't care about, and I did eventually get my bachelors and a masters, but that wasn't until my 30's.
Sounds too familiar. But I survived at school and I think that it helped a ton that I went to school at sixties (Soviet Union) – explicit teaching, homework and grades since age six, order in classrooms etc allowed me to practice handling my brain with babysteps since early age. If I look at classes my grandkids are put in – no way I'd survived in such chaotic and noisy environment with so few rules.
> Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably.
Honestly, these are the most important things to learn. I spend a lot of time with my kids talking about ways to get your brain to do what you want.
> I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything
I care about teaching my students leadership, because all real problems are political. What exactly is the "test" for this?
To me, revolutionizing school looks beyond "problem solving," because the parents and students who are excited about the thing they call "problem solving" - it's invoked in the article, it's talked about by many of the other comments - basically solves no real problems. The revolution will redefine what "problem solving" means.
>because all real problems are political
I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.
at every level, we face political problems that "STEM" provides bad or wrong answers to.
here's a simple one: what is the right answer for how to use a road? more parking? more bike lanes? exclusive use for busses? we do not bid on roadway land, there is no market solution to this. you can come up with a lot of metrics for efficiencies and optimize for them, but which metrics matter? journey times? environmental impact? there are real disputes about waymos, it isn't enough to invent autonomous vehicles, there must be leadership on adopting technology. these are all political issues. okay, and you probably spend 30m to an hour on roadways every day of your life, you can't say, this isn't a real problem.
the greatest irony is it is exactly the families with this fairly myopic "all problem solving is math problem sets" point of view who disengage from political life, and despite their fixation on cultural hegemony, they have disproportionately little representation in politics. to be real, the reason parents care about math is because money. which should tell you everything you really need to know about its power to "solve problems."
There's a huge difference between things people are forced to learn and stuff they want to learn. Life does tend to make you learn a few things by force, but that can also kill off one's taste for a subject.
Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...
As a math teacher myself I want to say... A parent taking an interest and spending some quality time with their child over a subject can have a huge impact on their motivation to learn. Props to your mom.
There's an art to making learning fun. I thought I had that skill, but I do not, at least not intrinsically. Maybe I could learn it, but since I was only a lecturer for about a year, I never really developed it.
I am not going to pretend I know how to make seemingly-boring subjects interesting, but a lot of things do need to be learned that aren't always fun.
I've always liked math [1], but I know a lot of people don't. Even still, I think having basic and intermediate math skills is important. I have no idea how to make math fun for people that actively don't like it.
[1] And I don't think I was given M&Ms for it :(
Thing about it is the students should be given an explanations about why each topic is important for them to learn to be able to learn more advanced topics.
Maybe briefly show how that adavanced topic will be taught and let them realize they can not possible even start to understand advanced topic because they are missing the more elementary pieces.
Similarly why they can't got further without doing their homework. How mastering the homework exercises let's you solve more problems.
I know that is not easy, the teacher may not quite understand how topics relate, why each of them is needed in a specific order, if they have not thought about that much.
Yes, to all of this.
The pedagogical term for the concept in your final paragraph is "scaffolding", and it's critical. Teachers have to know how to break their subject down into digestible pieces, and then find the proper order in which to build it up again. Advanced mode: be able to break it down and build it up again in different ways, for students with different backgrounds or learning styles.
(This is why many teachers - I was among them - aren't immediately good at teaching concepts or subjects that come easily to them as they may be at teaching things they struggled a bit to learn. If you've had to break something down for yourself then you're ahead of the game when it comes to breaking it down for others.)
For a while I taught an "Improv For Teachers" workshop (I have a theatre background), which was really about listening to your class and being ready to adapt your lesson plan to where they are in their course of work, or even to their mood on the day. It was mostly elementary school teachers, and some of them really resisted that idea. I'm convinced, though, that that's an important skill: the most memorable and successful classes I've taught have happened when I've been able to take advantage of a student question or a student interest and run with it - sometimes not even knowing where it'll go - with the confidence that I'll somehow be able to pivot back to the curriculum. You have to be willing to be a bit vulnerable, and embrace a bit of fear, and risk a bit of failure to do it, hence why the Improv experience is so helpful.
Do you have teaching experience?
How to teach isn't always aligned with how to learn.
How children learn is not how adults learn.
I am teaching for at the university level for 6 years now, with 5 courses per year.
The one most important goal many beginning (or bad) educators miss is making students care before going all explainy. My subjects are very practical (Media technology, Electronics) and I have repeatedly seen students who understand a theoretical explaination and then fail utterly to apply what was explained in a practical situation. Coincidentally the latter makes most of them care instantly.
The solution in my case was to weave the theory together with something practical tangible. If everybody knows what they are working towards, and you weave in small practical tasks where it has to be applied that knowledge serves a purpose and students are much, much more willing to understand.
When you then go all meta and details after they understood what it is for and how it is used that worked much better than front loading the a struct stuff.
So (1) the dumb explainations that avoid them hurting themselves or breaking things, geared towards "this is what we need in 5 minutes", (2) applying the dumb thing to a practical solution, (3) theory how does it actually work, (4) another practical thing, this time armed with knowledge, watching out for details that we now notice because of knowing the theory.
Students soak that up like sponges. But teaching is hard, especially if the knowledge levels of the students in a group are disparate or you have students that aren't actually fit to receive education for mental reasons in that moment.
Schooling has been trying for ever to institutionalize and standardize learning without really understanding what learning is. In that absence, we've focused on learning proxies, which are tests. And tests resulted in a focus on mechanics. Meaning was and is an intangible so it got leached out. Everything school does starts at the wrong end of meaning > motiviation > mechanics > measurement.
It is possible to fix school. It needs understanding learning, and also being willing to revisit learning design at every level. How to bring meaning in?
Without meaning you could have all your fancy chromebooks and chatbots but you won't move the needle (as we are seeing)
We are actually trying to change schooling (but with a tiny experiment, knowing that scaling does not happen without changes and cultural context)
https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...
Im definitely in this camp.
It seems like the biggest frustration from the teachers’ part with modern schooling is lack of engagement from the students. This is clearly telling us something.
Sure some students have not even had their basic needs met, which is a separate issue. But those that have and still don’t engage tells us that their brains have probably assigned the information they’re receiving as “having little or no value”, i.e. meaningless.
I bet if you were to lead a class of teenagers on the subject of relationships or friendship, or even how to host a successful party, suddenly you’d see a lot more engagement. Why? Because it’s actually relevant to their every day existence.
In highschool, at least, you have to somehow elevate the meaning of your subject to be more interesting than the movie theatre/concert/video game system they have in their pocket.
Kids will make eye contact with you and nod along as you teach, but they are wearing air pods and can't hear you over their spotify playlist.
Im not sure I can be more interesting than Taylor Swift, Call of Duty, MrBeast, and texting with friends all at the same time. You need the student to be a little bit receptive to even have the opportunity to convince them what you are teaching is relevant to them.
You might be interested in the experience of hackerspaces, and the "learn by doing":
https://github.com/zoobab/educode
https://www.educode.be/doku.php/educode_2019/conferences/hac...
Understanding learning should start by understanding how much it depends on mechanics.
I don't fully understand your comment but I think an issue with schooling is that tests are the meaning of schools - that is, test results and graduating are the objective of an education.
This is the disconnect I've always found growing up, I get told this is how you calculate angles, but besides the test, there's never the why. Granted this is a bad example because at least that one had a practical, real life application example (calculating the height of a tower in the distance based on distance + angle of the ground to the top from where you're standing), but things just get more and more abstract later on.
The best teaching was always projects and internships, because they start with an objective and meaning (= build software that does this), and what knowledge you need follows from that.
I mean sure you need some basic knowledge before you can work backwards from an end goal, but surely they can teach said basic knowledge without it just being "this is how you solve this test problem"?
Have you ever heard of John Taylor Gatto? If not, you may want to look into his books. They will help you realize that schooling and learning/education are mutually exclusive and even that schooling is counterproductive because its primary objectives are hostile to the objectives of education, real learning as a human.
The worst people in the world created schooling and the education system for their own narrow, selfish, greed and profit driven objectives. Is so deeply engrained, with the very “educators” themselves often not even realizing that through their having also done through the system, they are actually just enablers of an abusive and toxic, soul crushing system … which is precisely what it was designed for; because after all, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and “ no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”; both the words of a great steward of systems thinking, Stanford Beer.
IMO, the best questions around revolutionizing school should address whether children should be coerced into learning something.
It seems obvious to me that the answer should be yes. So the follow ups should be figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.
I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager. It is pretty easy to design education for the eager. And discussing how to optimize that is a completely different discipline than the discussion about how to coax. The discussion about moving the unwilling to the coaxable is another topic on its own.
Having a mixed class of unwilling, coaxable, and eager in a classroom with a mantra of "no child left behind" is a huge mistake in the same way it would be a mistake to have one teacher in a mixed classroom for Geometry, Alphabet, and Orchestra.
> I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager.
I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress.
> I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress.
This is a very bold claim. I don't think most kids are curious about the multiplication tables
Why learn multiplication tables when everyone carries a computer around with them? My kids never did (ineffective school plus later home education) and are good at maths as adults. A previous HN discussion contained this post
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395840
and ultimately this about a successful experiment in other approaches to maths:
Why learn to read and write when everyone carries a computer capable of TTS? Why learn anything when your pocket computer has access to AI doing the thinking much better than the average highschooler and has 100x the knowledge?
I think a lot of kids can be motivated for that by having a game out of counting in multiples (e.g . Have them count by 4s, 5s, etc). Which is good enough for practical purposes.
> I don't think most kids are curious about the multiplication tables
Which is exactly why they stopped teaching them in US curriculum under No Child Left Behind.
what? I started school in the early 2000s, after no child left behind started, and definitely learned multiplication tables lol
The claim was that "virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things", not that "virtually all young kids love to explore and learn multiplication tables".
I can easily claim that most kids are not interested in anything economically valuable. Probably most adults as well.
Sure. But the fact of the matter is that we must teach kids many diverse things, and most of them are going to be things that some (or even most) of the kids have no interest in learning. So one has to grapple with the question of how to teach kids who don't actually care about learning what you're teaching.
While my experience relates to learning in higher-ed, I completely agree with those three categories... Though a helpful nuance may be that it's a spectrum, not hard boundaries, and every subject/exercise can have a distinct relationship with the learner and context.
When rubber hits the road with a learning objective, I think the two most important axis are: how much does the student want to learn (this), and how easy is it for the student to learn (this)?
Both can depend on a variety of factors... For example a masters student paying their own way mid career maybe really wants to learn as much as they can, but a specific research report assigned during a busy work week, and some family emergency, etc. may mean they treat the assignment as "I just need to get this done" instead of "I want to get as much as I can out of this", and one way that can show up is how much they depend on an LLM to do the work for them...
When I was involved in higher education, people talked about three motivations: passing the class, being good at whatever is being measured, and learning the topic. Those were not distinct categories but separate axes, and they were understood to be situational rather than inherent qualities of the person. We didn't care much about the people who scored low on all three axes. Education was free, and if you didn't have the motivation, you were probably better off doing something else.
In any case, people who wanted to learn were easy to deal with. The other two motivations could be used to coax the person to learn, but they required different approaches.
I used to believe this until I got kids myself.
There is no stress, they just don’t want to “explore” things they see as non-urgent.. basically everything you need like writing, reading and calculating properly.
No amount of coaxing, gamification or whatever works consistently. The only thing that got my smartest kid through anything is by force. Not too much, but still, they need some amount of coercion no question about it. Anyone that denies this I find very, very hard to take seriously.
Interestingly the slightly less cerebral one is easier to guide through gamification. I guess the smarter you are the easier you see through BS. It’s easier to just learn to suck it up and Do The Thing instead of “learning is fun”. It isn’t and it doesn’t matter.
I’m curious about homeschooling and alternative methods of schooling so this is of interest to me. By “virtually all” I assume you mean “all but those developmentally delayed”. Have you run a program that uses your principles or have you tested your thesis in some way that you are willing to share?
Then think of them as the same child in different phases between "extinguished innate desire" and "loves to explore and learn things".
Real talk: which kids have you interacted with? What social class? What ethnicity? What household structure (nuclear, multigenerational, single parent, single parent plus intermittent partner, divorced with shared custody, dirtbag but grandparent covering)?
I've found that the people who are more optimistic about kids tend to live in a particular category of socioneconomic bubble.
Ignoring whatever you mean by injecting "ethnicity" into the question, I've interacted kids in all of those socio-economic situations and think both that GP's point about innate curiosity is true, and that GGP's unwilling / coaxable / eager concept is a reasonable framework. That's not to say that I'm necessarily optimistic - socio-economic difficulties create absolutely enormous challenges to learning - just that I've never encountered a group of kids, regardless of background, where there weren't students in each of those (unwilling / coaxable / eager) sets.
It's hard to convince kids why they should learn advanced abstract math, beyond what is necessary to calculate the tip on a restaurant bill. The number of high school students who will use advanced math beyond high school is very small, but those that do will have high impact, which is both in society's interest and their own interest as high earners.
The kids that study and apply themselves, I don't think it's so much that they can see they understand the benefits of linear algebra at the time, it's that their parents and the social network they're a part of sends them signals that this is what they should do to be successful and they're rewarded for doing well in school.
I will bet that the number of adults who ever engage in coloring or painting as adults is extremely small. Probably less than the number of full time scientists, engineers, finance professionals etc. Yet no one complains that we are forcing students to do art in school, even when many students don't particularly like doing art. Why? Because we recognize that developing general artistic ability in humans is important, so we need art classes.
The other argument about teaching "advanced math" is the same as why Cristiano Ronaldo spends a significant part of his training in the gym lifting weights? Ever seen Ronaldo take out a barbell and start doing squats during a game? One should reflect on this.
Math is a tool for solving problems, and people will do work to create value that they will share with you for helping them solve a problem which will ultimately create even more value.
In short, math is a powerhouse tool for carrying society forward.
Art, while cool to look at and experience, has a pretty low efficacy in terms of "motivating people to do work, or removing obstacles, to carry society forward"
In short, starving artists.
There is also the whole thing where art is an abstract concept with a subjective definition, and a solar cell sporting new tech with 33% efficiency objectively being better than one with 24% efficiency.
I cannot support such thinking. Art is foundational to human experience. People crave that their free time is filled with good food, good music, good books, good movies and shows in beautiful houses with beautiful gardens. All of these are various forms of art.
There were humans for tens of thousands of years before there was high technology. But there were hardly any humans around before there was art.
> Art, while cool to look at and experience, has a pretty low efficacy in terms of "motivating people to do work, or removing obstacles, to carry society forward"
Idk, the soviets didn't invest in socialist realism propaganda for nothing.
Less sarcastically, art has had an outsized influence on society and culture. Take any social movement you want, and there was probably some novel or work of art that galvanized it.
My argument isn't that art doesn't have an impact, my argument is that the artists to impact ratio is insane.
10,000 artists in, one $20k work of art out.
Whereas something like the engineer is closer to
5 engineers in, $500k of work out (and even that is pretty conservative)
Firstly, measuring art in $ terms ignores the benefits that extend way beyond $ terms. Most fine art produced has a value approaching 0. My wife and I buy art from time to time, but we've never spent more than about $100 or so, yet get disproportionate pleasure from it.
As a first order approximation the "price" of art (as distinct from its value) is a function of branding not asthetics.
Secondly most artists get paid, not from doing fine art, but from adjacent careers that require good color, balance, composition, and so on. Industrial designers (think Jonny Ive), interior design, food presentation, magazine layout, web design, architecture and so on. Art skills are all around us. In the same way engineering is around us.
Put another way, engineers build ugly (think beige PC boxes). It took an artist to give us the iMac. And it was a marketing genius (yet another important skillset) to bring the artist and engineer together.
Teaching math goes far beyond creating mathematicians. Teaching art goes far beyond teaching artists. Societies that drop art because it is unproductive get ugliness permeating everywhere.
I have this inner model of something i call "the rock star economics": many people want to do music but only one becomes a rock star and makes serious money. But he gets so much attention that many more people want to become rock stars.
Applies to art, fashion, media.
Most practical (including engineering) successes are much less externally attractive but do make decent money for everybody involved.
I know this is going to seem reductive, but especially with young children we teach art due to the value it gives them as individuals developing. Not for the GDP or individual fiscal benefit.
Further, judging the value of art to society by how much it costs is ridiculous and an asinine comparison.
Art class as part of public education is not completely uncontrovertial.
It grew out of a time where basic artistic skills were expensive to learn, and could be a real class differentiator (and had some employment benefits).
That's now a fair bit less true; but still continues to prevent these things becoming the sole domain of private schools.
re: not teaching math to kids is a pet peeve of mine.
the number of adults i've met who cannot add two fractions together is depressing.
at some point each of them had decided "i'm just bad with numbers, hahaha" and they gave themselves permission to stop trying math. worse, society gives you a pass at not knowing math. we need to apply the same constant social pressure to mathematics skills that we do for learning to read.
When young people ask me why they should learn math, I point out that managing your money requires math, and there are plenty of people who will steal from you if you are unable to recognize it.
An inability to understand compound interest is classic.
But that's basic arithmetic, and we have calculators to do that. Totally agree that understanding the problem and being able to frame a solution are also needed, but again, that's not hard maths.
I think we're more talking about algebra or, really, anything "higher" in maths than arithmetic. Does a solid knowledge of, e,g, Set Theory, give any benefit later in life?
And also, if we think that basic financial management is a good thing for kids to learn, why don't we teach that?
> But that's basic arithmetic, and we have calculators to do that.
I would disagree. How to minimize a function, how to calculate interest, first derrivative are all pretty useful in finance, and a bit beyond basic arithmatic.
> I think we're more talking about algebra
"Algebra" as a term covers a lot. Being able to solve for x is a very useful skill and often what people mean by algebra.
If you mean understanding groups, rings, fields, or whatever, then sure that is probably not very useful to the average person's day to day. However i dont think that is usually tought in high school.
> Does a solid knowledge of, e,g, Set Theory, give any benefit later in life?
Pretty sure nobody in high school is getting a solid understanding of set theory. That is more university level.
> And also, if we think that basic financial management is a good thing for kids to learn, why don't we teach that?
I guess it depends on where you live, but i had to take a class on that in high school.
No, we don't have calculators to do that. AI, maybe. But a calculator cannot form an equation out of a social context and solve the equation.
If you bought 6 liters of soda for £3/2-liter bottle with 8% consumption tax, how much should it cost?
You have to shape that all into a series of operations for your calculator. The calculator can't do it by itself. Even basic arithmetic takes some education before the calculator can be useful.
Set theory is actually the basis for all of math. This includes basic counting of the number of things in, ehm, sets. Cant be nore practical than this.
> Does a solid knowledge of, e,g, Set Theory, give any benefit later in life?
Is there any benefit to being able to distinguish logical entailments from non sequiturs?
The things that are taught under the label "set theory" are taught elsewhere under the label "basic logic". The most primitive symbols are intentionally matched: in logic, "and" is ∧ and "or" is ∨, while in set theory, "and" is ⋂ and "or" is ⋃.
The symbols stop matching quite that well after that - compare logical ⟶ and ¬ to set-theoretic ⊆ and ᶜ - but they continue to consist of the same material.
A calculator won't help at all if you don't have a grasp on what compound interest is. I've seen many laments on X from graduates who could not understand why they've paid more money to their student loan lender than the amount of the loan, and still have a balance that was more than the loan amount.
These are college graduates.
> Does a solid knowledge of, e,g, Set Theory, give any benefit later in life?
Knowledge of statistics will help a person a lot.
Another example. I wanted to put an elliptical brick patio in my yard. The contractor gave a square footage and I signed a deal with the charge per square foot. He staked it out.
It looked a bit peculiar to me. So I measured the major and minor axes and computed the area of the ellipse. It was 1/3 smaller than the contracted amount. The pallet of bricks was sitting in the driveway. I multiplied xyz to get the square footage of the bricks, and walla, it matched the area staked out.
I.e. I was being cheated. The contractor evidently was used to math challenged customers, and discovered how much he could cheat before being noticed. I pointed out the "error" (hahahaha) and the contractor reduced the bill by a third.
> why don't we teach that?
Exactly!
An excellent example that shows the value of understanding very basic geometry.
I'll add that math isn't really just about that sort of practicality though. It's also about a fundamental understanding of numbers and what they mean.
For example, inflation is in the news a lot. It's high, or low. Most people (the US president included) think that if inflation was 0% prices would come down. But that'd be a profound misunderstanding of the topic.
A grounding in numbers, in this case percentages, makes for a better understanding.
Any business owner needs to know fundamental truths to survive. Cost price, markup, margin, selling price, fixed expenses versus variable expenses and so on. All are grounded in basic math. Without that you can't do basic accounting. Without that you can't effectively run a business.
Anti-vax arguments are built on very bad math, and people bad at math fall for it.
We all use math all the time. People bad at math are at a major disadvantage. Populations bad at math are easily manipulated.
They're even proud of it, heaven help us. How many posts on HN by SWEs have we seen saying that people didn't lose any skills of importance when calculators became widespread?
> we need to apply the same constant social pressure to mathematics skills that we do for learning to read.
Ha Ha Ha! Cute you think society cares about reading abilities!
I mean, OK, you are expected to be able to do basic level reading. But, say, reading something independently to learn something? Even when I was in university 20 years ago it was a struggle to get people to read.
> kids why they should learn advanced abstract math
Could you clarify what do you mean by 'kids' and 'advanced math' here?
I personally believe we should stop believing advanced math is meaningful for everyone. Especially stop trying to push them down to high school curriculum.
When I say advanced math I mean anything involved with "what exactly is a ___ (vector space, real number, group, set, etc)".
Motivation to learn has nothing to do with practicality. That was definitely that way for me, especially when I was young.
I know full well that languages are necessary and useful ... and were. I still found learning languages the most boring thing in the world. I liked abstract math despite thinking it is not necessary useful - I did not cared. I could go on, but relation between interesting and useful was never all that straight forward.
> It's hard to convince kids why they should learn advanced abstract math, beyond what is necessary to calculate the tip on a restaurant bill.
When I was just a bit younger, I detested what I'm about to say, but now know as the "reality".
Your argument is focused on rationalism. You're trying to give kids/teenagers real world reasons to learn something.
People are rarely motivated by reason. They are motivated by emotions.
If you look, you'll find plenty of examples of very "rational" adults (college professors included) who clearly know something to be true, will admit to it, but will still go the emotional route.
As a parent, I looked into the research on changing/shaping children's behavior. And the key things that stood out:
1. If you know enough adults who do equivalently bad things even while they know the harm in it, don't expect kids to behave based on reason.
2. Focus on (positive) emotions. Give kids incentives. They shouldn't clean up the table because it will keep the house clean. They should clean it up because they'll get a (short term) positive reward.
3. Focus on building the ritual as a habit, and separate it from any semblance of morality. The brain needs to get accustomed to the actual behavior. The rationale can be added (now or when older), but if you focus too much on rationale without the habit, you'll get someone like me, who realizes a lot of behaviors are good for me, but won't do them because "my brain isn't wired for it".
Getting back to kids learning algebra, or whatever: Their lack of incentive isn't because they can't connect to practical skills in life.[1] The reason they don't want to do it is because it is not a valued skill amongst their peers. And it's also not a valued skill in American society.
That's why high school kids in Eastern Europe or East Asia tend to know this a lot better. If you can't multiply two numbers on paper, you're an idiot. Everyone will know you're an idiot. As much an idiot as not being able to read properly. So you learn it because you know that it's just a baseline intelligence marker you should have by a certain age. You don't whine about it any more than you'd whine about how to properly eat food without spilling it. Sure, once they're older and reflect back, they may say "I never needed algebra", but it doesn't bother them. Knowing it is merely part of being cultured.[2]
Now being motivated by shame is really not a great way to get people to do something, and that's not what I'm encouraging. The point is that it's a broader societal problem. Why should they learn it if they see no one else values it?
I wrote more about this about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065640
[1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?
[2] This is why California, in particular, had a strong push back regarding calculus not being taught in high schools. There's a strong and relatively wealthy Asian/immigrant community in those places, and they've tried to maintain the value of being decent at math. (All the stuff about impacting university education is fluff. I used to work at a university, and they had remedial programs for incoming students who didn't know algebra/pre-calculus. It adds to the time to graduate, but by and large is successful - it's OK if you go into engineering without being exposed to calculus).
> [1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?
'It's fun' is a pretty compelling reason for both kids and adults to learn certain things, but you can't just decide what's fun and what isn't. Maths rarely gets to have that reason (and when it does, it applies to people for whom this entire problem isn't relevant).
> Focus on (positive) emotions. Give kids incentives.
I taught at an English-immersion high school in Shanghai.
It's worth remarking that the boy at the top of the class in each grade was dating the girl at the top of the class.
Here's my take: school math past the basic arithmetic will be useless in life for the majority of people. Any non-trivial school-level-related math question can be easily solved within 10-20 seconds by a Google search.
That's also why all the examples of math's usefulness become ridiculous stories like: "imagine yourself getting stuck on an uninhabited island and having to calculate the triple integral to find the volume of a barrel of water".
No. The real use of school-level math/physics/chemistry/language is in laying the _foundation_ and training the brain.
And it doesn't really matter what exactly you want to use for mental training. Every structured activity is fine, as long as it engages the brain.
Even pointless tasks like memorizing scriptures help. There are studies that show that religious students who spent a lot of time on rote memorization, and later switch to other disciplines, in the end do quite well with their studies.
Having multiple parallel tracks for different types of students is controversial. Schooling tends to be cyclical with periods with more tracking is popular shifting to periods of less tracking and more classroom mixing. It really depends on what you want to optimize for. More tracking benefits the highest achievers. Less tracking raises the bottom and the average but at the cost of not maximizing the outcome of the top.
Do you find it controversial to have different tracks for Geometry, Swim, and Orchestra students? These are different types of students.
Arithmetic, Algebra, and Statistics are different classes should be taught separately.
"Please wake up and take your headphones off and answer my question even though you don't plan on passing any of your classes" and History are different classes with different types of students. Trying to conduct both classes at the same time using the same teacher is folly. You will be forced to abandon one or both of the students. You might argue that you should abandon them it turns every other day so they both get something out of the class. But that means they will each get half or less out of the class than they would have if you separated the classes. It is highly likely that you will frustrate both students to the point of impediment.
"Having multiple parallel tracks for different types of students is controversial."
It shouldn't be. The research overwhelming says its a good practice. The type of people who say this type of thing are the exact type of ideologically motivated people who are destroying school systems in blue districts. Ironically this group both hates private schools and creates the environment that pushes parents to pay for private schools. I've personally seen the bad consequences of schools that do this and I know people who aren't here anymore because of it. So please, for the love of god, stop talking about topics you know nothing about.
If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).
If you use other students for that problem instead of other teachers, you'd swap a budgetary problem for a bootstrap problem.
The upshot for this is that the benefit is as much for the student doing the teaching as the one doing the learning. Teaching has a much greater effect on _retention_ than listening reading or even doing, which is the majority determinant underlying the primary school curriculum.
There are a whole host of secondary benefits to this (as well as lots of logistical challenges): the students are doing something useful, teaching, and we pay teachers if you wanted to expend budget there I suspect it would have great effect, as would any other form of ~~bribery~~, I mean, incentivisation; socialising, especially if you have the teaching being done across different classes (which you would want to do because you want the teacher to know more than the student).
If we had budgets that allowed for one teacher per ten students, I imagine many problems in education would already be solved.
There is no correlation between better educational outcomes and higher teacher pay. Washington has the highest teacher pay and the smallest classrooms yet is below average in educational outcomes. Stop this canard, it just isn't true. US Schools have plenty of money, they just don't spend it wisely. In fact, both Mississippi and Louisiana have better outcomes than Washington state despite the fact they have half the spend per student.
The Washington schools constantly ask for more money so they can teach. I don't see what monetary resources are needed to teach arithmetic beyond a blackboard and chalk.
Projectors, videos, computers, tablets, calculators, are all completely useless in teaching math.
Walter,
I have a great deal of respect for you. Your math skills are much greater than my own. But you have stretched your statement too far. Flash cards can be very helpful in teaching math. Timed tests for math facts can be very helpful. Both of these can be facilitated with computers or tablets. Animations can be a very useful instructional tool. Even taking a picture of the chalk on the blackboard and putting it online can help students (and possibly helpful parents) review the in-class lecture from home while they do their homework.
I don't dismiss your overall point, but don't be too flippant. A video of the lecture can be very helpful.
All good examples but all relatively low cost as well (and don’t require 1:1 student-laptops). However I’m pretty darn sure that videos do more harm than good - too easy to zone out during them, and providing them to students only allows them to slack in class with the attitude “I can just watch the video again later.” Despite being horribly inefficient this is true for students of virtually all ages. Providing videos to those who ask only might help.
The real problem beyond all this is that the educational spending goes to the wrong spots. If you ask me, teachers should be empowered to select their own curriculum using a budget and most of the rest of the money should go towards paid tutors, better teacher-student ratios, etc (and probably way fewer administrators). I am firmly convinced that a lot of kids act out because they can’t grasp the material, not in spite of it.
I tried various methods on myself.
What works:
1. having a lecture on a chalkboard
2. taking notes by hand. Yes, by hand. Something about the act of writing it by hand fixes it in my brain
3. using pencil and paper to do the problems.
4. and what really works is giving an in-person lecture on how to do it
What doesn't work:
1. everything else
I've watched many instructional videos. Poof, none of it sticks. I've audited classes. Poof, none of it sticks, because I didn't do the homework.
I've never known anyone who learned arithmetic from a calculator.
It's like wanting to be strong. You have to do the work to get strong. There is no substitute.
I mostly agree with you. However, if you imagine yourself sitting down with a set of exercises that you need to figure out how to do, it is true that some well-chosen animations / models will be helpful in that process.
You have to do the exercises. But it might be beyond your ability to start doing them straight from the textbook. Crafted didactic material can walk you through initial exercises to the point where you have a theory of where to begin on another one. Or it can let you investigate a structure until you have an idea.
In your analogy, if you want to be able to bench 150 pounds, at some point you'll have to bench 150 pounds. But a nonconfigurable 150 pound weight isn't the best way to get there. You can have a set of weights that let you start with easier tasks. You can have a set of exercises that aren't bench pressing. Those things are helpful, and generally required.
What you've discovered is your learning style. It's not the same for everyone so it's an important thing that everyone should discover about themself.
There are visual learners out there. Being a visual learner doesn't mean you don't need to do the work, it means you typically need some visualization for things to click, and then you practice applying it like everyone else. Some people can even manage with just lectures.
This causes some students trouble in school because their needs may not be met by every teacher. It's especially worse if the student hasn't learned what their learning style is yet.
> What you've discovered is your learning style.
I have difficulty believing that my learning style is uncommon. Consider trying to build muscle. There are techniques that are proven to work best. There are no individual "muscle building styles" that work better, unless the person has a disability.
And I don't believe that in general the kids in classes are mentally disabled.
Yes, I know about ADHD, autism, and dyslexia.
Plenty of places have relatively high teacher pay, relative high staffing (for instance 1 teacher + 1 assistant per 25 children is standard here - not quite 1/10 but pretty close). The educational outcomes are bad and getting worse.
Budgets are a region-specific thing.
In the USA there are approximately 50 million students aged 5-18. If you paid for each student to get 1:1 attention one day a week, you would need one teacher per five students in schools that meet five days a week. Let's use that number because it reduces 50 million students nicely to 10 million teachers. Let's pay each teacher $70K/year. That would cost $700 billion per year.
The USA military spent $100 billion per year in Afghanistan.
If the USA provided the 1:1 attention only in 1st Grade and 3rd Grade, they could fund it with the same commitment they made in Afghanistan with a lot fewer deaths. The USA persisted in Afghanistan for 20 years. Shall we experiment with education for 10 years and see if we get a better result than we did in Afghanistan?
Even if the money had been available. you can't just spawn millions of teachers out of nothing. there aren't that many people who can and want to do the job.
Show me the lobbyist who will push for giving 700 billion a year to teachers.
That 100 billion goes to a bunch of extremely well-connected businesses who fund lobbyists to make sure the USA continues expending munitions in a series of utterly pointless, futile, wars.
Why is it obvious to you that children should be coerced into learning something?
Let's say that you have some curriculum C that you think is vital for children to learn, and you want as many children as possible to learn C.
Even ignoring ethics, it's not obvious to me that attempting to coerce all children into learning C is the best way to accomplish your goal!
I'm not the parent comment author, but my guess is that they probably meant persuade or inspire as much if not more than coerce. Most respectful interpretation and all...
Why is it obvious that an educator should do their best to teach a student something even when they don't want to learn? Well for one, it's their job, and two... Children especially are not good judges of which knowledge and skills will benefit them later in life.
> Children especially are not good judges of which knowledge and skills will benefit them later in life.
This. If children knew what was best for them, they wouldn't need teachers or parents.
When I was in college, the courses were laid out for particular majors. Electives were few. I trusted the college that they knew what they were doing in deciding the curricula, because I sure didn't.
In broad strokes, learning leads to better life outcomes just like brushing your teeth leads to better health outcomes, or any other example you may prefer. Brushing teeth is a chore so a child won't generally pick it up all by themselves without some nudging. If you don't do the nudging you're essentially letting a child be free, yes, but also willingly letting them end up worse off when they're too young to know any better. Learning is the same.
> just like brushing your teeth leads to better health outcomes
This is very context dependent. If you grow up surrounded by a typical western/industrial/post-industrial diet, then yes, it almost certainly does.
But you could also change the food environment.
Hopefully the analogy/metaphor that connects this to schooling is reasonably obvious.
So... We need to go back to living in the jungle?
You go do that then. Enjoy your slow death from malaria.
Where did I say anything about living in the jungle?
The food choices having nothing to do with the jungle, but rather: regular, significant consumption of highly processed and most significantly sweetened foods. There were plenty of people in the world before the widespread adoption of sugar as cooking ingredient whose dental health would likely not have been improved by brushing, and they didn't live in "the jungle" but places like ... America, and Japan, and India and ... basically the entire planet.
Forget children. I regularly coerce adults - junior members of my team - to learn properly things they don't care to learn too much. Both for the benefit of the organization (society in the case of children) and for their own benefit.
The answer is, as it's always been, aggressive tracking. Easier said than done because most school administrators and education policymakers base a lot of their self worth out of being "good people" and being liked by everyone. Having to give up on some kids is unthinkable to them. Simply giving up on all of the kids in a way that decouples the outcomes from their direct actions is much preferable and lets them sleep easy.
Here's the thing. Learning is hard. There's no going around it. You'll need to grind through practice problems, write essays, memorize facts, etc.
And you need to do that. It trains your brain. If you simply rely on calculators, LLMs, and Google Search, then you likely can forget about doing advanced science.
It doesn't mean that you have to _master_ everything. Far from it. But you need to apply real effort to various subjects to train yourself.
I agree this is the fundamental question and disagreement. I certainly don't think coercion is ethical.
We "coerce" children to do all sorts of things. We make them go to sleep. We make them learn to use the toilet.
Indeed. Children and not "little adults". They are emotionally and intellectually immature, literally with the brain and body growing into to the capabilities of an adult.
And if good habits are not instilled, they will have a difficult life ahead of them. It's far easier to learn those habits when young, than to try to independently course correct as an adult.
Not coercing a child towards correct behaviours, is doing them a great disservice. In some circumstances, it's child abuse to not coerce those bahaviours.
I think "coerce" is doing a lot of work here.
There's a huge difference between a loving parent gently but firmly teaching their kid to clean their teeth every day even though they don't want to, and a brutal schoolteacher beating facts into a class full of miserable kids.
I don't either - I'm am anarchist. But, ever hear the saying, "against all authority except mommy?" Kids need some level of coercion just to keep them alive. They have to be made to even eat sometimes.
Why not?
Not the poster to whom you are questioning, but I would argue that inspiring and encouraging are much better than coercing, especially if the goal is to educate, as I am skeptical that coercion is ever going to work to get true learning.
In a way, I think coercion is a requirement to be ethical. Ethics is determined based on what current society believes to be the right thing to do. We see that there are a variety of different cultures and ethics around the world, which would indicate that humans wouldn't just automatically follow a universal set of rules.
Thus to be ethical in your society, usually means you must follow the rules determined by a collective group of your nations ancestors or you will be shunned/jailed/harmed/etc. Which is essentially coercion. "Act this way or be punished."
But there is a difference in behaving ethically and behaving legally. While there may be consequences for behaving unethically (IE "I won't do business with them because I do not feel they are ethical"), society generally only overtly punishes those who do things that are illegal.
It is the other way around.
White collar crime might be illegal but most societies would definitely punish a murderer either legally or illegaly. Social stigma is a MUCH more serious thing than legality of action.
If your goal is high academic achievement, the only real answer is a stable home life, parent-enforced discipline and high parental expectations (note I said expectations not involvement - highly “involved” parents can be worse than the neglectful ones). That’s it. That’s the big secret. Show me a school full of tired/neglected/hungry/unruly students and I’ll show you a school full of students that are going to be almost impossible to teach effectively. There will be exceptions of course, but kids who aren’t parented properly at home will struggle massively to learn at school.
You can throw all the money, new techniques and technology you want to at the problem. It will not get better without fixing that fundamental issue.
I find it endlessly frustrating that this doesn’t get more prominence - there are studies from the early 20th century showing that the biggest factors in performance were things like housing and food stability, dentistry and glasses, etc. but fixing those problems drags up enough unpleasant societal choices that a lot of people prefer not to talk about it.
My wife is a public school teacher and I’ll never forget the time early on that an administrator tried to say she could deal with a kid who was absent more than half the time by making her classes “more engaging”. That kid reported rarely sleeping more than two nights under the same roof.
My wife too was a public school teacher for a decade, and resigned from sheer frustration and exhaustion. It became abundantly clear toward the end of her tenure that no amount of effort or technique was going to make the situation better. It’s really a completely broken system.
The primary reason I became a software engineer at middle age was to make enough money and have good enough health insurance that she could have the freedom to leave a job that was killing her mentally and physically.
I was a horrible student as a child, and in my 20s I strongly held the belief that education was broken. Now that I'm a few decades older I wonder if my problem was not education but life. I did not fit in at most schools, and that had a negative effect on my desire and ability to learn. That's what led me to teach myself computers as a teenager...education and online socialization combined. Win/win.
I think the author is right that education isn't the problem, but they don't really discuss is the social element of schools. Bullying. Ostrification. I'm not really sure how schools are expected to fix that.
There’s something lopsided about education for boys. The system appears to favor girls heavily. There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population. I think this is a systemic issue with school being built to favor a certain philosophy that isn’t well thought out for 50% of the population.
It's not that the system favors a particular gender. The system favors personality traits like self-regulation, organization, and conscientiousness. These traits develop earlier on average in girls than in boys.
i'm not sure if it's an issue of the educational system, but for at least several decades there has been a societal push to correct historical gender imbalances by encouraging girls to do well in school, go to college (especially STEM), get a career.
This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen and i think that has an effect.
It turns out that when you level the playing field, girls do better than boys. I don't think it's about the "girl power" nonsense, it's about the ability to sit down, focus on something, and produce work that meets a certain standard of achievement.
I would say the more harmful slogan has been "you're okay just the way you are." I'm not saying we go back to harsh discipline and abuse, but there has to be a middle ground where we hold children, especially boys, to a higher standard.
I disagree. There's cases where girls do better and cases where boys do better. This blanket statement is just as bad as saying that all men/boys are smarter than girls.
Exactly, girls and women can do astonishing work in fields that favour more or less their mutual traits and vice versa, no need for "hehe we are better because GPA said so".
> It turns out that when you level the playing field, girls do better than boys.
Why is it that when boys/men where outperforming and out-earning women, people were willing to move heaven and earth to correct this terrible injustice, but now when outcomes have reversed (for years at this point) it's considered acceptable to say "Welp, that's just how it goes. Boys just aren't good enough."
Hmmm...almost like, it's not a level playing field??
Approximate shares of undergraduate enrollment by sex:
Year Male Female
1970 58% 42%
1975 53% 47%
1980 48% 52%
1985 46% 54%
1990 45% 55%
1995 44.5% 55.5%
2000 43.9% 56.1%
2005 43.3% 56.7%
2010 43.0% 57.0%
2015 43.6% 56.4%
2020 42.7% 57.3%
2025 42.7% 57.3%
This is true and interesting but it's also incomplete. Men still dominate most STEM degrees, and unlike law or business it doesn't seem to be evening out over time. I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from this.
Until someone can show a real biological difference we should level the playing field.
We do know boys mature later which may be reason to not level the field completely, but we should still not allow that as an excuse.
If someone shows another difference I will have to think in depth about the details before I can comment.
Boys have been sitting down, focusing, and producing work that meets a certain standard for most of recorded history. That ability is really not a uniquely feminine trait, and suggesting it is is honestly bizarre.
Boys have also been doing more destructive things, but that's a different issue.
Boys and girls do struggle with different issues socially and culturally, which is upstream of struggling with them academically.
What's consistently missed that education is downstream of socialisation. The experience of learning as a first introduction to culture shapes consequences more than individual techniques do.
Part of that is challenging all gender stereotypes. The traditional stereotype was that girls were frankly rather stupid and couldn't handle anything rigorous and challenging.
Now the stereotype is that men lack focus, are disorganised, and have poor communication skills.
One stereotype has been challenged, the other seems to have replaced it, and younger men have almost been encouraged to live down to it.
I don't think as a culture we're emotionally mature enough yet to handle these issues in an effective way, and both education and socialisation will remain problematic until we do.
> This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen
This feels too vibes-based. I never saw messaging like this when I was a teacher, nor when I visited the schools my mom taught at, nor when I visited schools to help with kid hackathons. This would be in California, Texas, the PRC, Japan, and Taiwan. Mostly I saw little nonsense alphabet stickers, famous buildings, chemical symbols, or like, comically diverse but in the end harmless bits of bric a brac like an astronaut in a wheelchair.
What specifically have you been seeing that would lead you to think boys in schools are being held back by messaging?
> There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population.
We're well past that. In fact, the gender gap in college graduation is now worse than it was when Title IX was passed. But because the gap favors women no one gives a shit -- many 'progressives' even celebrate it and continue to insist we need all these programs specifically to get women into college.
> projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population
Projections? Aren’t we already there in reality? That future is today.
What philosophy? The gender based outcomes people never seem able to come up with any coherent explanation of what they think the problem is other then to play to stereotypes.
The explanation that I’ve seen floated is behavioral. Boys are active and physical and don’t focus as easily as girls, who are more amenable to sitting quietly and paying attention. The idea is that the current predominant K12 style favors students in the latter behavior group.
I have two kids in K12 and I don’t think it’s that simple. Not that I have a good explanation of my own, mind you.
>who are more amenable to sitting quietly and paying attention
Is this explanation not making a blatant assumption here that girls are statistically less hyperactive and distracted than boys?
"Hyperactive and distracted" is not necessarily the exact reason, but there is a large, well documented gap in performance for boys vs girls in elementary school (at least in the US).
Is that controversial (assuming otherwise normal children, excluding anybody with ADHD, etc)?
What confuses me is that the education system, especially the college track, was designed for men and boys. Lots of colleges didn’t even admit women, and they were largely excluded from learned professions like medicine, law, the ministry, engineering, etc.
I haven’t really seen a good argument for what changed. I guess it’s possible that the school system was originally designed to teach young men skills, like quiet study and deference to authority, that women either learn more naturally or get reinforced in other contexts, and the schools no longer effectively teach those skills but still reward them.
> What philosophy?
They might be referring to the TED Radio Hour "Beyond the manosphere" by Richard Reeves. I think it was on NPR a while ago, I looked it up because the "school isn't designed for boys but girls" sounded familiar.
This.
A math test is a math test is a math test.
What's the math teacher supposed to do?
I hate to be that guy, but I think it should be pointed out that asian boys don't seem to have much of a problem. If there's a gender bias, why do they succeed?
So the issue with this take imo is that one of the primary goals of schooling is to socialize kids and force them to interact with others they dont get along with. There needs to be some conflict among the students so that they can gain and practice conflict resolution skills that are absolutely vital. I agree that the current system can be improved, it's just not clear how.
My issue with saying socializing is one of the primary goals is that schools leave kids to figure it out on their own. Hard to know how schools are performing at that goal when it is going unmeasured.
Schools do better than home schooling. Those kids constantly do great on tests but it doesn't take long to figure out they are lacking socially.
I don't know how to teach socialization other than kids figure it out, but I'm open to the idea.
Some of those kids are lacking socially. It's not 100% by any means. The thing is that if you are home schooling your kids, you have to be intentional about socializing them in a way that you simply don't have to if you have them in a formal school setting. Obviously, some parents are going to fail at that but not all will.
Well the thing is if youre home schooling it's really easy to just never have your kid interact with someone they dont get along with. Thats the most important part of the socialization though. If you dont put effort into making your kids life a little uncomfortable Im not sure how theyll gain those skills.
Any time you try to randomly assort 30 children of the same calendar age into a room with a single (or even several) teacher, it's going to be bad for nearly everyone except those in the very middle of the curve. A very narrow portion of that middle too. It can't not be. And if the teacher tries to cater to the slow kids and the "gifted" kids even a little, then the middle-of-the-curve children will suffer for that too.
The problem isn't "education"... everyone not destined to be a feral caveman needs one. The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. But our single-minded pursuit of it to the detriment of all other alternatives just compounds the trouble.
Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
> Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
Because that's how language works. Stop being a pompous self-righteous ass and take responsibility for your own words.
> Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
Isn't this admission a sign that you should be more clear on the intent of the comment? There are many countries with well-functioning public school systems.
> The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work.
Do you have an alternative idea in mind?
It might have worked in the very distant past. I learned that there was once a monitorial system of education where a single teacher might be in charge of many students, but only because the teacher would get a lot of help from skilled students who would teach what they had learned to other students in their charge.
Isn't this just solved by better student teacher ratios, which you could totally have in public schools if they were funded better and societally we valued teachers more?
What are private schools doing that you couldn't implement in public schools with adequate political will and money?
Your question is easily resolved by looking up how much American schools are funded, compared to historical funding, other countries' funding, and their relative successes.
Meh, it's not like before public schools most children had access to tutors tailored to their individual needs.
Badly misquoting Churchill, public schools are the worst form of education, except for all the other forms.
I think I should also gently suggest here that the issue could also be expectations. The idea that you put 30 random children in a class and that therefore there must be some who are "gifted", and there must be some who are "slow".
I don't know man? I'm just saying that sometimes sure, all the kids in your neighborhood could be above average. But most of the time, all the kids in a class are just average. And now the poor teacher has to explain to irate parents that their kid's not any more special than the other kids in the class. (Only we don't. We acquiesce to their insanity and label average at best kids as "gifted" and then have everyone be shocked when those kids don't gain admission to Ivies. Ma'am, that kid was lucky to get into his/her state flagship. And even at that state flagship, s/he probably ain't gonna be majoring in ChemE or anything if you want my honest opinion.)
Sure, you can have slow kids in a class. But, really? 30 random kids? Is it statistically likely that any are "slow"? Or is it more likely you're dealing with no good parents who don't work with their children at home? Then those same parents come to berate the teachers for not doing enough to teach a fourth grader addition and subtraction. With absolutely no reflection on why a fourth grader, with no learning disability, doesn't understand addition and subtraction.)
I don't envy teachers because these are the attitudes they have to deal with.
Public Service Announcement: No people, your children aren't "gifted". And it's very unlikely that your kids are "slow". Your kids are very likely, (horror of horrors), just average. Every one of them.
If we can just get past those things we can start looking at some of the real issues.
Don't have kids huh...gifted is just a classification for those with test scores in the top 1-5%. So if you have 100 kids, there is a pretty high likelihood you have 1-5 gifted kids (yes its not that simple, whatever).
And the research on the topic says that tracking (the idea you are criticizing here), improves educational outcomes. What to know the real problem with education? Its people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system driving their own ideology and biases into the system. You have no stake in this, yet you want your opinion heard despite the fact that you put no effort into learning about the topic of education other than going through the system yourself which hardly counts.
PS You don't even know the term for the thing you are criticizing.
PPS By definition, every kid can't be average. So you don't understand statistics either.
>Don't have kids huh...
I'm a grandparent.
>people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system
You know when I did my student teaching stint to certify? 1993.
PS: You know why they say tracking works? Because we throw out data from after high school graduation. Ever wonder how those, uh, "gifted", kids who got "A"s in high school Calc typically do in Calculus streams at the University level? I can assure you there are many many professors out there dealing with the results of our tracking system, (that being where the proliferation of "gifted" programs came from), who would not say that it is "working".
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education yet, which basically argues for a revolution in the other direction - get rid of almost all schooling because almost none of it passes a sane cost benefit analysis. It's very well researched, and the author has a long track record of being happy when he moves people even marginally towards his views.
The praise here for Direct Instruction is akin in many ways to a lot of the research Caplan draws on, especially his findings that generally, most work related knowledge is built at work, by actually performing the job.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
1. the best teachers (of anything) rarely convey information or skills in any direct sense. Instead, they create the conditions where (willing) students will (or are at least more likely) to have experiences that cause them to learn.
2. John Holt (look him up)
3. I always wanted to offer people the chance to both leave and return to K-12 education. Lots of kids want out as teenagers, and we should make that possible but only if we make equally easy to come back when they realize the downsides.
4. Almost every child is a willing, in fact, overachieving learner. The fact that they fail to be interested in a topic is a reflection of things other than their capacity and capabilities for learning.
My experience was pretty contrary to points (1) and (4). My best teachers/professors directly conveyed information or skills. I found most students did the bare minimum to pass their classes (where "pass" = "not get their parents mad"). I tried to get a CS club started at my highschool and basically no one was interested, not even my friends.
Now, I did have a great coach in middle school who "created the conditions where willing students will learn", but I don't think she would have been a good teacher. She was great at organizing club meetings, finding the right materials to study, utilizing intraclub competition to motivate everyone, and getting her former students to come back and teach in highschool. I'm sure there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that she just knew how to do right, which made the club a whole lot better. But she wasn't a teacher. Closer to an administrator, but I think "coach" in the (m)athletic sense makes the most sense.
And, this is probably why my computer science club was not the success I envisioned. Yes, people are generally underachievers, but I also did not have the coaching skills to create the conditions where people wanted to overachieve.
> 1. the best teachers (of anything) rarely convey information or skills in any direct sense. Instead, they create the conditions where (willing) students will (or are at least more likely) to have experiences that cause them to learn.
When I was an international ESL teacher, this was known as “guided discovery,” the goal being that students organically uncover the rules that govern the specific domain being taught.
It works quite well because it transforms what would otherwise be a passive curriculum from more of a spectator sport into an active, participatory learning experience.
You are projecting. Those things are true of teachers who worked the best for you specifically. In some classes, these can work. Unless you have a high tracked class of kids with engaged and pro-education parents, it won't. It also tends to work better with kids in a specific age range, generally 10 to 14. But its not universal and don't project it into public policy that tries to maximize educational outcomes for the majority/all of the students. It also tends not to work for certain fields, like math for example. Its better for fields like history where debating viewpoints is part of the field instead of the scientific method.
Those things were not true of the teachers who worked the best for me specifically. I cite them based on stuff I've read during 40-50 years of reading about education and what actually works and how it works.
People do not, as a general rule, "learn" stuff by people telling them stuff. The retention rate is incredibly low, the comprehension is even lower. Now, it is often the case that good learning environments in our culture combine being told stuff with the sort of experiences that really lead to knowledge and skill acquisition. But everything I've read suggests that it is the latter, not the former, that generates the results we're hoping for.
Also, it may not be obvious, but sometimes testing is a critical part of those successful educational experiences. Nobody learns their times tables because a teacher told them the times tables ... but if you put children in an environment where they can both experience the patterns (or not) in the tables and where there is suffficient incentive to memorize either the tables or some heuristics, then they learn them.
You should look up "direct instruction" or mastery based learning. I was in agreement with you, mostly, but self-discovery has limits. I recently think this isn't the "optimal" way to teach, sometimes it's counterproductive. There might not _be_ an optimal way to teach and it might all be situational.
> People do not, as a general rule, "learn" stuff by people telling them stuff.
Yes. Recalling stuff and applying stuff is how we learn.
I strongly suggest you look into Math Academy and just bowse Justin Skycak's books on their method. I think they are right in many many aspects perhaps except the behavioral motivation ones. I think kids going through school need to either build self motivation or have someone build it for them, and I feel that is the gap in MA.
I don't think there's any way to revolutionize schooling on average. I do think that there are ways to make it dramatically better for specific kids. Pull up the tails of the distribution and you do improve the average, but not by a whole lot, since most kids by definition will still be...average.
I went to a charter school, and one with a very different (project-based) educational philosophy. The charter school was founded by, among others, a business leader who had previously exited a startup he founded. He thought it would revolutionize education for his kids. Instead, his kids did extremely poorly at this school, and ended up going back to their normal public schools, where they did great.
I ended up going to work for his next company as my first job out of high school, and he was recounting this story to my boss, who was a grizzled childless 50-something programmer without a dog in this fight. The school founder had soured on charter schools by then, and said somewhat sarcastically "Well, they work for some kids." My boss was like "Maybe that's the point, that the kids who they work for get to attend a school that works for them."
Random thoughts:
- Education should probably be an area where methods are chosen conservatively based on what is proven. It's easy to forget that a change in curriculum will affect thousands or millions of kids and could have a life-long impact on them. We'd pillory someone who suggested testing new drugs on thousands or millions of kids even though the effects might be far less pronounced or long-term than a few years under a poorly designed curriculum that embraces bad methods.
- Neither should we give up on finding better methods. Education has undergone significant changes that have almost certainly turned out for the better. How well would a kid perform if they were put through a typical 18th century study of the classics? Latin mastery is not the passport to success it once was.
- The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.
> The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.
This is a double edged sword, though. You have extremely knowledgeable people who can't teach because they have an actual degree in their subject matter but not in education. Also stuff like PE teachers teaching physics because they have the required education degree already and they can't find any physicists with them.
> In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching.
The mistake of the modern man is that he is more wise and clever than his ancestors, and that because of this he is able to re-invent all institutions from first principles. In the process, he destroys many load-bearing ideas and institutions and ends up with a more fragile, less successful, and generally more damaging replacement.
I'm skeptical about efforts to discuss changing schools (not even "revolutionizing" them) without even mentioning Ivan Illich or Paulo Freire.
Here some links for the lazy ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
I think we should start by making exams that mirror work day performance: Presenting ideas, summarizing, reviewing a proposal and commenting etc. This is of course more expensive, but keeping exams inexpensive is one of the major problems in the age of AI.
Just to note: I was taught 3 different writing systems and my ability to write on a whiteboard is rubbish
This is basically why the classical education movement exists. The fact that you can have remarkably better results using thousand(s) year old teaching methods/ideas than using 'modern' educational approaches is actually rather surprising.
We've known of a very good way to fix primary schools since 1907. Nearly 120 years. We simply do not want to do it because the labour and materials are more than we want to spend.
Schools are nominally about learning but actually about a whole of other stuff -- it's a non-goal to get better or revolutionize it, so that's the main blocker for actually getting better at teaching students.
Parents want their kids to get into college, admins want to keep the parents at bay, teachers are trying to get by, unions want teacher protections, etc. There's no QBR where people look at the stats and iterate.
> ed-tech games have a fairly low density of actual useful learning. I can attest to this: eager to give my son a head start on the phonetic skills involved in reading, I tried a few different iPad games with him. He mostly messed around randomly until he got the reward, largely ignoring the educational content to fixate on the cute cartoon characters.
I feel like defaulting to an ipad game is the wrong move here.
We solved this in the 90's! https://archive.org/search?query=emulator%3A%28*%29+jumpstar...
I would rather my kid was in a group of 10 students than 30. I remember very little time actually left for a teacher to help an individual child with all the kids to manage. Most people are scared to watch three kids at a time.
I'll take 1-on-1 mentoring over better computers, books, clubs, sports, or anything else the budget is spent on.
Please hire more teachers.
I think this is the part that often gets underestimated: school reform has to work with average teachers, average constraints, and students who may not be motivated in the first place. A model that only works when the teacher is unusually gifted is probably more of an inspiring example than a scalable system.
My own preference would be to build educational experiences on three pillars:
1. experiences. Intuition comes from experiences, and IMO an under-appreciated amount of 'education' is building strong intuitions. Experiences can include project work (including struggling!), travel & reading (what it's like to be someone else), sports and music (what it's like to build skills over time and work as a team).
2. practice. So much of what we can do - from language to mathematics - is a composition of rote behaviors, responses, and habits. It's impossible to become skilled without practice.
3. building habits of mind. This includes scientific thinking, applying mental models (I like this list here: https://fs.blog/mental-models/), pro-social behavior (listening, conversing). Much of science & math is having an available set of mental models, understanding how/where to apply them, and recognizing when a new one is needed.
My preference would be for traditional subjects to be taught with these firmly in mind: when thinking about biology, for example, what are the rote skills that must be learned? What intuitions should students achieve, and what experiences will enable them? What habits of mind produce an orientation, attitude, or set of thought processes conducive to practicing the science and art of biology?
I think this doesn't contradict the author.
There's a big missing point in this argument: it says "better" or "worse", "it works" or "it doesn't work", but does not specify how this is tested.
If we test students with standardized tests of their knowledge of facts and simple routines, I'm 100% convinced that direct instruction works better. I'd like to see if it's better also on aspects like student welfare, ability to reason and solve complex problems, creativity and innovation.
It _is_ possible that direct instruction also works better in these metrics, I just think this should be made explicit.
"Revolutionizing" is nonsense when the stuff we currently have isn't even implemented correctly. My personal assessment (from my own education and having worked in teaching positions) is that we need realistically quadruple the number of teachers and they should be paid double to attract and keep actual talent. Nobody is spending that much money. Trying to revolutionize it without massive increases in spending is pretty much a cope. You can find lectures from 20-30 years ago saying things like that and yet nothing was achieved at all.
Ya know, one way we could "revolutionize schooling" that would make sense for our modern world is to set up schools that make sense when both parents work.
Like have school open from 7 - 6 with the same amount of teaching but lots more recess so that parents can drop their kids off in the morning and pick them up after work. Also, have schools available in the summer so parents can drop the kids off while they go off to work.
All the schools in my area have before and after school programs for parents that both work or single parents or any other reason you want your kids to be at school longer. I recall my school as a kid had it as well. There isn't traditional class work but it serves as additional recess before and after school as well as lets age groups mix. There is a lot of social learning that happens in that setting that is good for the kids.
I agree with all of that. The problem in our area - I realize every local (US) school system is different, which itself seems to me to be a problem - is that the after school program is enormously expensive. Our kid is skipping (public) TK to stay another year in his private (all day) pre-school because TK + after-school is only, like, $50 / month cheaper. Not sure why three hours of after-school costs the same as 7.5 hours of Montessori, but it does.
That's what we do here. Around my high school there are dozens of 'after school' classes where parents send their children to stay until 7~9pm.
Now the birthrate is literally the lowest around the world, at 0.7[0]. The other comment is spot on:
> 7-6? Why even have kids
Humans should create societies that are friendly to parents who take care of their children. Not societies that encourage parents to delegate their children to someone else, being it nannies, schools or governments. Otherwise people will eventually ask this question: Why even have kids?
[0]: to put a scale for how low 0.7 is: you might have heard that Japan has a low birthrate. And they are at 1.15.
You expect teachers to work 12 hour days on top of being paid garbage?
You don't need the same teacher all day. You can have someone who watches the kids in the yard in the morning before classes start and a different person who watches after classes, and neither of those people necessarily need to be full class teaching teachers.
7-6? Why even have kids
The kids don't have to be there the whole time. Just the school is open. So you can have school open at 7 for dropoff and the kids can play in the yard but school actually starts at 8:30 or 9:00. Same at the end, classes might end at 3:00 or 4:00 but the school is open with supervision until 6:00 and the kids can play in the yard until the parents come get them.
This article reads like how to train a LLM
without a large corpus your pretrain is doomed to fail
Your post-train tricks hardly pays off if your base model doesn't scale.
Just as you should train for your body type and genetics, there's should be an assessment with incremental pivoting as to what and how you learn best that emphasizes your idiosyncrasies. Bias against boys should also be noted. They get reprimanded a LOT more and teachers are a LOT more forgiving to girls. Men falling out of the system is not by chance.
Where is this?
In Japan, at least in primary school, boys can get away with anything, as "boys will be boys." Girls must take care of others (first) and themselves (second). If girls misbehave, write sloppily, forget things, and so on, it is much more addressed than if a a boy does the same.
You should be skeptical of all revolutions. Not saying they shouldn't happen but you do need to keep a close watch.
How best to teach and effective teaching are problems solved long ago. It’s unaffordable for most.
What’s being discussed here is how to optimize mass education so that it’s least bad and is effective for a majority or least a substantial portion of children.
"It’s unaffordable for most."
Utter nonsense and the educational data says its nonsense. If what you say were true, the highest performers in STEM fields would be from the richest areas. In fact, the opposite is true, the majority of the highest performers come from middle of the road places. You are trying to make this about money. Its not about money. Its about the negative consequences of ideology and politics.
It's really just education - as well as industry - is over-regulated so there's no competition, ergo no cheaper higher quality offerings at a higher quantity
There is no regulation around education, as long as you don't claim to provide any accreditation or degree.
I've long held the belief that well-meaning adults who complain about "school these days" are mostly just talking about their own educational experience - either to complain about how they felt about it as a child (20+ years ago) or to elevate their nostalgia over whatever they imagine happens in classrooms now.
Educational professionals appear terminally prone to fads and magical thinking, but it's the people outside the school - parents and other adults - who seem to have the clearest conviction about things they know little about. Appeasing ignorant people makes bad public policy.
If you spend any amount of time listening to people complain about what is or isn't taught, you'll quickly discover that most things they hate aren't taught and the things they wish were taught are, at least in some form. Much of the rest is based on either outdated or misunderstood knowledge/beliefs.
My kid was given a hacky political axis test in school. Then all the kids were lined up in a row based upon the test results and the teacher then grilled the kids on the right side as to why. This is happening in a public school funded by taxes. Gaslighting parents about their own children's experiences isn't a great idea.
PS I know this is one event, it was also part of a consistent pattern of similar events. The school administrators had no problem admitting this in public and were proud of it.
Yes of course I don't actually hate what school is now. Not directly. How could I, I'm not even allowed to observe it! But I definitely hated what I had to do and it did not work for me. And that is useful information when I'm helping my kids.
"I'm not even allowed to observe it!"
Was this true when you were a kid? Why do you think it changed? Because when I was a kid and a kid was bad, the teacher would make the parent come to class until the kid started behaving. Do you think this would work today? And why would some teachers be opposed to it?
You say you can’t know something, and then assert that the dated knowledge you do have is still relevant.
If it wasn’t actually useful information, how would you know? How would you discover that?
As you say, it’s a bit of a black box unless you volunteer in the classroom (as my spouse did).
I was wondering about all this a lot.
I was teaching a lot of stuff to students: physics, math, statistics (during my university times) now I teach programming and Machine Learning.
I am torn between instructional based approach, which has this advantage that gives people a set of minimal skills to start doing stuff by themselves and the project-based approach, which is probably more interesting, but is very hard to squeeze in a relatively short classes time and also might left gaps, even in the base areas, as there is no time to cover everything end-to-end (think of teaching people about for loop, as it helps working with lists, but do not mention a while loop).
So, there should be some ideal holy grail in between both ways of teaching: show them everything versus let them explore and invent everything by themselves.
The crux is that instructional-based approach works great if it is well tuned to the student's needs. The problem is that every student has different needs and capabilities, so it is hard to do something that will work for everyone. So something is too difficult for some people, while being too easy for others.
That's why we have Bloom's 2 sigma problem - 1:1 learning works orders of magnitude better than in-class learning.
Now, LLM AI enters the scene, as the article is mentioning - individualized instruction could be finally achievable and I am much less skeptical about that than the author, as I tested that on myself, the good thing is I can ask and ask for more and more details if I am not able to grok something and my "teacher" is always patient, has as much time as I need.
It does not mean that teachers are not needed, just the opposite, because the key problem is to know what to learn, LLM will just do what you ask for, nothing more, so one need to know what to ask about. But once someone is on the specific topic and problem, you can really go quite far with LLM as a tutor.
I don't pretend to know the solution to improving schools, but I'm pretty sure the answer is not EdTech or "more/better technology". The disastrous drop in academic abilities during COVID made it clear that classroom education is indeed necessary for children, and that EdTech's promises "software will teach the kids" were hollow.
He's broadly right. And you should read some of the people he mentioned, like Greg Ashman.
But this part misses the point:
"As someone who makes use of AI quite a bit in my own learning, I can say that it’s still relatively weak at having a good model of an individual’s skill gaps and conceptual weaknesses."
It seems like he is expecting a chat-based LLM to maintain a model of the user's skill tree. But it wo:
- create a detailed skill tree for whatever subject
- have the user try to apply the skills
- store the user's mastery level for each node, in some structured format
This isn't something ChatGPT is going to do if you just starting chatting with it.
But you can design a system to do it, which is what the Math Academy folks have done.
Edtech tools don't have to have user-facing AI. They can use AI under the hood, or use no AI at run time at all.
I am a bit surprised that not in the subject article nor anywhere else in this thread, as of my writing this, does there seem to be any mention of John Taylor Gatto or any of his books.
He is a bit of a polarizing figure because he was a teacher of 26 years in NYC and was awarded the NY teacher of the year award two months before he published his famous resignation letter “I Quit, I Think”[1]
For anyone who is at all interested in education or the system will be aware that there is an scene crisis in the teaching profession and teachers are quitting left and right, to a degree that it is a serious civilization ending risk. I’m not even going to start talking about all of it because there is no way to do it justice, but suffice it to say, when the system of teaching the next generation collapses, your civilization/society/country will simply just stop functioning.
Maybe some of it can be eventually overcome where AI teaches your children instead of some government apparatchik type, but that’s a whole different set of problems caused by a solution.
“… we need to realize that the institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate"; that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing." - John Taylor Gatto
Big tech in schools is just an attempt to get their users hooked young.
- "Learning made easy" is an oxymoron. Learning is biologically required to be hard. (brain needs a forcing function to get out of its default-mode and pay attention to the novel stimuli)
- The hard part about education has little to do with learning and a whole lot to do with socioeconomic realties.
- Education and learning is a public good. Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it. Any successful company that looks like it's selling learning is not really selling learning. (access, prestige, a promise to earn more $$$, compliance)
I did not read the article. I just have thoughts. Got edtech nerd-sniped.
>Learning is biologically required to be hard.
I think we all know this to not be true. We've all had a super engaging teacher or task in which we learned quickly and efficiently without it feeling hard. I've learned far more through natural interest or through pursuing a goal than I have forcing myself to engage with a subject.
>Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it.
This also seems obviously false. Suppose some company did figure out a way to make learning twice as fast/efficient and proved it with data, there would be tons of money in it. Duolingo is just one example that there is plenty of money to be had even with dubious claims and a product that doesn't actually work that well. The issue seems to be that no company has figured out how to make arbitrary knowledge interesting enough to a wide enough variety of people.
If you take the extreme, people would pay huge amounts of money for The Matrix download to your brain type learning. The problem isn't no money in it, the problem is no solution thus far.
An engaging teacher makes the effort worth it. So it doesn't feel like the contrast effort required if oriented horribly. I fully believe there are good teachers and bad teachers. But that's why I used the word biology: there is no way to learn without effort. Your relationship with the effort is the important point.
> Duolingo is just one example that there is plenty of money to be had even with dubious claims and a product that doesn't actually work that well.
That's my point, it doesn't actually work for learning. Duolingo sells feel-good vibes of being productive with your doomscrolling time. It's learning-porn basically (could be worse).
> Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it.
I think a point to keep in mind is that even if some team cracked the ed-tech challenge and created a software that was wildly effective at getting students to learn, it would actually still be very difficult to get public schools to actually adopt it, unless they have some incentives like it being heavily subsidized, or free. And even then, it might not be free forever. That's part of the reason why ed-tech (even when it is proven to work) doesn't really make money.
> We've all had a super engaging teacher or task in which we learned quickly and efficiently without it feeling hard
Turns out that when you enjoy something, the same amount of effort doesn't feel so taxing! Who would have thought?
>General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught... students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught...
what.
You can teach anyone over the age of 12 the PAIR troubleshooting process. I have seen people with drug abuse related mental health problems cope with it. Kids are sponges. Soooo I guess I am agreeing with the back half of this section not the front half.
>In short, whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice.1 Or, in other words, the exact stereotype of schooling that so many of the people asking me about school reform despise.
Yeah it all goes back to Mastership learning, which modern schooling doesnt look anything like, because scaling to it would be madness.
>project-building or acting like a scientist, it will probably be worse...Students are unmotivated.
I feel like a lot of the systems being criticized here are designed to motivate children. And then all your N=1 people talking about their successes online, convincing people to approach things like this are related to having very motivated children.
>Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer.
Guy has at least 5 blog posts and a whole book on something he admits hes unqualified in.
> Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer.
Yes, but, you attended a school, no? You are more qualified to answer than you think.
> for the average student.
Who is the 'average student?' This is such a non-existent class I'm skeptical of it's invocation.
Not once is class size mentioned. Perhaps putting 30 randomly selected people in a room and then trying to move them lock step through a subject is complete folly?
Your schools are designed for administrative efficiency, not student outcomes, and "average people" simply do not exist.
The author cites 50-year-old education studies. It's exactly like citing 50-year-old papers about cancer research. They seriously need to update their views on what the state-of-the-art in pedagogy is.
Ahhhh but cancer treatment has gotten significantly better over the last 50 years.
Cancer research has a half-decent feedback mechanism that means fads eventually have to prove themselves or die out.
The reason schooling is hard to change - here in the US - is because the teachers unions and politicians work together to reduce hours, reliance on standards, eliminate "work" (homework isn't good for them!), and increase spend and pay. Government is incredibly inefficient at most tasks - on average things the government does cost twice as much - but it's incredibly terrible at education. Spending has increased - performance decreased ad infinium.
The obvious low hanging fruit is that most Americans just need less school and should skip straight into vocational training which can start as early as 15-16. These kids don't need to ever be even close to calculus or physics. There's an epidemic of overly educated people and it's a tremendous waste of resources and broken expectations.
Just follow the people who invented kindergarten :))
I think kids have a right to be exposed to these ideas. Stratifying society even further, only exposing select sections of the population to advanced ideas in philosophy or science, will not help build a solid democratic society.
Works very well in Germany. Devastating student loans is contributing way more to the stratification of society.