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.
I also went to a liberal arts college and, yes, my instructors care a lot about what I've learned. However, I am exactly that "asked educated question but sucked at homework and test" student. I usually got A or A- for first few assignments and just cannot finish any assignment near the end of the semester. The only exceptions are those "really hard and abstract" lessons where most of people got 70/100 for exams and I got 110/100 (literally).
I am 30 now and I realized that it was very much of ADHD symptoms. I am just an edge case of college education.
However, by genetics and mathematics we know that in every classroom, there are tons of “edge cases” from different perspectives.
I definitely struggled with feeling hyper engaged in the classroom setting, and then the jarring transition to the next class. By the time I switched between three and four subjects that day and on to do assignments, I was completely fried.
I'm having a hard time believing this. I've had one really good math teacher, his lecture prep was thorough, and the way he presented the material was very understandable, but without doing the problem sets, and some pre-exam review, I would not have been able to remember everything weeks later on an exam.
I can believe this. I had some subjects I was able to do this for going through Naval Nuclear Power school, and later college. Others I was unable to do this with.
Yes, I can see it with something you are naturally gifted in. But in that case the instruction probably has less impact; you'll get it even if it's poorly explained.
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.
You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.
> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers
…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence
What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.
So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.
> it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.
There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.
Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the last century. Up until the last five years student test scores were improving, and if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough. Why? Because the concern - after a baseline is established - is seeking exceptional performance, which definitionally cannot be made routine.
Just like in learn-by-doing, I believe some of it has to be done by the teacher themselves — by feeling where the pain is, they'll better focus on what matters.
Obviously, this starts mattering with more advanced education — not sure I can offer good insight for early education though :)
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?
> 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
This comment made me roll my eyes. :) Giving students high grades for little effort is a cheat code for being considered a great teacher. Most everyone working in academia knows that.
Perhaps worth reading through the rest of the comment too? I had other teachers where it was easy to pass and get good grades (As even), but I did not call them out as good.
Before jumping to conclusions, maybe ask for context too? In particular, this was a high school for gifted math kids, and what I learned through regular classes let me pass math uni entrance exam in the top 10 (out of ~500 students) with no extra prep and even easily pass a couple of semesters of uni math with almost no prep (I took exams for two semesters after the first semester). My (lack of) working habits did catch up to me after that.
Also, for 4 years in two uni degrees, I did not get such a good teacher ever again, and there were a few who were easy to get great grades with.
Perhaps you can give some benefit of the doubt, though?
Well, I don't know you, your teacher, or even what subject we're discussing but you wrote that you did "not have to bother with homework and assignments". Perhaps you would have learned more if the instruction had not failed to make you study? :P
Whether they'd be able to make me study (it was a mathematical analysis course, though I do not think it matters) is a question that'd be hard to answer — I was already highly motivated with different topics: I was spending my time reading on CS topics like algorithm complexity, operating system development and building software interfacing with hardware. So another possible outcome would have been that I simply learned less of it due to lousy instruction — which was the case with a few other subjects.
Sometimes a teacher can also do a great job of getting you interested (also important) but I was focusing on quality instruction.
this is not necessarily the case; the coursework could have been produced by a different person from the teacher (although generally at my alma mater the 'module organiser' fulfils both roles).
I’m not sure GP’s point landed. As I read it, it had nothing to do with who created the curriculum or even how much the student learned.
“Anyone who applies the smallest amount of effort gets a B and anyone who really tries gets an A” is a path to being seen as a great teacher in the eyes of the students, especially the students who got a B.
I am not disputing that being the case in general, but it'd be nicer if they gave me more benefit of the doubt: I tried to give an honest view of actually receiving good instruction, and not enjoying being handed good grades for nothing.
I've responded to them directly what that got me (like great uni entry exam scores with literally zero prep for a maths program, and a couple of semesters of exam passing with minimal prep for a maths/CS/physics majors).
On top of that, I am talking of this almost 30 years later — perhaps I have some perspective and I am not a fresh out of school guy who just loves getting off the hook easy?
One of my sons is one of those. He's smart, tends to creative pursuits, and while he will research and learn on his own about stuff he's interested in, put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.
Did well in class, participated, and my grades trended downwards as the school year went on.
A lot of it was undiagnosed ADHD, which didn't work well with the repetitive nature of much public schooling. OK, let's do polynomials. Start with two terms...then three...then four...and on and on. I lost interest after three. Of course, then I didn't study or practice and did poorly on tests.
I grasped the concepts, but couldn't be bothered to study.
I had the same problems in other subjects. I'm a big history nerd. I could write a huge essay on the causes of WW1, but instead the tests were "what was the date of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...".
We also read the Hobbit as a grade 8 class book. First question on the test? "Name all the dwarves that were at Bilbo's party...". It took me a decade to re-read it and get into Lord of the Rings.
I've actually thrived in the "real world" because I can quickly grasp concepts and with a combination of grit managed to make a great tech career. I was lucky with timing though. Had I been born a 5 years later, the career path wouldn't have worked.
Some of it was diagnosed ADHD (I was on Ritalin; I couldn't tell the difference, but my mom said it was huge; on almost every day I forgot to take it she would get a call from the school about my behavior), but much of it is something I still can't explain to this day.
I was a voracious reader, but if the book was assigned for school, I wouldn't read it.
Science was usually my best subject, but my personality clashed with my 5th grade teacher, so I spent one quarter of 5th grade just not doing it at all. As in when it was time for science, I read a book I had brought from home instead of participating. I did absolutely no work. I didn't even turn in the homework and I handed in blank pages for the in-class work. I received a D (the lowest passing grade) for that quarter, which rather confused me.
For 7th grade, I tested into Algebra, but at the time a teacher recommendation was also needed, and my 6th grade teacher declined to do so. I got a D in pre-algebra, with a B+ test-average being pulled down by my homework (or lack of it). I did however teach myself lock raking with a 5-pin lock that was on the file-cabinet in the back of the class.
I had the flu when I took the SATs so got what was (for me) a poor score. My guidance counselor told me that there was no need to retake, as no schools that wanted a higher SAT would take me with my GPA as low as it was.
It took me 11 semesters and two summer sessions to finish college with a 2.2 GPA.
Oh man did I hate math up until algebra. It just seems like pointless memorization and rote work. Then with algebra suddenly I could see applications. "I can actually solve problems with this" and my grades went from Cs to As immediately.
I still remember the test I took in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. For reasons I don't understand I was in a panic for nearly the entire test. My hands were shaking. I don't think I even finished it. Yet somehow I passed it and that was a turning point in actually starting to like math for me.
> put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.
Coming from a family of people assumed to be like this, and having friends in similar situations. Rarely are they actually disinterested in the subject, but are disinterested in how it was taught and self conscious of their perceived understanding of the subject. It's easier to say you don't care when it comes up.
I'm guessing your past this option but you could try a Montessori classroom -- less structured and allows children to chase their own pursuits. My sense is its stronger for years 1-6 as opposed to later years. Also it doesn't feel like Montessori tries to grind down the children - school/teachers dependent for sure (same could be said for other systems).
Oh he's well past that now. He did graduate High School, kept his grades up enough to be eligible to participate in some extracurriculars that he enjoyed. He made a couple attempts at community college, but it didn't go well and we agreed that we'd stop wasting money on that for now.
After 20 industry years, I've been teaching CS for the last 7. I sincerely hope that I figure it out before I retire. :) Doing this job effectively is more challenging than anything I've done in my career. I've read a lot about teaching, and it's amazing how much of it doesn't resonate for me. What has been the absolute best is sitting in on other instructors' classes and learning from them. And being completely flexible in how I teach--there really is no single solution to everything. "Be like water".
As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.
Yeah, honestly if I were to do the lecturing again, I would probably get some training first.
I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people on an individual level. For example, at previous jobs I was the person who was there to help explain functional programming concepts to people from different backgrounds, and I was often tasked as being the "theory guy" for the junior engineers when they were having trouble optimizing.
But there were some problems with my thinking. First, sort of by definition if someone is asking for help they're kind of invested with paying attention and understanding the concept. Second, there's a pretty big difference between explaining something to a single person (especially a person you already kind of know) and an entire class of ~15-20 people, all of which are different humans with different histories and backgrounds.
I also think I took things a bit more personally than I should have. I didn't have any training or practice, and I just jumped right into the teaching part. I think I did "ok" given that, but that's not exactly reassuring..."My professor for the class I paid money for wasn't quite as bad as he could have been."
> 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.
> 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:
I know a lot of people who believe this, and I think it just doesn't bear out.
I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.
I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.
Kids aren't just a blob of flesh that will some day become an adult. People don't take them seriously as individuals, but they should. That said, if left to their own devices, they simply will not do what is best for them. You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.
> I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.
My kids learned to read without being forced. They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards. As far as they were concerned it was guessing game. Then on to reading books together designed for more whole word recognition, which is reading guns stories. I wrote a blog post about it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/educating-lucy-learning
> I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.
You can explain to a 14 year old. My kids had been out of school for years at that age and I had not had to force them to do anything. A teenager is perfectly capable of understanding that in order to achieve somethings they have to do other things. If they want a particular career you explain that as well as the interesting things they have to do some less interesting things. If they want to study a particular subject to a higher level they have to meet entrance requirements.
> You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.
Sometimes, but rarely with learning. The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.
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.
What is wrong with focusing on what you find interesting and doing only what is really necessary of what you do not? The problem is forcing everyone, regardless of talents or interests or aims, to follow the same curriculum
If you know its useful you are still motived. if you are motivated overall you will develop the discipline to get through what you do not find interesting and put the work in. it avoids situations like this from the first comment in this thread: "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."
this is exactly how you create a population that is mathematically illiterate and ripe for manipulation by foreign powers and marketing agencies.
Our society and any democracy relies on a shared minimum level of competence. If you cannot compare costs per unit, do not understand basic biology, or cannot compare evidence, just because it does not interest you, you are cannot function in modern society.
Quite the opposite. A better education overall makes you better at maths, and more able to think critically. Killing kids love of learning is not the way to a better education. Drilling and memorising does not help you learn to think better. Engaging with things you are interested in does.
I find it very frustrating that people just refuse to believe there cannot be a better way to do things despite all the evidence (many, many academic studies) and the experience of people who have tried doing something different.
> If you cannot compare costs per unit
You are missing the point. You can make learning to do these things fun so kids want to do it. They will find a need for basic arithmetic to do something else and learn at that point.
> do not understand basic biology
Why not? Lots of people do not know basic biology after going through the school system.
> or cannot compare evidence
Why would someone who follows interests not be able to compare evidence? Every field has arguments and requires evidence.
For all these, my experience (and the available more formal evidence) is that allowing kids to follow interests (with guidance, help, suggestions as required) leads to far better results than forcing them to sit through a rigid and boring curriculum.
I'd argue honestly until graduate school too. Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.
I'm not saying this is a "bad" thing, having a well rounded education is important, but it's still a lot of stuff that a lot of students don't want to do.
Graduate school is more fun, and in some senses kind of easier (for want of a better word). Sure, the work is "harder" on an objective level, but by the time you've made it to grad school you're probably studying a subject that you think is interesting, so you don't mind powering through the hard parts.
> Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.
This is why I LOVED getting my MS. Just computer science all the time! Heaven! None of those pesky, worthless general ed classes!
I was just a dumb college kid. I'm convinced I'd have done better in life overall if I'd taken those GE courses seriously and made the effort to be a more well-rounded individual. How many chances do you get where your whole job is just learning shit? Youth is wasted on the young, as they say.
I go back and forth; part of what bothers me is how I'm paying for these GE courses.
Like, for example, I took a multicultural film course in college the first time around. I love movies, I love analyzing everything about movies, I love discussing themes and metaphors that are in movies, and I even love writing long essays pondering movies, and I enjoyed the class.
That said...is a multicultural film course really worth ~$1200 and like 10 weeks of my time? Maybe to some people, but it certainly wasn't for me.
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.
> 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.
While it is great that you are willing to help those in need catch up, something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world. In fact, given the immense cost of going to university, allowing them into university before they've gained that preparedness is quite unethical. It used to be that university had stringent admission standards as to not prey on those showing up mindlessness. Why do you think that fell apart?
> something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world
I think the GP's idea is that university is part of getting prepared for the world. And for many students, university is the final culmination of their preparation.
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.
> It’s virtually impossible to make every subject interesting for every student.
It its full generality that's probably true, but we probably don't fully appreciate how the classical school system kills interest. I've met many 6 year olds that were so curious about the world, you could tell them stuff about any subject and they would soak it up and ask for more. 2 years later, shaped by a school system that focuses on grading and pressure, and their interest in anything had tanked. It was very sad to see.
Maybe trying to avoid killing that natural curiosity would be a useful step in improving things.
> The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action.
I don't know if you forgot a negation somewhere. That's completely unsuitable to create interest, it fosters hate with a passion for subjects and school in general. I know it did for me.
I believe in school as an opportunity for intellectual enrichment, but fostering interest is not the primary goal of schooling. It's nice if school can make your kid an engaged and passionate reader, but your kid must become literate—whether they want to or not. And frankly, until they can string a sentence together, interesting books aren't even on the table.
At some point, kids have to develop the discipline to do the things they need to do, whether they want to or not. Carrots are better than sticks, but in the real world there are a lot more sticks than carrots.
I was a passionate and interested kid. I had a lot of boring classes in high school, but I worked hard at them anyway, even when I didn't give a shit. I got good grades because I knew bad grades could jeopardize my future. That was my stick; kids who don't take that seriously might need a different one, but ultimately you can't keep them going with carrots forever. It's good if they can be intrinsically motivated, but kids often will not be, and they need to do things anyway.
I'm speaking of disciplinary action that is home/family based and can just be rooted in the expectation of high effort. When this parenting is established young, the kid knows no other way. They know they have to participate. They generally don't want to disappoint their family. Everything is setup so disciplinary action should seldom need to occur and instead the opportunities for academic intervention are truly identified in a timely fashion and can receive a targeted solution (tutoring, different teaching style, etc).
Some families will decide to push harder, A's and AP classes are required, full effort in academics at all times. Some families will decide every assignment has to be completed and A's and B's with maybe an occasional C in a very hard class is acceptable and the student is left some bandwidth for social/non-academics. Some families take a simple pass/fail, as long as the kid finds a way to pass then they are good. So on...
The throughline is the parents are involved and monitoring the whole school year. Is homework being completed, how are your grades, talk to teachers when needed, etc. I feel this basic parenting is no longer common, parents want to blame the education system without taking any responsibility.
Sure we can incrementally improve education along the way, but we have to have a good faith expectation and base line of participation as a foundation or nothing will work.
Kids lose their curiosity because they witness their peers goofing around and not taking it serious. So if my friend's parents don't care and he's allowed to goof around instead of putting in the work, then I get a sense of FOMO or feel like a sucker for putting in the work. So everything devolves to the lowest common denominator. There's a lot more group dynamics and kids obviously don't know what is best for them, so adults really need to tell them what is expected. It's amazing how quickly a class elevates when you remove 1-2 distractions and likewise when the whole class is engaged and there is no distraction to begin with, it's ideal.
As with everything, there's a balance. I've had teachers who can make interesting content boring and ones who can make boring content interesting, even if they have to make themselves interesting in the process.
Just like you can only make your lecture so interesting, a parent can only punish their child so much until the child has nothing to lose anymore or their choice becomes boredom with effort VS boredom.
Sure, there's truth in that, but I've not seen a lot of evidence that teachers are the problem. Especially at a macro scale. For decades, they shoulder all the blame. We need to have a large level set / reality check on the parenting side of the equation. It's a cultural phenomenon that largely, in the US anyways, we don't care about education the way we say we do. We just want to buy it and check a box.
This time of year there's always a wave of videos that hit the internet that are basically outraged parents that their kids are not passing the year or graduating. The fact they are surprised by this at the end of the school year is usually not a lack of effort on the school's part and I feel this is a good indication of how aware/engaged many parents are.
Teaching is a lot like (a certain style of) management. You learn what motivates someone, make the connection between that and the subject matter at hand, and make it accessible for them to get to the next level. The rest takes care of itself.
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.
Humans are not so different from one other that we need different ways. However there are a lot of ways that work and it is very hard to run a real study to figure out which is best. You cannot isolate all the variables (several of the different ways claim teacher quality is important - just one variable that is hard to isolate)
Why do you think? For an example of something in support of my argument, China (and a number of other East Asian countries) use a very hardcore memorization + training routine. And they are having literally the best educational outcomes in the world from it, but such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.
> such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.
It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?
If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.
Yeah, here [1] are the PISA outcomes. PISA is an international test that's generally the gold standard for comparison of educational outcomes on an international level. [1] Over the last testing year China was #2, the test prior #1. Singapore was #1 in the most recent period, and is around 75% ethnic Chinese.
Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.
Are they having the best results from that? I've seen the claim of other countries using that and having book smart kids who can't think. (Whatever that means)
There is a common want to make the grass greener. However it isn't always and most people don't know.
> nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't.
It's typical for people to accumulate many examples of how "not to teach", and it's natural to extrapolate those experiences into ideas of "how to teach". To your point though, most people don't know how to do things they aren't practiced in, and some don't even know how to do things they are practiced in.
> They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class [...] but they didn't want to be there.
> [...] isn't interested in learning.
I highly doubt these students weren't interested in learning. By your own account they were engaged during class.
No teaching style is going to be able to fit to all students equally.
I was taught (when teaching for the military, actually) that leadership/teaching/etc. often talk about toolboxes but neglect a VERY important one.
You shouldn't just have a toolbox of things you've picked up from your best examples, that you've been taught, etc. It's possibly more important to have another toolbox of broken tools from all the terrible bosses, reactions to situations you've witnessed, etc.
This way when you go to do something and it's not in your toolbox, you can pull out that box of broken/bad tools and see if it's there. Otherwise we perpetuate bad leadership (and teaching IS leadership) through intentional ignorance (forgetting the lessons those bad situations gave us).
I had the opposite experience. I saw college kids who didn’t know where the F5 key was on the first day write smart matlab and python programs by the midterms.
I don’t think I’m exceptional at all. I was always behind and that probably reflected pretty poorly on me. But all it took to teach was preparing interesting examples and then spending time with subgroups and individuals.
I bet a lot of people think I’m catastrophically wrong, probably just got lucky.
Almost all such attempts start with the flawed assumption that there is One True Way to teach literally every person in the same cookie cutter fashion.
The fact that the dozens or hundreds of different teaching styles have great success with some but not all is not considered past "some is not all therefore it's a failure".
Individual humans can be radically different and have completely different needs. It's astounding how many people refuse to realize this.
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.
> students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students.
While I didn't do any additional looking into it -- this is often my biggest gripe. Is the _goal_ to have better exam scores and require less time studying or is the goal to be a better problem-solver holistically?
When faced with a novel problem that neither the problem-based learning group nor the traditional schooling group - which performed better and by what metrics?
---
It seems silly to say "This group who was instructed to rote memorize material could indeed perform better on a direct memory recall examination." and then close the door on problem-based learning.
I feel like many of the more alternative teaching methodologies have unclear learning goals. What is "holistic problem-solving"? How can we measure it? Do we know that conventionally taught students lack it? Is it hard to acquire? Is it even important?
When I first went into the workplace, it took me a bit of time to adjust to the non-academic setting. You think differently, you work differently. I discovered and learned problem-solving skills that I was not taught in school. Frankly, though, I'm glad I was not taught those skills in school, because they are easy to learn in the workplace, especially if you have a solid theoretical grounding (something which is a lot harder to pick up on the job).
To the extent that generalized problem-solving is a real thing, I think it probably boils down to the ability to quickly internalize information and draw connections, which conventional schooling already focuses on anyway.
It seems to me that exam scores are a better metric of the underlying thing we care about, the ability to accomplish things in the world, than solution skill when faced with novel problems. Even if you're a very innovative person leading a project to do something entirely unprecedented, most of the tasks you need to do, text you need to read, etc. will not be novel.
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.
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.
Younger children will do what they are told more easily, but making learning a chore they do because they are told to rather than a joy will kill their love of learning and that is what causes the lack of motivation later on.
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.
It was so long ago that I've forgotten most of it. I was impressed that it was based on evidence based literature. Here is a link to the training now https://carpentries.org/instructor-training/ I am disappointed that I don't see a reading list.
Unless it's changed since I was active, The Carpentries does not monetize content.
> 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.
Yeah, I was that student. It was undiagnosed ADHD (because nobody thinks to go send the kids who aren't literally jumping around the place shouting for an assessment, I'm ADD without so much of the hyperactivity). Put me in a classroom where literally all there is to do is getting on with the work and I'll be mostly ok, or at least give a good appearance of being so. Once I got home though I simply wasn't going to sit down and focus on doing homework, it wasn't a case of refusing too or anything, I always had the intent of doing it, but then the morning it was due would come round and somehow it hadn't happened.
Anyway, I did fine. Through some merciful coincidence the thing I was interested in doing turned out to be a lucrative career choice in an industry populated by people with the same sort of brain. That was almost entirely fluke though, it would be nice if instead of people just shrugging and going "huh, guess he's not interested in learning" we could improve education to better accommodate people who don't fit exactly down the median path.
I'd start by doing away with with homework which really is some grade A bullshit - if my employer decided to turn around and go "oh, by the way, now the work day is over here's some extra work I'd like you to get done in your own time" they wouldn't be my employer for very long. How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?
> How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?
This is great in theory, but then you have students who complete those tasks in half the time allotted, who then proceed to distract the rest of the class.
No easy one size fits all to the hw problem unfortunately.
Universal K-12 education was probably one of the greatest level-up programs that society has ever implemented. The question now, is it holding us back and how (if) it should be reformed. And reform is dangerous as there are people whose only goal is to ruin it, damned the consequences.
The thing is -- grades looked to me like a silly attempt in gamification. I did not really care about grades, but I care about learning. So you might have taught them good, and they will carry it to their lives, they just don't care to show it off in the form of grades.
Now, an admission tests grades are way different deal, of course.
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.
> tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen
Hilarious assertion.
Absolutely false in my experience.
Someone who just starts to learn in college will be years behind the students who began in high school. They probably mistake it for not “being good at” a subject, but it can really keep people away from some areas. For example, hard sciences and math, where years of training problem solving skills makes solving new problems easy.
Not saying all primary/secondary education is good, but there is a massive gap between the good and the bad.
> Currently, tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen.
The phrase "real learning" is hard to define but I think I understand what you mean here, ie critical thinking. But this is only possible on the back of foundational literacy possible by years of primary education.
> Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.
Kids that "don't want to be in school" need to be treated with care and shown the value of education. Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers. The kids might not want to be there for a variety of reasons, but if you've ever interacted with kids informally you'll know they are typically curious and eager to learn about the world around them.
And if they aren't the reasons need to be understood and the kids would ideally be provided the care they need, although there reality is far more complex.
This exception does not invalidate the basic premise of primary education, the benefits of which can be seen globally in pretty much every context.
> Kids that "don't want to be in school" need to be treated with care and shown the value of education.
I have yet to see a suggestion on how to do that, that isn't obviously unworkable.
> Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers.
It is not teachers I worry about, it is the other students. Peer pressure matters and so put kids who want to be there with kids that don't and some kids will decide they don't want to either. (the reverse is also true, but there is no way to know and I wouldn't risk my kids who like school in an area where many kids don't want to be there)
Yep that's definitely fair, to not want to put your kids in a school which has a large population of troubled children.
But to the original point I was trying to make, troubled kids don't automatically mean they don't deserve education or we should allow them to fail out or give them the option of leaving primary or secondary education. We should really be making every attempt at figuring out ways to make them stay in school, given how stark the difference in outcomes are.
If it was up to me (back then), I wouldn't have even done primary school. I'd wager that the vast majority of kids wouldn't want to do school, because obviously, but that's why we don't let kids make important decisions like those for themselves.
Looking back I am extremely appreciative of my time in school as much as I might've not liked it at the time, and my education has undoubtedly made me into a more intelligent and capable person in pretty much every conceivable way. Especially high school, pretty much everyone I know who's a high school dropout (and doesn't come from a wealthy family) is much worse off than their peers who finished it.
As for tertiary education, that is already completely optional. I attended university for 1 year, said "This ain't for me", and things worked out just fine for me.
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).
I don't like my options. I want all kids to like school and so be there from 6 - 26 (that is get a phd). Anything else is a failure, even if it makes some kids better to get rid of other kids, it makes those kids worse.
Leaving school after 8th grade used to be pretty common. Many jobs were available for someone with an 8th grade education, or you'd start an apprenticeship.
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.
That's the problem with having universities issue credentials. You end up with a lot of people who have no interest in learning but are going to stick it out for the credential.
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.
Then I agree. I read it as the argument that the economy is actually more technically complex and requires additional education, which is a common argument made be politicians and university admins.
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.
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...
Perhaps. For now, one of my one-on-one tutoring sessions (in real analysis) this semester consisted mostly on un-teaching a student a bunch of wrong crap they "learned" from ChatGPT.
I'm thinking of custom built Teacher AIs, trained in how to teach different kinds of students, and with well defined curriculums.
Even if they're not better than the best human teachers, I think being able to "personally" interact with each student 24/7 will be a huge improvement.
I regularly think about to how difficult it would have been to teach the younger me (while trying to stick myself in my kids' perspective).
Any well intended notion of "I wonder what sort of teacher would have ignited a passion for learning" is quickly replaced by the understanding that such a person likely didn't exist.
I was lazy up until I wasn't, which was largely a reaction to being lazy in the first place.
Fast forward a few decades and I am a serial workaholic who is continually making up for lost time.
Nowadays I wonder what it will take to motivate my offspring.
Also, there is no 'right way to teach', but there are 'right ways of teaching'. This difference being that people can respond very differently to the same approach, so many approaches are needed to be effective.
> 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.
"The A students lead the C students who direct the B students"
I thought I might be able to reach them, because I was never an A student. I was always kind of the underachiever who teachers knew was smart but would get mediocre grades because I wouldn't do the homework. I passed high school because I have a good enough memory to remember what was being taught in class and do fine on tests, but I'd still get middling-to-bad grades in high school because I wouldn't consistently do the homework.
To be clear, I do not blame the teachers at all for this; I do not think they took any joy giving me bad grades.
But because I was someone who knew what it was like to be a smart academic underachiever, I thought I might have luck reaching the students who I saw falling into the same negative patterns I had.
I do think I reached at least one, but I think most of them I did not. It's ok, teaching is hard. I hope a better teacher came along in these students' lives and helped them out.
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.
I always felt that large urban centers should concentrate on specialized schools. In large cities there is a critical mass of students to fill specialized schools such as ones for; biology, programming, electrical, automotive etc...
Many students have an interest and want to pursue it. It's only through self-motivation that people really learn.
There was a study of where hockey players come from, they tend to come from cities of approx. 50,000 people. Large enough for schools to offer many different types of programs in schools, but small enough that a teacher knows each student and their family, and can help a motivated student train. In many large urban centers teachers don't live in the same communities that their students are from, and can't offer that extra oversight. This is why in large urban centers, it would be better to start to specialize early.
All roads lead to the same destination. Eventually you'll need to know a bit of history, math, etc. no matter where you start from. So beginning in a specialization doesn't exclude other knowledge.
Sometimes it's better to have an in-depth knowledge of one subject, if a student starts early and focuses on one thing, they'll be ahead of their peers.
The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have. Maybe you find biology very boring, but that still doesn't mean you should be able to finish school without knowing that living organisms have cells that power them, that all animals have hearts, that plants do photosynthesis etc. It's alright to not like history, but you should still have some idea of what the Roman empire was or about the Second World War. It's ok to hate physics, but it's not ok to have no idea about Newton's laws of motion or about the notions of pressure, volume, and temperature and how they relate to each other in gasses.
Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.
Why does it have to be a fixed curriculum? Individualised learning can still cover everything important.
> The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have.
Do they actually have it? Do you think schools that have fixed a fixed curriculum are successful at teaching this to everyone? Try picking some average people and asking them to explain Boyles Law, or why and how Rome became an Empire or the causes of the Second World War.
Is the level of minimal knowledge the same for everyone regardless of talents? Some kids will know before they are teenagers than most adults ever will about any of the topics picked, and many more.
I am confused about why you think knowing Latin somehow excludes knowing history of physics or biology.
You are arguing from a position of not having an experience of eduction outside the school classroom setting. I am speaking from experience and from having actually read up on the evidence.
This is a really interesting framing to me. You say "forced," would you have preferred to give them a better grade even though they didn't do the work because they were smart?
I said "forced" because there's a grading framework that I had to follow and there was no amount of flexibility within that framework that made it so I could pass them... Especially since they didn't leave the class really understanding the subject.
I knew they were capable of understanding what I was teaching, and I even made it very clear to students that if they are having trouble with the homework they can bother me and I will help them through it, and I will spend whatever amount of time it takes. A few students actually took me up on that, and they really did improve as a result, but some of the students simply seemed content on failing.
I take it as a personal failing; if a person is smart enough to pass my class and didn't, then I didn't do a good enough job making it interesting.
I was one of these "smart students" but it really wasn't that I did not want to be there. I was a lazy, or complacent, f*ck. I've have had to learn how to learn and how to have discipline late(r) in life.
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.
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.
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.
That's true. I'm frustrated for example in how they teach math at my kids school. They don't do rote memorization of how to multiply. No quizzes, no reciting... they teach the conceptual parts of it which is fine, but without memorizing I feel they will never have fluency. And my daughter never did get fluency in math now I'm drilling my younger son every day.
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.
I think you need to go a level up. Forget the people that flunked the class. Did the people that get good grades learn anything? Really? Do you think they still know it?
Was learning the point for anyone or any institution involved?
I think for at least a couple of the students, they really did learn the subject well.
A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interesting follow-up questions [2].
Of course, there's a pretty strong selection-bias there: if they are actively looking for help from a professional, they probably have some interest in the subject matter, so it's difficult to know how much I helped compared to them just looking things up on Google and/or doing the homework, but I would like to think that I helped at least a little more than they would have had otherwise.
[1] On my own free time; I wasn't given any direct budget for office hours.
[2] e.g. one person became extremely interested multithreading and multiprocessing, and so I pointed him to the ZeroMQ guide and walked him through some basic farmout patterns...I should see how he's doing actually, I think he has a lot of potential.
Both my parents were teachers so I thought I had some idea, but it wasn't until I ventured into the middle school to assist a teacher with a coding class (probably this was 10 years ago now) that I learned something about education.
> 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.
Got to disagree, there's been a cohort of teachers pursuing that avenue of thought and all it's led to is colleges that shout down anything that'd pierce the monoculture and employees so politicized they lose some utility in actually doing the useful work that the company or entity exists to perform.
It's a side effect, perhaps, of the modern "main character syndrome". An electrician doesn't need political "leadership". He needs to know how to wire a house quickly, efficiently, and above all, safely. He doesn't need extensive training on how to help bring about a proletariat revolution. That's an example from the trades, but same in the white collar world; my employers accountants weren't hired because of any activism, but because they know accounting rules and regulations so the rest of the business doesn't have to think about those things as much.
If anything, modern generations need reminders that 99.99% of us are NPC's and the best thing we can do for the world, our families and those around us are to be really good, competent NPC's.
Let me also point out we landed on the moon without that view of education. People, on the moon, with all the technological and institutional advances necessary to make that happen.
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."
That's an odd comment below to see die from crm9125.
I'm not sure what's so offensive about it?
If it was downvoted, what interests could want to draw attention away from those sentences, and why?
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crm9125 13 hours ago [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]
Also there are about 2 billion children on earth, each with their own different idiosyncrasies.
Good luck finding the grand unified theory of pedagogy for that.
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.
I can recall that one motivation that helped to drive me when I was very young (K-2 at least) was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do. Like there was this ladder I could climb to in a sense help to advance to a more sophisticated peer group; even in relation to academic concerns like reading and math.
So for at least some students, there might be some potential in convincing them that "it's what the big kids / cool kids / etc can do" might help motivate them. :)
> was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do.
That's honestly a mentality that I never completely got over.
When I was first learning to program when I was ~13-15, Python was already a fairly typical "beginners language", and my dad actually already had a book on learning Python.
Wanna know why I started with C++ instead? Because one of my classmates told me that it was too hard and that I wasn't smart enough to do it and only professional software engineers can.
I wasn't about to let some kid tell me I wasn't smart enough to do something that I knew I was capable of, so that afternoon I begged my parents to take me to a nearby used-books store and buy me a "Learn to Program in C++" book, and started on that. Eventually I also found a copy of the Sams "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" book that I read through online.
I still kind of have that mentality; I learned how to use Isabelle because I felt that that's what the "grown up" computer scientists use. I learned how to write Haskell because that's what the "smart" software engineers use. I learned how to use Vim as a teenager because that's what the "good" coders used.
It's probably not the best way to motivate yourself, but it seems to have worked out ok for me.
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.
One of my favorite teachers that I ever had was my Calc 2 teacher in high school.
He always made a very special point to explain the "why" of everything. Not just "how is this used?", but he would also derive a lot of the formulas for us instead of having us just memorize forms. I think it makes you better at math in general; the whole point if mathematics education, in my mind, is to teach you the how and the why of things, not just to get to an answer.
I already loved math by the time I got into that class, but I attribute him as the reason that I love formal math so much.
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.
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.
One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectivenoun construction), which is very useful when either encountering an unfamiliar word and for constructing potentially new words.
Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.
I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially.
Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").
It's not even really about learning Greek or Latin as a true spoken language. It's about known the roots of the linguistics for understanding why a word is even created in the first place.
English is a really messy language but there are many simple underlying roots that can tell you what the word means with context clues after hearing it for the first time.
Also learning the International Phonetic Alphabet is probably another huge boon for comprehension, the nicer books often include IPA spelling for crazy off the rip words
In the US, it seems like malpractice to teach anything before Spanish IMO. 14% of the country are native Spanish speakers. It's hard to imagine a return on any other foreign-language instruction that would match improving communication between 45 million residents of the country and everyone else, to say nothing of improving communication with citizens of the other countries actually sharing a land mass with the US.
Learning Spanish in school was the single biggest waste of time. 14% of the country are native Spanish speaker! Many professions require some spanish! Those were the arguments back then as well.
However... unless you account that the native speakers and heritage speakers will learn English, making your ability to say cerveza useless. If you aren't fluent and have professional Spanish qualities (like Medical Spanish), its useless. Learning Latin or Greek would have been more useful, at least I could struggle through Cicero in Latin, than saying 3 words in Spanish before the other guy switches to English.
If we find a way to make 4-6 years of language instruction reliably lead to a reasonable level of language competency, maybe. But until then, the student's underlying interest in the language is much more important than any abstract sense of usefulness. I took Spanish in highschool, and despite being moderately ambitious about it, never got very good, and never got much use out of it, despite living in Florida and Texas. I suspect (although alternate history is hard, so I can't guarantee) that I would have gotten a lot more out of Japanese, simply due to alignment of interest.
No, because native Mandarin speakers make up only 1% of American citizens.
In the US you are very likely, at some point in your life, to encounter native Spanish speakers with poor English competency. Outside of higher education, you are very unlikely to encounter native Mandarin speakers with poor English competency.
The typical student does not emigrate or even travel that much, so you don't prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the population of the Earth, you prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the regions where they are likely to spend their lives.
We had, spread over the course of our 8th grade English class (Thanks Ms Wilson), about 500 greek and roman roots to memorize, and weekly quizzes. These were not graded curricula, they were for extra credit because it was the teacher's personal program. No grammar, no conjunctions or conjugations, no sentence construction, just the two biggest veins that PIE has contributed to English nouns and verbs. Rote memorization.
I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.
That sounds great, and very different from what GP said ("make French/Spanish/etc the second foreign language they learn after Latin&Greek").
Edit: I will still say that Greek has little relevance to common English vocabulary, though it is very relevant to almost every scholarly domain. The same is true to some extent for Latin - as the vast majority of non-scholarly Latin words in English are actually borrowed from French, and have (Old) French spelling and pronunciation, not Latin ones.
> Classical Latin [has] extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language
…I know almost nothing about this topic, but this doesn’t line up with what people who know Latin have told me. They’ve frequently cited the language’s simple grammar as something they like about it.
(Classical) Latin nouns have one of 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and each noun has 12 possible forms (6 cases * 2 numbers); pronouns follow similar rules; and the adjectives modifying a noun have to agree with it in case, gender, and number (so typically a single adjective has 36 possible forms). Verbs vary by voice (active/passive), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, participle, gerund, supine), tense (different moods have different numbers of tenses, with 6 for the indicative), number (singular or plural), and person (3 persons); overall, a single verb will have more than a hundred different forms.
Because verbs have so many specific forms, it is also pretty common in Latin, as in most modern Romance languages, to omit the subject of a sentence, as it can typically be inferred from context plus the specific verb form - so, you often have to recognize the verb form to be able to understand who the sentence is even talking about (e.g. a sentence might say "amo regem"; if you recognize the words but not the specific forms, this means "love king"; but this unambiguously means "I love the king").
Now, there is quite a bit of regularity here - there are 5 categories of regular verbs (plus some specific irregular verbs), and 5 categories of nouns (though there are multiple sub-categories, as there is some variation in noun forms even in the same category; plus of course some irregular nouns).
Overall no, I don't see any comparison where you could say that Latin is a simple language. All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features. For example, Spanish drops the case system entirely, drops the neuter gender, and reduces the number of moods for verbs.
> All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features.
Wikipedia informs me that Romanian is a Romance language and has retained some of it. Also, the Slavic languages have largely retained most or all of what you’re describing, although they are not classified as Romance languages.
I am a Romanian native, so I know quite a bit about it :D . Romanian has kept the major features, but it still dropped a lot. For example, instead of 6 noun cases, Romanian only has 3, of which only 2 are commonly used (the third, vocative - "hey, you, bird!" - is quite rarely needed; and even when it is, it's usually replaced with the nominative by most speakers - we commonly say "pisica rea!" instead of "pisico rea!" for "bad cat!"). There are also fewer verb tenses in Romanian than Classical Latin, and some are formed with auxiliary verbs instead of being truly separate verb forms. Also, the neuter gender, while technically existing in Romanian nouns, is simply masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, there is no unique third form for adjectives or articles.
Slavic languages also have a case system (I think it's possible that this is part of why Romanian kept the Latin case system, as there was quite a bit of Slavic influence in Romanian), but they didn't "retain" it from Latin, as they are not Romance languages at all - they simply share this linguistic feature; Latin and Old Slavonic are by no means the only languages with a case system.
I don't think they're talking about learning greek or latin before english, it sounds like they're talking about putting more time into learning etymology which is incredibly useful.
I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English.
Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.
In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.
I was blown away by how... retarded... my reading comprehension and skills really are, when I recently opened Charles Dickens' "Bleak House," reading just the first couple of pages in! Yet I am even more deeply troubled that I am above the median.
I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).
"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
I have a book that says it's intended as a science book focusing on biology for around elementary aged students, it's from the 1890s and the material is something I'd expect high schoolers to start learning not 4th graders!
I think these sorts of things are very commonly misleading. The Romanian school system I grew up in for example nominally had way more advanced subjects even in middle school, not to mention high school, than what is commonly taught in much of Europe and the USA. For example, we did a solid two-three months of basic group theory in the 10th grade (sophomore year?) - learning about monoids, groups, rings, fields, proving isomorphisms between various structures etc. These were even part of the Bacalaureat, our equivalent of the SAT. A foreign language (almost universally English) is part of the national curriculum in Romania starting from the first year of primary school. When I went through school, we also used to have a set of canonical literary works that we were expected to read and be able to provide literary criticism on during the national exams at the end of middle school without access to the text; for example, the exam you'd take at the end of 8th grade would ask students to write a ~700 word essay on the main character of a particular Romanian novel; or on the themes of a piece of poetry the exam named, but did not reproduce.
However, the number of students who actually ever understand any of this is typically only a small fraction. In particular for the Romanian language exams, despite the theoretically high level of literary knowledge that it tested for, the actual rate of functional illiteracy between students who passed this exam was >20-30%. A huge swath of students either cheated, or simply memorized entire essays by heart, without even understanding what they meant. Of course, some of us actually did learn all of this from an early age - but this was far less typical than looking at the curriculum, exams, and even exam results would have suggested.
This is true, this book was also written when the idea of high school education was extremely new (let alone public high school education). With what you're saying it was likely a book for advance students and even though it uses terms I associated with younger people they likely meant teenagers.
The whole-word learning "revolution" was based on a lie and misunderstood science. It set back a generation of kids and made them feel dumb because of a stupid group of educators.
My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at).
My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.
Very interesting. I do know that duolingo makes a great effort into trying to simplify the learning process to reduce friction, but still structured learning is really great for learning the rules, while duolingo is better for unstructured practice with some learning, like the article mentioned about the kid and the app I believe short circuiting to the reward.
I credit randomly deciding to take Latin in high school as a huge change in the trajectory of my life. It didn’t even happen all at once. Just a little different perspective on how words are formed. Oh they’re often combination of simple root words.
Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.
Education boards and school districts in America keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again: throwing away proven methods casually for experimental fads.
This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.
I believe this is something that is no longer done. On top of that, one of the early major proponents of it has admitted it was a failure, but I forget their name. The school my kids are at are not using this system. Obviously it's a data point of one, but I don't think most schools are doing this anymore.
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 agree and I have the evidence needed to back up your claims.
Stable home life? checked.
Parent-enforced discipline? checked.
High parental expectations? checked. Through some involvement though, to some degree: we as parents always show real and positive interest on what our children are doing and learning without really interfering unless they explicitly ask for it, and I believe this helps dearly. I learned by doing, trying at first to get involved too much - proved to be a mistake which he corrected it by himself, jumping from an IT career to chemistry in notime and shortly hitting silver at international chemistry olympics.
I never try to interfere anymore but just be there, always ready to talk about it and offer the emotional grounding they so much need. Kids will flourish. My elder is on his way to what seems to be a strong, well built medical career and my 6yr old oh boy, she's ready set.
Parent-modeled discipline is arguably just as important. The strengths and struggles in a young person are quite often some analog of the strengths and struggles of their parents. Dealing with the distractions of life and focus on what is truly valuable is a respectable challenge at any age. The expectations and enforcement can be high, but if that is missing, kids are going to struggle and school is going to feel like pretend.
It makes me _irate_ when the solution is "just throw more money at the problem, that will fix education!"
Like, irrationally mad. It is lazy. It is soulless. It is callous. It is arrogant. It is detached from reality.
"Education will fix the problems in schools!" is circular logic.
My pet theory, and this will bet destroyed here, is that we should have developed birth control for males a loonnngg time ago. Accidental kids that have dad peace out on them usually never get a fair shake at life.
Well I for one am always in favor of arbitrary humans having better ways to voluntarily attenuate their own fertility, full stop.
We may have a depopulation shock problem on our hands at the moment, but trying to encourage more accidental births isn't the way to solve that: we need to increase social and financial incentives for forming families and pull away as many of the social and financial barriers thereupon that we can. Not to increase population but to better slow the free-fall of it decreasing so badly that it upsets the actuarial tables.
While I have no way to assess whether better male birth control options would directly positively impact education in particular, I see zero ways it could negatively impact it.
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)
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.
I think math bas be slowly transforming more and more into word problems and scenarios. You might think oh yeah this engages the student by showing them reality, but I actually found it incredibly boring and useless, it served as a distraction from the actual numbers that I think are important to learn too.
Part of the goal there is not only "relatability" (demonstrating how this could be useful in reality) but "applicability" (demonstrating HOW to distill a math problem out of some potentially messy real world anecdote).
I have legit seen real world adults do things like say "Well, I got ten widgets because I know that's enough for two people. But there's gonna be four coming so.. uh.. 10+2=12, I'll bring 12 widgets"
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.
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.
If the purpose of a system is what it does, then what does the system of "not going to school" do?
If schooling and learning/education are truly mutually exclusive then who is the most learned and educated person you can point to that never stepped foot in a school? And how do those rare examples compare against the breadth of modern PHD holders?
There are a non-negligible fraction of kids that are kept out of school, homeschooled, etc. If school was as bad for learning as you suggest then one would expect those kept out of it to demonstrate higher-than-average aptitude.
Unschooling works for a fraction of kids, and at some stages of their life.
How big is that fraction? In my experience being around a bunch of home schoolers (and adjacent, and school system), some of whom were more in or out of unschooling, I think it's small enough that it should be a rarely considered option.
There are some kids where it will work _really_ well. I've interacted with a couple. There are a lot of kids where it really doesn't work, especially in a distraction rich environment.
Thanks, I have. And it resonated a whole lot! He was working within a very entrenched system. Systems have a way of achieving equilibria and then all the parts trying their best to maintain it (unions, lobbies etc) School is a practical necessity and there's a lot of good that's possible. It's easier to start outside of the system, but also consequently much harder to scale unless we build tools to help systems to stabilize.
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"?
You may be saying the same thing in different words. Scores and graduation may be the objective for some - but that doesnt this is an effective motivation for many.
If you have ever been stuck doing a project you didnt want or like, you may relate.
> Meaning > motivation > mechanics > measurement.
You might propose that getting a good measurement is the meaning, but saying that doesn't mean a student has really or fully bought into this idea and find it compelling. i.e Their heart may not be in it.
Derek Muller from the Veritasium channel gave a great (and funny) talk[1] about how AI will not revolutionize education and I'll quote my favorite part: "The world is full of heavy objects; yet not everyone is ripped". Meaning that what fails with AI in education is also what fails in education without AI: lack of motivation that a good coach could provide. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70
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
I think sibling comments are taking issue with `learn multiplication tables` versus `memorize multiplication tables`. I find no value in the latter in kids but incredible value in the former.
What I'm teaching my homeschoolers is to instead be able to quickly derive the table from the "easy" ones. Everyone practices counting by twos, fives, and tens at an earlier stage of math. So when multiplication tables come around, if you can fill 2s,5s, and 10s out easily, then any other thing you need is (usually) just one simple addition or subtraction operation away.
I do it this way for the same reason I'm against learning "tricks" like FOIL ( first-outer-inner-last) for binomial multiplication. You end up learning the narrow-scoped trick or you end up learning the table, and not a framework by which to solve problems of a broad class.
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I've seen entirely too many kids who memorize the table up to 10x10 and then are totally stunlocked at 11x11.
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?
Because learning to read and write still develop your mind and capabilities. memorising stuff does not.
A better analogy would be "why stop memorising long works now we can read things instead". No one memorises epic poems anymore but we read novel instead.
No its not, its why use your brains for useless things. Because my kids did not spend as much time on arithmetic and rote learning they learned algebra much earlier than most do. My older daughter did IGCSE physics when she was 11 and maths when she was 12 as a result. Their ability to read was always well ahead of average for their age.
They may refuse to learn multiplication tables (a popular subject if I remember right, reciting them as far as we could, a competition) while memorizing baseball stats.
Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid.
> "Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid."
"nerds" would disagree with you. I think the point that OP was trying to make is the three groups are dynamic based on the topic. So the groups are not the same for biology, maths and for literature.
Nerds are a group that have a separate definition of social peer and “cool” but aspire just as much as other groups to achieve social status or coolness.
It’s exceptionally rare to encounter any person, adult or otherwise, that genuinely holds no value in any opinion of another. And even those people hold to their own self evaluations which do not spawn from pure noise.
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.
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".
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.
You're right, apparently this was a much more recent thing and california only. I just knew neither of my kids were taught them, so I assumed it happened longer ago.
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’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?
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.
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.
I'm not sure i agree witb the ratio. I think its much more lopsided. E.g. 100,000 artists in, one trillion dollar work of art out. (I'm counting indirect value. e.g. All the people who read Dune or a silent spring and become environmentalists as a result should have their value attributed to that work of art)
Also i'd point out the selection bias of not counting people who fail out of engineering school but still counting every unsuccessful artist.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
[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).
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.
I find these arguments ignore one of the most obvious and important parts of school: discipline/behavior.
A really small number of disruptive kids will destroy the learning of the entire middle. The top kids will figure it out at home and survive, or their parents will separate them through brute-force - a few borderline high achievers will probably be brought down too.
In the poorer neighborhoods around me the school performance is actually shameful and the kids are being subjected to the worst of their peers constantly, destroying their ability to succeed. Many will (hopefully) drop out/get arrested by late middle/early high school but the damage they do to their entire neighborhood along the way is massive.
Cohorting the highs and the well-behaved middle would probably work out just fine but unless you can eliminate the disruptive and the very-behind it's just the worst of all worlds.
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.
It's not that easy. The status quo is that having multiple tracks creates terrible incentives among teachers: no teacher wants to teach the "bad" track, so they get stuck with the worst teachers and the worst educational outcomes over time. (This occurs not just because many remedial students have very real behavioral issues that deter the best teachers from engaging with them, but also notably because the progressive education establishment is dismissive of teaching methods that actually help those students learn effectively, and doesn't train general-ed educators in the use of such methods.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's more of a motivation problem. Not all students are eager to learn. They may not be interested in the subject for whatever reason. It's hard to teach someone who isn't open to it. Learning styles can help bring some of those barriers down by shifting the material into a form that they are more open to.
The same applies to building muscle. Not everyone is self-motivated to do it. There are different ways to motivate people to work out. But in the end they all need to do the work/practice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.
I've been giving chemistry lessons since I was a teenager, and quite early this became my first order of business after that alone was responsible for turning a D student into a B student in one session.
For that first non-mathematically inclined student who was having so much trouble, this had to be accomplished before any of the specific concepts and problems could be properly addressed in the course they were enrolled in.
All that was accomplished in two hours was gradual but progressive reversal of attitude, not unlike what I was accustomed to in ramping up to more advanced subject matter, but we never got around to that during the first session.
The next week they had a very positive attitude and were going to call me later with some challenging equations for some help.
Wasn't necessary, the very next week they got a B on their own initiative, were so excited and passed everything after that with no further problems. It was probably the most thankful student I ever tutored.
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.
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.
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.
There is a difference. Yet that's the point. Because "beating facts" and "miserable kids" is not necessarily inferred from 'coerced', as opposed to 'gently but firmly', and that's why people are clarifying so.
There is in fact little difference between "you have to learn these things" and "brushing your teeth".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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??
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.
Structural misandry. I'm telling you the Zoomer/Alpha boys have taken notice and are checking out of the system. Chickens coming home to roost in a few more decades as the West goes longhouse and gets economically pounded by the East. I was an early bird in MGTOW, but now it's common knowledge and operating strategy for most young men.
Boys don't owe society squat, and now they know it!
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.
> 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.
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
Homeschooled kids can socialize outside of homeschool and be perfectly well-adjusted. There's something to be said for avoiding the hierarchical social structure present in schools.
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.
As an adult, you can mostly choose to simply not interact with whomever you don't get along with, and this is exactly the right thing to do in that situation. Especially if the "not getting along" part involves severe abuse, as it often enough does among unsupervised kids. Why shouldn't kids get the same choice?
More importantly someone you get along with even though they are a [Democrat, Catholic, or a long list of other groups that people have strong beliefs in]
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.
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.
Outcomes aren't any better with lower ratios. The best-funded public schools have funding higher than anywhere else, in the world, and have poor outcomes... it's not a funding problem. And it's difficult to "value teachers" when we learn of these outcomes, it runs counter to human nature.
Private schools are (excepting the truly 0.01% which are the most elite schools meant for the children of billionaires and statesmen) are nothing more than public schools dressed up in $20,000/yr tuition so that the upper middle class can feel special. They draw personnel from the same pool of teachers, they use the same textbooks and pedagogy. They are essentially public schools with a new label. But that you think I might be talking about private schools shows how you can't even really think about alternatives. You don't have the mental language to do so.
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.
>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.
I cannot imagine coming to a place that has a reputation of having higher educated people, and presenting that education is a waste of time. All research has some levels of agenda behind it, and it would be very easy to steer anything the author presents into a direction he wishes. On the contrary, literally every country on earth benefited greatly from education and the results are very visible in all aspects of human development (HDI, GDP, pollution, literacy, etc...), most recently China, and even more recently India. Both had huge numbers of illiterate people, compared to both advancing at an incredible pace when a large emphasis was put on education.
My reading of it is not that Bryan thinks education (aka learning) is a waste of time, but that much of what we call 'education' in the US, particularly with respect to higher education (4 year colleges) is just signaling. Very little is being learned. It's just a very expensive and time-consuming way to sort people based on skills and attributes they already had.
Of course, the above paragraph isn't perfectly accurate. It's based on my impression of a book I read a couple of years ago, polluted with my own biases, other things I've read on the topic etc.
I strongly disagree (having not read the book and having my own biases). History teaches us that any education is better than no education. Formal education is very far from just booklernin', you also learn *how to learn*, you develop social skills, you network, you start understanding how to deal with administration stuff, how to deal with failures and many other skills...
No country has perfect education, but what we call education is very useful for becoming a society participating human.
Many people graduate from US high schools without being able to read. Many people graduate from US universities without significant skills in the areas you mention.
I highly recommend reading the book, even if you expect to disagree with every fact, statistic, opinion and conclusion.
The problem with any such statement is framing and agenda. I agree with the premise that education has a long way to go to be universally good. But compared to undeveloped rural areas where people don't have access to education? Is it better? Everything points to an unequivocal yes.
I personally avoid giving money to people who are easily obviously having a net negative effect on society.
With education, there's always someone trying to build a better mouse trap. When it comes down to it though, the basics still apply. In my opinion the single largest factor in education today (In this country) is the student's home environment. If the student isn't being set up for success at home, any attempts to re-vamp, redo, or otherwise modify the educational system that student learns from is doomed. If the student's family isn't reinforcing the importance of school, the authority and respect teachers should be given, and helping in meaningful ways, they are not setting up their child for success.
I absolutely agree. There are so many prongs to a complete education; mandates, curriculum changes, social and political injections, funding issues (particularly taxpayers needing to see a return on their educational investment), and so many more. One bad systemic decision can set off downward spirals in one, some, or all of these.
Some people looking for ways to extract wealth through the school system. There are always cuts at the classroom level but more money than ever at the admin level.
Some people are actively trying to sabotage the school system because the uneducated are easy to manipulate.
Any effort to change schooling needs to take those things into account.
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."
There are definitely differences between countries and differences over time as well. The painful thing for some countries is that decades of highly polarized ideological debate on this combined with austerity has had measurably negative impact vs. countries that made different choices over time.
There's a growing cost of living and poverty crisis in some countries that probably is strongly correlated with education levels. That's also the urgent issue to address.
And there are issues with students not finishing school. Or students entering higher education without basic skills for math and literacy after actually completing high school. I know some Dutch universities have had to skill up students on basic high school math, for example. No longer being taught adequately, apparently.
And then separately you might wonder which skills are actually still relevant for people to have. People not speaking more than one language used to be a big problem in some countries. These days that's still not great but something you can compensate with using AI translations. Being able to calculate numbers is nice. But it's not the end of the world if people use a calculator for some things. But it is an issue if that's not a thing they can do.
Education was never about enlightenment and more about making sure workers were ready for a productive live factories and offices and making sure companies had access to people with a good base level education. Before the industrial revolution, most people would not spend a lot of time, or any amount of time, in schools.
Teachers are workers, underpaid teachers are mediocre workers and the result is mediocre teaching skills.
Now, being six hours straight on a torture chamber seating on a medieval torture device are not the best conditions for learning.
I remember in the nineties I went to Japan for a course and they had executive chairs for every student, a nice desk, two whiteboards for projecting slides, breaks every hour, bombarded with visuals it was the best learning experience ever, you never got bored.
And learning Japanese role playing different characters, that's how you learn a language for daily use. A student played as a cab driver, turned the seat around, and another in the back seat, asking to go to the airport, the academy, a restaurant, counting money in Japanese, paying, being thankful for everything. Unforgettable learning experience.
Give more money to schools and teachers so that classroom sizes are smaller and the children can be separated by learning ability and the lessons be catered towards them.
> they should be more rigorous about carefully defining the knowledge objectives of the class, thoroughly breaking down complex skills into components, and doing lots and lots and lots of practice
> 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
Why not spec out the curriculum and spec out the approach (regular quizzes, etc.), then use that to guide the AI? Make the skill gap an objective thing.
I think the author hit the right notes here; we do know how best optimize learning for high marks at a classroom-level, we do struggle with improving outcomes for students who need extra help, and we do bore students to tears when they outpace their peers. Over their lifetime of schooling, students regularly a standard deviation above or below subject-matter-expectations do breed resentment for the parts of the institution that inconvenience them, and we would probably do well to fix that if we want to avoid ending up recreating "Idiocracy" from first principles. I wish more folks were more reflective on their own opinions like this.
- 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.
This goes back to something I’ve harped for years with friends and colleagues - the mistake of trying to revolutionize the education system is to treat it like an isolated case.
Schools are a function of families and the community. You can’t improve 1 without simultaneously improving all 3 at the same time. The key thing is family - because it’s actually the family that’s the bedrock and the first educator. Miss educating the family and the whole endeavors is lost.
After school, methodology, all these things, when you need to improve education you need to build a movement around doing so.
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've always wondered why we don't experiment a bit more around children teaching children. I appreciate it can be a bit of a can of worms but it would help the system be more self sustaining.
The only reason I'm interested in this approach is that education itself is a massive expense which is often deprioritised in budgeting due to the fact that children do not vote, so it relies on the voting of parents to coalesce around a party specifically seeking to invest, which is difficult and unreliable.
Very interesting... at face value it doesn't seem sustainable, extendable or consistent. Perhaps you need to elaborate more on what you mean about children teaching. That being said the "learn one, do one, teach one" model it great and I recall giving and receiving a lot of peer assistance when I was young.
children who are willing, teaching children of younger years certain skills they already know. Ofc they might need to learn some basics of how to teach in the first place. Its a bit meta but teaching as a first-class subject that is optional with hands on work during school would be really cool and be an incredibly strong indicator of people suitable for management/lead roles later up the track.
In my time at high school (UK equivalent) I don't remember receiving any peer assistance at all and its feels like we've missed a trick.
There are existing successful education models that we could and should borrow from. Instead we keep trying to reinvent things as if we and we alone must be the ones to develop it. I don't even think it's that much of a mystery, it's just that the potential costs cause our system to refuse to head down that path and as a result we get what we deserve, so to speak.
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
Nobody speaking up for rote learning but embedding core knowledge for recall has a role. Simply having recall that 1+1=2 and then inductance, not Bertrand Russel day #1.
Same with literacy. Depoliticised it needs phonics and whole-word. And a shit tonne better teacher pupil ratios and more pay for kinder and primary.
The Jesuits mantra is about "until 12" for a reason.
Good teachers have a thorough understanding of what they are teaching. My guess is that most teachers in UK schools don't. From my undergraduate degree, many years ago, the only people who went into teaching were bottom of the class. For example after a 3 year maths degree a guy who was enrolled in a teacher training course after graduation did not know what a linear function was (y = Ax + C simply blew his mind). It's hard to attract talent because at best it's a lifestyle job that is kind of awful while you're doing it where the pay is low and the expectations are low, but gives you 1/3 of the year off as compensation. Unless your primary concern is a job that fits around childcare, then teaching is not the job for a capable person (pragmatically). Also 80% of the concern in schools now is "safeguarding", which from what I can tell assumes that everyone is a constant threat to everyone.
Learning is not supposed to be fun, the way playing games is supposed to be fun. Sitting alone with books for hours at a time and thinking on problems has a certain joy to it, but that's hard won. Kidding children into thinking that it is, is a huge disservice to them.
> 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.
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.
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.
Our after/before school system is run in partnership with the local YMCAs. There are high school kids that help in addition to some teachers, paid extra for their time, and paid staff.
Maybe you could join the local parent teacher association and see if anything can be done to make it cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Looking at WHO is pushing for change tells you most of what you need to know. Teachers? No. Students? No. Parents? Usually not. Technologists with something to sell? Bingo.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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're rather used to the idea of progress in most areas of human endeavor. It's fairly absurd to believe rolling back the last 200 years of progress would lead to measurably better outcomes is absurd in fields like medicine, industry, science, history, technology, cuisine, transportation, ...
That it seems to be that case in education seems to me to qualify for the label of surprising.
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.
What this article and the comments here miss, is that the current system is already working optimally for the people it benefits. That's why it hasn't improved and why it won't improve.
The ruling class doesn't want the general population to be well educated critical thinkers. They want them to have just enough education to perform exploitable labor and engage in unquestioning consumption. They want them easy to manipulate and control. They want their children away from home all day so more parents can work instead of staying home raising them.
It isn't some giant conspiracy. It's loosely coupled, powerful people, with aligned interests guiding decisions, influencing opinion, and swaying sentiment bit by bit over decades.
It seems to me he contradicts his own thesis here: "The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill. For example, if you want to learn a language, you need to learn a lot of words. Any method that tries to skip over the fact that there are tens of thousands of words to learn is doomed to failure. All skills are like this, it’s simply that the “atoms” of learning are usually less obvious than in languages."
...but we don't learn our first language, or any other, by first learning a few thousand words and only then speaking. We start using the very first words we learn, in real life situations, and add words as we need them. It's the real-world applicability and project-based method that he pronounces skepticism of elsewhere in the same piece.
Every coach of every sports team ever, knows that you need drills, but you also need to play actual games, to keep kids motivated to do those drills.
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.
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.
I've really yet to see a coherent discussion about what's even _wrong_ with schooling. It's possible that coherent discussions are happening and I'm just not aware of them. I see two different patterns:
- A list of complaints about what people did not like about school. eg: "The teacher yelled at me too often and then I became discouraged in this subject."
- Working backwards from bad outcomes. "Numbers are getting worse. It must be that we're not _empathizing_ with kids enough!"
Neither seem to offer a real, coherent theory. The first argument totally fails to address if school is doing the most good for the most kids, and it was just a poor fit for you. The second problem is more general -- it's really difficult to build meaningful theories about complex systems.
The topic seems politically fraught enough (and for good reason, I suppose) that it's hard to imagine landing firmly on the correct answer. No matter how many good ideas you have, there will be so much complexity in the system, so many schools and systems that don't fit your model, that it will be possible to point to failure for any reform.
first you need to define « schooling », because you can’t put « schools » in the same bucket.
´technologists’ that aspire to reinvent « schools » generally refer to higher grades (usually > college).
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.
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.
Did you read TFA? It explicitly mentions Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. The best quality education, based on the data, is private tutoring with mastery learning. That is unaffordable for most. Nothing about the data indicates that “ideology and politics” are having a negative effect on education.
I think educational reform has often been motivated by several different reasons.
1. The desire for a "royal road" to understanding. This is a bad motivation, because while there are more or less effective ways to learn, there is no royal road. You will spend your entire life trying to squirm out of doing what learning requires.
2. A utilitarian view of education. This is a tragedy of our times. People insist that their learning be "useful". Calculus is useless, because chances are that most people who learn it will never employ it for practical work. But this totally degrades what education is. It turns human beings into mere machines for proximately practical work. There is no theoretical desire for understanding things to understand reality better. This is false education, because knowing and understanding the truth are central purposes of a true education.
3. An "agnostic" view of the purpose of education. Without a destination, there can be no discussion of strategy or tactics, no discussion of progress or what is good education. The classical liberal arts had an answer. Sadly, much of modern education does not, at least not a clear, coherent, or healthy one. It is often an incoherent assortment of disconnected and disorganized material with no organizing principle. This is disrespectful to the student. Also, where motivation is concerned, classical education places a great deal of emphasis on acquiring the virtues that should always be cultivated in parallel with learning.
4. Bad execution in practice. Not all teachers are great. When you press people on why they hate a particular subject, how often is it the case that the subject itself wasn't the problem, but how bad the teacher was, either as a pedagogue specifically or as a person?
5. A failure to distinguish between pedagogical problems and the influence of the home environment. Parents are the first and primary teachers of their children. Students enter schools as products of their moral and social education at home. When the home is deficient, students may lack the appropriate dispositions needed for formal education. Sometimes a good mentor can help counteract some of these deficiencies, but the bulk of the responsibility rests on parents. With the disintegration of traditional community life into which family life is embedded, things become even more difficult.
We also mustn't ignore that learning occurs within human relations. That is why a good pedagogue is so valuable. His goodness is first goodness as a person. Pedagogical skill becomes intelligible, human, and more effective when the pedagogue is like a benevolent parental figure who acts as a guide, neither dominating the student nor spoiling him. A parental figure also responds to the particular needs of the student, because there is a relationship there. The students doesn't just become an alienated number in the classroom.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
> If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you.
It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.
- "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.
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.
> 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.
No, Duolingo is an example that proves that there is plenty of money in taking a flawed-but-useful education tool, and making it much worse in specific, habit-forming ways. I don't know that it proves anything about the profitability of providing learning: merely about the profitability of providing the perception of learning / a habit-forming activity that you can persuade yourself is a virtue.
Perhaps showing people metrics derived from the "proved it with data", after each session, to provide the perception of progress even when the learning task is frustrating? Looking into gym psychology, rather than (video) game psychology, might help. You'd want to try to encourage intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic motivation, but I'm not aware of any research on how to do that.
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.
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.
>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.
i honestly don't care what other people do, there's no way my children will be sitting in a desk for 8 hours a day instead of learning how to live their life and survive
> 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 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.
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.
Many, perhaps most, of the teachers are underpaid. If spending more money isn't helping, there are probably too many middle-managers sucking up the money. Remove some of the middle-managers and divert their money to the teachers.
Revolutionizing education is easy. Ask teachers what they need and then give it to them. Unfortunately that's boring, obvious, and expensive. So hardly anyone does it.
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.
I also went to a liberal arts college and, yes, my instructors care a lot about what I've learned. However, I am exactly that "asked educated question but sucked at homework and test" student. I usually got A or A- for first few assignments and just cannot finish any assignment near the end of the semester. The only exceptions are those "really hard and abstract" lessons where most of people got 70/100 for exams and I got 110/100 (literally).
I am 30 now and I realized that it was very much of ADHD symptoms. I am just an edge case of college education.
However, by genetics and mathematics we know that in every classroom, there are tons of “edge cases” from different perspectives.
I definitely struggled with feeling hyper engaged in the classroom setting, and then the jarring transition to the next class. By the time I switched between three and four subjects that day and on to do assignments, I was completely fried.
I'm having a hard time believing this. I've had one really good math teacher, his lecture prep was thorough, and the way he presented the material was very understandable, but without doing the problem sets, and some pre-exam review, I would not have been able to remember everything weeks later on an exam.
I can believe this. I had some subjects I was able to do this for going through Naval Nuclear Power school, and later college. Others I was unable to do this with.
Different people grasp things at different rates.
Yes, I can see it with something you are naturally gifted in. But in that case the instruction probably has less impact; you'll get it even if it's poorly explained.
Bette White has an honorary degree from there for her Rose Nieland character on Golden Girls
Loved my time at Olaf.
My son went there! Andrew the cello player.
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.
You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.
> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers
…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence
What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.
So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.
> it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.
There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.
Oh yeah I mean theoretically possible, not practical, haha.
Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the last century. Up until the last five years student test scores were improving, and if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough. Why? Because the concern - after a baseline is established - is seeking exceptional performance, which definitionally cannot be made routine.
who will train them ? average trainers. it's a chicken/egg problem
There’s a massive amount of duplicated effort in curriculum creation.
If the really gifted are documenting their lessons and publishing the framework other really good teachers can pickup where they left off.
Having those curriculums in a standard format would go a long way to making components interchangeable and remixable.
Just like in learn-by-doing, I believe some of it has to be done by the teacher themselves — by feeling where the pain is, they'll better focus on what matters.
Obviously, this starts mattering with more advanced education — not sure I can offer good insight for early education though :)
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?
the market also prices out these gifted teachers.
you either struggle to pay the bills and teach -- a thankless job, often -- or you take those gifts and double your pay working in industry.
> 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
This comment made me roll my eyes. :) Giving students high grades for little effort is a cheat code for being considered a great teacher. Most everyone working in academia knows that.
Perhaps worth reading through the rest of the comment too? I had other teachers where it was easy to pass and get good grades (As even), but I did not call them out as good.
Before jumping to conclusions, maybe ask for context too? In particular, this was a high school for gifted math kids, and what I learned through regular classes let me pass math uni entrance exam in the top 10 (out of ~500 students) with no extra prep and even easily pass a couple of semesters of uni math with almost no prep (I took exams for two semesters after the first semester). My (lack of) working habits did catch up to me after that.
Also, for 4 years in two uni degrees, I did not get such a good teacher ever again, and there were a few who were easy to get great grades with.
Perhaps you can give some benefit of the doubt, though?
Well, I don't know you, your teacher, or even what subject we're discussing but you wrote that you did "not have to bother with homework and assignments". Perhaps you would have learned more if the instruction had not failed to make you study? :P
Whether they'd be able to make me study (it was a mathematical analysis course, though I do not think it matters) is a question that'd be hard to answer — I was already highly motivated with different topics: I was spending my time reading on CS topics like algorithm complexity, operating system development and building software interfacing with hardware. So another possible outcome would have been that I simply learned less of it due to lousy instruction — which was the case with a few other subjects.
Sometimes a teacher can also do a great job of getting you interested (also important) but I was focusing on quality instruction.
Or maybe OP is just naturally gifted at math.
this is not necessarily the case; the coursework could have been produced by a different person from the teacher (although generally at my alma mater the 'module organiser' fulfils both roles).
I’m not sure GP’s point landed. As I read it, it had nothing to do with who created the curriculum or even how much the student learned.
“Anyone who applies the smallest amount of effort gets a B and anyone who really tries gets an A” is a path to being seen as a great teacher in the eyes of the students, especially the students who got a B.
I am not disputing that being the case in general, but it'd be nicer if they gave me more benefit of the doubt: I tried to give an honest view of actually receiving good instruction, and not enjoying being handed good grades for nothing.
I've responded to them directly what that got me (like great uni entry exam scores with literally zero prep for a maths program, and a couple of semesters of exam passing with minimal prep for a maths/CS/physics majors).
On top of that, I am talking of this almost 30 years later — perhaps I have some perspective and I am not a fresh out of school guy who just loves getting off the hook easy?
One of my sons is one of those. He's smart, tends to creative pursuits, and while he will research and learn on his own about stuff he's interested in, put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.
I was one of those kids.
Did well in class, participated, and my grades trended downwards as the school year went on.
A lot of it was undiagnosed ADHD, which didn't work well with the repetitive nature of much public schooling. OK, let's do polynomials. Start with two terms...then three...then four...and on and on. I lost interest after three. Of course, then I didn't study or practice and did poorly on tests.
I grasped the concepts, but couldn't be bothered to study.
I had the same problems in other subjects. I'm a big history nerd. I could write a huge essay on the causes of WW1, but instead the tests were "what was the date of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...".
We also read the Hobbit as a grade 8 class book. First question on the test? "Name all the dwarves that were at Bilbo's party...". It took me a decade to re-read it and get into Lord of the Rings.
I've actually thrived in the "real world" because I can quickly grasp concepts and with a combination of grit managed to make a great tech career. I was lucky with timing though. Had I been born a 5 years later, the career path wouldn't have worked.
I was also one of those kids.
Some of it was diagnosed ADHD (I was on Ritalin; I couldn't tell the difference, but my mom said it was huge; on almost every day I forgot to take it she would get a call from the school about my behavior), but much of it is something I still can't explain to this day.
I was a voracious reader, but if the book was assigned for school, I wouldn't read it.
Science was usually my best subject, but my personality clashed with my 5th grade teacher, so I spent one quarter of 5th grade just not doing it at all. As in when it was time for science, I read a book I had brought from home instead of participating. I did absolutely no work. I didn't even turn in the homework and I handed in blank pages for the in-class work. I received a D (the lowest passing grade) for that quarter, which rather confused me.
For 7th grade, I tested into Algebra, but at the time a teacher recommendation was also needed, and my 6th grade teacher declined to do so. I got a D in pre-algebra, with a B+ test-average being pulled down by my homework (or lack of it). I did however teach myself lock raking with a 5-pin lock that was on the file-cabinet in the back of the class.
I had the flu when I took the SATs so got what was (for me) a poor score. My guidance counselor told me that there was no need to retake, as no schools that wanted a higher SAT would take me with my GPA as low as it was.
It took me 11 semesters and two summer sessions to finish college with a 2.2 GPA.
Oh man did I hate math up until algebra. It just seems like pointless memorization and rote work. Then with algebra suddenly I could see applications. "I can actually solve problems with this" and my grades went from Cs to As immediately.
I still remember the test I took in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. For reasons I don't understand I was in a panic for nearly the entire test. My hands were shaking. I don't think I even finished it. Yet somehow I passed it and that was a turning point in actually starting to like math for me.
> put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.
Coming from a family of people assumed to be like this, and having friends in similar situations. Rarely are they actually disinterested in the subject, but are disinterested in how it was taught and self conscious of their perceived understanding of the subject. It's easier to say you don't care when it comes up.
I'm guessing your past this option but you could try a Montessori classroom -- less structured and allows children to chase their own pursuits. My sense is its stronger for years 1-6 as opposed to later years. Also it doesn't feel like Montessori tries to grind down the children - school/teachers dependent for sure (same could be said for other systems).
Oh he's well past that now. He did graduate High School, kept his grades up enough to be eligible to participate in some extracurriculars that he enjoyed. He made a couple attempts at community college, but it didn't go well and we agreed that we'd stop wasting money on that for now.
After 20 industry years, I've been teaching CS for the last 7. I sincerely hope that I figure it out before I retire. :) Doing this job effectively is more challenging than anything I've done in my career. I've read a lot about teaching, and it's amazing how much of it doesn't resonate for me. What has been the absolute best is sitting in on other instructors' classes and learning from them. And being completely flexible in how I teach--there really is no single solution to everything. "Be like water".
As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.
Yeah, honestly if I were to do the lecturing again, I would probably get some training first.
I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people on an individual level. For example, at previous jobs I was the person who was there to help explain functional programming concepts to people from different backgrounds, and I was often tasked as being the "theory guy" for the junior engineers when they were having trouble optimizing.
But there were some problems with my thinking. First, sort of by definition if someone is asking for help they're kind of invested with paying attention and understanding the concept. Second, there's a pretty big difference between explaining something to a single person (especially a person you already kind of know) and an entire class of ~15-20 people, all of which are different humans with different histories and backgrounds.
I also think I took things a bit more personally than I should have. I didn't have any training or practice, and I just jumped right into the teaching part. I think I did "ok" given that, but that's not exactly reassuring..."My professor for the class I paid money for wasn't quite as bad as he could have been."
> 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.
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397182
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409530
I know a lot of people who believe this, and I think it just doesn't bear out.
I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.
I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.
Kids aren't just a blob of flesh that will some day become an adult. People don't take them seriously as individuals, but they should. That said, if left to their own devices, they simply will not do what is best for them. You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.
It does work in my experience.
> I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.
My kids learned to read without being forced. They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards. As far as they were concerned it was guessing game. Then on to reading books together designed for more whole word recognition, which is reading guns stories. I wrote a blog post about it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/educating-lucy-learning
> I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.
You can explain to a 14 year old. My kids had been out of school for years at that age and I had not had to force them to do anything. A teenager is perfectly capable of understanding that in order to achieve somethings they have to do other things. If they want a particular career you explain that as well as the interesting things they have to do some less interesting things. If they want to study a particular subject to a higher level they have to meet entrance requirements.
> You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.
Sometimes, but rarely with learning. The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.
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.
What is wrong with focusing on what you find interesting and doing only what is really necessary of what you do not? The problem is forcing everyone, regardless of talents or interests or aims, to follow the same curriculum
If you know its useful you are still motived. if you are motivated overall you will develop the discipline to get through what you do not find interesting and put the work in. it avoids situations like this from the first comment in this thread: "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."
this is exactly how you create a population that is mathematically illiterate and ripe for manipulation by foreign powers and marketing agencies.
Our society and any democracy relies on a shared minimum level of competence. If you cannot compare costs per unit, do not understand basic biology, or cannot compare evidence, just because it does not interest you, you are cannot function in modern society.
Quite the opposite. A better education overall makes you better at maths, and more able to think critically. Killing kids love of learning is not the way to a better education. Drilling and memorising does not help you learn to think better. Engaging with things you are interested in does.
I find it very frustrating that people just refuse to believe there cannot be a better way to do things despite all the evidence (many, many academic studies) and the experience of people who have tried doing something different.
> If you cannot compare costs per unit
You are missing the point. You can make learning to do these things fun so kids want to do it. They will find a need for basic arithmetic to do something else and learn at that point.
> do not understand basic biology
Why not? Lots of people do not know basic biology after going through the school system.
> or cannot compare evidence
Why would someone who follows interests not be able to compare evidence? Every field has arguments and requires evidence.
For all these, my experience (and the available more formal evidence) is that allowing kids to follow interests (with guidance, help, suggestions as required) leads to far better results than forcing them to sit through a rigid and boring curriculum.
I'd argue honestly until graduate school too. Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.
I'm not saying this is a "bad" thing, having a well rounded education is important, but it's still a lot of stuff that a lot of students don't want to do.
Graduate school is more fun, and in some senses kind of easier (for want of a better word). Sure, the work is "harder" on an objective level, but by the time you've made it to grad school you're probably studying a subject that you think is interesting, so you don't mind powering through the hard parts.
At least that's how it was for me.
> Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.
This is why I LOVED getting my MS. Just computer science all the time! Heaven! None of those pesky, worthless general ed classes!
I was just a dumb college kid. I'm convinced I'd have done better in life overall if I'd taken those GE courses seriously and made the effort to be a more well-rounded individual. How many chances do you get where your whole job is just learning shit? Youth is wasted on the young, as they say.
I go back and forth; part of what bothers me is how I'm paying for these GE courses.
Like, for example, I took a multicultural film course in college the first time around. I love movies, I love analyzing everything about movies, I love discussing themes and metaphors that are in movies, and I even love writing long essays pondering movies, and I enjoyed the class.
That said...is a multicultural film course really worth ~$1200 and like 10 weeks of my time? Maybe to some people, but it certainly wasn't for me.
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.
> 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.
While it is great that you are willing to help those in need catch up, something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world. In fact, given the immense cost of going to university, allowing them into university before they've gained that preparedness is quite unethical. It used to be that university had stringent admission standards as to not prey on those showing up mindlessness. Why do you think that fell apart?
> something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world
I think the GP's idea is that university is part of getting prepared for the world. And for many students, university is the final culmination of their preparation.
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.
> It’s virtually impossible to make every subject interesting for every student.
It its full generality that's probably true, but we probably don't fully appreciate how the classical school system kills interest. I've met many 6 year olds that were so curious about the world, you could tell them stuff about any subject and they would soak it up and ask for more. 2 years later, shaped by a school system that focuses on grading and pressure, and their interest in anything had tanked. It was very sad to see.
Maybe trying to avoid killing that natural curiosity would be a useful step in improving things.
> The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action.
I don't know if you forgot a negation somewhere. That's completely unsuitable to create interest, it fosters hate with a passion for subjects and school in general. I know it did for me.
I believe in school as an opportunity for intellectual enrichment, but fostering interest is not the primary goal of schooling. It's nice if school can make your kid an engaged and passionate reader, but your kid must become literate—whether they want to or not. And frankly, until they can string a sentence together, interesting books aren't even on the table.
At some point, kids have to develop the discipline to do the things they need to do, whether they want to or not. Carrots are better than sticks, but in the real world there are a lot more sticks than carrots.
I was a passionate and interested kid. I had a lot of boring classes in high school, but I worked hard at them anyway, even when I didn't give a shit. I got good grades because I knew bad grades could jeopardize my future. That was my stick; kids who don't take that seriously might need a different one, but ultimately you can't keep them going with carrots forever. It's good if they can be intrinsically motivated, but kids often will not be, and they need to do things anyway.
I'm speaking of disciplinary action that is home/family based and can just be rooted in the expectation of high effort. When this parenting is established young, the kid knows no other way. They know they have to participate. They generally don't want to disappoint their family. Everything is setup so disciplinary action should seldom need to occur and instead the opportunities for academic intervention are truly identified in a timely fashion and can receive a targeted solution (tutoring, different teaching style, etc).
Some families will decide to push harder, A's and AP classes are required, full effort in academics at all times. Some families will decide every assignment has to be completed and A's and B's with maybe an occasional C in a very hard class is acceptable and the student is left some bandwidth for social/non-academics. Some families take a simple pass/fail, as long as the kid finds a way to pass then they are good. So on...
The throughline is the parents are involved and monitoring the whole school year. Is homework being completed, how are your grades, talk to teachers when needed, etc. I feel this basic parenting is no longer common, parents want to blame the education system without taking any responsibility.
Sure we can incrementally improve education along the way, but we have to have a good faith expectation and base line of participation as a foundation or nothing will work.
Kids lose their curiosity because they witness their peers goofing around and not taking it serious. So if my friend's parents don't care and he's allowed to goof around instead of putting in the work, then I get a sense of FOMO or feel like a sucker for putting in the work. So everything devolves to the lowest common denominator. There's a lot more group dynamics and kids obviously don't know what is best for them, so adults really need to tell them what is expected. It's amazing how quickly a class elevates when you remove 1-2 distractions and likewise when the whole class is engaged and there is no distraction to begin with, it's ideal.
As with everything, there's a balance. I've had teachers who can make interesting content boring and ones who can make boring content interesting, even if they have to make themselves interesting in the process.
Just like you can only make your lecture so interesting, a parent can only punish their child so much until the child has nothing to lose anymore or their choice becomes boredom with effort VS boredom.
Both sides should do their part for best results.
Sure, there's truth in that, but I've not seen a lot of evidence that teachers are the problem. Especially at a macro scale. For decades, they shoulder all the blame. We need to have a large level set / reality check on the parenting side of the equation. It's a cultural phenomenon that largely, in the US anyways, we don't care about education the way we say we do. We just want to buy it and check a box.
This time of year there's always a wave of videos that hit the internet that are basically outraged parents that their kids are not passing the year or graduating. The fact they are surprised by this at the end of the school year is usually not a lack of effort on the school's part and I feel this is a good indication of how aware/engaged many parents are.
Teaching is a lot like (a certain style of) management. You learn what motivates someone, make the connection between that and the subject matter at hand, and make it accessible for them to get to the next level. The rest takes care of itself.
And a good manager understands the difference between obedience out of fear and internal motivation out of interest.
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.
Humans are not so different from one other that we need different ways. However there are a lot of ways that work and it is very hard to run a real study to figure out which is best. You cannot isolate all the variables (several of the different ways claim teacher quality is important - just one variable that is hard to isolate)
Why do you think? For an example of something in support of my argument, China (and a number of other East Asian countries) use a very hardcore memorization + training routine. And they are having literally the best educational outcomes in the world from it, but such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.
> such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.
It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?
If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.
Yeah, here [1] are the PISA outcomes. PISA is an international test that's generally the gold standard for comparison of educational outcomes on an international level. [1] Over the last testing year China was #2, the test prior #1. Singapore was #1 in the most recent period, and is around 75% ethnic Chinese.
Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
Are they having the best results from that? I've seen the claim of other countries using that and having book smart kids who can't think. (Whatever that means)
There is a common want to make the grass greener. However it isn't always and most people don't know.
> nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't.
It's typical for people to accumulate many examples of how "not to teach", and it's natural to extrapolate those experiences into ideas of "how to teach". To your point though, most people don't know how to do things they aren't practiced in, and some don't even know how to do things they are practiced in.
> They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class [...] but they didn't want to be there.
> [...] isn't interested in learning.
I highly doubt these students weren't interested in learning. By your own account they were engaged during class.
No teaching style is going to be able to fit to all students equally.
I was taught (when teaching for the military, actually) that leadership/teaching/etc. often talk about toolboxes but neglect a VERY important one.
You shouldn't just have a toolbox of things you've picked up from your best examples, that you've been taught, etc. It's possibly more important to have another toolbox of broken tools from all the terrible bosses, reactions to situations you've witnessed, etc.
This way when you go to do something and it's not in your toolbox, you can pull out that box of broken/bad tools and see if it's there. Otherwise we perpetuate bad leadership (and teaching IS leadership) through intentional ignorance (forgetting the lessons those bad situations gave us).
I had the opposite experience. I saw college kids who didn’t know where the F5 key was on the first day write smart matlab and python programs by the midterms.
I don’t think I’m exceptional at all. I was always behind and that probably reflected pretty poorly on me. But all it took to teach was preparing interesting examples and then spending time with subgroups and individuals.
I bet a lot of people think I’m catastrophically wrong, probably just got lucky.
Almost all such attempts start with the flawed assumption that there is One True Way to teach literally every person in the same cookie cutter fashion.
The fact that the dozens or hundreds of different teaching styles have great success with some but not all is not considered past "some is not all therefore it's a failure".
Individual humans can be radically different and have completely different needs. It's astounding how many people refuse to realize this.
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.
> students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students.
While I didn't do any additional looking into it -- this is often my biggest gripe. Is the _goal_ to have better exam scores and require less time studying or is the goal to be a better problem-solver holistically?
When faced with a novel problem that neither the problem-based learning group nor the traditional schooling group - which performed better and by what metrics?
---
It seems silly to say "This group who was instructed to rote memorize material could indeed perform better on a direct memory recall examination." and then close the door on problem-based learning.
I feel like many of the more alternative teaching methodologies have unclear learning goals. What is "holistic problem-solving"? How can we measure it? Do we know that conventionally taught students lack it? Is it hard to acquire? Is it even important?
When I first went into the workplace, it took me a bit of time to adjust to the non-academic setting. You think differently, you work differently. I discovered and learned problem-solving skills that I was not taught in school. Frankly, though, I'm glad I was not taught those skills in school, because they are easy to learn in the workplace, especially if you have a solid theoretical grounding (something which is a lot harder to pick up on the job).
To the extent that generalized problem-solving is a real thing, I think it probably boils down to the ability to quickly internalize information and draw connections, which conventional schooling already focuses on anyway.
I think one claim is that the pile of rote memorized info is a required basis for novel solutions.
It seems to me that exam scores are a better metric of the underlying thing we care about, the ability to accomplish things in the world, than solution skill when faced with novel problems. Even if you're a very innovative person leading a project to do something entirely unprecedented, most of the tasks you need to do, text you need to read, etc. will not be novel.
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!
Piques their interest. Sorry to be that guy.
Thanks, English is not my first language, and I appreciate the knit pick :)
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.
Younger children will do what they are told more easily, but making learning a chore they do because they are told to rather than a joy will kill their love of learning and that is what causes the lack of motivation later on.
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.
It was so long ago that I've forgotten most of it. I was impressed that it was based on evidence based literature. Here is a link to the training now https://carpentries.org/instructor-training/ I am disappointed that I don't see a reading list.
Unless it's changed since I was active, The Carpentries does not monetize content.
> 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.
Yeah, I was that student. It was undiagnosed ADHD (because nobody thinks to go send the kids who aren't literally jumping around the place shouting for an assessment, I'm ADD without so much of the hyperactivity). Put me in a classroom where literally all there is to do is getting on with the work and I'll be mostly ok, or at least give a good appearance of being so. Once I got home though I simply wasn't going to sit down and focus on doing homework, it wasn't a case of refusing too or anything, I always had the intent of doing it, but then the morning it was due would come round and somehow it hadn't happened.
Anyway, I did fine. Through some merciful coincidence the thing I was interested in doing turned out to be a lucrative career choice in an industry populated by people with the same sort of brain. That was almost entirely fluke though, it would be nice if instead of people just shrugging and going "huh, guess he's not interested in learning" we could improve education to better accommodate people who don't fit exactly down the median path.
I'd start by doing away with with homework which really is some grade A bullshit - if my employer decided to turn around and go "oh, by the way, now the work day is over here's some extra work I'd like you to get done in your own time" they wouldn't be my employer for very long. How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?
> How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?
This is great in theory, but then you have students who complete those tasks in half the time allotted, who then proceed to distract the rest of the class.
No easy one size fits all to the hw problem unfortunately.
Universal K-12 education was probably one of the greatest level-up programs that society has ever implemented. The question now, is it holding us back and how (if) it should be reformed. And reform is dangerous as there are people whose only goal is to ruin it, damned the consequences.
Yes, and I probably was that student in school.
The thing is -- grades looked to me like a silly attempt in gamification. I did not really care about grades, but I care about learning. So you might have taught them good, and they will carry it to their lives, they just don't care to show it off in the form of grades.
Now, an admission tests grades are way different deal, of course.
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.
> tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen
Hilarious assertion.
Absolutely false in my experience.
Someone who just starts to learn in college will be years behind the students who began in high school. They probably mistake it for not “being good at” a subject, but it can really keep people away from some areas. For example, hard sciences and math, where years of training problem solving skills makes solving new problems easy.
Not saying all primary/secondary education is good, but there is a massive gap between the good and the bad.
> Currently, tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen.
The phrase "real learning" is hard to define but I think I understand what you mean here, ie critical thinking. But this is only possible on the back of foundational literacy possible by years of primary education.
> Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.
Kids that "don't want to be in school" need to be treated with care and shown the value of education. Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers. The kids might not want to be there for a variety of reasons, but if you've ever interacted with kids informally you'll know they are typically curious and eager to learn about the world around them.
And if they aren't the reasons need to be understood and the kids would ideally be provided the care they need, although there reality is far more complex.
This exception does not invalidate the basic premise of primary education, the benefits of which can be seen globally in pretty much every context.
> Kids that "don't want to be in school" need to be treated with care and shown the value of education.
I have yet to see a suggestion on how to do that, that isn't obviously unworkable.
> Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers.
It is not teachers I worry about, it is the other students. Peer pressure matters and so put kids who want to be there with kids that don't and some kids will decide they don't want to either. (the reverse is also true, but there is no way to know and I wouldn't risk my kids who like school in an area where many kids don't want to be there)
Yep that's definitely fair, to not want to put your kids in a school which has a large population of troubled children.
But to the original point I was trying to make, troubled kids don't automatically mean they don't deserve education or we should allow them to fail out or give them the option of leaving primary or secondary education. We should really be making every attempt at figuring out ways to make them stay in school, given how stark the difference in outcomes are.
If it was up to me (back then), I wouldn't have even done primary school. I'd wager that the vast majority of kids wouldn't want to do school, because obviously, but that's why we don't let kids make important decisions like those for themselves.
Looking back I am extremely appreciative of my time in school as much as I might've not liked it at the time, and my education has undoubtedly made me into a more intelligent and capable person in pretty much every conceivable way. Especially high school, pretty much everyone I know who's a high school dropout (and doesn't come from a wealthy family) is much worse off than their peers who finished it.
As for tertiary education, that is already completely optional. I attended university for 1 year, said "This ain't for me", and things worked out just fine for me.
> I'd wager that the vast majority of kids wouldn't want to do school, because obviously
You are probably right that most kids do not want to be in school, however most kids love learning. They do not have to learn in school.
Not do schools have to teach they way they do, and if they were more fun and interesting the kids would want to be there.
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).
I don't like my options. I want all kids to like school and so be there from 6 - 26 (that is get a phd). Anything else is a failure, even if it makes some kids better to get rid of other kids, it makes those kids worse.
closer to 12 than to 15.
Leaving school after 8th grade used to be pretty common. Many jobs were available for someone with an 8th grade education, or you'd start an apprenticeship.
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.
That's the problem with having universities issue credentials. You end up with a lot of people who have no interest in learning but are going to stick it out for the credential.
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.
Then I agree. I read it as the argument that the economy is actually more technically complex and requires additional education, which is a common argument made be politicians and university admins.
reading skills are important.
So? People can decide if they want the job enough to participate in the degree or not.
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
The study picked an artificial and useless proxy.
What did tutored students go on to do? Were they over represented in Nobel Prizes, hedge fund billionaires, heads of state?
Or did they do well on a meaningless test and then forget all about whatever they “learned” just like everyone else?
The entire field is absolutely littered with this problem. Everyone is targeting cholesterol and not all cause mortality.
What evidence would change your mind?
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...
Perhaps. For now, one of my one-on-one tutoring sessions (in real analysis) this semester consisted mostly on un-teaching a student a bunch of wrong crap they "learned" from ChatGPT.
I'm thinking of custom built Teacher AIs, trained in how to teach different kinds of students, and with well defined curriculums.
Even if they're not better than the best human teachers, I think being able to "personally" interact with each student 24/7 will be a huge improvement.
There are some early products around:
- https://www.khanmigo.ai/
- https://squirrelai.com/
Absolutely.
I regularly think about to how difficult it would have been to teach the younger me (while trying to stick myself in my kids' perspective).
Any well intended notion of "I wonder what sort of teacher would have ignited a passion for learning" is quickly replaced by the understanding that such a person likely didn't exist.
I was lazy up until I wasn't, which was largely a reaction to being lazy in the first place.
Fast forward a few decades and I am a serial workaholic who is continually making up for lost time.
Nowadays I wonder what it will take to motivate my offspring.
It's the circle of liiiiiife......
Also, there is no 'right way to teach', but there are 'right ways of teaching'. This difference being that people can respond very differently to the same approach, so many approaches are needed to be effective.
> 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.
"The A students lead the C students who direct the B students"
I thought I might be able to reach them, because I was never an A student. I was always kind of the underachiever who teachers knew was smart but would get mediocre grades because I wouldn't do the homework. I passed high school because I have a good enough memory to remember what was being taught in class and do fine on tests, but I'd still get middling-to-bad grades in high school because I wouldn't consistently do the homework.
To be clear, I do not blame the teachers at all for this; I do not think they took any joy giving me bad grades.
But because I was someone who knew what it was like to be a smart academic underachiever, I thought I might have luck reaching the students who I saw falling into the same negative patterns I had.
I do think I reached at least one, but I think most of them I did not. It's ok, teaching is hard. I hope a better teacher came along in these students' lives and helped them out.
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.
I always felt that large urban centers should concentrate on specialized schools. In large cities there is a critical mass of students to fill specialized schools such as ones for; biology, programming, electrical, automotive etc...
Many students have an interest and want to pursue it. It's only through self-motivation that people really learn.
There was a study of where hockey players come from, they tend to come from cities of approx. 50,000 people. Large enough for schools to offer many different types of programs in schools, but small enough that a teacher knows each student and their family, and can help a motivated student train. In many large urban centers teachers don't live in the same communities that their students are from, and can't offer that extra oversight. This is why in large urban centers, it would be better to start to specialize early.
All roads lead to the same destination. Eventually you'll need to know a bit of history, math, etc. no matter where you start from. So beginning in a specialization doesn't exclude other knowledge.
Sometimes it's better to have an in-depth knowledge of one subject, if a student starts early and focuses on one thing, they'll be ahead of their peers.
The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have. Maybe you find biology very boring, but that still doesn't mean you should be able to finish school without knowing that living organisms have cells that power them, that all animals have hearts, that plants do photosynthesis etc. It's alright to not like history, but you should still have some idea of what the Roman empire was or about the Second World War. It's ok to hate physics, but it's not ok to have no idea about Newton's laws of motion or about the notions of pressure, volume, and temperature and how they relate to each other in gasses.
Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.
Why does it have to be a fixed curriculum? Individualised learning can still cover everything important.
> The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have.
Do they actually have it? Do you think schools that have fixed a fixed curriculum are successful at teaching this to everyone? Try picking some average people and asking them to explain Boyles Law, or why and how Rome became an Empire or the causes of the Second World War.
Is the level of minimal knowledge the same for everyone regardless of talents? Some kids will know before they are teenagers than most adults ever will about any of the topics picked, and many more.
I am confused about why you think knowing Latin somehow excludes knowing history of physics or biology.
You are arguing from a position of not having an experience of eduction outside the school classroom setting. I am speaking from experience and from having actually read up on the evidence.
This is a really interesting framing to me. You say "forced," would you have preferred to give them a better grade even though they didn't do the work because they were smart?
I said "forced" because there's a grading framework that I had to follow and there was no amount of flexibility within that framework that made it so I could pass them... Especially since they didn't leave the class really understanding the subject.
I knew they were capable of understanding what I was teaching, and I even made it very clear to students that if they are having trouble with the homework they can bother me and I will help them through it, and I will spend whatever amount of time it takes. A few students actually took me up on that, and they really did improve as a result, but some of the students simply seemed content on failing.
I take it as a personal failing; if a person is smart enough to pass my class and didn't, then I didn't do a good enough job making it interesting.
Forced, presumably, by the student themself.
I was one of these "smart students" but it really wasn't that I did not want to be there. I was a lazy, or complacent, f*ck. I've have had to learn how to learn and how to have discipline late(r) in life.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That's true. I'm frustrated for example in how they teach math at my kids school. They don't do rote memorization of how to multiply. No quizzes, no reciting... they teach the conceptual parts of it which is fine, but without memorizing I feel they will never have fluency. And my daughter never did get fluency in math now I'm drilling my younger son every day.
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.
I think you need to go a level up. Forget the people that flunked the class. Did the people that get good grades learn anything? Really? Do you think they still know it?
Was learning the point for anyone or any institution involved?
I think for at least a couple of the students, they really did learn the subject well.
A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interesting follow-up questions [2].
Of course, there's a pretty strong selection-bias there: if they are actively looking for help from a professional, they probably have some interest in the subject matter, so it's difficult to know how much I helped compared to them just looking things up on Google and/or doing the homework, but I would like to think that I helped at least a little more than they would have had otherwise.
[1] On my own free time; I wasn't given any direct budget for office hours.
[2] e.g. one person became extremely interested multithreading and multiprocessing, and so I pointed him to the ZeroMQ guide and walked him through some basic farmout patterns...I should see how he's doing actually, I think he has a lot of potential.
Both my parents were teachers so I thought I had some idea, but it wasn't until I ventured into the middle school to assist a teacher with a coding class (probably this was 10 years ago now) that I learned something about education.
> 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.
Got to disagree, there's been a cohort of teachers pursuing that avenue of thought and all it's led to is colleges that shout down anything that'd pierce the monoculture and employees so politicized they lose some utility in actually doing the useful work that the company or entity exists to perform.
It's a side effect, perhaps, of the modern "main character syndrome". An electrician doesn't need political "leadership". He needs to know how to wire a house quickly, efficiently, and above all, safely. He doesn't need extensive training on how to help bring about a proletariat revolution. That's an example from the trades, but same in the white collar world; my employers accountants weren't hired because of any activism, but because they know accounting rules and regulations so the rest of the business doesn't have to think about those things as much.
If anything, modern generations need reminders that 99.99% of us are NPC's and the best thing we can do for the world, our families and those around us are to be really good, competent NPC's.
Let me also point out we landed on the moon without that view of education. People, on the moon, with all the technological and institutional advances necessary to make that happen.
>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."
How to teach isn't always aligned with how to learn.
How children learn is not how adults learn.
That's an odd comment below to see die from crm9125.
I'm not sure what's so offensive about it?
If it was downvoted, what interests could want to draw attention away from those sentences, and why?
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crm9125 13 hours ago [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]
Also there are about 2 billion children on earth, each with their own different idiosyncrasies. Good luck finding the grand unified theory of pedagogy for that.
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.
She was an elementary school teacher herself.
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 :(
I can recall that one motivation that helped to drive me when I was very young (K-2 at least) was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do. Like there was this ladder I could climb to in a sense help to advance to a more sophisticated peer group; even in relation to academic concerns like reading and math.
So for at least some students, there might be some potential in convincing them that "it's what the big kids / cool kids / etc can do" might help motivate them. :)
> was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do.
That's honestly a mentality that I never completely got over.
When I was first learning to program when I was ~13-15, Python was already a fairly typical "beginners language", and my dad actually already had a book on learning Python.
Wanna know why I started with C++ instead? Because one of my classmates told me that it was too hard and that I wasn't smart enough to do it and only professional software engineers can.
I wasn't about to let some kid tell me I wasn't smart enough to do something that I knew I was capable of, so that afternoon I begged my parents to take me to a nearby used-books store and buy me a "Learn to Program in C++" book, and started on that. Eventually I also found a copy of the Sams "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" book that I read through online.
I still kind of have that mentality; I learned how to use Isabelle because I felt that that's what the "grown up" computer scientists use. I learned how to write Haskell because that's what the "smart" software engineers use. I learned how to use Vim as a teenager because that's what the "good" coders used.
It's probably not the best way to motivate yourself, but it seems to have worked out ok for me.
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.
One of my favorite teachers that I ever had was my Calc 2 teacher in high school.
He always made a very special point to explain the "why" of everything. Not just "how is this used?", but he would also derive a lot of the formulas for us instead of having us just memorize forms. I think it makes you better at math in general; the whole point if mathematics education, in my mind, is to teach you the how and the why of things, not just to get to an answer.
I already loved math by the time I got into that class, but I attribute him as the reason that I love formal math so 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?
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.
One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectivenoun construction), which is very useful when either encountering an unfamiliar word and for constructing potentially new words.
Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.
I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially.
Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").
It's not even really about learning Greek or Latin as a true spoken language. It's about known the roots of the linguistics for understanding why a word is even created in the first place.
English is a really messy language but there are many simple underlying roots that can tell you what the word means with context clues after hearing it for the first time.
Also learning the International Phonetic Alphabet is probably another huge boon for comprehension, the nicer books often include IPA spelling for crazy off the rip words
If we're discussing pedagogy, hearing a word and repeating it with a human judging your pronunciation is miles better than IPA.
This makes me think that "accent/dialect reviewer" sounds like a rich option for something to train neural networks to do. :)
In the US, it seems like malpractice to teach anything before Spanish IMO. 14% of the country are native Spanish speakers. It's hard to imagine a return on any other foreign-language instruction that would match improving communication between 45 million residents of the country and everyone else, to say nothing of improving communication with citizens of the other countries actually sharing a land mass with the US.
Learning Spanish in school was the single biggest waste of time. 14% of the country are native Spanish speaker! Many professions require some spanish! Those were the arguments back then as well.
However... unless you account that the native speakers and heritage speakers will learn English, making your ability to say cerveza useless. If you aren't fluent and have professional Spanish qualities (like Medical Spanish), its useless. Learning Latin or Greek would have been more useful, at least I could struggle through Cicero in Latin, than saying 3 words in Spanish before the other guy switches to English.
If we find a way to make 4-6 years of language instruction reliably lead to a reasonable level of language competency, maybe. But until then, the student's underlying interest in the language is much more important than any abstract sense of usefulness. I took Spanish in highschool, and despite being moderately ambitious about it, never got very good, and never got much use out of it, despite living in Florida and Texas. I suspect (although alternate history is hard, so I can't guarantee) that I would have gotten a lot more out of Japanese, simply due to alignment of interest.
If you extend that logic to the world, is it malpractice to teach anything before Mandarin or Hindi?
No, because native Mandarin speakers make up only 1% of American citizens.
In the US you are very likely, at some point in your life, to encounter native Spanish speakers with poor English competency. Outside of higher education, you are very unlikely to encounter native Mandarin speakers with poor English competency.
... I'm not sure what part of "If you extend that logic to the world" you didn't understand.
The logic is inherently local.
The typical student does not emigrate or even travel that much, so you don't prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the population of the Earth, you prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the regions where they are likely to spend their lives.
We had, spread over the course of our 8th grade English class (Thanks Ms Wilson), about 500 greek and roman roots to memorize, and weekly quizzes. These were not graded curricula, they were for extra credit because it was the teacher's personal program. No grammar, no conjunctions or conjugations, no sentence construction, just the two biggest veins that PIE has contributed to English nouns and verbs. Rote memorization.
I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.
That sounds great, and very different from what GP said ("make French/Spanish/etc the second foreign language they learn after Latin&Greek").
Edit: I will still say that Greek has little relevance to common English vocabulary, though it is very relevant to almost every scholarly domain. The same is true to some extent for Latin - as the vast majority of non-scholarly Latin words in English are actually borrowed from French, and have (Old) French spelling and pronunciation, not Latin ones.
> Classical Latin [has] extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language
…I know almost nothing about this topic, but this doesn’t line up with what people who know Latin have told me. They’ve frequently cited the language’s simple grammar as something they like about it.
(Classical) Latin nouns have one of 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and each noun has 12 possible forms (6 cases * 2 numbers); pronouns follow similar rules; and the adjectives modifying a noun have to agree with it in case, gender, and number (so typically a single adjective has 36 possible forms). Verbs vary by voice (active/passive), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, participle, gerund, supine), tense (different moods have different numbers of tenses, with 6 for the indicative), number (singular or plural), and person (3 persons); overall, a single verb will have more than a hundred different forms.
Because verbs have so many specific forms, it is also pretty common in Latin, as in most modern Romance languages, to omit the subject of a sentence, as it can typically be inferred from context plus the specific verb form - so, you often have to recognize the verb form to be able to understand who the sentence is even talking about (e.g. a sentence might say "amo regem"; if you recognize the words but not the specific forms, this means "love king"; but this unambiguously means "I love the king").
Now, there is quite a bit of regularity here - there are 5 categories of regular verbs (plus some specific irregular verbs), and 5 categories of nouns (though there are multiple sub-categories, as there is some variation in noun forms even in the same category; plus of course some irregular nouns).
Overall no, I don't see any comparison where you could say that Latin is a simple language. All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features. For example, Spanish drops the case system entirely, drops the neuter gender, and reduces the number of moods for verbs.
> All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features.
Wikipedia informs me that Romanian is a Romance language and has retained some of it. Also, the Slavic languages have largely retained most or all of what you’re describing, although they are not classified as Romance languages.
I am a Romanian native, so I know quite a bit about it :D . Romanian has kept the major features, but it still dropped a lot. For example, instead of 6 noun cases, Romanian only has 3, of which only 2 are commonly used (the third, vocative - "hey, you, bird!" - is quite rarely needed; and even when it is, it's usually replaced with the nominative by most speakers - we commonly say "pisica rea!" instead of "pisico rea!" for "bad cat!"). There are also fewer verb tenses in Romanian than Classical Latin, and some are formed with auxiliary verbs instead of being truly separate verb forms. Also, the neuter gender, while technically existing in Romanian nouns, is simply masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, there is no unique third form for adjectives or articles.
Slavic languages also have a case system (I think it's possible that this is part of why Romanian kept the Latin case system, as there was quite a bit of Slavic influence in Romanian), but they didn't "retain" it from Latin, as they are not Romance languages at all - they simply share this linguistic feature; Latin and Old Slavonic are by no means the only languages with a case system.
O-S-T-MUS-TIS-NT!!
i did Latin in HS. it's not simple, and classical Latin is "static" compared to modern Latin-based languages, which have evolved.
Good for getting SAT scores, but 3 years of actual French or Spanish would have done far more for me.
I don't think they're talking about learning greek or latin before english, it sounds like they're talking about putting more time into learning etymology which is incredibly useful.
They said "Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the second foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first.".
I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English.
Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.
In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.
I was blown away by how... retarded... my reading comprehension and skills really are, when I recently opened Charles Dickens' "Bleak House," reading just the first couple of pages in! Yet I am even more deeply troubled that I am above the median.
I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).
"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
To me that all sounds lovely and evocative, hmm. Maybe an inspiration for some of the vibe in the game Little Inferno?
I have a book that says it's intended as a science book focusing on biology for around elementary aged students, it's from the 1890s and the material is something I'd expect high schoolers to start learning not 4th graders!
I think these sorts of things are very commonly misleading. The Romanian school system I grew up in for example nominally had way more advanced subjects even in middle school, not to mention high school, than what is commonly taught in much of Europe and the USA. For example, we did a solid two-three months of basic group theory in the 10th grade (sophomore year?) - learning about monoids, groups, rings, fields, proving isomorphisms between various structures etc. These were even part of the Bacalaureat, our equivalent of the SAT. A foreign language (almost universally English) is part of the national curriculum in Romania starting from the first year of primary school. When I went through school, we also used to have a set of canonical literary works that we were expected to read and be able to provide literary criticism on during the national exams at the end of middle school without access to the text; for example, the exam you'd take at the end of 8th grade would ask students to write a ~700 word essay on the main character of a particular Romanian novel; or on the themes of a piece of poetry the exam named, but did not reproduce.
However, the number of students who actually ever understand any of this is typically only a small fraction. In particular for the Romanian language exams, despite the theoretically high level of literary knowledge that it tested for, the actual rate of functional illiteracy between students who passed this exam was >20-30%. A huge swath of students either cheated, or simply memorized entire essays by heart, without even understanding what they meant. Of course, some of us actually did learn all of this from an early age - but this was far less typical than looking at the curriculum, exams, and even exam results would have suggested.
This is true, this book was also written when the idea of high school education was extremely new (let alone public high school education). With what you're saying it was likely a book for advance students and even though it uses terms I associated with younger people they likely meant teenagers.
The whole-word learning "revolution" was based on a lie and misunderstood science. It set back a generation of kids and made them feel dumb because of a stupid group of educators.
My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at).
My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.
Very interesting. I do know that duolingo makes a great effort into trying to simplify the learning process to reduce friction, but still structured learning is really great for learning the rules, while duolingo is better for unstructured practice with some learning, like the article mentioned about the kid and the app I believe short circuiting to the reward.
I credit randomly deciding to take Latin in high school as a huge change in the trajectory of my life. It didn’t even happen all at once. Just a little different perspective on how words are formed. Oh they’re often combination of simple root words.
Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.
Education boards and school districts in America keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again: throwing away proven methods casually for experimental fads.
This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.
I believe this is something that is no longer done. On top of that, one of the early major proponents of it has admitted it was a failure, but I forget their name. The school my kids are at are not using this system. Obviously it's a data point of one, but I don't think most schools are doing this anymore.
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 agree and I have the evidence needed to back up your claims. Stable home life? checked. Parent-enforced discipline? checked. High parental expectations? checked. Through some involvement though, to some degree: we as parents always show real and positive interest on what our children are doing and learning without really interfering unless they explicitly ask for it, and I believe this helps dearly. I learned by doing, trying at first to get involved too much - proved to be a mistake which he corrected it by himself, jumping from an IT career to chemistry in notime and shortly hitting silver at international chemistry olympics. I never try to interfere anymore but just be there, always ready to talk about it and offer the emotional grounding they so much need. Kids will flourish. My elder is on his way to what seems to be a strong, well built medical career and my 6yr old oh boy, she's ready set.
Parent-modeled discipline is arguably just as important. The strengths and struggles in a young person are quite often some analog of the strengths and struggles of their parents. Dealing with the distractions of life and focus on what is truly valuable is a respectable challenge at any age. The expectations and enforcement can be high, but if that is missing, kids are going to struggle and school is going to feel like pretend.
This should be the top comment.
It makes me _irate_ when the solution is "just throw more money at the problem, that will fix education!"
Like, irrationally mad. It is lazy. It is soulless. It is callous. It is arrogant. It is detached from reality.
"Education will fix the problems in schools!" is circular logic.
My pet theory, and this will bet destroyed here, is that we should have developed birth control for males a loonnngg time ago. Accidental kids that have dad peace out on them usually never get a fair shake at life.
Well I for one am always in favor of arbitrary humans having better ways to voluntarily attenuate their own fertility, full stop.
We may have a depopulation shock problem on our hands at the moment, but trying to encourage more accidental births isn't the way to solve that: we need to increase social and financial incentives for forming families and pull away as many of the social and financial barriers thereupon that we can. Not to increase population but to better slow the free-fall of it decreasing so badly that it upsets the actuarial tables.
While I have no way to assess whether better male birth control options would directly positively impact education in particular, I see zero ways it could negatively impact it.
Some problems suffer negative economies of scale and simply cant be outsourced.
There is not enough money in the economy to pay for all the domestic work that productive people do for themselves.
Parenting is a good example of this.
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.
I think math bas be slowly transforming more and more into word problems and scenarios. You might think oh yeah this engages the student by showing them reality, but I actually found it incredibly boring and useless, it served as a distraction from the actual numbers that I think are important to learn too.
Part of the goal there is not only "relatability" (demonstrating how this could be useful in reality) but "applicability" (demonstrating HOW to distill a math problem out of some potentially messy real world anecdote).
I have legit seen real world adults do things like say "Well, I got ten widgets because I know that's enough for two people. But there's gonna be four coming so.. uh.. 10+2=12, I'll bring 12 widgets"
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.
Just ban the phones from schools. Because with that you cannot compete. Instant gratification vs hard work?
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...
Thanks!
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.
If the purpose of a system is what it does, then what does the system of "not going to school" do?
If schooling and learning/education are truly mutually exclusive then who is the most learned and educated person you can point to that never stepped foot in a school? And how do those rare examples compare against the breadth of modern PHD holders?
There are a non-negligible fraction of kids that are kept out of school, homeschooled, etc. If school was as bad for learning as you suggest then one would expect those kept out of it to demonstrate higher-than-average aptitude.
Unschooling works for a fraction of kids, and at some stages of their life.
How big is that fraction? In my experience being around a bunch of home schoolers (and adjacent, and school system), some of whom were more in or out of unschooling, I think it's small enough that it should be a rarely considered option.
There are some kids where it will work _really_ well. I've interacted with a couple. There are a lot of kids where it really doesn't work, especially in a distraction rich environment.
Thanks, I have. And it resonated a whole lot! He was working within a very entrenched system. Systems have a way of achieving equilibria and then all the parts trying their best to maintain it (unions, lobbies etc) School is a practical necessity and there's a lot of good that's possible. It's easier to start outside of the system, but also consequently much harder to scale unless we build tools to help systems to stabilize.
School system was created to increase productivity.
It is also and equalizer. Unschooled kids from bad backgrounds now start even lower.
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"?
"test results and graduating are the objective of an education"
No. The objective is for you to learn a specific topic. Tests are how we tell if you have learned it. Graduating is proof that you have learned it.
You may be saying the same thing in different words. Scores and graduation may be the objective for some - but that doesnt this is an effective motivation for many.
If you have ever been stuck doing a project you didnt want or like, you may relate.
> Meaning > motivation > mechanics > measurement.
You might propose that getting a good measurement is the meaning, but saying that doesn't mean a student has really or fully bought into this idea and find it compelling. i.e Their heart may not be in it.
Understanding learning should start by understanding how much it depends on mechanics.
Derek Muller from the Veritasium channel gave a great (and funny) talk[1] about how AI will not revolutionize education and I'll quote my favorite part: "The world is full of heavy objects; yet not everyone is ripped". Meaning that what fails with AI in education is also what fails in education without AI: lack of motivation that a good coach could provide. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70
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:
https://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/1.html
> learn multiplication tables
I think sibling comments are taking issue with `learn multiplication tables` versus `memorize multiplication tables`. I find no value in the latter in kids but incredible value in the former.
What I'm teaching my homeschoolers is to instead be able to quickly derive the table from the "easy" ones. Everyone practices counting by twos, fives, and tens at an earlier stage of math. So when multiplication tables come around, if you can fill 2s,5s, and 10s out easily, then any other thing you need is (usually) just one simple addition or subtraction operation away.
I do it this way for the same reason I'm against learning "tricks" like FOIL ( first-outer-inner-last) for binomial multiplication. You end up learning the narrow-scoped trick or you end up learning the table, and not a framework by which to solve problems of a broad class.
---
I've seen entirely too many kids who memorize the table up to 10x10 and then are totally stunlocked at 11x11.
True, you need to understand and teach techniques rather than memorise.
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?
Because learning to read and write still develop your mind and capabilities. memorising stuff does not.
A better analogy would be "why stop memorising long works now we can read things instead". No one memorises epic poems anymore but we read novel instead.
This is very close to "Why use brains".
No its not, its why use your brains for useless things. Because my kids did not spend as much time on arithmetic and rote learning they learned algebra much earlier than most do. My older daughter did IGCSE physics when she was 11 and maths when she was 12 as a result. Their ability to read was always well ahead of average for their age.
Learning to read must have meant memorizing vocabulary though, right?
A multiplication table is just a single-digit multiplication vocabulary.
They may refuse to learn multiplication tables (a popular subject if I remember right, reciting them as far as we could, a competition) while memorizing baseball stats.
Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid.
> "Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid."
"nerds" would disagree with you. I think the point that OP was trying to make is the three groups are dynamic based on the topic. So the groups are not the same for biology, maths and for literature.
Nerds are a group that have a separate definition of social peer and “cool” but aspire just as much as other groups to achieve social status or coolness.
It’s exceptionally rare to encounter any person, adult or otherwise, that genuinely holds no value in any opinion of another. And even those people hold to their own self evaluations which do not spawn from pure noise.
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.
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.
Well, there's your problem. You've gone from "teach kids" to "economic value". Keep your eye on the ball, not on the stands.
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.
> 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
You're right, apparently this was a much more recent thing and california only. I just knew neither of my kids were taught them, so I assumed it happened longer ago.
https://www.thewellnews.com/opinions/california-removes-memo...
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.
That sounds right to me. I like that model and will remember it, thanks.
Then think of them as the same child in different phases between "extinguished innate desire" and "loves to explore and learn things".
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?
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.
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)
I'm not sure i agree witb the ratio. I think its much more lopsided. E.g. 100,000 artists in, one trillion dollar work of art out. (I'm counting indirect value. e.g. All the people who read Dune or a silent spring and become environmentalists as a result should have their value attributed to that work of art)
Also i'd point out the selection bias of not counting people who fail out of engineering school but still counting every unsuccessful artist.
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.
Never had art in school.
Did do writing although a lot was extracurricular.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
nitpick: "walla" -> "voila"
> 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.
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).
I'm not opposed to trying to make learning anything fun. At a larger scale, though, if that's the primary strategy, you'll barely move the needle.
> 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.
Are you suggesting that in that culture boys/girls did not value the other party unless they were academically similar...?
I can believe it, but I don't know if it's true. Obviously not true in the US.
I'm suggesting that in Chinese culture, academic success is an effective way to impress girls.
Or ... for them to impress guys?
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.
I find these arguments ignore one of the most obvious and important parts of school: discipline/behavior.
A really small number of disruptive kids will destroy the learning of the entire middle. The top kids will figure it out at home and survive, or their parents will separate them through brute-force - a few borderline high achievers will probably be brought down too.
In the poorer neighborhoods around me the school performance is actually shameful and the kids are being subjected to the worst of their peers constantly, destroying their ability to succeed. Many will (hopefully) drop out/get arrested by late middle/early high school but the damage they do to their entire neighborhood along the way is massive.
Cohorting the highs and the well-behaved middle would probably work out just fine but unless you can eliminate the disruptive and the very-behind it's just the worst of all worlds.
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.
It's not that easy. The status quo is that having multiple tracks creates terrible incentives among teachers: no teacher wants to teach the "bad" track, so they get stuck with the worst teachers and the worst educational outcomes over time. (This occurs not just because many remedial students have very real behavioral issues that deter the best teachers from engaging with them, but also notably because the progressive education establishment is dismissive of teaching methods that actually help those students learn effectively, and doesn't train general-ed educators in the use of such methods.)
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.
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.
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.
"Learning styles" might be a myth. Eg, see
Learning Styles: VAK Doesn't Exist (Here's What Research Actually Shows)
https://www.structural-learning.com/post/learning-styles-myt...
Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental (by American Psychological Association)
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...
> 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.
It's definitely not uncommon.
I think it's more of a motivation problem. Not all students are eager to learn. They may not be interested in the subject for whatever reason. It's hard to teach someone who isn't open to it. Learning styles can help bring some of those barriers down by shifting the material into a form that they are more open to.
The same applies to building muscle. Not everyone is self-motivated to do it. There are different ways to motivate people to work out. But in the end they all need to do the work/practice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm that's fair, I forgot about the assistant; they're probably not that much cheaper than a teacher to be a significant budgetary difference.
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.
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.
>figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.
I've been giving chemistry lessons since I was a teenager, and quite early this became my first order of business after that alone was responsible for turning a D student into a B student in one session.
For that first non-mathematically inclined student who was having so much trouble, this had to be accomplished before any of the specific concepts and problems could be properly addressed in the course they were enrolled in.
All that was accomplished in two hours was gradual but progressive reversal of attitude, not unlike what I was accustomed to in ramping up to more advanced subject matter, but we never got around to that during the first session.
The next week they had a very positive attitude and were going to call me later with some challenging equations for some help.
Wasn't necessary, the very next week they got a B on their own initiative, were so excited and passed everything after that with no further problems. It was probably the most thankful student I ever tutored.
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.
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.
There is a difference. Yet that's the point. Because "beating facts" and "miserable kids" is not necessarily inferred from 'coerced', as opposed to 'gently but firmly', and that's why people are clarifying so.
There is in fact little difference between "you have to learn these things" and "brushing your teeth".
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.
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.
> 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?
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:
So men have been in the minority for at least 46 years, and the skew is as large as it was in 1970, but reversed.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.
Structural misandry. I'm telling you the Zoomer/Alpha boys have taken notice and are checking out of the system. Chickens coming home to roost in a few more decades as the West goes longhouse and gets economically pounded by the East. I was an early bird in MGTOW, but now it's common knowledge and operating strategy for most young men.
Boys don't owe society squat, and now they know it!
MGTOW nonsense most certainly is not the common mode of operation for young men. Where are you getting this idea?
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.
So you claim that biolgically males and females are the same?
For the purposes of 'intelligent' which is the topic here.
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.
> 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.
Homeschooled kids can socialize outside of homeschool and be perfectly well-adjusted. There's something to be said for avoiding the hierarchical social structure present in schools.
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.
Not 100% is claimed often, but I have personally never seen an exception.
Maybe some exist but I don't know of any
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.
As an adult, you can mostly choose to simply not interact with whomever you don't get along with, and this is exactly the right thing to do in that situation. Especially if the "not getting along" part involves severe abuse, as it often enough does among unsupervised kids. Why shouldn't kids get the same choice?
More importantly someone you get along with even though they are a [Democrat, Catholic, or a long list of other groups that people have strong beliefs in]
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.
Outcomes aren't any better with lower ratios. The best-funded public schools have funding higher than anywhere else, in the world, and have poor outcomes... it's not a funding problem. And it's difficult to "value teachers" when we learn of these outcomes, it runs counter to human nature.
Private schools are (excepting the truly 0.01% which are the most elite schools meant for the children of billionaires and statesmen) are nothing more than public schools dressed up in $20,000/yr tuition so that the upper middle class can feel special. They draw personnel from the same pool of teachers, they use the same textbooks and pedagogy. They are essentially public schools with a new label. But that you think I might be talking about private schools shows how you can't even really think about alternatives. You don't have the mental language to do so.
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...
I cannot imagine coming to a place that has a reputation of having higher educated people, and presenting that education is a waste of time. All research has some levels of agenda behind it, and it would be very easy to steer anything the author presents into a direction he wishes. On the contrary, literally every country on earth benefited greatly from education and the results are very visible in all aspects of human development (HDI, GDP, pollution, literacy, etc...), most recently China, and even more recently India. Both had huge numbers of illiterate people, compared to both advancing at an incredible pace when a large emphasis was put on education.
My reading of it is not that Bryan thinks education (aka learning) is a waste of time, but that much of what we call 'education' in the US, particularly with respect to higher education (4 year colleges) is just signaling. Very little is being learned. It's just a very expensive and time-consuming way to sort people based on skills and attributes they already had.
Of course, the above paragraph isn't perfectly accurate. It's based on my impression of a book I read a couple of years ago, polluted with my own biases, other things I've read on the topic etc.
I strongly disagree (having not read the book and having my own biases). History teaches us that any education is better than no education. Formal education is very far from just booklernin', you also learn *how to learn*, you develop social skills, you network, you start understanding how to deal with administration stuff, how to deal with failures and many other skills...
No country has perfect education, but what we call education is very useful for becoming a society participating human.
Many people graduate from US high schools without being able to read. Many people graduate from US universities without significant skills in the areas you mention.
I highly recommend reading the book, even if you expect to disagree with every fact, statistic, opinion and conclusion.
The problem with any such statement is framing and agenda. I agree with the premise that education has a long way to go to be universally good. But compared to undeveloped rural areas where people don't have access to education? Is it better? Everything points to an unequivocal yes.
I personally avoid giving money to people who are easily obviously having a net negative effect on society.
> long track record of being happy when he moves people even marginally towards his views
Most cranks are.
Caplan is a radical libertarian bent on annihilating what few functioning social institutions we have left.
With education, there's always someone trying to build a better mouse trap. When it comes down to it though, the basics still apply. In my opinion the single largest factor in education today (In this country) is the student's home environment. If the student isn't being set up for success at home, any attempts to re-vamp, redo, or otherwise modify the educational system that student learns from is doomed. If the student's family isn't reinforcing the importance of school, the authority and respect teachers should be given, and helping in meaningful ways, they are not setting up their child for success.
I think a bad home environment will limit a students performance more than bad classroom instruction.
Bad decisions at the state level can hurt the academic performance for thousands and thousands of students.
Both are very bad problems that should be addressed.
I absolutely agree. There are so many prongs to a complete education; mandates, curriculum changes, social and political injections, funding issues (particularly taxpayers needing to see a return on their educational investment), and so many more. One bad systemic decision can set off downward spirals in one, some, or all of these.
Some people looking for ways to extract wealth through the school system. There are always cuts at the classroom level but more money than ever at the admin level.
Some people are actively trying to sabotage the school system because the uneducated are easy to manipulate.
Any effort to change schooling needs to take those things into account.
comment is competely devoid of any logic or facts. pure emotion.
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."
There are definitely differences between countries and differences over time as well. The painful thing for some countries is that decades of highly polarized ideological debate on this combined with austerity has had measurably negative impact vs. countries that made different choices over time.
There's a growing cost of living and poverty crisis in some countries that probably is strongly correlated with education levels. That's also the urgent issue to address.
And there are issues with students not finishing school. Or students entering higher education without basic skills for math and literacy after actually completing high school. I know some Dutch universities have had to skill up students on basic high school math, for example. No longer being taught adequately, apparently.
And then separately you might wonder which skills are actually still relevant for people to have. People not speaking more than one language used to be a big problem in some countries. These days that's still not great but something you can compensate with using AI translations. Being able to calculate numbers is nice. But it's not the end of the world if people use a calculator for some things. But it is an issue if that's not a thing they can do.
Education was never about enlightenment and more about making sure workers were ready for a productive live factories and offices and making sure companies had access to people with a good base level education. Before the industrial revolution, most people would not spend a lot of time, or any amount of time, in schools.
Teachers are workers, underpaid teachers are mediocre workers and the result is mediocre teaching skills.
Now, being six hours straight on a torture chamber seating on a medieval torture device are not the best conditions for learning.
I remember in the nineties I went to Japan for a course and they had executive chairs for every student, a nice desk, two whiteboards for projecting slides, breaks every hour, bombarded with visuals it was the best learning experience ever, you never got bored.
And learning Japanese role playing different characters, that's how you learn a language for daily use. A student played as a cab driver, turned the seat around, and another in the back seat, asking to go to the airport, the academy, a restaurant, counting money in Japanese, paying, being thankful for everything. Unforgettable learning experience.
There's only one real answer.
Give more money to schools and teachers so that classroom sizes are smaller and the children can be separated by learning ability and the lessons be catered towards them.
That's it.
> they should be more rigorous about carefully defining the knowledge objectives of the class, thoroughly breaking down complex skills into components, and doing lots and lots and lots of practice
> 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
Why not spec out the curriculum and spec out the approach (regular quizzes, etc.), then use that to guide the AI? Make the skill gap an objective thing.
I think the author hit the right notes here; we do know how best optimize learning for high marks at a classroom-level, we do struggle with improving outcomes for students who need extra help, and we do bore students to tears when they outpace their peers. Over their lifetime of schooling, students regularly a standard deviation above or below subject-matter-expectations do breed resentment for the parts of the institution that inconvenience them, and we would probably do well to fix that if we want to avoid ending up recreating "Idiocracy" from first principles. I wish more folks were more reflective on their own opinions like this.
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.
This goes back to something I’ve harped for years with friends and colleagues - the mistake of trying to revolutionize the education system is to treat it like an isolated case.
Schools are a function of families and the community. You can’t improve 1 without simultaneously improving all 3 at the same time. The key thing is family - because it’s actually the family that’s the bedrock and the first educator. Miss educating the family and the whole endeavors is lost.
After school, methodology, all these things, when you need to improve education you need to build a movement around doing so.
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've always wondered why we don't experiment a bit more around children teaching children. I appreciate it can be a bit of a can of worms but it would help the system be more self sustaining.
The only reason I'm interested in this approach is that education itself is a massive expense which is often deprioritised in budgeting due to the fact that children do not vote, so it relies on the voting of parents to coalesce around a party specifically seeking to invest, which is difficult and unreliable.
Very interesting... at face value it doesn't seem sustainable, extendable or consistent. Perhaps you need to elaborate more on what you mean about children teaching. That being said the "learn one, do one, teach one" model it great and I recall giving and receiving a lot of peer assistance when I was young.
children who are willing, teaching children of younger years certain skills they already know. Ofc they might need to learn some basics of how to teach in the first place. Its a bit meta but teaching as a first-class subject that is optional with hands on work during school would be really cool and be an incredibly strong indicator of people suitable for management/lead roles later up the track.
In my time at high school (UK equivalent) I don't remember receiving any peer assistance at all and its feels like we've missed a trick.
It's amazing to me how some of these techniques are part of certain cultures already.
Case in point:
In the book Angry White Pyjamas [0], the author is British and living in Japan.
He is going through the Tokyo Riot Police training which involves a lot of aikido training. He is also teaching English to high school students.
He points out that the techniques used for training aikido worked well with the students as well.
Specifically:
- show the technique
- have someone try out the technique
- talk about what they did well and what they didn't do well
- have everyone else practice
Highly recommend the book btw if you are interested at all in Japan, martial arts, living abroad etc.
0 - https://amzn.to/4v3rHdq
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
There are existing successful education models that we could and should borrow from. Instead we keep trying to reinvent things as if we and we alone must be the ones to develop it. I don't even think it's that much of a mystery, it's just that the potential costs cause our system to refuse to head down that path and as a result we get what we deserve, so to speak.
The problem is we keep learning that learning doesn't scale and there is nothing we can do about.
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
Nobody speaking up for rote learning but embedding core knowledge for recall has a role. Simply having recall that 1+1=2 and then inductance, not Bertrand Russel day #1.
Same with literacy. Depoliticised it needs phonics and whole-word. And a shit tonne better teacher pupil ratios and more pay for kinder and primary.
The Jesuits mantra is about "until 12" for a reason.
Good teachers have a thorough understanding of what they are teaching. My guess is that most teachers in UK schools don't. From my undergraduate degree, many years ago, the only people who went into teaching were bottom of the class. For example after a 3 year maths degree a guy who was enrolled in a teacher training course after graduation did not know what a linear function was (y = Ax + C simply blew his mind). It's hard to attract talent because at best it's a lifestyle job that is kind of awful while you're doing it where the pay is low and the expectations are low, but gives you 1/3 of the year off as compensation. Unless your primary concern is a job that fits around childcare, then teaching is not the job for a capable person (pragmatically). Also 80% of the concern in schools now is "safeguarding", which from what I can tell assumes that everyone is a constant threat to everyone.
Learning is not supposed to be fun, the way playing games is supposed to be fun. Sitting alone with books for hours at a time and thinking on problems has a certain joy to it, but that's hard won. Kidding children into thinking that it is, is a huge disservice to them.
> 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...
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.
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.
Our after/before school system is run in partnership with the local YMCAs. There are high school kids that help in addition to some teachers, paid extra for their time, and paid staff.
Maybe you could join the local parent teacher association and see if anything can be done to make it cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looking at WHO is pushing for change tells you most of what you need to know. Teachers? No. Students? No. Parents? Usually not. Technologists with something to sell? Bingo.
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.
You should be skeptical of all revolutions. Not saying they shouldn't happen but you do need to keep a close watch.
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.
If it's not clear, my post was about school curricula.
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
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.
Why is it surprising?
We're rather used to the idea of progress in most areas of human endeavor. It's fairly absurd to believe rolling back the last 200 years of progress would lead to measurably better outcomes is absurd in fields like medicine, industry, science, history, technology, cuisine, transportation, ...
That it seems to be that case in education seems to me to qualify for the label of surprising.
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.
What this article and the comments here miss, is that the current system is already working optimally for the people it benefits. That's why it hasn't improved and why it won't improve.
The ruling class doesn't want the general population to be well educated critical thinkers. They want them to have just enough education to perform exploitable labor and engage in unquestioning consumption. They want them easy to manipulate and control. They want their children away from home all day so more parents can work instead of staying home raising them.
It isn't some giant conspiracy. It's loosely coupled, powerful people, with aligned interests guiding decisions, influencing opinion, and swaying sentiment bit by bit over decades.
It seems to me he contradicts his own thesis here: "The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill. For example, if you want to learn a language, you need to learn a lot of words. Any method that tries to skip over the fact that there are tens of thousands of words to learn is doomed to failure. All skills are like this, it’s simply that the “atoms” of learning are usually less obvious than in languages."
...but we don't learn our first language, or any other, by first learning a few thousand words and only then speaking. We start using the very first words we learn, in real life situations, and add words as we need them. It's the real-world applicability and project-based method that he pronounces skepticism of elsewhere in the same piece.
Every coach of every sports team ever, knows that you need drills, but you also need to play actual games, to keep kids motivated to do those drills.
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.
I've really yet to see a coherent discussion about what's even _wrong_ with schooling. It's possible that coherent discussions are happening and I'm just not aware of them. I see two different patterns:
Neither seem to offer a real, coherent theory. The first argument totally fails to address if school is doing the most good for the most kids, and it was just a poor fit for you. The second problem is more general -- it's really difficult to build meaningful theories about complex systems.The topic seems politically fraught enough (and for good reason, I suppose) that it's hard to imagine landing firmly on the correct answer. No matter how many good ideas you have, there will be so much complexity in the system, so many schools and systems that don't fit your model, that it will be possible to point to failure for any reform.
first you need to define « schooling », because you can’t put « schools » in the same bucket. ´technologists’ that aspire to reinvent « schools » generally refer to higher grades (usually > college).
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.
Scratching my head: The majority of high-performers would absolutely not come from the richest areas. The very rich are relatively very few in number.
Did you read TFA? It explicitly mentions Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. The best quality education, based on the data, is private tutoring with mastery learning. That is unaffordable for most. Nothing about the data indicates that “ideology and politics” are having a negative effect on education.
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.
I think educational reform has often been motivated by several different reasons.
1. The desire for a "royal road" to understanding. This is a bad motivation, because while there are more or less effective ways to learn, there is no royal road. You will spend your entire life trying to squirm out of doing what learning requires.
2. A utilitarian view of education. This is a tragedy of our times. People insist that their learning be "useful". Calculus is useless, because chances are that most people who learn it will never employ it for practical work. But this totally degrades what education is. It turns human beings into mere machines for proximately practical work. There is no theoretical desire for understanding things to understand reality better. This is false education, because knowing and understanding the truth are central purposes of a true education.
3. An "agnostic" view of the purpose of education. Without a destination, there can be no discussion of strategy or tactics, no discussion of progress or what is good education. The classical liberal arts had an answer. Sadly, much of modern education does not, at least not a clear, coherent, or healthy one. It is often an incoherent assortment of disconnected and disorganized material with no organizing principle. This is disrespectful to the student. Also, where motivation is concerned, classical education places a great deal of emphasis on acquiring the virtues that should always be cultivated in parallel with learning.
4. Bad execution in practice. Not all teachers are great. When you press people on why they hate a particular subject, how often is it the case that the subject itself wasn't the problem, but how bad the teacher was, either as a pedagogue specifically or as a person?
5. A failure to distinguish between pedagogical problems and the influence of the home environment. Parents are the first and primary teachers of their children. Students enter schools as products of their moral and social education at home. When the home is deficient, students may lack the appropriate dispositions needed for formal education. Sometimes a good mentor can help counteract some of these deficiencies, but the bulk of the responsibility rests on parents. With the disintegration of traditional community life into which family life is embedded, things become even more difficult.
We also mustn't ignore that learning occurs within human relations. That is why a good pedagogue is so valuable. His goodness is first goodness as a person. Pedagogical skill becomes intelligible, human, and more effective when the pedagogue is like a benevolent parental figure who acts as a guide, neither dominating the student nor spoiling him. A parental figure also responds to the particular needs of the student, because there is a relationship there. The students doesn't just become an alienated number in the classroom.
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.
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.
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 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
[1] https://saintkosmas.org/gatto-i-quit-i-think
John Gatto's books and talks are all very insightful. His old website had the full text of The Underground History of American Education for free.
Archive.org crawled the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/johntaylorgatto.... (check the versions from maybe 10 years ago...)
IIRC he had a stroke, and finally passed away. Now https://JohnTaylorGatto.com redirects to his youtube channel.
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.
> If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you.
It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.
>I’m skeptical of dramatic proposals to make school considerably more effective or efficient for the average student.
Whther you're skeptical or not, lots of the things that are ideal for the average student, can be a disadvantage for the above average student.
- "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.
> 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.
No, Duolingo is an example that proves that there is plenty of money in taking a flawed-but-useful education tool, and making it much worse in specific, habit-forming ways. I don't know that it proves anything about the profitability of providing learning: merely about the profitability of providing the perception of learning / a habit-forming activity that you can persuade yourself is a virtue.
Perhaps showing people metrics derived from the "proved it with data", after each session, to provide the perception of progress even when the learning task is frustrating? Looking into gym psychology, rather than (video) game psychology, might help. You'd want to try to encourage intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic motivation, but I'm not aware of any research on how to do that.
> 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?
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.
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.
>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.
Big tech in schools is just an attempt to get their users hooked young.
i honestly don't care what other people do, there's no way my children will be sitting in a desk for 8 hours a day instead of learning how to live their life and survive
school was a massive waste of potential
> 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 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.
Have you asked some people of migration background lately?
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.
Many, perhaps most, of the teachers are underpaid. If spending more money isn't helping, there are probably too many middle-managers sucking up the money. Remove some of the middle-managers and divert their money to the teachers.
Revolutionizing education is easy. Ask teachers what they need and then give it to them. Unfortunately that's boring, obvious, and expensive. So hardly anyone does it.