9 ms·

The older are in school learning more challenging things. Most teens would be unable to take the responsibility, and most are not psychologically mature enough

The older are in school learning more challenging things. Most teens would be unable to take the responsibility, and most are not psychologically mature enough to meet today's standards. The modern world is more complicated and education is more advanced than it was, say, 100 years ago.

adrianN 11y ago
I would never send my child to a school with such a system. Just look at the quality you get from asking teenagers (or even college students!) to prepare presentations. Usually the result is so awful that you can't cover the topic in the exam and expect anyone to pass. I wouldn't want my child to be taught via a game of Chinese whispers. There is a reason why teachers have to be well educated, not only in the field they teach but also in teaching methods.
- eru 11y ago
  Presentations are a horrible way to teach (and learn). I've learned eg cycling from practical demonstrations of my slightly older cousins.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    This is highly dependent on the student. Some students learn quite well from lectures, some need an interactive discussion, others need to "do", and others still benefit from teaching to understand.
- ef4 11y ago
  > Just look at the quality you get from asking teenagers (or even college students!) to prepare presentations. The counterpoint is that those teenagers suck because they missed out on years of practice because they were never given the opportunity to actually teach anyone anything meaningful before. You are also presuming a high-stakes situation where mistakes are costly and go uncorrected forever. That is not realistic. Well-educated teachers are still vital, and a lesson gone bad presents even more teaching opportunities than a lesson gone well.
- jeffdavis 11y ago
  I don't think anyone is suggesting that we engage in a Lord of the Flies situation where the children are in charge. Rather, that children participate in a helpful way as a part of their own growth. If an 8-year-old is helping a 6-year-old with math, then they are both learning, and the teacher is spending a lot less time watching either of them. I think what we're seeing here is a general problem with outsourcing: you try to come up with a clean separation of responsibilities, but you end up with a costly mistake instead. In this case, thinking of all children as customers that are served by your employees, it would make a lot more sense to make it a collaborative effort between expert caregivers/teachers and students of various ages.
- 1stop 11y ago
  I would say go and have a look at a well run martial arts school. Ever wonder how a single "master" can teach a class of 30 people at different levels and ages without it being a complete mess?
  - bmelton 11y ago
    I was on the fence for this argument, but your dojo analogy solidifies my complete agreement. Moreover, parents with lagging children often turn to tutors, many of whom (last I checked) are just slightly older children -- older enough that they know the material, and young enough that it's still fresh in their minds, educationally. Offtopic, I can't help but wonder how much the tutoring reinforces what they were probably certain to forget anyway. In the same way that blogging about a subject reinforces your understanding of it (e.g., if you can't explain it, you don't know it), I suspect that tutoring a younger generation would help those tutors cement that knowledge more deeply into their minds than just retaining it long enough to pass whatever tests they're given in the short term. At the end of the day though, your dojo analogy is most precise -- senseis don't just promote every student to assistant instructor. They carefully curate based on knowledge, discipline and behavior. Having every older child tutor the younger is probably unnecessary, and would likely lead to chaos, but if teachers chose only those students capable of helping out the younger children, even assuming some failure rate in selection, it would probably be a dramatic improvement over the current situation.
- Jach 11y ago
  Maybe teachers are well educated in teaching methods (I don't know the full curricula needed to be a licensed teacher at various levels), but in my experience the variation in teaching styles wasn't very great, those that had variation were the most subject to parent and district and other faculty pressure to conform, and from what I hear it's only gotten more uniform. Teachers may have a job incentive to ensure enough of their students 'pass' the course and demonstrate enough understanding to move on, which can encourage different methods to try and reach more students, but students themselves have a larger incentive to learn the minimum required material somehow regardless of how the teacher teaches which will inflate the pass rate by the amount students can teach themselves what the teachers failed to teach (and little incentive beyond personal desire to learn anything beyond the minimum necessary to advance). And teachers, seeing a high pass rate for method A (which involves a ton of extra work in and out of class on their part) vs method B (which involves such minimum effort it could almost be a 9-5 job) which may have a slightly lower but still acceptable pass rate than A or C or D will in the absence of further motivation coalesce as a whole on B. In my experience very few teachers tried anything different than B. The idea you propose of students being asked to prepare a presentation with the expectation that the other students will only get that info in class from that presentation and will be tested on it later never happened to me for any class. Nor would I want it to, as it's just B (by nature of students teaching via prepared presentation) with the variation that it's even less work for the teacher because the student is doing the teaching. The times I learned from my fellow students (or they from me) were in study/homework sessions outside of class where we went over the source material, our notes, other sources, and talked to each other to try and explain what our teacher's lecture didn't. No one did presentations.
ef4 11y ago
> The older are in school learning more challenging things. Most teens would be unable to take the responsibility Do you see the contradiction in your own statement? Teaching younger children is both too easy and too hard? Responsibility is the whole point. Yes, it's supposed to be a non-trivial challenge. That is part of why it's worth doing. > education is more advanced than it was, say, 100 years ago. Education is certainly more democratized now, but it's hard to identify any advances. Picking up a student textbook from 1900 is very eye opening. Students today don't learn any math invented later than the 18th century. Though that is hardly the worst thing I can say about school math. They study history in much the same way that students studied history two hundred years ago -- but without actually learning classical languages to read the original works. They study literature and composition the same way it has been done for many generations. The canon that educated people are supposed to have read has shifted somewhat, but it is just different, not more complex. The contents of their science books have updated somewhat, but the method sadly has not. Memorization of facts is still the norm -- the dried up husks of actual science. The only true advance I see is the elimination of corporal punishment.
- QSIITurbo 11y ago
  There's no contradiction, you are misunderstanding my statement. Older children need to go to school to learn stuff like mathematics, history, sciences, languages, and so on. Hanging around and taking care of younger kids all day would be a hindrance to their development. It's too much to assume that an average child can productively solve problems that are related to raising children with various family backgrounds. How to deal with shy or angry children, conflicts with the family members and so on. While I don't know how it's done everywhere in the world, contrast that to kindergarten teachers that have academic education with focus on teaching (including methods, subjects, psychology, and so on). If you claim that education hasn't advanced in 100 years tremendously, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. For instance, think about the education of children with mental or learning disabilities. It has advanced a lot in my lifetime, too.
  - 1stop 11y ago
    It's advanced a lot...? And your example is to cite how a tiny tiny minority is now taught differently... Even though the broad structure of a school, class, teacher and curriculum and learning outcomes hasn't changed significantly since Plato was at school, in fact the ancient Greeks model was pretty effective if extremely exclusive.
mipapage 11y ago
The setting here is pre-school: older kids are 5-6, not in their teens.
- QSIITurbo 11y ago
  All the more reason: children develop a lot in those short years and they can be at very different mental stages.
  - plonh 11y ago
    So? It doesn't mean they can't interact with each other and get indivual benefits from the experience.
    - QSIITurbo 11y ago
      No, we're talking about mental and especially social development, not just single topics like "calculating" or "biology". Look up development psychology. Care-giving is another subject and even small children can to some extent do that to each other.
conceit 11y ago
It's even more advanced than 200 years ago when there weren't any public schools. The comparison isn't sensible.

adrianN 11y ago

I would never send my child to a school with such a system. Just look at the quality you get from asking teenagers (or even college students!) to prepare presentations. Usually the result is so awful that you can't cover the topic in the exam and expect anyone to pass. I wouldn't want my child to be taught via a game of Chinese whispers. There is a reason why teachers have to be well educated, not only in the field they teach but also in teaching methods.

eru 11y ago
Presentations are a horrible way to teach (and learn). I've learned eg cycling from practical demonstrations of my slightly older cousins.
- falcolas 11y ago
  This is highly dependent on the student. Some students learn quite well from lectures, some need an interactive discussion, others need to "do", and others still benefit from teaching to understand.
ef4 11y ago
> Just look at the quality you get from asking teenagers (or even college students!) to prepare presentations. The counterpoint is that those teenagers suck because they missed out on years of practice because they were never given the opportunity to actually teach anyone anything meaningful before. You are also presuming a high-stakes situation where mistakes are costly and go uncorrected forever. That is not realistic. Well-educated teachers are still vital, and a lesson gone bad presents even more teaching opportunities than a lesson gone well.
jeffdavis 11y ago
I don't think anyone is suggesting that we engage in a Lord of the Flies situation where the children are in charge. Rather, that children participate in a helpful way as a part of their own growth. If an 8-year-old is helping a 6-year-old with math, then they are both learning, and the teacher is spending a lot less time watching either of them. I think what we're seeing here is a general problem with outsourcing: you try to come up with a clean separation of responsibilities, but you end up with a costly mistake instead. In this case, thinking of all children as customers that are served by your employees, it would make a lot more sense to make it a collaborative effort between expert caregivers/teachers and students of various ages.
1stop 11y ago
I would say go and have a look at a well run martial arts school. Ever wonder how a single "master" can teach a class of 30 people at different levels and ages without it being a complete mess?
- bmelton 11y ago
  I was on the fence for this argument, but your dojo analogy solidifies my complete agreement. Moreover, parents with lagging children often turn to tutors, many of whom (last I checked) are just slightly older children -- older enough that they know the material, and young enough that it's still fresh in their minds, educationally. Offtopic, I can't help but wonder how much the tutoring reinforces what they were probably certain to forget anyway. In the same way that blogging about a subject reinforces your understanding of it (e.g., if you can't explain it, you don't know it), I suspect that tutoring a younger generation would help those tutors cement that knowledge more deeply into their minds than just retaining it long enough to pass whatever tests they're given in the short term. At the end of the day though, your dojo analogy is most precise -- senseis don't just promote every student to assistant instructor. They carefully curate based on knowledge, discipline and behavior. Having every older child tutor the younger is probably unnecessary, and would likely lead to chaos, but if teachers chose only those students capable of helping out the younger children, even assuming some failure rate in selection, it would probably be a dramatic improvement over the current situation.
Jach 11y ago
Maybe teachers are well educated in teaching methods (I don't know the full curricula needed to be a licensed teacher at various levels), but in my experience the variation in teaching styles wasn't very great, those that had variation were the most subject to parent and district and other faculty pressure to conform, and from what I hear it's only gotten more uniform. Teachers may have a job incentive to ensure enough of their students 'pass' the course and demonstrate enough understanding to move on, which can encourage different methods to try and reach more students, but students themselves have a larger incentive to learn the minimum required material somehow regardless of how the teacher teaches which will inflate the pass rate by the amount students can teach themselves what the teachers failed to teach (and little incentive beyond personal desire to learn anything beyond the minimum necessary to advance). And teachers, seeing a high pass rate for method A (which involves a ton of extra work in and out of class on their part) vs method B (which involves such minimum effort it could almost be a 9-5 job) which may have a slightly lower but still acceptable pass rate than A or C or D will in the absence of further motivation coalesce as a whole on B. In my experience very few teachers tried anything different than B. The idea you propose of students being asked to prepare a presentation with the expectation that the other students will only get that info in class from that presentation and will be tested on it later never happened to me for any class. Nor would I want it to, as it's just B (by nature of students teaching via prepared presentation) with the variation that it's even less work for the teacher because the student is doing the teaching. The times I learned from my fellow students (or they from me) were in study/homework sessions outside of class where we went over the source material, our notes, other sources, and talked to each other to try and explain what our teacher's lecture didn't. No one did presentations.

ef4 11y ago

> The older are in school learning more challenging things. Most teens would be unable to take the responsibility Do you see the contradiction in your own statement? Teaching younger children is both too easy and too hard? Responsibility is the whole point. Yes, it's supposed to be a non-trivial challenge. That is part of why it's worth doing. > education is more advanced than it was, say, 100 years ago. Education is certainly more democratized now, but it's hard to identify any advances. Picking up a student textbook from 1900 is very eye opening. Students today don't learn any math invented later than the 18th century. Though that is hardly the worst thing I can say about school math. They study history in much the same way that students studied history two hundred years ago -- but without actually learning classical languages to read the original works. They study literature and composition the same way it has been done for many generations. The canon that educated people are supposed to have read has shifted somewhat, but it is just different, not more complex. The contents of their science books have updated somewhat, but the method sadly has not. Memorization of facts is still the norm -- the dried up husks of actual science. The only true advance I see is the elimination of corporal punishment.

QSIITurbo 11y ago
There's no contradiction, you are misunderstanding my statement. Older children need to go to school to learn stuff like mathematics, history, sciences, languages, and so on. Hanging around and taking care of younger kids all day would be a hindrance to their development. It's too much to assume that an average child can productively solve problems that are related to raising children with various family backgrounds. How to deal with shy or angry children, conflicts with the family members and so on. While I don't know how it's done everywhere in the world, contrast that to kindergarten teachers that have academic education with focus on teaching (including methods, subjects, psychology, and so on). If you claim that education hasn't advanced in 100 years tremendously, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. For instance, think about the education of children with mental or learning disabilities. It has advanced a lot in my lifetime, too.
- 1stop 11y ago
  It's advanced a lot...? And your example is to cite how a tiny tiny minority is now taught differently... Even though the broad structure of a school, class, teacher and curriculum and learning outcomes hasn't changed significantly since Plato was at school, in fact the ancient Greeks model was pretty effective if extremely exclusive.

mipapage 11y ago

The setting here is pre-school: older kids are 5-6, not in their teens.

QSIITurbo 11y ago
All the more reason: children develop a lot in those short years and they can be at very different mental stages.
- plonh 11y ago
  So? It doesn't mean they can't interact with each other and get indivual benefits from the experience.
  - QSIITurbo 11y ago
    No, we're talking about mental and especially social development, not just single topics like "calculating" or "biology". Look up development psychology. Care-giving is another subject and even small children can to some extent do that to each other.

conceit 11y ago

It's even more advanced than 200 years ago when there weren't any public schools. The comparison isn't sensible.