6 ms·

There's no contradiction, you are misunderstanding my statement. Older children need to go to school to learn stuff like mathematics, history, sciences, languag

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.
- QSIITurbo 11y ago
  Children with learning and behavioral disorders are a minority, yes, but they cause the most damage in a group, hindering the natural progression of others so the teacher has to know how to deal with these children. Now, that was just one that I gave you, but even ordinary children often have behavioral issues that stem from their upbringing at home and the teacher has to be able to address that. Our high school biology ends with relatively detailed information about DNA replication and sequencing using PCR that combines chemistry and physics. Physics includes nuclear physics and electrical engineering. Mathematics contains differential equations and statistics. Chemistry has topics going in to details of organic chemistry. Was Plato talking about those too? If you feel that there's some problem in education that you can solve better, feel free to get a degree and write a thesis about that.
  - redahs 11y ago
    The mistake you are making is assuming that synchronous group activities are a necessary and important part of teaching. There will always be deviations from the mean, regardless of whether or not they are pathologized as behavioral disorders, which will slow down such attempts at synchronous learning. This is why sense classical times the ultimate model for education has been that of the individual conversation, dialogue, between student and tutor. We aren't using alternative methods outside of tutorship for education because we have discovered better methodologies, we are doing so because of economics and cost. Expert tutors were formerly extremely scarce and retained by the nobility. We employ group lectures in packed classrooms not because they are a necessary or efficient way to learn, but because educated teachers used to be extremely scarce, and it gave everybody a chance to hear.
    - QSIITurbo 11y ago
      Synchronous group activities are a necessity because of time and resource limitations, so I'm not making any mistakes nor assumptions. It's impossible to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio in common education. 1:1 is used sometimes in medical sciences and practical professions that require physical demonstration, at least. For common education, the results are excellent even with larger group sizes. You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions. The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. They can also ask their peers who have better understanding of the topic. However, printing press made it possible to create text books that allow a lot more information to be learned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on. As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be, and how much they affect groups of children at sensitive development stages.
      - redahs 11y ago
        > It's impossible to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio in common education. Well, this assertion of impossibility is demonstrably and historically false, because since the times of Ancient Greece, that is how precisely how many people in the upper classes and great thinkers received their education. It's also within the realm of economic possibility to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio today for most disciplines while simultaneously expanding education access. You do it by only supplying lectures in the form of video recordings by the single foremost expert lecturer on that topic, drastically reducing non-tutoring related administrative expenditures and overheads, crowd-sourcing free tutors from all age groups and professional backgrounds including non-academics, and gradually replacing public education funding with a voucher system for parents to go out, find, and pay for the best and most academically qualified tutors and mentors for their children in a competitive education market. A lecture which proceeds at a pacing not controlled by the individual, in which the learner cannot interrogate each and every claim and proposition at their own pace in the order it is presented, is largely a dramatic performance. It's little more than a motivational speech for them go out and acquire the knowledge on their own time, outside of lecture, at a future date. Instead of having thousands of teachers perform daily motivational speeches on the same topic nationwide, you can just have the single best speaker on the topic make a single recording once every few years using modern technology, and pay all of those workers to expend their labor on performing 1:1 interaction to accelerate the rate of learning. > You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions. You cannot rationally judge the efficiency of an existing process in comparison to a proposed alternative by only observing the output of the existing one. > The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. In a generalized form, dialogue is also conducted by learners internally through self questioning, and when engaging with an external medium which provides feedback (experimentation). It is a necessary experience for any learner to accept a new proposition as true, and something which one-to-many synchronous lectures are never directly capable of providing. > earned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on. Textbooks provide an essential aide for students engaged in self questioning to verify their answers, but as a static medium, they lack the ability to make predictions about what each learner is thinking based on observed behavioral cues like a tutor or peer can. Since static media cannot make efficient inferences about the individual based on reactive observation, it cannot tell each learner what they don't know they don't know. Learning what you don't know you don't know is something which currently can only be efficiently achieved through conversation, and greatly accelerates the learning process. > As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. I would not argue that the phenomena which pathologies describe does not objectively exist, only that the principle which distinguishes atypical behavior from pathological behavior is a normative distinction containing embedded social-political beliefs rather than a purely descriptive one. It's an optional distinction to make, based on whether it provides us any utility any achieving our goals. >It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be I have met children with severe learning disabilities and it is widely accepted among teachers and parents that they are benefitted by more 1:1 interaction and shouldn't be stuck in large classrooms. My point is simply that everybody learns faster with 1:1 interaction and learns slower in large classrooms.
redahs 11y ago
But what psychology currently tells us is that spaced repetition and recall is necessary to consolidate information into long term memory. Interacting with younger people who force you to reexplain and repeat things you were previously taught is a great way to do this. Education without this is like building a sandcastle. The brain is going to discard the information after the test if you aren't required to reexplain it the next year, and your foundations get eroded.
- QSIITurbo 11y ago
  Yes, that's how long term memory works in the brain. Explaining things and social learning are excellent learning techniques, I'm not denying that. These days smart phones and social media are an excellent tool for communicating ideas with your peers. But it has to happen with peers that are on the same level as you are. Otherwise you are explaining too simple things that you've already mastered. This "discarding after test" is already and automatically addressed in the education: high school repeats things learned in previous schools and builds on those. Our high schools also have large final exams that require one to be able to understand the whole curriculum of the subject. The grade measures your memory, and understanding because you cannot just memorise everything. The same is true for all education levels.
  - redahs 11y ago
    I don't think it's suitably addressed in current education structures. Under the principal of spaced repetition, you might also want people in the workforce infrequently tutoring college students, graduate students infrequently tutoring high school students, college students infrequently tutoring middle schoolers, so on and so forth. The teacher-student heirarchy was decent way to mass produce educational services during industrialization but creates unnecessarily rigid classifications between learners at different levels of knowledge. I think there is room for a more mutualistic exchange, between tutors who would like to clarify their existing knowledge, and between students who like to learn something new, to emerge in the future.
    - QSIITurbo 11y ago

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.

QSIITurbo 11y ago
Children with learning and behavioral disorders are a minority, yes, but they cause the most damage in a group, hindering the natural progression of others so the teacher has to know how to deal with these children. Now, that was just one that I gave you, but even ordinary children often have behavioral issues that stem from their upbringing at home and the teacher has to be able to address that. Our high school biology ends with relatively detailed information about DNA replication and sequencing using PCR that combines chemistry and physics. Physics includes nuclear physics and electrical engineering. Mathematics contains differential equations and statistics. Chemistry has topics going in to details of organic chemistry. Was Plato talking about those too? If you feel that there's some problem in education that you can solve better, feel free to get a degree and write a thesis about that.
- redahs 11y ago
  The mistake you are making is assuming that synchronous group activities are a necessary and important part of teaching. There will always be deviations from the mean, regardless of whether or not they are pathologized as behavioral disorders, which will slow down such attempts at synchronous learning. This is why sense classical times the ultimate model for education has been that of the individual conversation, dialogue, between student and tutor. We aren't using alternative methods outside of tutorship for education because we have discovered better methodologies, we are doing so because of economics and cost. Expert tutors were formerly extremely scarce and retained by the nobility. We employ group lectures in packed classrooms not because they are a necessary or efficient way to learn, but because educated teachers used to be extremely scarce, and it gave everybody a chance to hear.
  - QSIITurbo 11y ago
    Synchronous group activities are a necessity because of time and resource limitations, so I'm not making any mistakes nor assumptions. It's impossible to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio in common education. 1:1 is used sometimes in medical sciences and practical professions that require physical demonstration, at least. For common education, the results are excellent even with larger group sizes. You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions. The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. They can also ask their peers who have better understanding of the topic. However, printing press made it possible to create text books that allow a lot more information to be learned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on. As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be, and how much they affect groups of children at sensitive development stages.
    - redahs 11y ago
      > It's impossible to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio in common education. Well, this assertion of impossibility is demonstrably and historically false, because since the times of Ancient Greece, that is how precisely how many people in the upper classes and great thinkers received their education. It's also within the realm of economic possibility to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio today for most disciplines while simultaneously expanding education access. You do it by only supplying lectures in the form of video recordings by the single foremost expert lecturer on that topic, drastically reducing non-tutoring related administrative expenditures and overheads, crowd-sourcing free tutors from all age groups and professional backgrounds including non-academics, and gradually replacing public education funding with a voucher system for parents to go out, find, and pay for the best and most academically qualified tutors and mentors for their children in a competitive education market. A lecture which proceeds at a pacing not controlled by the individual, in which the learner cannot interrogate each and every claim and proposition at their own pace in the order it is presented, is largely a dramatic performance. It's little more than a motivational speech for them go out and acquire the knowledge on their own time, outside of lecture, at a future date. Instead of having thousands of teachers perform daily motivational speeches on the same topic nationwide, you can just have the single best speaker on the topic make a single recording once every few years using modern technology, and pay all of those workers to expend their labor on performing 1:1 interaction to accelerate the rate of learning. > You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions. You cannot rationally judge the efficiency of an existing process in comparison to a proposed alternative by only observing the output of the existing one. > The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. In a generalized form, dialogue is also conducted by learners internally through self questioning, and when engaging with an external medium which provides feedback (experimentation). It is a necessary experience for any learner to accept a new proposition as true, and something which one-to-many synchronous lectures are never directly capable of providing. > earned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on. Textbooks provide an essential aide for students engaged in self questioning to verify their answers, but as a static medium, they lack the ability to make predictions about what each learner is thinking based on observed behavioral cues like a tutor or peer can. Since static media cannot make efficient inferences about the individual based on reactive observation, it cannot tell each learner what they don't know they don't know. Learning what you don't know you don't know is something which currently can only be efficiently achieved through conversation, and greatly accelerates the learning process. > As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. I would not argue that the phenomena which pathologies describe does not objectively exist, only that the principle which distinguishes atypical behavior from pathological behavior is a normative distinction containing embedded social-political beliefs rather than a purely descriptive one. It's an optional distinction to make, based on whether it provides us any utility any achieving our goals. >It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be I have met children with severe learning disabilities and it is widely accepted among teachers and parents that they are benefitted by more 1:1 interaction and shouldn't be stuck in large classrooms. My point is simply that everybody learns faster with 1:1 interaction and learns slower in large classrooms.

redahs 11y ago

But what psychology currently tells us is that spaced repetition and recall is necessary to consolidate information into long term memory. Interacting with younger people who force you to reexplain and repeat things you were previously taught is a great way to do this. Education without this is like building a sandcastle. The brain is going to discard the information after the test if you aren't required to reexplain it the next year, and your foundations get eroded.

QSIITurbo 11y ago
Yes, that's how long term memory works in the brain. Explaining things and social learning are excellent learning techniques, I'm not denying that. These days smart phones and social media are an excellent tool for communicating ideas with your peers. But it has to happen with peers that are on the same level as you are. Otherwise you are explaining too simple things that you've already mastered. This "discarding after test" is already and automatically addressed in the education: high school repeats things learned in previous schools and builds on those. Our high schools also have large final exams that require one to be able to understand the whole curriculum of the subject. The grade measures your memory, and understanding because you cannot just memorise everything. The same is true for all education levels.
- redahs 11y ago
  I don't think it's suitably addressed in current education structures. Under the principal of spaced repetition, you might also want people in the workforce infrequently tutoring college students, graduate students infrequently tutoring high school students, college students infrequently tutoring middle schoolers, so on and so forth. The teacher-student heirarchy was decent way to mass produce educational services during industrialization but creates unnecessarily rigid classifications between learners at different levels of knowledge. I think there is room for a more mutualistic exchange, between tutors who would like to clarify their existing knowledge, and between students who like to learn something new, to emerge in the future.
  - QSIITurbo 11y ago