4 ms·

> So they can have a seriously deleterious effect on really very large numbers of children as a result of the power they wield. I have a hard time seeing how

> So they can have a seriously deleterious effect on really very large numbers of children as a result of the power they wield. I have a hard time seeing how anything they decide to do to change schooling is going to make it worse than it is. Our current education system is largely still in a factory style, where students are all taught the same material, run on the same idiotic schedule, are taught aimed at tests, and generally have any genuine interest in learn crushed out of them by the second grade. Classes teach generic material and completely fail to demonstrate useful applications. Useful things like critical thought, philosophy, personal finance, cooking, computing systems/programming - not taught. Students learn to focus on rote memorization and local application of principles - see the articles the problems of getting students to solve conceptual physics problems vs. mathematical ones - and then proceed to forget most of the material as soon as there's no test on the horizon. And we've known how to do better for a long time. Montessori's analysis of children and how they learn, her experimentation with the classroom and materials - this sort of thing is a hundred years old at this point, but we don't apply it widely. Instead we largely have the same old ineffective crap that we pass for "teaching". There's a reason Khan Academy became a thing. We already know that schools do a bad job of preparing students for the current economic landscape. There's no reason to look at this and say "but some of these things might not work! Think of the children!" The children will be fine (or at a minimum, no worse off). We've already seen this where school districts have blown millions of dollars on new tech, to no useful effect. Zuckerberg threw a hundred million at some school district on the east coast, to zero benefit. But stuff like that isn't going to make things any worse. And on the flip side, they won't get better without action like this and without experimentation. Better education is, imo, the best way to put this country on a strong footing for the coming decades. The government isn't going to do it. The private market isn't going to do it at scale. The average PTA isn't going to do it, and really, what the hell do most parents know about education, other than what they experienced? Committees and groups are the kind of thing that get bogged down in details, have no clear direction, and take forever to decide anything. At least a random billionaire can have the money and direction to get things done, even if not all of their ideas pan out. One last thing - I feel these days schools are much less important than in the past, in so far as learning. The internet provides tremendous access to information; sites like Khan and other education material has improved over traditional textbooks by leaps and bounds; Stack Overflow and similar provide places to ask questions and find answers/explanations to specific problems or concepts; and so on. Fifty years ago, if a billionaire decided to bulldoze some schools and leave a bunch of children with no place to learn, that would have been a dire problem. Today, it's much less of an issue.

scrumper 9y ago
I agree with your broad point about the fairly poor state of education and its central role in the country's future. I don't agree with some other things: one of which being "at least a random billionaire can have the money and direction to get things done, even if not all their ideas pan out." I argued that above so I won't rehash it, but to summarize, I hold the precautionary principle in high regard, and you - I think - prefer iteration and experimentation; we can agree to disagree. Otherwise I found your comment a bit contradictory. You don't like recent investments in classroom technology and say that technology isn't a solution, but you seem to think that technology is an at least partially adequate replacement for the classroom itself. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $100m in New Jersey (was it a waste? How do we know?) but seem happy for that pattern to continue. To pick on a specific theme you touched on a few times: learning isn't even mostly about information. Ask anyone who bought a textbook in college then slept through lectures and never spoke to their professor. Kahn Academy doesn't represent a visionary, Montessori-compatible approach to learning math; instead it's a scaled up, gamified, alternative to an already stale math education pattern of rote memorization, depersonalized instruction, and practice problems. That's a part of math education - you have to learn how to apply techniques after all - but hardly represents the paradigm shift in math teaching that gets talked about here frequently. Don't get me wrong: Khan is a very good thing, especially for students struggling with bad teachers, but it's not the next step. And that's just talking about math education. I don't agree at all that schools are less important. Schools are the only place where kids have mandatory exposure to specialists who's only job is to teach them things. To my point above, information is not education. 'Education' is the thing that happens when decent teachers with adequate materials and reasonable tools spend focused time with children. So you need time - which means smaller class sizes; you need tools, which really is a solved problem requiring only situational application of cash; you need materials, same; and you need decent teachers, which is a matter of training and status and autonomy and job satisfaction and vocation, and that is a really thorny mess. It's a generational political problem, not a thing a billionaire can meaningfully affect with a recommendation algorithm for syllabus modules. So I guess my conclusion is - a really just absolutely epically well-funded lobbying foundation with a world-class policy board would do far more good than a series of expensive experiments playing with the margins of the existing borked system.

scrumper 9y ago

I agree with your broad point about the fairly poor state of education and its central role in the country's future. I don't agree with some other things: one of which being "at least a random billionaire can have the money and direction to get things done, even if not all their ideas pan out." I argued that above so I won't rehash it, but to summarize, I hold the precautionary principle in high regard, and you - I think - prefer iteration and experimentation; we can agree to disagree. Otherwise I found your comment a bit contradictory. You don't like recent investments in classroom technology and say that technology isn't a solution, but you seem to think that technology is an at least partially adequate replacement for the classroom itself. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $100m in New Jersey (was it a waste? How do we know?) but seem happy for that pattern to continue. To pick on a specific theme you touched on a few times: learning isn't even mostly about information. Ask anyone who bought a textbook in college then slept through lectures and never spoke to their professor. Kahn Academy doesn't represent a visionary, Montessori-compatible approach to learning math; instead it's a scaled up, gamified, alternative to an already stale math education pattern of rote memorization, depersonalized instruction, and practice problems. That's a part of math education - you have to learn how to apply techniques after all - but hardly represents the paradigm shift in math teaching that gets talked about here frequently. Don't get me wrong: Khan is a very good thing, especially for students struggling with bad teachers, but it's not the next step. And that's just talking about math education. I don't agree at all that schools are less important. Schools are the only place where kids have mandatory exposure to specialists who's only job is to teach them things. To my point above, information is not education. 'Education' is the thing that happens when decent teachers with adequate materials and reasonable tools spend focused time with children. So you need time - which means smaller class sizes; you need tools, which really is a solved problem requiring only situational application of cash; you need materials, same; and you need decent teachers, which is a matter of training and status and autonomy and job satisfaction and vocation, and that is a really thorny mess. It's a generational political problem, not a thing a billionaire can meaningfully affect with a recommendation algorithm for syllabus modules. So I guess my conclusion is - a really just absolutely epically well-funded lobbying foundation with a world-class policy board would do far more good than a series of expensive experiments playing with the margins of the existing borked system.