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This article is infuriating. #1 problem with education is that nobody is building for the student. The student is never the user. Think about all of the compa

This article is infuriating. #1 problem with education is that nobody is building for the student. The student is never the user. Think about all of the companies and institutions that make up the experience of the modern student. Think about who they are serving. Who are they building for? Who are textbook publishers building for? It's probably not the students. Tools will not fix this. Laptops will not fix this. Until students' experience affects schools' bottom line, education will not change for the better.

ivan_ah 9y ago
Very true. In many contexts (ancient, current, and new) the students are painted as an empty receptacle to be filled in with knowledge from some external source. In that world view, innovation is about "filling" students in a more efficient, more controlled, or more measurable way. Did anyone ever ask what students actually want to learn? Did anyone ever talk to them like adults, and put them in charge of their own learning process? I think for primary school there needs to be some sort of structure and "guidance from above" but starting with high school, students need to be put in charge. Sure we'll still need some sort of standardized testing and "proof of knowledge," but learning will be so much better if we let students follow their interests and their own pace, possibly working in small groups.
- mjevans 9y ago
  There's also the "core" curriculum that needs to be covered, however I see no reason why this can't be paired with the student's actual passion. It's important to give relevance to the work so that it actually matters to the student. In higher education (high school / college / beyond) it would be nice if the work were actually productive to society instead of just busy work.
dyarosla 9y ago
I think this is very incorrect. Companies are not not building for the student. It may very well be true that companies can be guided by other factors (businesses do need money to run), but it's not that they are not looking at students experience' when writing, creating, or publishing content- which at the heart of it is meant to get students to learn and engage.
- zachlatta 9y ago
  It's a matter of the student's experience affecting the school's bottom line. At best, that's happening indirectly. Which isn't good enough.
  - codingdave 9y ago
    True, but dig deeper -- schools don't care about their bottom line because they are trying to make a profit. They care because they are trying to stay open while serving ALL the students. And their funding is driven by the government, which in turn decides how to fund based on standardized testing... which drives the curriculum, which drives the student experience. You aren't wrong, but you are not describing the bigger picture. There is a vicious cycle going on. And school and district administrators are painfully aware of it, and would love to break it.
pdfernhout 9y ago
My wife and I spent over seven person-years building stuff for education in the 1990s on our own dime (funded by unrelated consulting) -- hardly anyone cared: http://gardenwithinsight.com/ http://gardenwithinsight.com/ No doubt we could have done a better job on that software (including about marketing and financing). But puzzling over that situation, to try to understand what went wrong (despite magazine articles back then going on about the need for better educational software), I read widely in the alternative educational field. I discovered many surprising things about the differences between "education" and "schooling" (including regarding self-development, citizenship, employability, and obedience). One big clue though should have been reading Seymour Papert writing about how almost all schools took his Lego/Logo system and turned a playful fun open-ended educational experience into a structured unpleasant one. This book by NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto explains why hardly anyone cares whether kids learn, especially page 363-365 (power divided by 22) which explains twenty-two groups involved in education none of whom benefit by kids actually learning anything: https://archive.org/stream/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation#page/n361/mode/2up/search/players+in+the+school+game https://archive.org/stream/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEd... See also by Gatto: https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-revolutions-become-one-undergroudhistory/ https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev... "I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there." Even most parents don't care about expansive educational experiences, sadly. Most of them, schooled themselves, just want to see their children rise through the grades of the same religious-like cult of compulsory schooling they went through so their kids can "get a good job". It's the only life the last few generations have ever known since compulsory schooling was invented by the Prussians (contributing to two World Wars made possible by trained reflexive blind obedience to authority). As Gatto says, maybe such schooling was an idea that could have been justified at one time to produce material abundance -- but it no longer makes sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU As Gatto says: http://ojisanseiuchi.com/2014/08/10/schools-are-adoption/ http://ojisanseiuchi.com/2014/08/10/schools-are-adoption/ “Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted. ... But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.” This is what most school teachers really teach: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes." That said, there are exceptions, usually informal education like at museums or arts programs or software like Kerbal Space Program. And some schools and teachers do better than others (like Gatto would bend or break the rules for his junior high school students such as by getting them internships). And homeschooling provides an (expensive-in-lost-income) alternative. https://xkcd.com/1356/ https://xkcd.com/1356/ Lots more related links collected by me: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives... Kids can certainly learn a lot via the web and using a search engine. There are a lot of great educational resources out there from the more conventional Khan Academy to the unconventional and everything in between. But there is also the flip side of a flood of too much exciting information leading to the risks of: * "supernormal stimuli" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli * "the acceleration of addiction" http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html * "the cyber effect" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/14/the-cyber-effect-mary-aiken-review-internet-social-media-psychology https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/14/the-cyber-effe... * "[addictive] video games and the human condition". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU So, it sure helps to have guides and a community of learners (of all ages and abilities) learning together. And it helps to have resource centers (including libraries and makerspaces) the learners can spend time in to learn hands-on skills. But sadly such good places are few and far between even while hundreds of billions of dollars in the US flow into conventional "schooling" every year. I have a lot more optimism that something like a basic income can remake the nature of education in our society by giving people freedom to pursue their own interests (including social interests and family interests including homeschooling their own kids) -- than optimism that tech entrepreneurs can improve schooling by pouring billions of dollars into helping fundamentally broken schools break kids even faster. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/business/dealbook/the-melting-of-mark-zuckerbergs-donation-to-newark-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/business/dealbook/the-mel... One alternative I proposed along those lines of an educationally-funded basic income and local educational resource centers: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-s...

ivan_ah 9y ago

Very true. In many contexts (ancient, current, and new) the students are painted as an empty receptacle to be filled in with knowledge from some external source. In that world view, innovation is about "filling" students in a more efficient, more controlled, or more measurable way. Did anyone ever ask what students actually want to learn? Did anyone ever talk to them like adults, and put them in charge of their own learning process? I think for primary school there needs to be some sort of structure and "guidance from above" but starting with high school, students need to be put in charge. Sure we'll still need some sort of standardized testing and "proof of knowledge," but learning will be so much better if we let students follow their interests and their own pace, possibly working in small groups.

mjevans 9y ago
There's also the "core" curriculum that needs to be covered, however I see no reason why this can't be paired with the student's actual passion. It's important to give relevance to the work so that it actually matters to the student. In higher education (high school / college / beyond) it would be nice if the work were actually productive to society instead of just busy work.

dyarosla 9y ago

I think this is very incorrect. Companies are not not building for the student. It may very well be true that companies can be guided by other factors (businesses do need money to run), but it's not that they are not looking at students experience' when writing, creating, or publishing content- which at the heart of it is meant to get students to learn and engage.

zachlatta 9y ago
It's a matter of the student's experience affecting the school's bottom line. At best, that's happening indirectly. Which isn't good enough.
- codingdave 9y ago
  True, but dig deeper -- schools don't care about their bottom line because they are trying to make a profit. They care because they are trying to stay open while serving ALL the students. And their funding is driven by the government, which in turn decides how to fund based on standardized testing... which drives the curriculum, which drives the student experience. You aren't wrong, but you are not describing the bigger picture. There is a vicious cycle going on. And school and district administrators are painfully aware of it, and would love to break it.

pdfernhout 9y ago

My wife and I spent over seven person-years building stuff for education in the 1990s on our own dime (funded by unrelated consulting) -- hardly anyone cared: http://gardenwithinsight.com/ http://gardenwithinsight.com/ No doubt we could have done a better job on that software (including about marketing and financing). But puzzling over that situation, to try to understand what went wrong (despite magazine articles back then going on about the need for better educational software), I read widely in the alternative educational field. I discovered many surprising things about the differences between "education" and "schooling" (including regarding self-development, citizenship, employability, and obedience). One big clue though should have been reading Seymour Papert writing about how almost all schools took his Lego/Logo system and turned a playful fun open-ended educational experience into a structured unpleasant one. This book by NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto explains why hardly anyone cares whether kids learn, especially page 363-365 (power divided by 22) which explains twenty-two groups involved in education none of whom benefit by kids actually learning anything: https://archive.org/stream/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation#page/n361/mode/2up/search/players+in+the+school+game https://archive.org/stream/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEd... See also by Gatto: https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-revolutions-become-one-undergroudhistory/ https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev... "I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there." Even most parents don't care about expansive educational experiences, sadly. Most of them, schooled themselves, just want to see their children rise through the grades of the same religious-like cult of compulsory schooling they went through so their kids can "get a good job". It's the only life the last few generations have ever known since compulsory schooling was invented by the Prussians (contributing to two World Wars made possible by trained reflexive blind obedience to authority). As Gatto says, maybe such schooling was an idea that could have been justified at one time to produce material abundance -- but it no longer makes sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU As Gatto says: http://ojisanseiuchi.com/2014/08/10/schools-are-adoption/ http://ojisanseiuchi.com/2014/08/10/schools-are-adoption/ “Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted. ... But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.” This is what most school teachers really teach: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes." That said, there are exceptions, usually informal education like at museums or arts programs or software like Kerbal Space Program. And some schools and teachers do better than others (like Gatto would bend or break the rules for his junior high school students such as by getting them internships). And homeschooling provides an (expensive-in-lost-income) alternative. https://xkcd.com/1356/ https://xkcd.com/1356/ Lots more related links collected by me: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives... Kids can certainly learn a lot via the web and using a search engine. There are a lot of great educational resources out there from the more conventional Khan Academy to the unconventional and everything in between. But there is also the flip side of a flood of too much exciting information leading to the risks of: * "supernormal stimuli" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli * "the acceleration of addiction" http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html * "the cyber effect" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/14/the-cyber-effect-mary-aiken-review-internet-social-media-psychology https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/14/the-cyber-effe... * "[addictive] video games and the human condition". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU So, it sure helps to have guides and a community of learners (of all ages and abilities) learning together. And it helps to have resource centers (including libraries and makerspaces) the learners can spend time in to learn hands-on skills. But sadly such good places are few and far between even while hundreds of billions of dollars in the US flow into conventional "schooling" every year. I have a lot more optimism that something like a basic income can remake the nature of education in our society by giving people freedom to pursue their own interests (including social interests and family interests including homeschooling their own kids) -- than optimism that tech entrepreneurs can improve schooling by pouring billions of dollars into helping fundamentally broken schools break kids even faster. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/business/dealbook/the-melting-of-mark-zuckerbergs-donation-to-newark-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/business/dealbook/the-mel... One alternative I proposed along those lines of an educationally-funded basic income and local educational resource centers: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-s...