17 ms·

After skimming the paper, I get the sense that there's this underlying assumption that the goal of education is to get students to learn specific facts, i.e. th

After skimming the paper, I get the sense that there's this underlying assumption that the goal of education is to get students to learn specific facts, i.e. that a physics student should learn the formula that force equals mass times acceleration. While there is of course lots of value in ensuring that students can learn specific facts and figures, the criticism (if I recall correctly) is that an approach that dictates specificity of recall as the end goal is not an approach that induces a lifelong love of learning. Most of the value in an experiential-based approach is not limited to the specificity of facts learned during the experiences, but in the cognitive linking of learning with the dynamism of the experience, which encourages independent growth. This leads back to the philosophical question of whether our school systems should focus on graduating students who know specific knowledge (an approach that leads to standardized testing), or students who have become independently capable lifelong learners (a more holistic approach that tries to adapt to students' individual strengths). Which approach better prepares students for life after school, and equally important, which approach can prove to scale to the levels required for public education?

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
It's not a either-or choice. You can certainly know a lot of facts while at the same time developing those skills. In fact, my guess would be that the two are related: learning a lot of facts teaches one to learn arbitrary things, even things that aren't that interesting. This, learning things not that interesting, is the skill. My money says an education is about developing a certain set of habits. The base one is probably being able to sit down by yourself and memorize a bunch of arbitrary detail that you can recall on command, but that's just the base, maybe 1% of the habits you should get. I don't know, though. We may just suck at managing public education, not implementing it. In that case, no discussion of underlying theory is ever going to amount to much more than noise.
- lowry 8y ago
  Sherlock Holmes famously refused to learn things that would be useless for his job, to keep his mind tidily organized. He is a fictional character, but the idea that learning facts can be detrimental to someone's ability is interesting. Look at yourself: browsing Hacker News and Twitter in the morning to achieve little by the end of the day. ;-)
  - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
    It's an extremely relevant point. I don't know. You may be right! There is another school of thought that truly interesting and transformative work comes from joining up things that naturally don't go together. In this school of thought, people who focus too narrowly only ever do "normal" science, as Kuhn taught. They never achieve breakthrough. I suspect that both are valuable: skimming and remembering/assimilating random surface-level material from all over, and deep-diving into only those things that you feel matter. As an official Old Programming Dude, and a self-taught coder/consultant, what I see in the dang kids of today is a lack of being able to manage both needs. They're either great at one or the other. Neither bunch amounts to much intellectually in terms of being interesting, but at least with the focused group they are able to do some really cool stuff. Personally, I need more focus. I know this. (And I plan on finishing up 4 hours of coding and two essays by the end of the day, kid!) ADD: One of the things I've noticed about focus is that when solving problems, I work best when I manage my focus. I'll put the problem on the monitor or on the wall where it's always visible. Then I'll go do something else. Anything. As long as I can see the problem, somehow-or-another my brain keeps working on it, even if I'm not aware of it. So for many, the problem may not be HN/Twitter, but the inability to control the subtle parts of their work environment that might be preventing them from working at a higher level.
  - signal11 8y ago
    He was also famously interested in all sorts of trivia (such as types of London clays, and types of cigar ashes) because it helped him with his job. I think "neo-generalist" would be a good way to describe Holmes: https://hackernoon.com/the-neo-generalist-and-why-we-should-all-have-one-13d651706a0c?gi=2977fb69deed https://hackernoon.com/the-neo-generalist-and-why-we-should-... For engineers and developers, many of whom come from a STEM background, learning about the humanities can be an enriching experience and even help them design better systems. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who has the time -- and it doesn't have to mean learning random facts. There are a lot of good reading lists, podcasts, etc, that one can go through in their spare time.
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    Just as an aside, the BBC version of the quote: https://youtu.be/OVXt8jBAGkc?t=87 https://youtu.be/OVXt8jBAGkc?t=87 For the last few years I took some time off to recover from a mild heavy metal poisoning, and used the time to learn learn learn. I was pretty lazy in childhood and now had a desire to learn, but also to prove to myself that I can study diligently for an extended period, which I never did (had to do) before. So I took some 60 courses on edX and Coursera mostly (but also Youtube channels and some Khan academy for refreshing some basics, plus some reading) - at the time everything still was free. Most of the courses were "life-sciency", stuff I never had to deal with since school and never thought I would ever touch. More than one course in each chemistry, org. chem., bio-chem., physiology, anatomy, neuroscience, lots of statistics (again - had forgotten everything, this time I actually cared). The more I learned the more I can relate to the Sherlock Holmes quote. It's no use. The deeper I went, the more courses I took, the more I forgot. Also, the more I felt that I don't have any practical use for any of it. It made me feel good, but society won't benefit one bit from my learning. Humans specialize, and most people who do good work in their place in society really don't benefit from cramming ever more stuff into their heads. At this point I would not even care if I met somebody who really didn't know about earth and sun, as long as they perform well in their actual job. Part of it is that the more I learned the more I also learned that I still know nothing at all. I can take all the basic courses about medical topics, it does not help one bit to make any practical decisions- There is a high threshold before the knowledge is practically useful (you can't be 1/3rd of a doctor). I have switched to mostly learning things related to my actual work now and stopped taking courses outside my field. It just felt increasingly futile. Sure, I now have quite good basics but it was a huge investment, if I hadn't had anything else to do during the time anyway it would have been quite a waste. I would not expect anything similar from larger society, let them specialize. I now think trust is far more important. It's okay if people don't know much or anything about a lot of subjects - as long as they trust others who do. Things like for-profit health care lead to things like skepticism of the specialists. I too had plenty of doctors who tried to sell me useless stuff (network marketing!) and useless treatments when I tried to find someone for the problem I had. The missing trust is something rarely if ever mentioned in discussions about "anti-vaxxers". Even those who think they are stupid know nothing at all about the immune system and about how immunization actually works (edX has some good and detailed courses, and it's a lot and can be quite boring unless one really is into the subject) - the difference is not that they know anything but that they trust official authority. So the question is not how do you teach immune system fundamentals to skeptics, but how do you create trust that they don't have to? There are enough headlines to show that mistrust of the profit-driven system is not exactly completely stupid. That it shows up as anti-vaccination attitude is, I think actually secondary and incidental and not the actual root problem. In a highly specialized society we need trust, and we don't need to want to teach everybody lots of everything. Food for thought - ignore the product this is about, it's just an example: https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d449929ef https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499... (see the reader-highlighted text at the end for the summary).
C1sc0cat 8y ago
And this leads to savvy kids at 14 asking the teacher " miss what's the learning experience". It also leads to say Eng Lit students only reading the text's (or parts of the texts) on the test and not actively reading other related works in the cannon.
watwut 8y ago
The issue I heard people saying was that not just love for learning was issue, but also recall in long term, lack of understanding and students freezing when they encountered just slightly different problem then the one they have been taught directly. E.g. the act of actively solving problem, having to try out different options and think makes you better able to derive formula again when you forget it or to use it in different contexts. Also that students who are taught via direct instruction only (everything on the platter) freeze when they encounter non straightforward exercises. They are unused to initial uncertainty, doubt, assume that if first attempt failed then it means something bad and there is no point in continuing etc. Obviously, in practice it is not and should not be exclusive dichotomy between the two. The teacher should be able to teach some parts of curriculum via direct instruction and others via minimal guidance depending on what is taught, where students struggle and looking for reasonable trade-off between the two.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > [Direct instruction students] freeze when they > encounter non straightforward exercises. They > are unused to initial uncertainty, doubt, > assume that if first attempt failed then it > means something bad and there is no point in > continuing etc. I would argue that students "freezing up" when presented with new problems is _also_ a part of a solid educational approach. Careful guided instruction when introducing new topics is absolutely necessary. But at some point the student is going to need to practice "open-ended" problems. It is sort of like weight lifting, to really develop one needs to reach the point of failure in a controlled way, regularly and repeatedly, BUT NOT ALL THE TIME.
bluGill 8y ago
We need both. I as a tax payer am paying for kids to attend school because food is not free for everybody - somebody needs to work no matter what system you come up with. It is better a better investment for me to get you educated so you can support yourself, than to remove your staved to death body from the street. There are some facts that almost everybody universally needs to know to support themselves: you need to know how to read, write and some basic arithmetic. F=MA is useful to enough jobs that it is best for everybody to know it even if whatever job you end up with doesn't need it. The above is intentionally overblown to make the point.
hyperpape 8y ago
I've increasingly come to value mastering the basics.[0] A quote from Michael Nielsen in his great article Augmenting Long-Term Memory (http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html) puts it very well: "Over the years, I've often helped people learn technical subjects such as quantum mechanics. Over time you come to see patterns in how people get stuck. One common pattern is that people think they're getting stuck on esoteric, complex issues. But when you dig down it turns out they're having a hard time with basic notation and terminology." [0] I suspect individuals who learn things relatively easily may undervalue that skill, because they typically were ahead in school.
- sitkack 8y ago
  It isn't just the basics that need mastering, but all of it [1] Adding knowledge to your own knowledge graph requires existing context, without context, there is no place for new knowledge to attach. Without master, eventually the new knowledge is simply remembered and not fully understood. The knowledge front is a fixed distance from the last fully mastered concept. It is ok to go slow, who cares how fast shaky knowledge is consumed. You want a building that will stand, not one that was built on time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
- paulgrant999 8y ago
  I also tutor/educate. I've fixed people in 1 week, what the education system couldn't accomplish in x years. I just reach in, and remove the blocks. Once they get it, they are never the same again. True story, somebody came up to me, who was having severe difficulty. They were studying for their GED (700+ hours in) and couldn't crack it. He asked for my help and I told him I was busy at the moment, but that I could give him 30 minutes in a couple of days - but that I would be happy to talk to him right now for 5-10 minutes. So I basically grilled him for a couple of minutes, then gave him a complete dump on what he needed to do in a highly-abbreviated manner. About a week later, I see him and tell him I'm free to sit with him again if he likes, to which he replies "No, thats not necessary - I passed. I followed your advice." :) I get people calling me up after decades (for whom I only sat with for 1-3 hours) telling me about how much I changed their lives. ... I also do "IQ" raising. Just being around me gives you about a 10-12 point jump. The longer the period, the more permanent the results. Takes about a couple of weeks to kick in. Takes about about 1-2 years for full raise (permanent, for life). And shit, if you give me somebody smart-smart whose open & ethical? :) Like gas, on a fire. My only real constraints are: a) I don't put out anything dual-use. b) I don't hack people for harm or personal gain. c) I don't enable crimes, criminals, or unethical people.
scott_s 8y ago
What gives you that impression? I don't think any physics teacher would consider that their goal; rather, they would want the students to gain an understanding of the concepts of force, mass, acceleration and how they interact. Being able to easily recall the formula describing that relationship would be a side-effect. I also read the abstract of this paper, and I didn't see any evidence of that underlying assumption.
amp108 8y ago
Specificity of recall is not an end, but it is a necessary means to the end goal of education. We can only know that someone is an independent lifelong learner if we can tell that they have learned something; not only that, but that they have learned a lot of related, non-obvious facts, and can work with them. This dichotomy, between learning facts and learning concepts, is not an innate one and I wish that notion would go away.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

It's not a either-or choice. You can certainly know a lot of facts while at the same time developing those skills. In fact, my guess would be that the two are related: learning a lot of facts teaches one to learn arbitrary things, even things that aren't that interesting. This, learning things not that interesting, is the skill. My money says an education is about developing a certain set of habits. The base one is probably being able to sit down by yourself and memorize a bunch of arbitrary detail that you can recall on command, but that's just the base, maybe 1% of the habits you should get. I don't know, though. We may just suck at managing public education, not implementing it. In that case, no discussion of underlying theory is ever going to amount to much more than noise.

lowry 8y ago
Sherlock Holmes famously refused to learn things that would be useless for his job, to keep his mind tidily organized. He is a fictional character, but the idea that learning facts can be detrimental to someone's ability is interesting. Look at yourself: browsing Hacker News and Twitter in the morning to achieve little by the end of the day. ;-)
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  It's an extremely relevant point. I don't know. You may be right! There is another school of thought that truly interesting and transformative work comes from joining up things that naturally don't go together. In this school of thought, people who focus too narrowly only ever do "normal" science, as Kuhn taught. They never achieve breakthrough. I suspect that both are valuable: skimming and remembering/assimilating random surface-level material from all over, and deep-diving into only those things that you feel matter. As an official Old Programming Dude, and a self-taught coder/consultant, what I see in the dang kids of today is a lack of being able to manage both needs. They're either great at one or the other. Neither bunch amounts to much intellectually in terms of being interesting, but at least with the focused group they are able to do some really cool stuff. Personally, I need more focus. I know this. (And I plan on finishing up 4 hours of coding and two essays by the end of the day, kid!) ADD: One of the things I've noticed about focus is that when solving problems, I work best when I manage my focus. I'll put the problem on the monitor or on the wall where it's always visible. Then I'll go do something else. Anything. As long as I can see the problem, somehow-or-another my brain keeps working on it, even if I'm not aware of it. So for many, the problem may not be HN/Twitter, but the inability to control the subtle parts of their work environment that might be preventing them from working at a higher level.
- signal11 8y ago
  He was also famously interested in all sorts of trivia (such as types of London clays, and types of cigar ashes) because it helped him with his job. I think "neo-generalist" would be a good way to describe Holmes: https://hackernoon.com/the-neo-generalist-and-why-we-should-all-have-one-13d651706a0c?gi=2977fb69deed https://hackernoon.com/the-neo-generalist-and-why-we-should-... For engineers and developers, many of whom come from a STEM background, learning about the humanities can be an enriching experience and even help them design better systems. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who has the time -- and it doesn't have to mean learning random facts. There are a lot of good reading lists, podcasts, etc, that one can go through in their spare time.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  Just as an aside, the BBC version of the quote: https://youtu.be/OVXt8jBAGkc?t=87 https://youtu.be/OVXt8jBAGkc?t=87 For the last few years I took some time off to recover from a mild heavy metal poisoning, and used the time to learn learn learn. I was pretty lazy in childhood and now had a desire to learn, but also to prove to myself that I can study diligently for an extended period, which I never did (had to do) before. So I took some 60 courses on edX and Coursera mostly (but also Youtube channels and some Khan academy for refreshing some basics, plus some reading) - at the time everything still was free. Most of the courses were "life-sciency", stuff I never had to deal with since school and never thought I would ever touch. More than one course in each chemistry, org. chem., bio-chem., physiology, anatomy, neuroscience, lots of statistics (again - had forgotten everything, this time I actually cared). The more I learned the more I can relate to the Sherlock Holmes quote. It's no use. The deeper I went, the more courses I took, the more I forgot. Also, the more I felt that I don't have any practical use for any of it. It made me feel good, but society won't benefit one bit from my learning. Humans specialize, and most people who do good work in their place in society really don't benefit from cramming ever more stuff into their heads. At this point I would not even care if I met somebody who really didn't know about earth and sun, as long as they perform well in their actual job. Part of it is that the more I learned the more I also learned that I still know nothing at all. I can take all the basic courses about medical topics, it does not help one bit to make any practical decisions- There is a high threshold before the knowledge is practically useful (you can't be 1/3rd of a doctor). I have switched to mostly learning things related to my actual work now and stopped taking courses outside my field. It just felt increasingly futile. Sure, I now have quite good basics but it was a huge investment, if I hadn't had anything else to do during the time anyway it would have been quite a waste. I would not expect anything similar from larger society, let them specialize. I now think trust is far more important. It's okay if people don't know much or anything about a lot of subjects - as long as they trust others who do. Things like for-profit health care lead to things like skepticism of the specialists. I too had plenty of doctors who tried to sell me useless stuff (network marketing!) and useless treatments when I tried to find someone for the problem I had. The missing trust is something rarely if ever mentioned in discussions about "anti-vaxxers". Even those who think they are stupid know nothing at all about the immune system and about how immunization actually works (edX has some good and detailed courses, and it's a lot and can be quite boring unless one really is into the subject) - the difference is not that they know anything but that they trust official authority. So the question is not how do you teach immune system fundamentals to skeptics, but how do you create trust that they don't have to? There are enough headlines to show that mistrust of the profit-driven system is not exactly completely stupid. That it shows up as anti-vaccination attitude is, I think actually secondary and incidental and not the actual root problem. In a highly specialized society we need trust, and we don't need to want to teach everybody lots of everything. Food for thought - ignore the product this is about, it's just an example: https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d449929ef https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499... (see the reader-highlighted text at the end for the summary).

C1sc0cat 8y ago

And this leads to savvy kids at 14 asking the teacher " miss what's the learning experience". It also leads to say Eng Lit students only reading the text's (or parts of the texts) on the test and not actively reading other related works in the cannon.

watwut 8y ago

The issue I heard people saying was that not just love for learning was issue, but also recall in long term, lack of understanding and students freezing when they encountered just slightly different problem then the one they have been taught directly. E.g. the act of actively solving problem, having to try out different options and think makes you better able to derive formula again when you forget it or to use it in different contexts. Also that students who are taught via direct instruction only (everything on the platter) freeze when they encounter non straightforward exercises. They are unused to initial uncertainty, doubt, assume that if first attempt failed then it means something bad and there is no point in continuing etc. Obviously, in practice it is not and should not be exclusive dichotomy between the two. The teacher should be able to teach some parts of curriculum via direct instruction and others via minimal guidance depending on what is taught, where students struggle and looking for reasonable trade-off between the two.

crispyambulance 8y ago
> [Direct instruction students] freeze when they > encounter non straightforward exercises. They > are unused to initial uncertainty, doubt, > assume that if first attempt failed then it > means something bad and there is no point in > continuing etc. I would argue that students "freezing up" when presented with new problems is _also_ a part of a solid educational approach. Careful guided instruction when introducing new topics is absolutely necessary. But at some point the student is going to need to practice "open-ended" problems. It is sort of like weight lifting, to really develop one needs to reach the point of failure in a controlled way, regularly and repeatedly, BUT NOT ALL THE TIME.

bluGill 8y ago

We need both. I as a tax payer am paying for kids to attend school because food is not free for everybody - somebody needs to work no matter what system you come up with. It is better a better investment for me to get you educated so you can support yourself, than to remove your staved to death body from the street. There are some facts that almost everybody universally needs to know to support themselves: you need to know how to read, write and some basic arithmetic. F=MA is useful to enough jobs that it is best for everybody to know it even if whatever job you end up with doesn't need it. The above is intentionally overblown to make the point.

hyperpape 8y ago

I've increasingly come to value mastering the basics.[0] A quote from Michael Nielsen in his great article Augmenting Long-Term Memory (http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html) puts it very well: "Over the years, I've often helped people learn technical subjects such as quantum mechanics. Over time you come to see patterns in how people get stuck. One common pattern is that people think they're getting stuck on esoteric, complex issues. But when you dig down it turns out they're having a hard time with basic notation and terminology." [0] I suspect individuals who learn things relatively easily may undervalue that skill, because they typically were ahead in school.

sitkack 8y ago
It isn't just the basics that need mastering, but all of it [1] Adding knowledge to your own knowledge graph requires existing context, without context, there is no place for new knowledge to attach. Without master, eventually the new knowledge is simply remembered and not fully understood. The knowledge front is a fixed distance from the last fully mastered concept. It is ok to go slow, who cares how fast shaky knowledge is consumed. You want a building that will stand, not one that was built on time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
paulgrant999 8y ago
I also tutor/educate. I've fixed people in 1 week, what the education system couldn't accomplish in x years. I just reach in, and remove the blocks. Once they get it, they are never the same again. True story, somebody came up to me, who was having severe difficulty. They were studying for their GED (700+ hours in) and couldn't crack it. He asked for my help and I told him I was busy at the moment, but that I could give him 30 minutes in a couple of days - but that I would be happy to talk to him right now for 5-10 minutes. So I basically grilled him for a couple of minutes, then gave him a complete dump on what he needed to do in a highly-abbreviated manner. About a week later, I see him and tell him I'm free to sit with him again if he likes, to which he replies "No, thats not necessary - I passed. I followed your advice." :) I get people calling me up after decades (for whom I only sat with for 1-3 hours) telling me about how much I changed their lives. ... I also do "IQ" raising. Just being around me gives you about a 10-12 point jump. The longer the period, the more permanent the results. Takes about a couple of weeks to kick in. Takes about about 1-2 years for full raise (permanent, for life). And shit, if you give me somebody smart-smart whose open & ethical? :) Like gas, on a fire. My only real constraints are: a) I don't put out anything dual-use. b) I don't hack people for harm or personal gain. c) I don't enable crimes, criminals, or unethical people.

scott_s 8y ago

What gives you that impression? I don't think any physics teacher would consider that their goal; rather, they would want the students to gain an understanding of the concepts of force, mass, acceleration and how they interact. Being able to easily recall the formula describing that relationship would be a side-effect. I also read the abstract of this paper, and I didn't see any evidence of that underlying assumption.

amp108 8y ago

Specificity of recall is not an end, but it is a necessary means to the end goal of education. We can only know that someone is an independent lifelong learner if we can tell that they have learned something; not only that, but that they have learned a lot of related, non-obvious facts, and can work with them. This dichotomy, between learning facts and learning concepts, is not an innate one and I wish that notion would go away.