8 ms·

What's Gone Wrong in Schooling?

55 points by nkurz 7y ago

johnfisher57 7y ago
probably they dont have a best communication app that lets them collaborate with mentor and classmates https://scalefusion.com/eva-business-messenger https://scalefusion.com/eva-business-messenger
germinalphrase 7y ago
What even is this? An essay competition? A vague pitch for a nonexistent product? The author clearly lacks the foundation to be making such authoritative claims.
- fredgrott 7y ago
  I do not know.. his UX design seems up to date in that he is applying human behavior to UX
avip 7y ago
So... does this guy know anything about education systems? What's his perspective? Was he a teacher for 25 years? Why did I read this?!
- kathe-rine 7y ago
  edit: my bad, I missed that this is a guest post; doesn't change my opinion of Perell though. I'd genuinely recommend his newsletter. He is an "essayist". I'm subbed to his newsletter because he's excellent at finding good reading material, but his original writing is often insufficiently informed (charitably) or arrogant (uncharitably), and in poor style. This boggles the mind, since he sells online instruction in writing.
  - ema 7y ago
    FYI although this article is published on the website of David Perell it was written by Mason Hartman who I believe goes by female pronouns.
    - kathe-rine 7y ago
      Ah, I missed that and thought this was Perell's work.
- socialdemocrat 7y ago
  I don't know, but as someone who has been interested in this for a long time and who likes to observe how children learn, I think he was right on point. Honestly he is really just articulating well, what everybody ought to already know if they have previously had any interest in the topic.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Proven 7y ago
What's wrong is State took over. By definition there can't be anything wrong with private schools because you don't have to pay for or attend any of them if you don't like them. Bad private school means empty private school.
lopmotr 7y ago
Even in America, education isn't like that, is it?. I've done a college entrance exam from there and it was full of questions that required problem solving, understanding, and intelligence, not naming concepts. I even remember being surprised how it managed to avoid using the names of concepts in the questions and described scenarios instead. I've been a teacher in other countries and it's not like that there either. No test would ever ask that question about combustion. Even not knowing a word wasn't penalized - if the student could convey the idea with a picture or slang or whatever, that would be fine too. Whenever I had the freedom to, I'd make my tests open-book or bring-your-own-notes. I'd also give them any formulas they'd need. Rote memorization wasn't going to help them.
- germinalphrase 7y ago
  No. The author doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s uninformed speculation and hubris.
- kathe-rine 7y ago
  This does not line up with my experience attending a fairly average / slightly above average US public school. At least half my classes largely required problem-solving and critical thinking. I spent a fair amount of time parroting stuff but that's unavoidable early in education, and most of my teacher's used it as a base for higher thinking. My primary and secondary education could certainly have been better, but this article strikes me as a gross and counterproductive exaggeration.
- astura 7y ago
  No, this author clearly has no experience with education but wants to sound smart.
  - socialdemocrat 7y ago
    Ironically you are displaying the very problem he addresses. A smart-ass "authority" simply asserting something which we should take as truth, because there is an implication that "astura" has experience in education and knows what he/she is talking about. Ironically you prove his point. The problem today are too many astura style assertions of truth "listen to me, I have experience!!!" instead of promoting critical thinking and genuine understanding.
begemotz 7y ago
I do not know which educational system the author is referring to but there are aspects to this that ring true concerning education in America- both in terms of what happens in many high schools and then what students come to expect when they enter college (and in some cases are unpleasantly shocked, but in other cases have their expectations fulfilled). And I think i can identify some of the literature(s) that influenced the writer. IN my opinion though, the ideas are not new, nor do they really tell the full complex story of education.
Already__Taken 7y ago
Classes are too big. If I dump my GCSE computer science classes that's 16,13,25,19,21. In a 60 minute lesson if you waste no time logging on/off or presenting that's at best 4.5minutes per student and worst 2.5min. How much do you think you can debug over an hours worth of problems given 4 minutes. Including reading and figuring out the problem before explaining. So we plan to put a child in a room with a teacher knowing pretty much full well it's at best a 50% chance they'll be the one to get help with a question. Individual play is individual problems, which needs individual help. Much deeper there is a conflict with education and day-care. That's just CS of course, the non-gcse sizes are: 26,27,29,28,26,28,29,31,27,28,27,26,30 if you were wondering.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  That is assuming that each student needs help on every problem each lesson. Presumably at least some of the lessons should be on how to diagnose problems I assume your talking about the programming side. Though back when I did Computing in school (70's) in my second year I knew more than the teacher did. ironically as I was dyslexic I wasn't allowed to take the O level as I was dumped in the CSE stream. Even though I maxed out at CSE in maths and computing I wasn't allowed to take A level computing
- mfer 7y ago
  Research has been done on this. There is a sweet spot range. Too few or too many decreases results. This is looking at grade school classes. Not sure how this plays out at the university level where the expectations are different and teachers have office hours to discuss questions outside of class
  - mr_gibbins 7y ago
    I can answer that one for you having recently taught a semester of postgraduate database systems to a cohort of just 6 students. It was a blast. I followed a pre-planned course of lectures, but due to the low class sizes it didn't work out that way a lot of the time. An example, following a question about relations, I ended up doing a chalk n' talk on set theory and explained how set theory could be represented as first-order logic. Filled the wall full of Greek letters and drilled down into the topic. Then started talking about axioms. The students joined in - you could see them taking an interest, as the conversation had turned. In the event we spent 90 minutes (it was a 60 minute session) working through axiomatic set theory on the board. I had to look things up as we went. It was great, the students learned a ton (and some of the content turned up in their assignments, too) - I learned a fair bit, as Feynman will attest, there's nothing like teaching a topic to make you understand it better yourself - and it was productive and interesting. I'm not sure I could repeat the same trick with a cohort of 20 or 30.
celticmusic 7y ago
I don't understand why you would use the pronoun she in a context where the pronoun them and they would be wholly appropriate.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  It's become standard etiquette/respect/decency to use the pronouns preferred by the subject. Yes, it's an adjustment for us "old" folks over ~30 or so, but it gets easier with exposure and mindfulness.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    hmmm, I wonder if a trans person would agree...
    - organsnyder 7y ago
      I haven't done any formal polling, but all the trans people I know prefer to be addressed by the pronouns of their choosing.
      - celticmusic 7y ago
        what if the author is writing about a trans person, which preference takes precedence? Did the author imply trans students don't exist when choosing to use a gender-specific pronoun to describe the student body?
        organsnyder 7y ago
        I'm not understanding what the difficulty is. Always use the pronouns preferred by the person the pronouns are referring to. After that, basic grammar rules apply.
        celticmusic 7y ago
        You fully understand the difficulty, stop gaslighting (I mean that seriously). We have two ideas that are inherently at odds with each other. That the speaker gets to choose the pronouns that are appropriate and that the listener gets to choose the pronouns that are appropriate. words have meaning. she and they mean different things, and using she when they is more appropriate is problematic for all the reasons that have been implied here. Do boys not exist as students? trans students aren't a thing? The pronouns they and them are literally meant to be gender-neutral, they are the appropriate pronoun to use in this article. Stop trying to defend the incorrect usage of the English language, because when you do so you find yourself feigning ignorance to try and gaslight people. There was at one time a movement against using he as a gender-neutral pronoun. Great. Stop using she as well. If they/them is acceptable for trans people, it's acceptable for authors.
pjc50 7y ago
Compare Feynman (1985): https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education > I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question – the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell – they couldn’t answer it at all! (He proceeds to discuss the difference between rote learning of phrases and the ability to visualise a physical system and have insights into it. Along with a bonus example of a textbook that includes only one experimental result, which is fake and gives the wrong answer)
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  Eliezer Yudkowsky from LessWrong has similar essays on education, they were a quite amusing read. Fake Explanations (2007) [0]: > Once upon a time, there was an instructor who taught physics students. One day the instructor called them into the classroom and showed them a wide, square plate of metal, next to a hot radiator. The students each put their hand on the plate and found the side next to the radiator cool, and the distant side warm. And the instructor said, Why do you think this happens? Some students guessed convection of air currents, and others guessed strange metals in the plate. They devised many creative explanations, none stooping so low as to say “I don’t know” or “This seems impossible.” And the answer was that before the students entered the room, the instructor turned the plate around. > Consider the student who frantically stammers, “Eh, maybe because of the heat conduction and so?” I ask: Is this answer a proper belief? The words are easily enough professed—said in a loud, emphatic voice. But do the words actually control anticipation? > Ponder that innocent little phrase, “because of,” which comes before “heat conduction.” Ponder some of the other things we could put after it. We could say, for example, “Because of phlogiston,” or “Because of magic.” > “Magic!” you cry. “That’s not a scientific explanation!” Indeed, the phrases “because of heat conduction” and “because of magic” are readily recognized as belonging to different literary genres. “Heat conduction” is something that Spock might say on Star Trek, whereas “magic” would be said by Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. > [...] They simply moved their magic from one literary genre to another. Guessing the Teacher's Password (2007) [1]: > [...] And when I finally understood, I realized that the whole time I had accepted the honest assurance of physicists that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves, I had not had the vaguest idea of what the word “wave” meant to a physicist. > There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says “light is made of waves,” and the teacher says “What is light made of?” and the student says “Waves!”, then the student has made a true statement. That’s only fair, right? We accept “waves” as a correct answer from the physicist; wouldn’t it be unfair to reject it from the student? Surely, the answer “Waves!” is either true or false, right? > [...] And this leads into an even worse habit. Suppose the teacher asks you why the far side of a metal plate feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. If you say “I don’t know,” you have no chance of getting a gold star—it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection,” “because of heat conduction,” and “because of radiant heat.” One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?” > This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/fysgqk4CjAwhBgNYT https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/fysgqk4CjAwh... [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-t...
socialdemocrat 7y ago
As a father of two with a great interest in education I got to say I think this article beautifully articulated everything that is wrong with modern schooling. Sadly judging by various comments here I don't think most people really grasp what the author is talking about. Not that it is odd. I also failed to grasp this most of my life. In fact I ridiculed play oriented schooling. It was not until I became a father myself I got to observe for myself how children learn and see what a disaster school was that I finally understood what a lot of these "radicals" where actually talking about. It is spurred me to discuss this with many other parents. I see so many of the same problems. School really has a nasty habit of killing the joy of learning. In its defense it is an okay substitute when parents have no love of learning themselves and don't encourage creativity and curiosity in their own children. The key problem I see is that schools obsess about teaching X amount of material. Rather than focus on understanding. A child struggling with learning concepts in math will choose memorization as an efficient strategy because covering all the needed material by actually learning to understand it would take too long time. This sort of quantity obsession means memorization almost always gets picked over genuine understanding. Actually learning to think critically and clearly is not prioritized. Sure they always claim that is prioritized. But priority implies something else is prioritized less. And that is never the case. Regardless of the flowery words, getting through the whole curriculum is always prioritized above all else.
- davidgl 7y ago
  Out of interest, which country are you in ? Approaches to education are quite varied across the world.
- barrkel 7y ago
  I had read that unschooling had turned out poorly, but while searching for evidence, it seems it goes the other way: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201406/survey-grown-unschoolers-i-overview-findings https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201406... I think it's heavily dependent on the home environment and learning opportunities, though, and it probably can't scale to the industrial daycare that is formalized primary and secondary education.
grabbalacious 7y ago
Most thoughtful people seem to agree that school is bad for creativity and that real learning is led by curiosity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY But we still have little idea how curiosity works exactly or how an institution could be turned from an exam factory into something a bit closer to a child's bedroom and computer at home, i.e. to a place of play. For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'. At university one is effectively granted permission to do 'curiosity-led' research by an external grant agency. So what does institutionalised play look like? Perhaps something like a university. Yet how much could university life be said to be 'following the fun'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idvGlr0aT3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idvGlr0aT3c
- ianai 7y ago
  I think institutionalized play would look more like a library staffed with people in place of the books - and a traditional library on premises. Ie have people of “all” careers or skills do some portion of their work on site with a way for interested students to engage with them. Maybe they offer classes for the really interested. Definitely leave a casual way to interact with the experts that’s noncommittal. Like have a request board for students to post topics or expertise they’d like a subject area expert discuss the basics of within a lecture. I have to redline the current practice of heavily weighting towards exams and giving almost no weight to homework or reflections of actual effort towards learning. Some careers may pivot on crucial hour long expositions of skills (ala sales or trial law), but mostly people have time to figure out a problem and carefully plan or communicate with coworkers and more experienced people. Your end grade should reflect your performance 99% of the time instead of .01% or whatever portion effectively one lecture length of a class represents.
- jdbernard 7y ago
  I wanted to respond to just this statement: For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'. I don't disagree with your larger point but in my experience the limitation on screen time is an important protection of unstructured, self-directed play (especially for younger kids).
known 7y ago
Asking "why" is a taboo for students in most schools
Izkata 7y ago
I think it's actually worse than "parroting" as described in the first few paragraphs: Back in highschool around 2005, I and a couple friends realized we could get passing grades in multiple-choice tests just by getting a sense of the teacher, and the style they'd use to invent the wrong answers. Didn't even need to parrot anything.
- clay10 7y ago
  I took the authors "play the game" line as including other aspects like this. Parroting just being the larger theme.
leftyted 7y ago
The assumption here is that all children who enter schools are capable of being curious and creative people but the system crushes it out of them. I don't think so. I think schools transform students into parrots because that's the only way to get most of the children to pass the tests. Educational outcomes for children are primarily decided by parents, not schools.

55 points by nkurz 7y ago

probably they dont have a best communication app that lets them collaborate with mentor and classmates https://scalefusion.com/eva-business-messenger https://scalefusion.com/eva-business-messenger

germinalphrase 7y ago

What even is this? An essay competition? A vague pitch for a nonexistent product? The author clearly lacks the foundation to be making such authoritative claims.

fredgrott 7y ago
I do not know.. his UX design seems up to date in that he is applying human behavior to UX

avip 7y ago

So... does this guy know anything about education systems? What's his perspective? Was he a teacher for 25 years? Why did I read this?!

kathe-rine 7y ago
edit: my bad, I missed that this is a guest post; doesn't change my opinion of Perell though. I'd genuinely recommend his newsletter. He is an "essayist". I'm subbed to his newsletter because he's excellent at finding good reading material, but his original writing is often insufficiently informed (charitably) or arrogant (uncharitably), and in poor style. This boggles the mind, since he sells online instruction in writing.
- ema 7y ago
  FYI although this article is published on the website of David Perell it was written by Mason Hartman who I believe goes by female pronouns.
  - kathe-rine 7y ago
    Ah, I missed that and thought this was Perell's work.
socialdemocrat 7y ago
I don't know, but as someone who has been interested in this for a long time and who likes to observe how children learn, I think he was right on point. Honestly he is really just articulating well, what everybody ought to already know if they have previously had any interest in the topic.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Proven 7y ago

What's wrong is State took over. By definition there can't be anything wrong with private schools because you don't have to pay for or attend any of them if you don't like them. Bad private school means empty private school.

lopmotr 7y ago

Even in America, education isn't like that, is it?. I've done a college entrance exam from there and it was full of questions that required problem solving, understanding, and intelligence, not naming concepts. I even remember being surprised how it managed to avoid using the names of concepts in the questions and described scenarios instead. I've been a teacher in other countries and it's not like that there either. No test would ever ask that question about combustion. Even not knowing a word wasn't penalized - if the student could convey the idea with a picture or slang or whatever, that would be fine too. Whenever I had the freedom to, I'd make my tests open-book or bring-your-own-notes. I'd also give them any formulas they'd need. Rote memorization wasn't going to help them.

germinalphrase 7y ago
No. The author doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s uninformed speculation and hubris.
kathe-rine 7y ago
This does not line up with my experience attending a fairly average / slightly above average US public school. At least half my classes largely required problem-solving and critical thinking. I spent a fair amount of time parroting stuff but that's unavoidable early in education, and most of my teacher's used it as a base for higher thinking. My primary and secondary education could certainly have been better, but this article strikes me as a gross and counterproductive exaggeration.
astura 7y ago
No, this author clearly has no experience with education but wants to sound smart.
- socialdemocrat 7y ago
  Ironically you are displaying the very problem he addresses. A smart-ass "authority" simply asserting something which we should take as truth, because there is an implication that "astura" has experience in education and knows what he/she is talking about. Ironically you prove his point. The problem today are too many astura style assertions of truth "listen to me, I have experience!!!" instead of promoting critical thinking and genuine understanding.

begemotz 7y ago

I do not know which educational system the author is referring to but there are aspects to this that ring true concerning education in America- both in terms of what happens in many high schools and then what students come to expect when they enter college (and in some cases are unpleasantly shocked, but in other cases have their expectations fulfilled). And I think i can identify some of the literature(s) that influenced the writer. IN my opinion though, the ideas are not new, nor do they really tell the full complex story of education.

Already__Taken 7y ago

Classes are too big. If I dump my GCSE computer science classes that's 16,13,25,19,21. In a 60 minute lesson if you waste no time logging on/off or presenting that's at best 4.5minutes per student and worst 2.5min. How much do you think you can debug over an hours worth of problems given 4 minutes. Including reading and figuring out the problem before explaining. So we plan to put a child in a room with a teacher knowing pretty much full well it's at best a 50% chance they'll be the one to get help with a question. Individual play is individual problems, which needs individual help. Much deeper there is a conflict with education and day-care. That's just CS of course, the non-gcse sizes are: 26,27,29,28,26,28,29,31,27,28,27,26,30 if you were wondering.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
That is assuming that each student needs help on every problem each lesson. Presumably at least some of the lessons should be on how to diagnose problems I assume your talking about the programming side. Though back when I did Computing in school (70's) in my second year I knew more than the teacher did. ironically as I was dyslexic I wasn't allowed to take the O level as I was dumped in the CSE stream. Even though I maxed out at CSE in maths and computing I wasn't allowed to take A level computing
mfer 7y ago
Research has been done on this. There is a sweet spot range. Too few or too many decreases results. This is looking at grade school classes. Not sure how this plays out at the university level where the expectations are different and teachers have office hours to discuss questions outside of class
- mr_gibbins 7y ago
  I can answer that one for you having recently taught a semester of postgraduate database systems to a cohort of just 6 students. It was a blast. I followed a pre-planned course of lectures, but due to the low class sizes it didn't work out that way a lot of the time. An example, following a question about relations, I ended up doing a chalk n' talk on set theory and explained how set theory could be represented as first-order logic. Filled the wall full of Greek letters and drilled down into the topic. Then started talking about axioms. The students joined in - you could see them taking an interest, as the conversation had turned. In the event we spent 90 minutes (it was a 60 minute session) working through axiomatic set theory on the board. I had to look things up as we went. It was great, the students learned a ton (and some of the content turned up in their assignments, too) - I learned a fair bit, as Feynman will attest, there's nothing like teaching a topic to make you understand it better yourself - and it was productive and interesting. I'm not sure I could repeat the same trick with a cohort of 20 or 30.

celticmusic 7y ago

I don't understand why you would use the pronoun she in a context where the pronoun them and they would be wholly appropriate.

organsnyder 7y ago
It's become standard etiquette/respect/decency to use the pronouns preferred by the subject. Yes, it's an adjustment for us "old" folks over ~30 or so, but it gets easier with exposure and mindfulness.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  hmmm, I wonder if a trans person would agree...
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    I haven't done any formal polling, but all the trans people I know prefer to be addressed by the pronouns of their choosing.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      what if the author is writing about a trans person, which preference takes precedence? Did the author imply trans students don't exist when choosing to use a gender-specific pronoun to describe the student body?
      - organsnyder 7y ago
        I'm not understanding what the difficulty is. Always use the pronouns preferred by the person the pronouns are referring to. After that, basic grammar rules apply.
        celticmusic 7y ago
        You fully understand the difficulty, stop gaslighting (I mean that seriously). We have two ideas that are inherently at odds with each other. That the speaker gets to choose the pronouns that are appropriate and that the listener gets to choose the pronouns that are appropriate. words have meaning. she and they mean different things, and using she when they is more appropriate is problematic for all the reasons that have been implied here. Do boys not exist as students? trans students aren't a thing? The pronouns they and them are literally meant to be gender-neutral, they are the appropriate pronoun to use in this article. Stop trying to defend the incorrect usage of the English language, because when you do so you find yourself feigning ignorance to try and gaslight people. There was at one time a movement against using he as a gender-neutral pronoun. Great. Stop using she as well. If they/them is acceptable for trans people, it's acceptable for authors.

pjc50 7y ago

Compare Feynman (1985): https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education > I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question – the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell – they couldn’t answer it at all! (He proceeds to discuss the difference between rote learning of phrases and the ability to visualise a physical system and have insights into it. Along with a bonus example of a textbook that includes only one experimental result, which is fake and gives the wrong answer)

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky from LessWrong has similar essays on education, they were a quite amusing read. Fake Explanations (2007) [0]: > Once upon a time, there was an instructor who taught physics students. One day the instructor called them into the classroom and showed them a wide, square plate of metal, next to a hot radiator. The students each put their hand on the plate and found the side next to the radiator cool, and the distant side warm. And the instructor said, Why do you think this happens? Some students guessed convection of air currents, and others guessed strange metals in the plate. They devised many creative explanations, none stooping so low as to say “I don’t know” or “This seems impossible.” And the answer was that before the students entered the room, the instructor turned the plate around. > Consider the student who frantically stammers, “Eh, maybe because of the heat conduction and so?” I ask: Is this answer a proper belief? The words are easily enough professed—said in a loud, emphatic voice. But do the words actually control anticipation? > Ponder that innocent little phrase, “because of,” which comes before “heat conduction.” Ponder some of the other things we could put after it. We could say, for example, “Because of phlogiston,” or “Because of magic.” > “Magic!” you cry. “That’s not a scientific explanation!” Indeed, the phrases “because of heat conduction” and “because of magic” are readily recognized as belonging to different literary genres. “Heat conduction” is something that Spock might say on Star Trek, whereas “magic” would be said by Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. > [...] They simply moved their magic from one literary genre to another. Guessing the Teacher's Password (2007) [1]: > [...] And when I finally understood, I realized that the whole time I had accepted the honest assurance of physicists that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves, I had not had the vaguest idea of what the word “wave” meant to a physicist. > There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says “light is made of waves,” and the teacher says “What is light made of?” and the student says “Waves!”, then the student has made a true statement. That’s only fair, right? We accept “waves” as a correct answer from the physicist; wouldn’t it be unfair to reject it from the student? Surely, the answer “Waves!” is either true or false, right? > [...] And this leads into an even worse habit. Suppose the teacher asks you why the far side of a metal plate feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. If you say “I don’t know,” you have no chance of getting a gold star—it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection,” “because of heat conduction,” and “because of radiant heat.” One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?” > This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/fysgqk4CjAwhBgNYT https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/fysgqk4CjAwh... [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-t...

socialdemocrat 7y ago

As a father of two with a great interest in education I got to say I think this article beautifully articulated everything that is wrong with modern schooling. Sadly judging by various comments here I don't think most people really grasp what the author is talking about. Not that it is odd. I also failed to grasp this most of my life. In fact I ridiculed play oriented schooling. It was not until I became a father myself I got to observe for myself how children learn and see what a disaster school was that I finally understood what a lot of these "radicals" where actually talking about. It is spurred me to discuss this with many other parents. I see so many of the same problems. School really has a nasty habit of killing the joy of learning. In its defense it is an okay substitute when parents have no love of learning themselves and don't encourage creativity and curiosity in their own children. The key problem I see is that schools obsess about teaching X amount of material. Rather than focus on understanding. A child struggling with learning concepts in math will choose memorization as an efficient strategy because covering all the needed material by actually learning to understand it would take too long time. This sort of quantity obsession means memorization almost always gets picked over genuine understanding. Actually learning to think critically and clearly is not prioritized. Sure they always claim that is prioritized. But priority implies something else is prioritized less. And that is never the case. Regardless of the flowery words, getting through the whole curriculum is always prioritized above all else.

davidgl 7y ago
Out of interest, which country are you in ? Approaches to education are quite varied across the world.
barrkel 7y ago
I had read that unschooling had turned out poorly, but while searching for evidence, it seems it goes the other way: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201406/survey-grown-unschoolers-i-overview-findings https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201406... I think it's heavily dependent on the home environment and learning opportunities, though, and it probably can't scale to the industrial daycare that is formalized primary and secondary education.

grabbalacious 7y ago

Most thoughtful people seem to agree that school is bad for creativity and that real learning is led by curiosity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY But we still have little idea how curiosity works exactly or how an institution could be turned from an exam factory into something a bit closer to a child's bedroom and computer at home, i.e. to a place of play. For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'. At university one is effectively granted permission to do 'curiosity-led' research by an external grant agency. So what does institutionalised play look like? Perhaps something like a university. Yet how much could university life be said to be 'following the fun'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idvGlr0aT3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idvGlr0aT3c

ianai 7y ago
I think institutionalized play would look more like a library staffed with people in place of the books - and a traditional library on premises. Ie have people of “all” careers or skills do some portion of their work on site with a way for interested students to engage with them. Maybe they offer classes for the really interested. Definitely leave a casual way to interact with the experts that’s noncommittal. Like have a request board for students to post topics or expertise they’d like a subject area expert discuss the basics of within a lecture. I have to redline the current practice of heavily weighting towards exams and giving almost no weight to homework or reflections of actual effort towards learning. Some careers may pivot on crucial hour long expositions of skills (ala sales or trial law), but mostly people have time to figure out a problem and carefully plan or communicate with coworkers and more experienced people. Your end grade should reflect your performance 99% of the time instead of .01% or whatever portion effectively one lecture length of a class represents.
jdbernard 7y ago
I wanted to respond to just this statement: For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'. I don't disagree with your larger point but in my experience the limitation on screen time is an important protection of unstructured, self-directed play (especially for younger kids).

known 7y ago

Asking "why" is a taboo for students in most schools

Izkata 7y ago

I think it's actually worse than "parroting" as described in the first few paragraphs: Back in highschool around 2005, I and a couple friends realized we could get passing grades in multiple-choice tests just by getting a sense of the teacher, and the style they'd use to invent the wrong answers. Didn't even need to parrot anything.

clay10 7y ago
I took the authors "play the game" line as including other aspects like this. Parroting just being the larger theme.

leftyted 7y ago

The assumption here is that all children who enter schools are capable of being curious and creative people but the system crushes it out of them. I don't think so. I think schools transform students into parrots because that's the only way to get most of the children to pass the tests. Educational outcomes for children are primarily decided by parents, not schools.