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>Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences How about learning from the Internet?

xwdv 5y ago
Doesn’t work very well with young children.
- redisman 5y ago
  Today I learned how to alt-tab into Minecraft all day while still getting marked as attending!
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  It works for 10-year-olds, and I'd say it works for younger children too. The problem is needing supervision (curiosity leads to doing some very harmful things, and that's not even considering bouts of malice…). If children want to learn, and they can learn, there's no stopping them (except with video games, television, toys, a field, a garden, a paved area, a woodland, the fact that books make a loud noise every time you close them, other children… but apart from the first two, I see no problem with that).
  - mholm 5y ago
    > It works for 10-year-olds No. It works for some 10-year-olds. Few, even. The school system is not intended to educate a few children, it is intended to educate all the children in the country. Even the poorest and least motivated. You cannot just throw children into a room with an adult and computers and tell them to learn.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      It could well be selection bias, but I've seen the least-interested (middling-motivated) 10-year-olds rapidly learn when something that interests them is placed in front of them, and they're not expected to do anything with it. (Specifically, Scratch, with a “you could make a game” directive, after a quick back-and-forth game design session.) The existing school system isn't doing a particularly great job of educating those kids. Is the goal for kids to pass exams and then forget most of it by adulthood? Or is it for kids to gain basic life skills, find out what interests them, and have the environment to pursue their interests? (Almost everyone finds some “work”-type things interesting.) Note: I'm not saying that my system would work for everyone; I'm challenging the suggestion that the existing system works for most people. Some people require interactive (rather than book) teachers to learn well, but that doesn't mean that “You Must Learn This, Then This, Then This” is an effective approach.

xwdv 5y ago

Doesn’t work very well with young children.

redisman 5y ago
Today I learned how to alt-tab into Minecraft all day while still getting marked as attending!
wizzwizz4 5y ago
It works for 10-year-olds, and I'd say it works for younger children too. The problem is needing supervision (curiosity leads to doing some very harmful things, and that's not even considering bouts of malice…). If children want to learn, and they can learn, there's no stopping them (except with video games, television, toys, a field, a garden, a paved area, a woodland, the fact that books make a loud noise every time you close them, other children… but apart from the first two, I see no problem with that).
- mholm 5y ago
  > It works for 10-year-olds No. It works for some 10-year-olds. Few, even. The school system is not intended to educate a few children, it is intended to educate all the children in the country. Even the poorest and least motivated. You cannot just throw children into a room with an adult and computers and tell them to learn.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    It could well be selection bias, but I've seen the least-interested (middling-motivated) 10-year-olds rapidly learn when something that interests them is placed in front of them, and they're not expected to do anything with it. (Specifically, Scratch, with a “you could make a game” directive, after a quick back-and-forth game design session.) The existing school system isn't doing a particularly great job of educating those kids. Is the goal for kids to pass exams and then forget most of it by adulthood? Or is it for kids to gain basic life skills, find out what interests them, and have the environment to pursue their interests? (Almost everyone finds some “work”-type things interesting.) Note: I'm not saying that my system would work for everyone; I'm challenging the suggestion that the existing system works for most people. Some people require interactive (rather than book) teachers to learn well, but that doesn't mean that “You Must Learn This, Then This, Then This” is an effective approach.