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> HOW do you measure knowledge? This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. You DON'T measure knowledge. You should measure the satisfaction

> HOW do you measure knowledge? This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. You DON'T measure knowledge. You should measure the satisfaction of the students. Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning. > maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics. pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say. Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate" young people and is is often the case that it means they impose or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their kids. And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too, even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I completely disagree on catholic schools for example). The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void. Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State laws under the State government but also offering a service the people paid for to the State. Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland. CONTROVERSIAL On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most important, that will quite certainly cause uproar. If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in every possible way. The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.

Glawen 4y ago
>This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. >You DON'T measure knowledge. >You should measure the satisfaction of the students. >Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning. What is satisfaction going to get you? As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks that's the wrong way to look at it. As a student you would have been very satisfied to have recognition for your hard work (something that rarely happens in most school systems I know) You switched cause and effect. > while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties So you were getting satisfaction from doing it, or you would have skipped studying to go to parties. Which is what I did, I had great marks and went to parties to reward myself.
ItsMonkk 4y ago
This speaks to the heart of the issue to me. Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Then the other topics I didn't love, and largely did not like to experience them. So in the end my satisfaction was miserable, and I dropped out of 7th grade. Eventually I got a GED and went to college for CS, but it was that time in-between those two that even allowed that to happen. I needed time to explore the world, find what I wanted to know, and figure out how school can help me get there. As someone on the other end of the hiring table now, I don't even care about knowledge. Knowledge tells me how far you've got. I don't care how far you've got, I want to know how quickly you pick up the material based on the job I'm hiring for. I care about acceleration. While the two can be correlated, it's not precise. There's not a single hiring test that I can do to figure out someone's acceleration. What I do know, that testing the farthest on some topic as a metric, like leetcode does, it's going to fail every single jack of all trades programmer.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Thanks for posting this. This was my experience as well, with the added malus that when I went into school, people were still saying things like "what do I need maths for?" or "a computer will never write the next Dante" and things like that, so not only it was frustrating, it was borderline painful and lonely. Then I discovered kids, I don't have kids on my own, but I have a very big family and I am grateful for being surrounded by people younger than me of any age from 3 to 20. I saw them being entertained by the most boring stuff just because it was new to them and build up from there, at an incredible pace, and become young experts, with all the limits of being inexpert and also being kids, in a very short time. I realized that what kept them motivate was a feedback loop that needed no external validation: knowing more about that thing made them happily satisfied and so they kept doing it. They don't care about understanding things the wrong way, eventually they'll get it right, they don't care about not doing any mistake, eventually they'll learn to make new mistake, they just wanna learn more and experience more. What you call "acceleration". I saw most of them struggle in school because they were bored, they were getting good grades, most of them at least, they were kin to put up the work necessary to get them, but their motivation started lacking, until they arrived to university and chose something that could (potentially) assure a good job or would make their parents happy. It's a sad state of things, if I think about it, but it's also a "great filter" and we should strive to make education something that adapts to people receiving it (I'm not talking about schools for the gifted or smth like that) and not the other way around. When I was in my 30s a friend of mine married a woman from Finland, who was living in Sweden, and then they moved back there when they had kids. I've visited them on many occasions and when I saw how they intend school there I was astonished. They are not tracked, they are not tested, there is no standardized grade scale, there is virtually no homeworks, they do not compete, they learn by playing and are simply thought that you have to get the basics rights to go on and then helped to follow their paths. I think that, in general, it makes happier adults. Which is a good goal by itself.
srveale 4y ago
> Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland. I did an education degree, and come from a family of educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in that direction were not teachers, but politicians, parents and high-up administrators. >Teachers are not doctors Indeed. And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient. People in the education system have opinions that are informed by years of experience in the field and decades of research. With respect, I'm thinking you are an example of the type of person described by the comment you're replying to: not much experience inside the system but confident in your opinion of how to fix it. > schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say. My country, and yours too I think, pays for health care with taxes along with education. Again, does that mean you and I get to tell a doctor how to do their job? > teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead Teachers existed long before mandatory attendance laws. Also, what point are you trying to make with this statement? That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient That's not correlated: doctors ask patient how do they feel all the time. If they don't feel well, they try to adjust the prescription and/or the therapy. Don't like the word satisfaction? Replace it with "listen to feedback from your customers". Maybe it's gonna ring a bell. disclaimer: most of my family members work or have worked in health care. > That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible? The point is that they do not run the education system, they are employees of the education system And should act like that. Meaning that they have proper channels already in place to file their complains. Including protected rights like the right to go on strike. If they want to govern it, they better step up their career and try with politics or with manager roles. So that teachers can complain about them, their choices and how much of a better job they would do if they were in their position.
MadWombat 4y ago
"You should measure the satisfaction of the students" OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > OK. Then how do you measure competency? You don't. You certify it, when it is required. > Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. exactly! because it is required by regulations. > If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't? there is a high chance than an unsatisfied medical student is gonna be an equally unsatisfied doctor, even if they check all the boxes. let's be clear: satisfaction is not a measure of how much they are having fun. just like if you go to the gym you're not more satisfied if they give you free candies and hot dogs and couches with Netflix, but you end up being fatter and less fit than before.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> You DON'T measure knowledge. > You should measure the satisfaction of the students. > Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning. But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning. Self-improvement theater is as much a thing as security theater, and it's something we probably want to be able to distinguish from actual education.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning. good for them. In which way this is an obstacle for those who want to?
Planktonne 4y ago
> You should measure the satisfaction of the students. It's very easy to make satisfying and engaging teaching. It's a lot harder to make that valuable. If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them. while making them unsatisfied gives them a lot of motivation to understand. Anyway, satisfaction is about the product: the product is education. The product is not entertainment.

Glawen 4y ago

>This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. >You DON'T measure knowledge. >You should measure the satisfaction of the students. >Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning. What is satisfaction going to get you? As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks that's the wrong way to look at it. As a student you would have been very satisfied to have recognition for your hard work (something that rarely happens in most school systems I know) You switched cause and effect. > while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties So you were getting satisfaction from doing it, or you would have skipped studying to go to parties. Which is what I did, I had great marks and went to parties to reward myself.

ItsMonkk 4y ago

This speaks to the heart of the issue to me. Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Then the other topics I didn't love, and largely did not like to experience them. So in the end my satisfaction was miserable, and I dropped out of 7th grade. Eventually I got a GED and went to college for CS, but it was that time in-between those two that even allowed that to happen. I needed time to explore the world, find what I wanted to know, and figure out how school can help me get there. As someone on the other end of the hiring table now, I don't even care about knowledge. Knowledge tells me how far you've got. I don't care how far you've got, I want to know how quickly you pick up the material based on the job I'm hiring for. I care about acceleration. While the two can be correlated, it's not precise. There's not a single hiring test that I can do to figure out someone's acceleration. What I do know, that testing the farthest on some topic as a metric, like leetcode does, it's going to fail every single jack of all trades programmer.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Thanks for posting this. This was my experience as well, with the added malus that when I went into school, people were still saying things like "what do I need maths for?" or "a computer will never write the next Dante" and things like that, so not only it was frustrating, it was borderline painful and lonely. Then I discovered kids, I don't have kids on my own, but I have a very big family and I am grateful for being surrounded by people younger than me of any age from 3 to 20. I saw them being entertained by the most boring stuff just because it was new to them and build up from there, at an incredible pace, and become young experts, with all the limits of being inexpert and also being kids, in a very short time. I realized that what kept them motivate was a feedback loop that needed no external validation: knowing more about that thing made them happily satisfied and so they kept doing it. They don't care about understanding things the wrong way, eventually they'll get it right, they don't care about not doing any mistake, eventually they'll learn to make new mistake, they just wanna learn more and experience more. What you call "acceleration". I saw most of them struggle in school because they were bored, they were getting good grades, most of them at least, they were kin to put up the work necessary to get them, but their motivation started lacking, until they arrived to university and chose something that could (potentially) assure a good job or would make their parents happy. It's a sad state of things, if I think about it, but it's also a "great filter" and we should strive to make education something that adapts to people receiving it (I'm not talking about schools for the gifted or smth like that) and not the other way around. When I was in my 30s a friend of mine married a woman from Finland, who was living in Sweden, and then they moved back there when they had kids. I've visited them on many occasions and when I saw how they intend school there I was astonished. They are not tracked, they are not tested, there is no standardized grade scale, there is virtually no homeworks, they do not compete, they learn by playing and are simply thought that you have to get the basics rights to go on and then helped to follow their paths. I think that, in general, it makes happier adults. Which is a good goal by itself.

srveale 4y ago

> Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland. I did an education degree, and come from a family of educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in that direction were not teachers, but politicians, parents and high-up administrators. >Teachers are not doctors Indeed. And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient. People in the education system have opinions that are informed by years of experience in the field and decades of research. With respect, I'm thinking you are an example of the type of person described by the comment you're replying to: not much experience inside the system but confident in your opinion of how to fix it. > schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say. My country, and yours too I think, pays for health care with taxes along with education. Again, does that mean you and I get to tell a doctor how to do their job? > teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead Teachers existed long before mandatory attendance laws. Also, what point are you trying to make with this statement? That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient That's not correlated: doctors ask patient how do they feel all the time. If they don't feel well, they try to adjust the prescription and/or the therapy. Don't like the word satisfaction? Replace it with "listen to feedback from your customers". Maybe it's gonna ring a bell. disclaimer: most of my family members work or have worked in health care. > That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible? The point is that they do not run the education system, they are employees of the education system And should act like that. Meaning that they have proper channels already in place to file their complains. Including protected rights like the right to go on strike. If they want to govern it, they better step up their career and try with politics or with manager roles. So that teachers can complain about them, their choices and how much of a better job they would do if they were in their position.

MadWombat 4y ago

"You should measure the satisfaction of the students" OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> OK. Then how do you measure competency? You don't. You certify it, when it is required. > Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. exactly! because it is required by regulations. > If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't? there is a high chance than an unsatisfied medical student is gonna be an equally unsatisfied doctor, even if they check all the boxes. let's be clear: satisfaction is not a measure of how much they are having fun. just like if you go to the gym you're not more satisfied if they give you free candies and hot dogs and couches with Netflix, but you end up being fatter and less fit than before.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> You DON'T measure knowledge. > You should measure the satisfaction of the students. > Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning. But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning. Self-improvement theater is as much a thing as security theater, and it's something we probably want to be able to distinguish from actual education.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning. good for them. In which way this is an obstacle for those who want to?

Planktonne 4y ago

> You should measure the satisfaction of the students. It's very easy to make satisfying and engaging teaching. It's a lot harder to make that valuable. If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them. while making them unsatisfied gives them a lot of motivation to understand. Anyway, satisfaction is about the product: the product is education. The product is not entertainment.