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> It's kind of annoying when people dismiss an idea without taking time to fully engage with and understand it. I expect more from my middle school students, le

> It's kind of annoying when people dismiss an idea without taking time to fully engage with and understand it. I expect more from my middle school students, let alone someone I'm taking time to discuss things with on HN. I fully agree, and I wish you'd do your part. What are people for?

mlyle 3y ago
I doubt we disagree on that all that much, but I think we probably take very different second-order interpretations. People are agents of joy and experience and change. Life is a quest to find interest, fulfillment, and meaning, and we all end up valuing different things. It's a quest pretty much everyone struggles with. And it's one that's made harder by everything getting so big and mechanization taking away so much. But there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest. Many of us enjoy the vibrancy of the larger world, and enjoy the bigger things we are able to accomplish by educating ourselves (and our children) deeply, and also enjoy our deeper engagement in this larger complicated world. Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)? I know I am easily fooled by what "seems to work" and the power of the anecdote. I seek to continually improve through careful study of what can be proven. We know that we don't have the resources as a society to provide the depth of education we currently do in a one-to-one or co-op format. We also know the quality of real co-op or homeschool is terrifically variable. Some of the best education is there. Much more of the worst is.
- carapace 3y ago
  Well met. (If you haven't, do read Wendell Berry's "What are People For?" or any of his work. His writing is so fine!) > there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest. I agree, I'm pointing out that complexity itself has become the problem of the day (in my opinion.) FWIW, I just acquired some land on which to experiment with a high-tech, ecologically-harmonious lifestyle. Fingers crossed. When I was a young man I read in an old Taoist book about a farmer who was so content with his life that he had never even been to the next village over, even though he lived so close to them he could hear the cries of their rooster. At the time it gave me a feeling of dull horror. Now, nearly fifty, I envy that farmer and hope to reach his level someday before I die. Times change. > Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)? Well, there it is: paucity of reliable data and research. Further, and to my point (why I'm jerking your chain) there's the problem with the very idea that education can be researched. The growth of the human mind cannot be represented by a single scalar value. At least not for any admirable end, eh? It doesn't matter whether that scalar value is graduated in five increments ("A" through "F") or fifteen (A+, A, A-, ... F-, does anyone actually use F-? Hehe.) or a hundred (per cent), it's just silly. It was understood, at least I formed the impression as a child, that the A-F grade system was a dufus solution to a problem nobody was actually trying to solve. Schools are part of the anthropological machinery that societies use to get the kids to behave like the adults. Any educational value they have is a side-effect. You cannot actually educate a child outside of a deep, sustained (20-30 years), one-to-one relationship between a caring adult who is sane mentally and emotionally and the child. [edit to add: well, really I suspect it takes at least a whole village, eh? Where are you gonna find a whole village of mentally and emotionally sane people on Earth in this day and age, huh?] To a first approximation this is pretty much the most important human activity. All others rely on it, eh? Education is the process of growing humans out of talking primates. So again, the mind that conceives of measuring the "mastery" of the human mind using a single scalar value is the mind of a fool, and in my view is automatically disqualified from having their views and ideas considered at all, let alone taken seriously. He's not "sane mentally and emotionally" and should not be let anywhere near children or schools! To me, once you get away from physics, most science seems to be a kind of cargo-cult. Chemists and biologists are mostly okay, but sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. are not actual scientists in my view. They do not do science, they ape it. So maybe you want to back away from this conversation? I won't be offended. That's why I told you. So you don't waste your time. :) (I also "believe in" Neurolinguistic Programming.) But getting back to my point: you can't measure learning by a single scalar value; the idea is pernicious and counter-productive. Corollary: people who believe such a silly thing, and who somehow get a hold of kids to experiment on, will go right ahead and plug them into talking "learning machines", and they will believe they do it "for their own good". Not to put too fine a point on it: your life is my horror story. (I was educated in public school in San Francisco. Fair warning: you're not going to be able to change my mind about how much of a bad idea modern schooling is. I'm still feeling the effects three decades later.)
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > So again, the mind that conceives of measuring the "mastery" of the human mind using a single scalar value is the mind of a fool I think you've fundamentally misunderstood the concept. Mastery levels are a huge vector of how well you've demonstrated various skills. The main idea is that you don't move on to a later skill until you've shown high proficiency in the skills that it depends upon. Of course, there's always room for judgment and to adjust things based on individual students. > You cannot actually educate a child outside of a deep, sustained (20-30 years), one-to-one relationship between a caring adult who is sane mentally and emotionally and the child. In the end, educators do depend upon the parental relationship to be successful. But I get an awful lot done with excited students in several weeks of 40 minutes per day (average). > (I was educated in public school in San Francisco. Fair warning: you're not going to be able to change my mind about how much of a bad idea modern schooling is. I'm still feeling the effects three decades later.) I didn't enjoy my school years much. That's part of why I'm here and teaching. Plugging my ears and going "la la la" about the evidence and just doing what I want is not how I will make anything better. > there's the problem with the very idea that education can be researched. You can definitely divide students into groups, and do different things, and measure outcomes. We have that for mastery, for tutorial methods, for some things like "flipped classrooms," etc. You can also do case control studies, though you need to be very cautious because of confounds.
    - carapace 3y ago
      > I think you've fundamentally misunderstood the concept. It's worse than that: I've not even tried to understand it. > The main idea is that you don't move on to a later skill until you've shown high proficiency in the skills that it depends upon. Okay. That idea is foolish and regressive. The human mind learns on multiple levels simultaneously. A single "lesson" can evoke or participate in many "learnings" over the course of a pupil's life. You can teach a skill and the skills that depend on it at the same time, if you know what you're doing. Arguing the details of how Bloom is a crank is uninteresting to me. I would sooner study the "evidence" of the free energy generator crackpots, as I would be slightly less certain that I wasn't wasting my time. You don't know what you're doing. Doing it harder and faster with computers is not a good idea. I pity your student and you as well. > Plugging my ears and going "la la la" about the evidence and just doing what I want is not how I will make anything better. If you want to discuss how the weird shit you're doing to these kids will or will not prepare them for the world where computers talk and think better than they can, I'd love to do that. If you want to passively condescend to me because I won't taste your particular flavor of pseudo-scientific kool-aid I've got better things to do with my time.

mlyle 3y ago

I doubt we disagree on that all that much, but I think we probably take very different second-order interpretations. People are agents of joy and experience and change. Life is a quest to find interest, fulfillment, and meaning, and we all end up valuing different things. It's a quest pretty much everyone struggles with. And it's one that's made harder by everything getting so big and mechanization taking away so much. But there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest. Many of us enjoy the vibrancy of the larger world, and enjoy the bigger things we are able to accomplish by educating ourselves (and our children) deeply, and also enjoy our deeper engagement in this larger complicated world. Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)? I know I am easily fooled by what "seems to work" and the power of the anecdote. I seek to continually improve through careful study of what can be proven. We know that we don't have the resources as a society to provide the depth of education we currently do in a one-to-one or co-op format. We also know the quality of real co-op or homeschool is terrifically variable. Some of the best education is there. Much more of the worst is.

carapace 3y ago
Well met. (If you haven't, do read Wendell Berry's "What are People For?" or any of his work. His writing is so fine!) > there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest. I agree, I'm pointing out that complexity itself has become the problem of the day (in my opinion.) FWIW, I just acquired some land on which to experiment with a high-tech, ecologically-harmonious lifestyle. Fingers crossed. When I was a young man I read in an old Taoist book about a farmer who was so content with his life that he had never even been to the next village over, even though he lived so close to them he could hear the cries of their rooster. At the time it gave me a feeling of dull horror. Now, nearly fifty, I envy that farmer and hope to reach his level someday before I die. Times change. > Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)? Well, there it is: paucity of reliable data and research. Further, and to my point (why I'm jerking your chain) there's the problem with the very idea that education can be researched. The growth of the human mind cannot be represented by a single scalar value. At least not for any admirable end, eh? It doesn't matter whether that scalar value is graduated in five increments ("A" through "F") or fifteen (A+, A, A-, ... F-, does anyone actually use F-? Hehe.) or a hundred (per cent), it's just silly. It was understood, at least I formed the impression as a child, that the A-F grade system was a dufus solution to a problem nobody was actually trying to solve. Schools are part of the anthropological machinery that societies use to get the kids to behave like the adults. Any educational value they have is a side-effect. You cannot actually educate a child outside of a deep, sustained (20-30 years), one-to-one relationship between a caring adult who is sane mentally and emotionally and the child. [edit to add: well, really I suspect it takes at least a whole village, eh? Where are you gonna find a whole village of mentally and emotionally sane people on Earth in this day and age, huh?] To a first approximation this is pretty much the most important human activity. All others rely on it, eh? Education is the process of growing humans out of talking primates. So again, the mind that conceives of measuring the "mastery" of the human mind using a single scalar value is the mind of a fool, and in my view is automatically disqualified from having their views and ideas considered at all, let alone taken seriously. He's not "sane mentally and emotionally" and should not be let anywhere near children or schools! To me, once you get away from physics, most science seems to be a kind of cargo-cult. Chemists and biologists are mostly okay, but sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. are not actual scientists in my view. They do not do science, they ape it. So maybe you want to back away from this conversation? I won't be offended. That's why I told you. So you don't waste your time. :) (I also "believe in" Neurolinguistic Programming.) But getting back to my point: you can't measure learning by a single scalar value; the idea is pernicious and counter-productive. Corollary: people who believe such a silly thing, and who somehow get a hold of kids to experiment on, will go right ahead and plug them into talking "learning machines", and they will believe they do it "for their own good". Not to put too fine a point on it: your life is my horror story. (I was educated in public school in San Francisco. Fair warning: you're not going to be able to change my mind about how much of a bad idea modern schooling is. I'm still feeling the effects three decades later.)
- mlyle 3y ago
  > So again, the mind that conceives of measuring the "mastery" of the human mind using a single scalar value is the mind of a fool I think you've fundamentally misunderstood the concept. Mastery levels are a huge vector of how well you've demonstrated various skills. The main idea is that you don't move on to a later skill until you've shown high proficiency in the skills that it depends upon. Of course, there's always room for judgment and to adjust things based on individual students. > You cannot actually educate a child outside of a deep, sustained (20-30 years), one-to-one relationship between a caring adult who is sane mentally and emotionally and the child. In the end, educators do depend upon the parental relationship to be successful. But I get an awful lot done with excited students in several weeks of 40 minutes per day (average). > (I was educated in public school in San Francisco. Fair warning: you're not going to be able to change my mind about how much of a bad idea modern schooling is. I'm still feeling the effects three decades later.) I didn't enjoy my school years much. That's part of why I'm here and teaching. Plugging my ears and going "la la la" about the evidence and just doing what I want is not how I will make anything better. > there's the problem with the very idea that education can be researched. You can definitely divide students into groups, and do different things, and measure outcomes. We have that for mastery, for tutorial methods, for some things like "flipped classrooms," etc. You can also do case control studies, though you need to be very cautious because of confounds.
  - carapace 3y ago
    > I think you've fundamentally misunderstood the concept. It's worse than that: I've not even tried to understand it. > The main idea is that you don't move on to a later skill until you've shown high proficiency in the skills that it depends upon. Okay. That idea is foolish and regressive. The human mind learns on multiple levels simultaneously. A single "lesson" can evoke or participate in many "learnings" over the course of a pupil's life. You can teach a skill and the skills that depend on it at the same time, if you know what you're doing. Arguing the details of how Bloom is a crank is uninteresting to me. I would sooner study the "evidence" of the free energy generator crackpots, as I would be slightly less certain that I wasn't wasting my time. You don't know what you're doing. Doing it harder and faster with computers is not a good idea. I pity your student and you as well. > Plugging my ears and going "la la la" about the evidence and just doing what I want is not how I will make anything better. If you want to discuss how the weird shit you're doing to these kids will or will not prepare them for the world where computers talk and think better than they can, I'd love to do that. If you want to passively condescend to me because I won't taste your particular flavor of pseudo-scientific kool-aid I've got better things to do with my time.