3 ms·

I keep hearing that education is broken, but I never see specifics. Could you present some?

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
For thousands of generations we effectively learned through individual, tailored mentorship and trial-and-error. A hundred or two generations ago mass instruction was adopted for scions of certain of the powerful, or for everyone in organizations such as militaries. It's only in the last couple of hundred years that this mass instruction generalized to almost the entire populace of countries. Mass instruction effectively treats students as the average of their cohort, without really getting to know each particular student. This is the fundamental break. It treats students more as blank states to be filled, than as collaborators in their own development. As a specific anecdote, when I was in 4th/5th grade I didn't work ahead in math much because the assignments were to do every even problem on a page (one page, the potato page, as it had pictures of potatoes on it, had over 100 problems, I still remember it), which was tedious as heck. Because I didn't work ahead I was mainstreamed in math in 6th grade, and felt absolute horror at repeating yet again what I had already tediously repeated so many times.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  What an ordeal!
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Assuming you're being sarcastic about my anecdote, I was in gifted classes in elementary and middle school (there were no gifted classes in high school for anyone in my district). 1330 SATs as a 14 year old (edit to add: 14 years, 10 months, to be precise). I ended up in poor fit colleges and didn't finish an A.S. until almost 30, and a B.S. until 35. My abilities were wasted in jobs such as newspaper delivery until the A.S., and even wasted in the A.S.-level job as I had very little power to be anything other than someone else's hands in that job. Miraca Gross, in her literature on the exceptionally gifted, has a person with a 4 S.D. IQ who dropped out of high school and ended up in a store management track.
    - hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
      Here's my question. If this person has a 4sd IQ, why can't they just educate themselves? One explanation that occurs to me immediately is that this person was really good at scoring IQ tests but otherwise not especially smart. My point is - sure, if you have more specialized attention smarter people will learn even more and even faster, I don't dispute that. But this idea that there's super smart people out there that end up doing store management because they weren't spoonfed the right information is just self-contradictory.
      - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        > If this person has a 4sd IQ, why can't they just educate themselves? Quoting his mother: "At school he never had to learn to focus and concentrate to get over a difficult piece of work because everything came easily. Now he finds it extremely difficult to concentrate. Also, there have always been other things which he has deemed more important." His education was mismanaged as a young child (e.g. being accelerated, but then being held back because a new principal "wasn't comfortable" making exceptions for him). Gross' book has a lot of specifics on a few kids (including the future Terrence Tao, pseudonamed Adrian Seng in this book), I'll try to excerpt and summarize a few pertinent ones: --- > At five years of age Rick was handling, with ease, division problems such as 3721 ÷ 6. --- A principal made the decision to mainstream him in math and revert him to Grade 2 math even though he had already successfully completed Grade 3 math. This was because the principal was concerned that he wouldn't learn how to be "happy" or "creative". > the principal’s insistence that all children, regardless of their level of mastery, should use concrete materials in mathematics. Rick’s teachers tried hard to discourage him from working out maths problems in his head instead of using the materials provided to assist him. > I have tried to explain to the teacher that to Rick all maths becomes a sum to be worked out mentally, even if it is a worded problem-solving task, but she still becomes so openly concerned when he does this, and speaks to him sternly in front of the other kids, that on occasions he comes home in tears. The change in him since last year is really disturbing. He has gone from being a happy, confident, stimulated little boy to a child who is bewildered and uncertain of what is expected of him. > Next, the school began to encourage Rick to moderate his reading achievement so that it would be more in line with his classmates. > His teacher allows the children to bring books from home to read in class, but for the last few weeks when he has arrived at school with the novel he has been reading, she has told him that she would rather he bring along shorter books with more pictures, which would be more ‘enjoyable’ for him. I’m sure she thinks that I am interfering with Rick’s choice of book, but I’m not. He is now frightened of taking his own choice of book to school in case he gets into trouble. (Jan Ward, mother of Rick) --- Following social hazing from teachers (not just the above, but active, IRL shunning) and the effective exclusion from playing with other boys who were his age, when his parents transferred him to another school in Grade 5 he made it clear that he didn't want anyone to know he was gifted and ended up mainstreamed. He learned to mask his giftedness to fit in. At this new school he was still bullied and begged his parents to transfer him to another, which they did for his Grade 8. > At his request, his parents did not mention his high ability to the new school and he chose to ‘cruise’ academically, doing enough work to get by but not enough to stand out from the crowd. He was content to excel in music – a subject in which this school not only permitted but expected students to excel. Around this time he realized he was gay, became involved in a long-distance relationship with another boy, and became seriously depressed when the other boy ended the relationship. A few weeks later he started skipping school and dropped out entirely the following year (Grade 12). --- The book ends when he's around 20, and sums things up then (he was then currently in the management track at the supermarket chain): > I know that I will be discriminated against in some ways because I don’t have a Grade 12 Certificate [he says], but I don’t think, at this stage, that I could try school again, and if I went to university I have no idea what I’d want to do. I don’t want to have wasted the last two years, working for this company. I have to establish a profession to stay in. I still disagree with a lot of company policy. I can see so many ways of improving things both financially and in terms of customer service. But I’m not even going to try to explain my points at this stage. I can wait. > Rick’s parents are glad he has found something to which he can commit. They understood, only too well, his early restlessness, even while it worried them. He has never learned how to study [Jan said]. At school he never had to learn to focus and concentrate to get over a difficult piece of work because everything came easily. Now he finds it extremely difficult to concentrate. Also, there have always been other things which he has deemed more important. > A recent synthesis of research on issues in the social and emotional development of gifted students concurs. Most of their school days are spent relearning material they have already mastered or could master in a fraction of the time it takes their chronological peers. Therefore, many never learn strategies to cope with the challenges related to effort and perseverance that other children encounter throughout their childhood and later lives. In addition, the maturity of their personal outlook, which is, in many ways, similar to that of older students, may result in a mismatch, not only with the curriculum, but also with their classmates . . . They may have difficulty finding friends who share their understandings and far too often they endure not only the burden of loneliness but also enormous peer pressure to 'be like everyone else' [1]. > I believe that, in Australia at this time, it may be somewhat more acceptable to be gay than to be highly gifted. This may be why he is accepting his sexuality while holding much more ambivalent feelings about his extraordinary intellectual gifts. > I recently asked Jan and Tony whether they have ever doubted that Rick still possesses the capacity to excel academically. They answered immediately and emphatically: The ability is absolutely still there. We have no doubt of that and whatever has happened in his life we have never doubted it. He has an astonishing capacity to learn. Recently, as part of his training in the supermarket, he did a theory of management course, which was supposed to take a year – but he did it in six months! [1] - Robinson, N.M., Reis, S.M., Neihart, M. and Moon, S.M. (2002) ‘Social and emotional issues: what have we learned and what should we do now?’, in M. Neihart, S.M. Reis, N.M. Robinson and S.M. Moon (eds) The social and emotional development of gifted children. Washington, DC: Prufrock Press, pp. 267–288.
- tzs 3y ago
  Thousands of generations ago considerably predates the invention of agriculture, civilization, and humans living in societies larger than a few dozen people. So many things are different compared to then that it probably isn't useful to compare to.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    I'm saying that this policy of apprenticeships and the like has continued for thousands of generations, not that it ended thousands of generations ago. Apprenticeships still exist, both formal and informal. There's a good chance that either we evolved to it, or it evolved to us, over that time span. Much less so with respect to mass education. Mass education abandoned Chesterton's fence. For reasons, but pedagogical adaptations were still lost with the abandonment of it. And now educators need to relearn and reimplement structures which fulfill the purpose of those lost adaptations. The process of reimplementing these purposes (and adapting to novel purposes that come with non-lifelong-employment) means that students are still falling through the cracks.

For thousands of generations we effectively learned through individual, tailored mentorship and trial-and-error. A hundred or two generations ago mass instruction was adopted for scions of certain of the powerful, or for everyone in organizations such as militaries. It's only in the last couple of hundred years that this mass instruction generalized to almost the entire populace of countries. Mass instruction effectively treats students as the average of their cohort, without really getting to know each particular student. This is the fundamental break. It treats students more as blank states to be filled, than as collaborators in their own development. As a specific anecdote, when I was in 4th/5th grade I didn't work ahead in math much because the assignments were to do every even problem on a page (one page, the potato page, as it had pictures of potatoes on it, had over 100 problems, I still remember it), which was tedious as heck. Because I didn't work ahead I was mainstreamed in math in 6th grade, and felt absolute horror at repeating yet again what I had already tediously repeated so many times.

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
What an ordeal!
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  Assuming you're being sarcastic about my anecdote, I was in gifted classes in elementary and middle school (there were no gifted classes in high school for anyone in my district). 1330 SATs as a 14 year old (edit to add: 14 years, 10 months, to be precise). I ended up in poor fit colleges and didn't finish an A.S. until almost 30, and a B.S. until 35. My abilities were wasted in jobs such as newspaper delivery until the A.S., and even wasted in the A.S.-level job as I had very little power to be anything other than someone else's hands in that job. Miraca Gross, in her literature on the exceptionally gifted, has a person with a 4 S.D. IQ who dropped out of high school and ended up in a store management track.
  - hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    Here's my question. If this person has a 4sd IQ, why can't they just educate themselves? One explanation that occurs to me immediately is that this person was really good at scoring IQ tests but otherwise not especially smart. My point is - sure, if you have more specialized attention smarter people will learn even more and even faster, I don't dispute that. But this idea that there's super smart people out there that end up doing store management because they weren't spoonfed the right information is just self-contradictory.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      > If this person has a 4sd IQ, why can't they just educate themselves? Quoting his mother: "At school he never had to learn to focus and concentrate to get over a difficult piece of work because everything came easily. Now he finds it extremely difficult to concentrate. Also, there have always been other things which he has deemed more important." His education was mismanaged as a young child (e.g. being accelerated, but then being held back because a new principal "wasn't comfortable" making exceptions for him). Gross' book has a lot of specifics on a few kids (including the future Terrence Tao, pseudonamed Adrian Seng in this book), I'll try to excerpt and summarize a few pertinent ones: --- > At five years of age Rick was handling, with ease, division problems such as 3721 ÷ 6. --- A principal made the decision to mainstream him in math and revert him to Grade 2 math even though he had already successfully completed Grade 3 math. This was because the principal was concerned that he wouldn't learn how to be "happy" or "creative". > the principal’s insistence that all children, regardless of their level of mastery, should use concrete materials in mathematics. Rick’s teachers tried hard to discourage him from working out maths problems in his head instead of using the materials provided to assist him. > I have tried to explain to the teacher that to Rick all maths becomes a sum to be worked out mentally, even if it is a worded problem-solving task, but she still becomes so openly concerned when he does this, and speaks to him sternly in front of the other kids, that on occasions he comes home in tears. The change in him since last year is really disturbing. He has gone from being a happy, confident, stimulated little boy to a child who is bewildered and uncertain of what is expected of him. > Next, the school began to encourage Rick to moderate his reading achievement so that it would be more in line with his classmates. > His teacher allows the children to bring books from home to read in class, but for the last few weeks when he has arrived at school with the novel he has been reading, she has told him that she would rather he bring along shorter books with more pictures, which would be more ‘enjoyable’ for him. I’m sure she thinks that I am interfering with Rick’s choice of book, but I’m not. He is now frightened of taking his own choice of book to school in case he gets into trouble. (Jan Ward, mother of Rick) --- Following social hazing from teachers (not just the above, but active, IRL shunning) and the effective exclusion from playing with other boys who were his age, when his parents transferred him to another school in Grade 5 he made it clear that he didn't want anyone to know he was gifted and ended up mainstreamed. He learned to mask his giftedness to fit in. At this new school he was still bullied and begged his parents to transfer him to another, which they did for his Grade 8. > At his request, his parents did not mention his high ability to the new school and he chose to ‘cruise’ academically, doing enough work to get by but not enough to stand out from the crowd. He was content to excel in music – a subject in which this school not only permitted but expected students to excel. Around this time he realized he was gay, became involved in a long-distance relationship with another boy, and became seriously depressed when the other boy ended the relationship. A few weeks later he started skipping school and dropped out entirely the following year (Grade 12). --- The book ends when he's around 20, and sums things up then (he was then currently in the management track at the supermarket chain): > I know that I will be discriminated against in some ways because I don’t have a Grade 12 Certificate [he says], but I don’t think, at this stage, that I could try school again, and if I went to university I have no idea what I’d want to do. I don’t want to have wasted the last two years, working for this company. I have to establish a profession to stay in. I still disagree with a lot of company policy. I can see so many ways of improving things both financially and in terms of customer service. But I’m not even going to try to explain my points at this stage. I can wait. > Rick’s parents are glad he has found something to which he can commit. They understood, only too well, his early restlessness, even while it worried them. He has never learned how to study [Jan said]. At school he never had to learn to focus and concentrate to get over a difficult piece of work because everything came easily. Now he finds it extremely difficult to concentrate. Also, there have always been other things which he has deemed more important. > A recent synthesis of research on issues in the social and emotional development of gifted students concurs. Most of their school days are spent relearning material they have already mastered or could master in a fraction of the time it takes their chronological peers. Therefore, many never learn strategies to cope with the challenges related to effort and perseverance that other children encounter throughout their childhood and later lives. In addition, the maturity of their personal outlook, which is, in many ways, similar to that of older students, may result in a mismatch, not only with the curriculum, but also with their classmates . . . They may have difficulty finding friends who share their understandings and far too often they endure not only the burden of loneliness but also enormous peer pressure to 'be like everyone else' [1]. > I believe that, in Australia at this time, it may be somewhat more acceptable to be gay than to be highly gifted. This may be why he is accepting his sexuality while holding much more ambivalent feelings about his extraordinary intellectual gifts. > I recently asked Jan and Tony whether they have ever doubted that Rick still possesses the capacity to excel academically. They answered immediately and emphatically: The ability is absolutely still there. We have no doubt of that and whatever has happened in his life we have never doubted it. He has an astonishing capacity to learn. Recently, as part of his training in the supermarket, he did a theory of management course, which was supposed to take a year – but he did it in six months! [1] - Robinson, N.M., Reis, S.M., Neihart, M. and Moon, S.M. (2002) ‘Social and emotional issues: what have we learned and what should we do now?’, in M. Neihart, S.M. Reis, N.M. Robinson and S.M. Moon (eds) The social and emotional development of gifted children. Washington, DC: Prufrock Press, pp. 267–288.
tzs 3y ago
Thousands of generations ago considerably predates the invention of agriculture, civilization, and humans living in societies larger than a few dozen people. So many things are different compared to then that it probably isn't useful to compare to.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I'm saying that this policy of apprenticeships and the like has continued for thousands of generations, not that it ended thousands of generations ago. Apprenticeships still exist, both formal and informal. There's a good chance that either we evolved to it, or it evolved to us, over that time span. Much less so with respect to mass education. Mass education abandoned Chesterton's fence. For reasons, but pedagogical adaptations were still lost with the abandonment of it. And now educators need to relearn and reimplement structures which fulfill the purpose of those lost adaptations. The process of reimplementing these purposes (and adapting to novel purposes that come with non-lifelong-employment) means that students are still falling through the cracks.