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I am sure that there exist good criticisms of this curriculum, but I don't think these are them. As per the HN commenting guidelines, I think they're incurious

I am sure that there exist good criticisms of this curriculum, but I don't think these are them. As per the HN commenting guidelines, I think they're incurious and attack a weak version of what's being proposed. It seems to me that the disagreement here is about whether to structure a curriculum around bottom-up or top-down pedagogy. Do we fundamentally structure things: - like the tech-tree from a strategy game: I think this is how a lot of us conceive of traditional learning. "Congratulations! You've done enough calculus problems to unlock Newtonian physics!" is the extreme position. - or like a Kanban "just-in-time" system: We start with a large theme and learn things as we need them. "Well, we've been learning about `conflict and civilization` for six months, and you've been trying to build a better trebuchet for a while but in order to for you to improve it any more I'm going to have to teach you this thing called calculus". Obviously both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. Also obviously, any real learning is some combination of both of those. A purely "tech tree" approach would require hellish discipline, and human knowledge is way more messy than a clean DAG anyway. Also no-one would stare at a group of kindergarteners who can't count past 10 and say "lets build a large language model!" I happen to think that the ideal system is closer to the to top-down approach, but there are big challenges to implementing it. I think it's probably much easier to do bottom-up learning if you're treating large classrooms of children like widgets on a conveyor belt. I.e it may be that bottom-up wins on efficiency and so given the current resources of our education system, a much more top-down system would just fail at the implementation stage. Whereas if our education system had way more resources, then top-down would win.

gloryjulio 3y ago
The problems is that it doesn't matter what happens, all the competitive parents that I know of regardless of race, country, class would choose the schools and private tutors. They will pay what they can afford to push their children ahead. That's just how it is. And then we can see who are truly left behind
- heisenzombie 3y ago
  I don’t see how your comment is related to mine? Schools have to make choices about pedagogy. I think this is a debate about which choices give the best outcomes. You’re pointing out that access to educational resources is allocated by wealth to some degree, which is obviously true but I don’t understand your point beyond that?
  - melony 3y ago
    Because so long Bloom's 2 sigma observation holds, pedagogy only matters at scale. In other words, it mostly affect the lower middle class and poor people. Good education systems can ensure that most people get educated. The elites and upper middle class are more than capable of giving their children an excellent education anywhere. Working class parents don't have time to babysit every single homework problem or to fix every gap and flaw in the school's syllabus by themselves.
  - gloryjulio 3y ago
    It's the aggressive parents that u need to show the results and convince that the new system will show better learning, better resumes, better applications to the universities, make their children more competitive than the others. Else the parents will take the matters to their own hands, because they know the moment their children r in the real world internships or entrepreneurship, they r in the world of stack ranking and result based fierce competitions. Have we seen these kind of reforms would make the children more competitive by those parents standard? Tbh no so far. I don't think those parents will take the chances
- grass_is_green 3y ago
  The private high school in my small NZ town costs half of the before tax salary of someone on minimum wage. For a good IT job in this town, probably still 1/2 to 1/3 of your after tax salary. Private schools here are very much a minority option. Even on my bigger-city tech salary, putting both of my kids through private high school would be about 1/3 to 1/2 my after tax income. Yes it's an option, but it's a big sacrifice.
- getwiththeprog 3y ago
  That is not my experience in Australia at all. Many of the best students go to public schools and do not take tutoring. No one needs to be left behind. Real learning requires real inquiry, which unrelated to your comment, is what the NZ Education Dept is trying to do - make subjects about the world around us to focus on problem solving - rather than the rote learning of say Newtonian laws.
  - melony 3y ago
    The issue is that many things ultimately still require rote learning. Most STEM subjects cannot avoid it unless you are genuinely talented and mathematically inclined. You can appreciate Newton's laws in classical mechanics as much as you want but you still need practice if you want to apply the kinematics and force equations in any reasonable amount of time during an exam. Same with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. The further you go, the more intuition requires rote learning to build up. (I would note however that rote learning doesn't necessarily impart any mathematical maturity, but it does help with achieving conceptual understanding of the problem. Solve enough differentiation problems on pen and paper and gradient descent and backpropagation become obvious, but proving epsilon deltas won't necessarily be as helpful.)
    - defrost 3y ago
      > You can appreciate Newton's laws in classical mechanics as much as you want but you still need practice if you want to apply the kinematics and force equations in any reasonable amount of time during an exam. Same with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. As a general rule there is exactly zero of any of this for the overwhelming vast majority of primary school children in their first 7 years of formal education in either Australia or New Zealand.
      - hot_gril 3y ago
        Ok thanks, I was here thinking my elementary school must've been terrible. We learned that pushing an object makes it move.
grass_is_green 3y ago
I think you need both. If you teach maths in a JIT fashion, when do you learn "basic facts" like 3+4=7? If you don't teach that stuff systematically, how do students get to the point where they feel they can apply maths reliably - e.g. adding prices together in their head? So you need both - a solid foundation, plus applications using that foundation plus a bit more.
- heisenzombie 3y ago
  Absolutely you need both. We agree there. And any reasonable curriculum - in practice - will be a combination. But the curriculum will still be organized in some fashion, it's a very high-level document after all. And that's where one or the other flavor will come through.
- alexvoda 3y ago
  I disagree that "3+4=7" is a basic fact of math. Basic facts of math are for example ZFC axioms of Set theory. I only learned some set theory in high school. My point being, that teaching math is unexpectedly surprisingly top-down, at least at first.
  - grass_is_green 3y ago
    3+4=7 is what NZ primary school teachers mean when they say "basic facts." Source: I have two children in NZ primary schools.
PeterStuer 3y ago
Your top-down vs bottom-up observations are reasonable and valid observations. However, both assume a well intented and agreed upon implicit goal of looking for the best way to teach science. I do not think the politics pushing for the changes described in the article share that goal.
- heisenzombie 3y ago
  That's interesting, what makes you say that? Everyone I have talked to in the New Zealand education system has seemed to me to be genuinely trying to get the best outcomes for students, given the constraints imposed by pretty severely limited resources and the challenges imposed by out-of-school circumstances. We have a pretty decent history of being relatively early adopters of evidence-based changes to our education system in New Zealand. That's reflected in, for example, the high desirableness of New Zealand-trained educators in the prestigious international-school circuit. What do you think the politics is pushing for?
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    Here is one opinion out of many The postmodern curriculum theorists influencing these ideas are fundamentally anti-science. They criticize presence and origin, they deny that there is a inherent truth behind phenomena, criticize the idea that anything is really there, really exists, or can be directly apprehended if it does exist. Furthermore they see the natural sciences itself as product of the social relations that they serve to judge, that is,the idea was created at a certain time and place, to serve certain interests, and is dependent on a certain intellectual and social context, specifically one that that serves the "status-quo" of patriarchal oppression maintained through an active process of "exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization" that is inevitably embedded in the scientific method itself. The "situating" and "holistic" approach, while in theory neutral, is in practice presented to facilitate the introduction of relationalism, placing "power and suppression" as the fundamental paradigm in which to contextualize every element of the curriculum and the teaching interactions. The choice of current contexts with far from more settled science and and highly divisive narratives is no accident, meant to deconstruct and displace science rather than convey it.
crote 3y ago
> in order to for you to improve it any more I'm going to have to teach you this thing called calculus The problem is that it often doesn't happen like this. Instead, it goes "You need calculus for this next part. Don't know calculus? Well, you are supposed to, so figure it out yourself."
nerdbert 3y ago
> "Well, we've been learning about `conflict and civilization` for six months, and you've been trying to build a better trebuchet for a while but in order to for you to improve it any more I'm going to have to teach you this thing called calculus". Where do you find enough teachers to staff a nation full of secondary schools who can effortlessly move from competently teaching history to competently teaching calculus? I don't think that's realistic.
- function_seven 3y ago
  You don’t necessarily need the same teacher for the different subjects. Just coordination among the teachers. In high school we did a solar hot dog cooker project. In my Algebra 2 class, we determined the right conic to use for the cross-sectional shape of the reflector. In my physics class we calculated the energy coming in from the sun at various times of the day for our latitude. In my drafting class we produced blueprints for the cooker. And over in wood shop, they built the cooker using the designs we drew (which were dependent on the math from Algebra class), and using the materials selected by the physics class. Then one day we all went outside and cooked our dogs. This was a one-off thing of course. My school wasn’t structured to completely integrate all the subjects all the time. But it was valuable in teaching mushy things like project coordination and management. It was kind of like a group project, except each member of the “group” was more like a cog in the supply chain :)

gloryjulio 3y ago

The problems is that it doesn't matter what happens, all the competitive parents that I know of regardless of race, country, class would choose the schools and private tutors. They will pay what they can afford to push their children ahead. That's just how it is. And then we can see who are truly left behind

heisenzombie 3y ago
I don’t see how your comment is related to mine? Schools have to make choices about pedagogy. I think this is a debate about which choices give the best outcomes. You’re pointing out that access to educational resources is allocated by wealth to some degree, which is obviously true but I don’t understand your point beyond that?
- melony 3y ago
  Because so long Bloom's 2 sigma observation holds, pedagogy only matters at scale. In other words, it mostly affect the lower middle class and poor people. Good education systems can ensure that most people get educated. The elites and upper middle class are more than capable of giving their children an excellent education anywhere. Working class parents don't have time to babysit every single homework problem or to fix every gap and flaw in the school's syllabus by themselves.
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  It's the aggressive parents that u need to show the results and convince that the new system will show better learning, better resumes, better applications to the universities, make their children more competitive than the others. Else the parents will take the matters to their own hands, because they know the moment their children r in the real world internships or entrepreneurship, they r in the world of stack ranking and result based fierce competitions. Have we seen these kind of reforms would make the children more competitive by those parents standard? Tbh no so far. I don't think those parents will take the chances
grass_is_green 3y ago
The private high school in my small NZ town costs half of the before tax salary of someone on minimum wage. For a good IT job in this town, probably still 1/2 to 1/3 of your after tax salary. Private schools here are very much a minority option. Even on my bigger-city tech salary, putting both of my kids through private high school would be about 1/3 to 1/2 my after tax income. Yes it's an option, but it's a big sacrifice.
getwiththeprog 3y ago
That is not my experience in Australia at all. Many of the best students go to public schools and do not take tutoring. No one needs to be left behind. Real learning requires real inquiry, which unrelated to your comment, is what the NZ Education Dept is trying to do - make subjects about the world around us to focus on problem solving - rather than the rote learning of say Newtonian laws.
- melony 3y ago
  The issue is that many things ultimately still require rote learning. Most STEM subjects cannot avoid it unless you are genuinely talented and mathematically inclined. You can appreciate Newton's laws in classical mechanics as much as you want but you still need practice if you want to apply the kinematics and force equations in any reasonable amount of time during an exam. Same with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. The further you go, the more intuition requires rote learning to build up. (I would note however that rote learning doesn't necessarily impart any mathematical maturity, but it does help with achieving conceptual understanding of the problem. Solve enough differentiation problems on pen and paper and gradient descent and backpropagation become obvious, but proving epsilon deltas won't necessarily be as helpful.)
  - defrost 3y ago
    > You can appreciate Newton's laws in classical mechanics as much as you want but you still need practice if you want to apply the kinematics and force equations in any reasonable amount of time during an exam. Same with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. As a general rule there is exactly zero of any of this for the overwhelming vast majority of primary school children in their first 7 years of formal education in either Australia or New Zealand.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      Ok thanks, I was here thinking my elementary school must've been terrible. We learned that pushing an object makes it move.

grass_is_green 3y ago

I think you need both. If you teach maths in a JIT fashion, when do you learn "basic facts" like 3+4=7? If you don't teach that stuff systematically, how do students get to the point where they feel they can apply maths reliably - e.g. adding prices together in their head? So you need both - a solid foundation, plus applications using that foundation plus a bit more.

heisenzombie 3y ago
Absolutely you need both. We agree there. And any reasonable curriculum - in practice - will be a combination. But the curriculum will still be organized in some fashion, it's a very high-level document after all. And that's where one or the other flavor will come through.
alexvoda 3y ago
I disagree that "3+4=7" is a basic fact of math. Basic facts of math are for example ZFC axioms of Set theory. I only learned some set theory in high school. My point being, that teaching math is unexpectedly surprisingly top-down, at least at first.
- grass_is_green 3y ago
  3+4=7 is what NZ primary school teachers mean when they say "basic facts." Source: I have two children in NZ primary schools.

PeterStuer 3y ago

Your top-down vs bottom-up observations are reasonable and valid observations. However, both assume a well intented and agreed upon implicit goal of looking for the best way to teach science. I do not think the politics pushing for the changes described in the article share that goal.

heisenzombie 3y ago
That's interesting, what makes you say that? Everyone I have talked to in the New Zealand education system has seemed to me to be genuinely trying to get the best outcomes for students, given the constraints imposed by pretty severely limited resources and the challenges imposed by out-of-school circumstances. We have a pretty decent history of being relatively early adopters of evidence-based changes to our education system in New Zealand. That's reflected in, for example, the high desirableness of New Zealand-trained educators in the prestigious international-school circuit. What do you think the politics is pushing for?
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  Here is one opinion out of many The postmodern curriculum theorists influencing these ideas are fundamentally anti-science. They criticize presence and origin, they deny that there is a inherent truth behind phenomena, criticize the idea that anything is really there, really exists, or can be directly apprehended if it does exist. Furthermore they see the natural sciences itself as product of the social relations that they serve to judge, that is,the idea was created at a certain time and place, to serve certain interests, and is dependent on a certain intellectual and social context, specifically one that that serves the "status-quo" of patriarchal oppression maintained through an active process of "exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization" that is inevitably embedded in the scientific method itself. The "situating" and "holistic" approach, while in theory neutral, is in practice presented to facilitate the introduction of relationalism, placing "power and suppression" as the fundamental paradigm in which to contextualize every element of the curriculum and the teaching interactions. The choice of current contexts with far from more settled science and and highly divisive narratives is no accident, meant to deconstruct and displace science rather than convey it.

crote 3y ago

> in order to for you to improve it any more I'm going to have to teach you this thing called calculus The problem is that it often doesn't happen like this. Instead, it goes "You need calculus for this next part. Don't know calculus? Well, you are supposed to, so figure it out yourself."

nerdbert 3y ago

> "Well, we've been learning about `conflict and civilization` for six months, and you've been trying to build a better trebuchet for a while but in order to for you to improve it any more I'm going to have to teach you this thing called calculus". Where do you find enough teachers to staff a nation full of secondary schools who can effortlessly move from competently teaching history to competently teaching calculus? I don't think that's realistic.

function_seven 3y ago
You don’t necessarily need the same teacher for the different subjects. Just coordination among the teachers. In high school we did a solar hot dog cooker project. In my Algebra 2 class, we determined the right conic to use for the cross-sectional shape of the reflector. In my physics class we calculated the energy coming in from the sun at various times of the day for our latitude. In my drafting class we produced blueprints for the cooker. And over in wood shop, they built the cooker using the designs we drew (which were dependent on the math from Algebra class), and using the materials selected by the physics class. Then one day we all went outside and cooked our dogs. This was a one-off thing of course. My school wasn’t structured to completely integrate all the subjects all the time. But it was valuable in teaching mushy things like project coordination and management. It was kind of like a group project, except each member of the “group” was more like a cog in the supply chain :)